• 2 Posts
  • 716 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle






  • Yeah, I don’t know why they don’t have the normal “what is this” text from their main page at least at the bottom or something.

    cock.li offers free email service with no personal info needed for signup. They’ve done this for 11 years, with no major outages to my knowledge, relying only on donations without explicitly asking for them or bugging their users.

    I think at some point they also offered paid VPS services.

    Very useful for accounts that you don’t want connected to your other “identities”, but where you’ll still need them associated with a real email for things like password resets.

    It’s also tor friendly.





  • Flashing your lights or highbeams to pass is seen as quite agressive in the US. It isn’t taught in drivers ed, and the general interpretation I hear most people have of it isn’t “Hey, could you let me pass?” but instead “Hey! Fuckface! Stop driving so goddamn slow and get out of the damn way you shithead!”

    Doesn’t help that in my experience, the only people flashing to pass are aggressively tailgating me when I’m already 10 mph or more over the speed limit.

    Better to just pass on the right if there’s room. And if there isn’t room, fuck off telling someone to get out of your way. Not like they can get over anyway.




  • While identity politics are important, I have always believed that their explosion into mainstream after Occupy Wall Street died was part of an intentional plan of the powers that be to kill the momentum of the potential class war.

    That, along with some of the stories coming out of the camps as things crumbled, match up pretty directly with stuff out of leaked and un-classified three letter agency guides on disrupting grass roots movements.

    Hard to have any kind of momentum against the 1% when you’re busy arguing about microagressions along identity lines. Or ignoring the point of intersectionality entirely to lump poverty level trailerpark white males in with old money white male ceos.

    Wealth is a far more influential force on life outcomes than any identity aspects. Identity more heavily impacts the 99%, so focusing on it takes eyes off the tippy top elite.

    Just like all the recent focus on landlords including hate for small local people renting out one family property rather than focusing on the fucking investment companies buying up entire towns worth of housing.

    Keep your eyes on the fucking prize folks, instead of squabbling over the tablescraps.




  • You might be interested in Marc Laidlaw’s (the story author for Half-Life) Epistle 3, the rough outline of the story plan for Half-Life 3 that he turned into a letter from Gordon and released after he left Valve. He has since said that he regrets releasing it, as game stories are wildly impacted by the design and development of the game itself, so the end result would likely be far different. Especially with Alyx retconning some things. That said, it’s still an interesting look at what was planned at least at one point. Fans are working on a fangame based on the concept.

    Likewise, there’s the book Half-Life: Raising the Bar, which documents a TON of stuff about the creation of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, with a bunch of info on concept art and cut ideas. The original plan for the game would have been even darker than what we got and didn’t feature Gordon at all! Unfortunately you’ll probably just need to download a pirate scan of it, as I don’t believe they’ve printed new copies in over a decade.

    Together with everything the fans have figured out about the early leaked version of Half-Life 2 that matches up with the cut plot in Raising the Bar, you can build your own rich “fan canon” until Valve releases anything more.

    I do think it was a missed opportunity to not have Laidlaw write some books set in the universe when they didn’t need him working on game plot though.


  • In downtown some establishments (especially if they’re near warm air vents) will play the sounds of crying babies or screaming women.

    That’s just fucking evil. Better than using some barely audible tone that hooks into the primal parts of our brains to make us uncomfortable and anxious (those supposedly exist), but even what you’ve said is just literally psychological warfare tactics.

    Seriously, the CIA (or the equivalent) during the Korean War used to fly over vietkong areas blasting that sort of shit to disrupt sleep and demoralize them.