AnimalsDream

Viva Longevity has become one of my favorite channels for anything nutrition and longevity related. Chris MacAskill is a retired Earth scientist who started the channel as a passion project. He claims to keep all possible ad things shut off, doesn’t accept donations, and is doing the channel out of his own pocket.

The gist of it is to push back against all the misinformation, by providing a platform for the most cited and respected health and nutritional researchers, who do actual science, to talk about their work. He also has episodes about how industry-funded disinformation campaigns work to undermine the scientific communities.

I love when there are basic bike lanes directly adjacent to the road, and cars are just using them as extra parking space, making them completely useless and forcing the cyclist to use the road.

Fuck cars.

I’ve played with and without the analog inputs, and using a real DualShock 2. By default it’s not L3, it’s circle for cqc, and square for pressure sensitive controls for the gun.

The controls were even worse on ps2 because even though they are technically analog buttons, they have a very short travel distance which makes it too easy to accidentally do the wrong thing. I found the modern controls slightly more intuitive.

There was also a time I tried to play the ps2 version on pcsx2, but could only use a DualShock 4 then. Since that controller doesn’t have analog face buttons, I remapped cqc to L2 and gunfire to R2 and found that control scheme worked surprizingly well.

But the basic controls are the least of those game’s problems.

Despite my best efforts, I never got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t fighting against the controls and mechanics. As somebody who has played a fair share of other stealth games, they just are really bad.

I’ll talk about the boss fight that was the final straw for me.

The whole thing was an exercise in annoyance and frustration. After getting past it, it made me realize how hard I had been trying to ignore the way these things had been annoying me throughout the entire game. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Just hate it, the games are not for me.

These days when I play Bethesda games I always end up using console commands to expand inventory space. I’m so done with hyper-limited inventory systems and having to waste stat points to increase them.

I really want to like Metal Gear Solid games, but after playing a fair way into MGS3… I kind of hate it. The controls and mechanics are so bad.

I get that, I had to keep my FB when I lived in a rural area just to pay rent. Lazy.

You can probably find plenty of similar results for every alternative by making a search like that.

Trying to find relevant information that’s supposed to be in a Discord server is one of the most hair-pulling aggravating experiences I’ve ever had on a computer. I mean seriously, any aspiring software developer of any kind should outright feel ashamed if they are relying on Discord for anything related to their project. Code repository sites are free, made for that purpose, and already offer everything necessary for collaboration. If communications are necessary, that’s what email is for - everyone has it already.

And yeah I also hate the over-dependence on Facebook. If a companies “site” is their fb page, they don’t get my business.

These things are successful not because they’re good. It’s because they’re easy and convenient. That’s the biggest thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to alternatives.

Yeah to be honest, as a regular user I find Matrix’s ux to ve at least somewhat less of a clusterfuck than Discord. Some things are still unintuitive, but that’s nothing rtfm shouldn’t be able to fix.

Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.

What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.

Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that’s already being worked on.

Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.

I keep researching alternatives, and every time I circle back around toward Matrix, despite criticisms. Part of it is a question of what everyone is using. I pretty consistently see that groups who use or used to use irc are now using Matrix additionally or as a replacement.

Part of me would like xmpp to be the best answer, but I’ve yet to see an implementation that handles public communities well, particularly for anything that functions at all like Discord. Matrix seems to be at least gaining voice/video chat support?

The last time I looked into Stoat (back when it was Revolt), they had basically no cryptographic capabilities enabled. Have they added any e2e features at all yet? Like, the overall impression I got from them it is that it’s being developed mainly by someone who seems pretty new to programming in general, and that makes me feel pretty cautious.

Pretty much. Recently got a device for Meshtastic, need to get around to playing with it. If I recall, SearX is an open-source search engine yeah? We should mod it to explicitly block the corpoweb as a whole and strictly favor results from foss and federated sources.

I hate trucks in particular, and cars, and am re-dedicated to a car-free lifestyle since it’s easier than ever with my current work commute. That said, having lived in a heavy winter rural midwest area and trying for years to be car-free there, I hit a breaking point in my situation at the time, and learned that a reasonably sized truck is actually the appropriate tool for such inhospitable tundras.

But again, fuck cars.

too overwhelming in UI/UX for majority of people coming from Discord

Uhhh, Discord’s user experience is one of the most chaotic fever dreams I’ve ever come across, and is a large part of what makes me want to get away from it (among many other reasons).

One of the really frustrating things about Discord is that people are using it for things that it’s not good for. Like documentation, or really anything where a new reader is looking to find a persistent source of information. Chat should be good at chat, and wikis should be easily accessible on the open web - not in an obscure digital group that has to be joined to be seen.

It’s like when people start a business and then use facebook as their “site.” No that is not a site, and you know what, I don’t want to shop there anymore either. Same energy.

1. Get a cheap mobile specifically for protests, especially using it for pictures and video.
2. Set it up to livestream everything, so that any video evidence gained can’t be taken away.
3. Get a faraday bag for when you need to put that mobile away and not be tracked.

Maybe I’m missing something though?

*Slaps on top of fusion reactor*

“You can boil so much water with this.”