God’s sake. I mean… At least he’s apologising? I could imagine some of our recent lot doubling down on this and refusing to give in to wokeness blah blah blah…

But yeah. I’m really trying hard to be charitable cos it’s Christmas and everything. That’s not really pleasant stuff to hear from the guy who is in charge of the Police (over 1,100 under investigation for sexual assault or domestic violence atm)

Love his Thursday Next books to bits!

It depends on the game, character etc. I mean I suppose it adds to the escapism slightly?

I play all sorts of different games though, some where you’re not given the choice (Life Is Strange for example) and I don’t feel like it’s that big a deal

Yeah it’s a real shame because from what I saw of the Artemis app it looked good as well. I hope the dev is ok.

Kbin definitely needs a decent app. The web app does the job but it can be a bit irritating as you say

Sorry for that, but I don’t actually understand what you mean…

EDIT OK I’ve googled it and it seems to be a page that is sponsored by Google but I use Firefox and it worked fine with that - so is the problem that it doesn’t work with certain browsers?

Someone I’m in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.

He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.

It’s not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn’t that interested by what he saw so didn’t stick with it - to each their own

I mean this isn’t miles away from what the writer’s strike is about. Certainly I think the technology is great but after the last round of tech companies turning out to be fuckwits (Facebook, Google etc) it’s only natural that people are going to want to make sure this stuff is properly regulated and run fairly (not at the expense of human creatives).

Hey cool that’s by Zoe Quinn!

Point taken though - didn’t do the whole thing but more then a few I thought were Hitler turned out to be Lovecraft. Never actually read any of his books. (Lovecraft’s that is. Well Hitler’s either thinking about it…)

A lot of people can hold low key prejudices against the abstract notion of a group of people but make exceptions for people that they actually know, it’s really weird but that’s humans for you…

Another vote for Kbin here - the atmosphere seems so much more chilled from what I’ve heard and seen on Lemmy. The feddit instances also seem pretty cool.

Sorry this weird stuff is happening to you

I know that’s like stealth vape 101… Had no intention of hiding it

No sorry, this is an extremely trivial thing to send death threats over. The PR for this achieves the impossible and gains sympathy for Unity

When I was a kid we used to have audiobooks in the car on long car journeys and that was brilliant.

But at some point I lost that part of my brain which can retain information like that because even if I know I’m finding the story interesting, these days I’m more likely to find my mind wandering and thinking about what to cook, other things that need doing and I just can’t get it. I think maybe because I’m quite a fast reader it’s a bit of a slower pace and my brain is waiting for them to hurry up.

What I do like though on audible is there’s lots of dramas and comedies, usually from BBC but not always. So on commutes I’ll listen to that sort of thing and it keeps me engaged.

But different things work for different people. I am definitely someone who takes in written information better whether it’s reading for pleasure or work stuff

I’m actually surprised he’s not crossed that bridge. I do find it interesting to have a billionaire that doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to being a civil human being but is just a massive racist tool.

But you know what if he met these people irl he’d get along fine with them I bet and there wouldn’t be these unhinged outbursts. He’s a complete paper tiger suffering a case of being terminally online because he thinks it’s his job (it isn’t).

Maybe he’s taking something either prescribed or recreationally that has him perpetually on a knife edge like this.

The Precession To Calvery was hilarious from beginning to end.

You beat me to it because this game is genius!

Someone else mentioned Procession to Calvary - an adventure game set in a cut and paste world of renaissance art with a very surreal plot and sense of humour. Pythonesque.

There Is No Game is pretty hilarious, the voice acting always makes me crack up.

Agatha Knife is a funny point and click adventure game where you’re a 7 year old girl who’s a butcher and needs to set up her own religion sacrificing pigs in the basement for… Reasons.

Ah I was just going to their website and it was refusing to load the page. But then when I tried it on Chrome it was fine.

I’ll have a play around later, cheers

Reading Venemous Lumpsucker because it was in the news recently as winning an award. It’s very funny, a satire on Corporate Business and climate change. It actually reminds me of when I read Stark by Ben Elton as a young teen in many ways - it’s more inventive but there’s a similar vibe (the world is helpless in the hands of corporate greed because corporate people just don’t know what else to do).

2/3 of the way through and it’s definitely easy to read and funny

Doesn’t seem to play nicely with Firefox Android unfortunately. Which is ironic because Chrome on Android is one of the areas of Google I decided to experiment degoogling from just a week ago or so

I mean the article is specifically about Google search. Which might have gone downhill since whenever it first came out with the introduction of ads (sorry, ‘Sponsored Results’) but I’m not seeing significantly better competition for delivering search results. Everyone is still just aping the brand leader.

DuckDuckGo is obviously better for privacy for example but it doesn’t seem to have any ambition except to deliver the same results as Google but without the ads and tracking which is ok but not a big enough draw except for people already concerned about privacy. Bing gets essentially the same results but if anything seems more spammy than Google with pop ups about making it or edge your default search engine or browser. It feels like other search engines just take Google search as something to copy and put their spin on it though.

I’d say search is one of the things Google is still getting right enough to earn its place as the leader. Some things it does well, some things it has badly declined on (someone above mentioned Google assistant hardly understanding anything anymore, when it used to be the best in this area too), but generally you can replace most Google things with programmes doing things their own way. Search engines just feel a bit like reskins to me