Doom and Doom II.

They certainly were not the first games I played. For my young self, games before then were either trivial games which you can figure out and play easily or difficult games without manuals which held my interest for brief periods of time. Games were (and are?) a certain difficulty and operate as they were designed. For Doom and Doom II, that was different.

Doom and Doom II were the first games I used cheat codes in (because they were the first games that I knew cheat codes for). The cheat codes in those games spoiled because they did more than just “make you invincible” but they also let you walk through the walls of the levels (noclip). They allowed you to see how the game worked (at least in a small way). You could also level jump (a more common cheat code) so that you can see levels that I did not have skills to reach. This made the games more than just a triviality since I could keep exploring and trying new things despite my skill level.

Those games were able to be modded though. You could easily get CDs with plenty of mods that changed the weapons, added levels, completely changed the game, and so on. This was the first game that I ever played that could do that. The CDs also came with editors which let me dabble in messing with weapons myself (where I managed to get around 1 FPS with all the rockets I fired at once from a rocket launcher). As such, the games could be made fresh and new again by modding it to be something different.

Those games also had a great sound track. It seems like a minor thing (and other games have great sound tracks as well) but I learned that music significantly influences my like or dislike for a game. Games that I played before didn’t have bad music per say but nothing earlier really grabbed my attention like Doom and Doom II.

I do enjoy many modern games. Still, I miss that games typically do not have cheat codes (and things like noclip are a rarity in any new games) and modding has never seemed as “wild” as some of the Doom mods that were created back then. If Doom was never around, I’m sure that some other game would have grabbed my interest in different ways (likely it would still have a great sound track though). However, I would have likely missed the wonder of seeing how a game worked and seeing a game be modified.

Fortunately, these games are still playable today and still have new mods released for them today. As such, I can take a nostalgic trip and play them whenever I want.

Their website and a Wikipedia article about them are below.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

For a certain area, I back in to a parking space so that the sun in the afternoon is coming through the back window. This means that my drivers seat and steering wheel are not the temperature of the sun when I have to drive away. Other people may park in different ways to avoid the sun in the morning should they prefer to drive out to get lunch.

SDF offers far more than just this Lemmy instance. You should poke around https://sdf.org/ and see what other things may be of interest to you. Other social networking things are found under Social in the top menu. Also, there is aNONradio, information of which is a bit hidden I think. They can be found at this link and more info is also at this other link.

That’s right, there is nothing wrong with what they (Beehaw) are doing. Some people find it desirable and join them due to that, others find it detracting and do not join, and even more people don’t care one way or the other. People join instances for all sorts of reasons and variety helps create interesting choices.

I just mentioned what Beehaw was notable for doing in recent history since you were curious. Their actions did generate “a bit of buzz” on the Internet so people kind of associate them for the actions that they have taken.

I have no idea what’s going on at beehaw.

Specifically answering this thought…

Beehaw is the “Aspiring to be(e) a safe, friendly and diverse place.” More information is available on their site at https://beehaw.org/ but below is a summary as far as I know it.

Quoting from their main page on the right side…

We’re a collective of individuals upset with the way social media has been traditionally governed. A severe lack of moderation has led to major platforms like Facebook to turn into political machinery focused on disinformation campaigns as a way to make profit off of users.

That policy is reflected on how that instance operates. They are known to be an instance that has defederated with a very large amount of other instances due to policies that those instances have as well as other things such as allowing anyone to register for an account without account approval first. (A listing is at this link and the instances they are block are under the Bl column.)

The defederating from a place because it has open registrations means that Beehaw defederated from the largest Lemmy instances due to that (referring to lemmy.world). The concern is that open registration may let undesirable people register and they do not want to federate with an instance that would condone that. If they kept the federation intact, any users “openly registering” over there could just participate on Beehaw. Beehaw prefers that their participants are vetted by someone first.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/66921

As such, Beehaw’s policy is to have a more isolated instance where they only interoperate with instances which are compatible with their overall mission statement. Some users prefer that and seek them out specifically for that. Other users are turned off by such things and find other instances to host their account.

Fortunately, you are able to create an account with whatever instance you want and migrate over to that new instance. Unfortunately, your account information cannot migrate over there (since Lemmy does not support that). Still, you should have account on an instance where you feel the most comfortable and then you can subscribe to communities across the Fediverse that interest you (assuming, of course, that your instance is not blocking them or is being blocked by them).

AI coming up with sayings of that type is something already being done ( https://inspirobot.me/ ). Youtube reaction videos exist referring to that site (like “Ai Generates Hilarious Motivational Posters” by jacksepticeye).

This seems like a rather new situation. The Github links below seem to mention that other instances were also suffering problems.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897

It appears like a fix was only made available about an hour ago.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895#issuecomment-1629219976

On SSH, you should be able to type in uinfo to see information about yourself and groups to also see a bit of information. Both should let you know if you paid for an upgrade or not because they would mention something about ARPA.

When paying for an upgraded account, they needed to know your SSH username in order to give that account increased permissions. If that was not done then they likely need to know information from you so that they can associate the payment with the correct account.

It has been mentioned at the link below that there is an email address where you can reach out and mention membership issues. It may take a bit of time for a reply though.

https://sdf.org/?faq%3FBASICS%3F12

Windows 11 is supported longer and will receive patches for longer than Windows 10. In fact, I believe Windows 10 is only supported for a few more years. To ensure that you do not have an unpatched (therefore insecure) operating system on the internet, you will either migrate to a newer version of Windows or to a different operating system eventually.

That all being said, Windows 11 was commonly referred to as being faster than Windows 10 on the same hardware. The largest gripes are that Windows 11 has very strict system requirements (therefore not officially working on most computers) and that Windows 11 has a different user interface (taking away some things people like). Windows 10 or 11 are operating systems which basically need to be installed on an SSD so be sure to consider upgrading to that if you have not done so already.

I’m pretty sure that an upgrade to Windows 11 can be reverted and you can go back to Windows 10 if necessary. Still, I would back up any valuable data before experimenting.

On the Linux side of the world, Steam can be installed on Linux and devices such as the Steam Deck exist. Depending on what games you play on your gaming PC, Linux could be an option.

The differences between Windows 10 and Linux are greater than the differences between Windows 10 and Windows 11. In other words, Windows 11 may be a bit better or worse (depending on your opinion) but it isn’t majorly better or worse.

Information about the shell access part of SDF is at their website ( https://sdf.org/ ). The Join page explains a bit more as well as how to upgrade your membership to a different level.

https://sdf.org/?join

Basically, you can register for a free shell account. You can opt to pay for lifetime ARPA access ($36 paid once) to get access to developer type programs. The MetaARPA level ($ 36 a year) gives you even more things.

Software that is accessible at certain membership levels can be shown after logging in to your terminal by typing in software and following the on screen directions. You can pipe the command over to grep to learn that git only shows up at the ARPA level. As far as I know, you need to be ARPA or higher to access git. Regardless, you need to be ARPA to access compilers like gcc so you may want to upgrade anyway.

Notably, I am at the ARPA level and I can run the git command without any issues.

What may help in the future is that you have access to the bboard command. There you can post help messages to the HELPDESK board which may receive a faster response.

http://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial – This explains how to use bboard.

When I was graduating from college, I realized that I would soon lose terminal access to their main server. I wanted a place to store my old programming bits and bobs that I could still SSH into. I found the SDF back then and it served that purpose well. At that point, I learned of bboard and I like to read that from time to time (although I have never posted to it).

(For those not in the know, bboard is described at https://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial )

SDF is notable to me because it a shell account plus more things. This elevates it past any computer I can just set up with any Linux distro. The “more things” is what keeps me checking back and what makes SDF special to me.