self

a couple of our regulars have expressed interest in having an anti-cryptocurrency sub here. so interest check: reply to this thread if you want us to have buttcoin

edit: also, meme stock bullshit is on topic for our buttcoin (unless the threads get overwhelming, then we’ll split off another sub)

update: the fix for this was stupid, please let me know if anything still looks broken

it's looking like our federation with other servers may have fallen over sometime during the week. we're currently debugging; right now we're seeing that threads seem to federate between lemmy instances (and federate into mastodon when requested specifically), but comments aren't federating in either direction

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

• if you’re new to playing interactive fiction (essentially the modernized form of the old Infocom text adventures), check out his tutorial game and guide to IF parser commands
• Spider and Web is an old favorite; it uses the nature of the interactive fiction medium to involve the player in a game of deception
• Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home is a good interactive sci-fi short story
• Shade is an exploration into dreamlike writing and horror
• Lists and Lists is a gamified Lisp tutorial — it’s where I learned the language!

given the absolute fucking state of the open source community in general, and the fact that hacker news of all places is where the majority of new open source projects get discovered, is there any interest in starting a community here where folks can announce and solicit for help with their open source projects?

we could possibly use NotAwfulTech, but:

• I kind of want to keep self-promotion out of that community
• my code is probably awful for everyone else, that's why I'm seeking contributors

let me know if anyone's down for the new community or wants to expand the scope of NotAwfulTech to include stuff like this. if you're on team new community also feel free to suggest a name

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:

• its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077
• the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner
• the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it
• the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner.

because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap:

• any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing
• you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards
• or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on jinteki.net, a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet

the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics.

Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.

Hypnospace Outlaw is that funny meme game with the pizza dance. it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic.

above all, it’s one of the better cyberpunk games I’ve played, though I can’t really explain why without spoiling the ending. Hypnospace Outlaw can be finished fairly quickly, so I encourage anyone who hasn’t to give it a play or at least watch a playthrough from a non-annoying YouTuber. ending spoilers follow:

the game’s author, Jay Tholen, is currently in progress on its sequel, Dreamsettler. I can’t wait for more good cyberpunk.

in a thread complaining about the general state of lemmy, I read a comment where someone linked the alternative lemmy UI Photon. some general thoughts:

• this shit looks like new.reddit, which I hate
• however, it is extremely fast
• it looks like someone with UX experience was at least in proximity to this at the time it was designed?
• I don’t think there’s an easy CSS way to make this look less like new.reddit
• having tried it on a test instance, the promise of better mod/admin tools seems ambitious currently, though maybe they’ll get there faster than lemmy-ui
• overall, it feels a lot nicer to use than either lemmy-ui or new.reddit

you can hook Photon up to awful.systems using the Accounts option in the menu on the top right, though for opsec reasons I can’t encourage anyone to log in to this weird external site with their awful.systems credentials. check it out with the guest instance option (which doesn’t need a login) or use a disposable lemmy.ml account or something

what I want to know is: does anyone use this thing, and does anyone want it here? if there’s demand for it, I can spin up a secure copy of it for our instance under an alternate path. for me it’s a bit of a hard sell due to its resemblance to the reddit redesign, but lemmy’s UI is decoupled enough from its backend that running this thing shouldn’t impact much

whoa, lemmygrad got a vaporwave logo and a much stupider name! too bad their posts are still fucking terrible

this is a computer that’s almost entirely without graphical capabilities, so here’s a demo featuring animations and sound someone did last year

kinda glad I bounced off of the suckless ecosystem when I realized how much their config mechanism (C header files and a recompile cycle) fucking sucked