Level 12/9 Technomancer/Doomscroller

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.

    You’re not wrong, lol.

    'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit’s so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That’s also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it’s really good at that. There’s always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn’t care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.

    After setup, though, it’s not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug



  • I largely agree with this. It’s a shame that S2 ended on a cliffhanger where they were finally getting into the sci-fi questions.

    Light Spoilers, though they may make the show more interesting if you’re on the fence:

    spoiler

    The main character discovers he was murdered when someone hacked the self-driving cab he was riding in and forced it to crash. When he was uploaded into the corporate-controlled post-death community, he had memories removed: prior to his death, he was working on a free alternative afterlife system, so it seems likely he was murdered to keep him from competing with the big players in the industry.

    Additionally, while there are laws about the uploaded/deceased no longer being allowed to work or otherwise be involved in business with the living, they find proof not only that the founder (?) of the current afterlife megacompany is still running things despite being dead, but that they’re working on technology to grow clone bodies and upload the deceased back into them, all for insane prices, of course. It’s illegal tech that could further shift the balance of power between the rich and the poor.

    That’s all from memory, so I may have mucked up a detail or two, but by the end I was really interested to see where it was all going. The show could be really smart when it wanted to, which is why it’s a shame that it mostly wants to meander through a slow-paced will-they-won’t-they for two seasons instead of getting into the meat of things. Maybe they felt they had to make it more “accessible” and sneak the cyberpunk in?

    I dunno.

    It was greenlit for a third season, and recent news reports indicate it was still coming (all prior to the current strikes), so maybe we’ll get a conclusion? I’ll certainly watch it when it drops.


  • People have been arguing about the definition of “Cyberpunk” pretty much from the moment the term was coined. I think, for the vast majority of people, it seems they focus on the aesthetic more than anything else: neon lights, megatowers, rain, tech, crime, etc.

    Personally, I like to see some hints of the “punk” half of the phrase shining through. Rebels and misfits, either by choice or by circumstance, using technology to fight oppressive systems enabled by technology. Neuromancer remains the measuring stick that I’ve always used, but I’m not going to turn my nose up on a good story if it’s only “cyberpunk adjacent”.

    High tech, low life, as Bruce Sterling put it (apocryphally). And, that works well enough most of the time.

    So, given the above, as an example, no, I wouldn’t call The Fifth Element cyberpunk. It has lots of aesthetic similarities, but very little “punk”: the heroes are working with the governments to preserve the status quo after all, but I still love it, as it’s a damn great film.



  • Form and function are inextricably linked: one will inform the other. A lot of the ergo-split community focuses on the use case where you move your hands as little as possible, and the designs tend to revolve around maximizing that ideal. And they are damn good at it. The drawback, as you note, is that it’s a design that expects you not to move your hands around: it encourages keyboard navigation and shortcuts in place of using the mouse as much as possible.

    That said, you can get around it. You can use layers to move common shortcuts to the left hand, so you don’t have to do the whole “Stretch my hand across two units” dance. Or, you can look into something like a macro pad.

    Me, I just deal. The comfort when typing is well worth the tradeoff, to me. I’ll favor avoiding the mouse when possible, and just dance my one hand across both halves when needed. It’s not a huge deal to me, but the whole point is personalization: find what works best for you!


  • Not 20 years old, but if you’re willing to look at 10, I’ll always shout out the often-overlooked Remember Me by DONTNOD, back before they did Life is Strange.

    It’s a 3rd person action-adventure game set in a cyberpunk future where everyone has a cybernetic implant called the SenSen in their brain to allow all their memories to be uploaded into cloud, so they can revisit them whenever they want. Of course, this technology is the property of one corporation, Memorize, but I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything evil with the ability to read and store every memory of every person connected to the system, right? You play as Nilin, a former memory hacker with some bad amnesia, who is broken out of prison by unknown benefactors with their own agenda. Navigate the streets and slums of 2084 Paris, avoiding hit squads and breaking into memories to piece together your own fractured past.

    Definitely a solid B-tier game, it didn’t blow anyone’s mind on release, but it’s decently fun to play, has an interesting story, and the atmosphere of the cyberpunk city is just perfect. Plus, it gets pretty damn cheap come sale times. I can’t recommend it enough for anyone with a love of cyberpunk and mid-tier games with heart making up for the lack of budget.