skulblaka

Re: The MUD situation, I know from personal experience that Iron Realms has still been cranking out a few of them in the last few years. I was a big fan of Starmourn but that one just got demoted to Legacy recently, I guess because of lack of players. Shame because it was really neat and polished. But they've got a triumvirate of Lusternia, Achaea (my personal favorite) and Aetolia as active MUD worlds.

They've also got an Android client called Nexus that you can download from their website. https://www.ironrealms.com/the-nexus-client/

Now granted Iron Realms is a whole ass company, not just some nerd hosting a game off his basement server rack strictly out of love for the game, and open source self-hosting enthusiasts may not be super jazzed about that. But as far as I can tell they're about as harmless as a company can be and do seem to still be in business more as a labor of love than anything else. At least as far as I've ever been able to find out. They mostly exist on donations so far as I know, I've never had to buy anything from them or been served an ad. And I do really, really like their Nexus client, the interface is really slick and it adds a lot of features and conveniences that I found lacking in other older MUD clients (though, granted, the only non-Iron Realms MUD I ever put any significant amount of time into was Aardwolf and I think I had to use a third party client for that).

All that said, MUD is a dying genre and any influx of new users would help revitalize many of these worlds. If it sounds interesting to you don't hesitate to go check it out. Veteran users have always been universally helpful in my experience, unless they have an actual lore appropriate reason to be hostile to you - then, watch out! Although even most of those guys won't stomp on a brand new noob without warning. Players who enjoy social roleplay will find themselves at home in a MUD. Players who enjoy social roleplay and have, or gain, a little bit of scripting knowledge will find themselves especially at home in a MUD. Give one a shot, they're free and fun and it'll raise your typing speed a lot.

I would much rather wear a silly hat than have open skull brain surgery to implant a device that will stop receiving security updates in 5 years.

We've been able to stick an electrode to the outside of your head and pull electrical activity data from your brain without invasive open-skull surgery for a couple decades now. Neuralink hasn't actually accomplished anything new except making this same thing way, way more expensive and way, way more likely to end in death of the patient.

I imagine a lot of places may wonder about this and then kick that can down the road until someone does actually collide with their bridge.

The data is never getting deleted in the first place, "delete" just needs to set a flag for non-visibility. The language used in their disclaimer leads me to believe exactly that is what is happening.

People lashing out about Linux terminal commands and people editing their own Windows registry entries are not the same people, lmao

A regular Windows user being instructed to enter the registry would have a stroke and shit their pants when opening regedit, and those users would never have found the tech support thread instructing them to change a registry key in the first place. Someone who already knows about but is uncomfortable editing reg keys may fall into the group you're describing, but they would probably have an identical discomfort about regedit or about unknown terminal commands. Someone who is comfortable editing reg keys already has a Linux install on their home machine.

That's pretty much exactly it. Windows as a whole is now catering to the lowest common denominator. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially as more and more of the world population are adopting computers (or being required to adopt them, for work). But in trying to make things easier for beginners they're damaging some of the tools that we experts are used to. It's a give-and-take sort of situation, and I'm not as livid about it as some professionals seem to be, but the fact remains that Windows is situating itself to be used by... idiots sounds rude, so we'll say "beginners". Folks that don't know where or how to find what they're looking for. Web search in the start menu, and Cortana-now-Copilot are two prime examples of that - tools that "nobody" really needed in Windows but that help someone who has absolutely zero idea what they're doing get things done, even if poorly or inefficiently.

I'm not upset at their attempt to add accessibility to Windows, but I do wish they wouldn't make their existing product worse in the attempt.

Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?

When they use that fan art in the next official marvel movie, yes absolutely they should.

Corporate corruption is what makes America what it is

Not annoyingly so. It's noticeably high pitched but not in such a way that I find it unpleasant.

In fact, with a little bit of effort and a bit of training, you could probably have a pretty extensive voice range. Your tone is animated and friendly and I could see a potential for voice acting for you.

There's far too much sequential quest nesting that blocks you out of content for no reason.

The reason is for replayability and having a fresh experience each time. You get blocked out of content because there are about 60 unique paths you can take through the game with different content for each.

Not to mention the bugs

The few I experienced personally were fixed within a couple months of release. I haven't seen a bug of any sort, actually, since January.

Save scumming shouldn't be a part of normal gameplay

Then... Don't do that. Save scumming also isn't a part of tabletop gameplay. You fail a roll or fuck up your plan, you deal with the outcome. Saves are only for emergencies if some bug does come up.

You're allowed to not enjoy the game, and that's fine, it's not for everyone. But your reasons why are poor reasons.

If they can't deliver a product that stays in one piece when not even being shot at, they aren't about to stay a part of that MIC for long.