Verdx - Verdx

  I re-blogged this (the first time) in 2014. Today, I tried half a dozen times to re-blog it, and it wouldn’t work. So, I saved the images and re-posted it. I hope it helps make life a little easier. :-)   The original post is by iraffiruse.

Please, can someone do an account to repost the downward spiral to the dead internet, pretty please? I need to see AI failing on a daily basis to be able to take the decadence of technology with some humour

Thanks google

I always assume the train will be so boring and I bring seven things to do but then I'm entranced by the wonderful window the entire time

I don't think people realize how absolutely wild Linux is.

Here we have an Operating system that now has 100 different varieties, all of them with their own little features and markets that are also so customizable that you can literally choose what desktop environment you want. Alongside that it is the OS of choice for Supercomputers, most Web servers, and even tiny little toy computers that hackers and gadget makers use. It is the Operating System running on most of the world's smartphones. That's right. Android is a version of Linux.

It can run on literally anything up to and including a potato, and as of now desktop Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are so easily to use and user friendly that technological novices can use them. This Operating system has had App stores since the 90s.

Oh, and what's more, this operating system was fuckin' built by volunteers and users alongside businesses and universities because they needed an all purpose operating system so they built one themselves and released it for free. If you know how to, you can add to this.

Oh, and it's founder wasn't some corporate hotshot. It's an introverted Swedish-speaking Finn who, while he was a student, started making his own Operating system after playing around with someone else's OS. He was going to call it Freax but the guy he got server space from named the folder of his project "Linux" (Linus Unix) and the name stuck. He operates this project from his Home office which is painted in a colour used in asylums. Man's so fucking introverted he developed the world's biggest code repo, Git, so he didn't have to deal with drama and email.

Steam adopted it meaning a LOT of games now natively run in Linux and what cannot be run natively can be adapted to run. It's now the OS used on their consoles (Steam Deck) and to this, a lot of people have found games run better on Linux than on Windows. More computers run Steam on Linux than MacOS.

On top of that the Arctic World Archive (basically the Svalbard Seed bank, but for Data) have this OS saved in their databanks so if the world ends the survivors are going to be using it.

On top of this? It's Free! No "Freemium" bullshit, no "pay to unlock" shit, no licenses, no tracking or data harvesting. If you have an old laptop that still works and a 16GB USB drive, you can go get it and install it and have a functioning computer because it uses less fucking resources than Windows. Got a shit PC? Linux Mint XFCE or Xubuntu is lightweight af. This shit is stopping eWaste.

What's more, it doesn't even scrimp on style. KDE, XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon, all look pretty and are functional and there's even a load of people who try make their installs look pretty AF as a hobby called "ricing" with a subreddit (/r/unixporn) dedicated to it.

Linux is fucking wild.

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

There's no way you can live without the help of your neighbours. Despite the rhetoric coming out of the media, everyone around you wants to pull together in a crisis. They want to be known as a true leader who steps up when needed. They want to have an excuse to use their cool winch.

Yes indeed. Most winches are never used. A Jeep owner buys one, thinking they will be using it to do bad-ass rock climbing up in the mountains. Maybe they'll be able to slowly lower their trucks down the side of a mountain, like the anarchist heroes of the novels they read when they were teenagers. And then it just kind of sits there on the front of the thing, consuming extra fuel, and catching road salt and stray rocks. Never needed. Unless they find themselves the victims of circumstance.

An obvious application of the winch is the stranded car. Someone drives off the edge of the road, gets stuck in the snow? Throw that baby around a tow hook and yank them back onto it. This is satisfying, and helpful, but unimaginative.

Pulling down fascist propaganda? Not a great application of the humble winch. Fascists these days prefer to put their angry screeds on the internet, rather than on billboards and telephone poles. It's extremely difficult to use a winch to pull down the internet. Maybe if you're really good at throwing it through the window of that data centre over there.

If you ask me, the most important use of a winch is yardwork. Ever had to dig out a fence post, or a dead tree? That takes a lot of time. Time which you could be using working on shitty cars. If only someone made an electrically-actuated device for pulling things that could be easily placed around your pile of shitty cars. If only my neighbour had one, and was willing to help me out here, Tederick.

I mean, isn't a glowing orb some kind of body, maybe better trying to be an entity, or even better, an idea

Cat??

Birch tree.