An invented creation used to segment regions of the Earth in homebrew RPG campaigns :P

I guess it could be used in many different ways, but when I read it I thought of it in the context of a homebrew campaign’s lore (maybe ttrpg memes have corrupted my mind?)

Region code 0 (“Worldwide”) discs work in all regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

Post: https://fedi.underscore.world/objects/ce9986b6-50f7-4daa-921a-df7175f18420

Hey, if he’s willing to come on board in support of a good cause, I’m willing to have him o7

Kinda wild to have that particular group working together for the same thing. Wish we could get some more of that going on 😪

There is this

The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation.

I don’t personally know much about it beyond that.

I thought Frozen Synapse’s ability to let you simulate your opponent’s moves was super cool - surprised I didn’t end up seeing it in more strategy games (obviously not so much applicable to the normal real-time stuff though!).

If you read the article, which part of the last-resort financial consequences do you deem insufficient to curb the “absorb the fines” business approach?

Supermarkets that fail to meet these requirements would open themselves to fines worth three times any benefit they derived from their misconduct.

Alternatively, the fine could be up to $10 million, or 10 per cent of the supermarket’s annual turnover if the benefit can’t be determined.

Those fines would need to be approved by a court, but consumer watchdog the ACCC could also issue up-front infringement notices worth up to $187,800 if they believe there has been a breach.

Are you not entertained?

I’ve sent him a DM on infosec.exchange (Y)

Edit: he said he’s taking a look

Happy stomping!

On the modding side there are differing opinions on how much to change. I stuck with mostly the QoL and performance-improvement stuff, but there are mods to do things like add additional mission variety and improve AI. I’m hesitant to provide many recommendations for specific mods because the last time I was playing was before the most recent couple of DLCs, and I don’t know if the mods I used back then are still current / updated. An example that I think still works fine would be QOL Upgrades 2 - Thermals and Headlights - small things like headlights imo should just be in the base game but aren’t.

DLC-wise I’ve only played half of them (waiting on sales for the rest!), but for example Legend of the Kestrel Lancers gives you a self-contained storyline of maybe a dozen missions or so. The main thing about those missions for me personally is that the maps are unique (and not just rehashed procgen) and there’s supporting dialogue with some cinematics etc. So the gameplay overall is mostly pretty similar if you drill down to it, but the window dressing on top of it largely addressed the lifeless feeling of all the procgen missions (again, at least for me!).

It looks like both The Dragon’s Gambit and Rise of Rasalhague are similar in that they add a set of new once-off missions, but I’ve yet to play them personally. I guess you could try watching a bit of gameplay from a let’s play of them or something to see if it tickles your fancy. The reviews on the DLCs hovers around 70% on Steam, so it’s not as though they were universally well-liked and to be honest they might not be enough for you if you weren’t at least lukewarm on the base game already.

??? Why the hell did my link get turned into a link back to Fedia lmao

but even when he was unnamed, the Guardian had piles of hard evidence to back up the 2012 Pentagon stories.

I guess to me, the difference between publishing some documents [1][2] or slides [3] as per your example with The Guardian isn’t that different (again, for me) as implicitly saying “the source(s) is/are legit” if whoever’s publishing the information has a track record of being trustworthy regarding factuality since I can’t necessarily verify the authenticity of that evidence anyway.

While I can certainly believe the US would do this, the article is very light on evidence: a “senior official” is their source.

The article says “In uncovering the secret U.S. military operation, Reuters interviewed more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers. Reporters also reviewed Facebook, X and Instagram posts, technical data and documents about a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military. Some were active for more than five years.” which seems like it’s not just hinging everything on one person. I don’t think naming the military / government sources would be reasonable here, so I’m not sure what more burden of proof you’re after that they could actually provide.

It also doesn’t say whether studies showed the efficacy of the Sinovac vaccine. All reports at the time (which could definitely be the result of propaganda) said it was nowhere near as effective as the big 2 (later 3) western vaccines. Was/is Sinovac comparable to the western vaccines?

Also in the article: “Although the Chinese vaccines were found to be less effective than the American-led shots by Pfizer and Moderna, all were approved by the World Health Organization.”, so no, not as effective, but:

• “Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.”
• "“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog.
• “Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.””
• “Although the Chinese vaccines were still months from release, controversy roiled the Muslim world over whether the vaccines contained pork gelatin and could be considered “haram,” or forbidden under Islamic law. Sinovac has said that the vaccine was “ manufactured free of porcine materials.” Many Islamic religious authorities maintained that even if the vaccines did contain pork gelatin, they were still permissible since the treatments were being used to save human life. The Pentagon campaign sought to intensify fears about injecting a pig derivative.”

These quotes I’ve copied are not simply campaigns of “Sinovac is less effective”.

Then they chuck in Osama Bin Laden and the South China sea for some reason. Yes, the CIA stealing blood samples from Polio Vaccine recipients was oafish, but those were real vaccines. There was no propaganda comparison.

In context, what’s there about Osama bin Laden feels fair to me. It’s saying don’t get… whatever this is (psyops?) and healthcare mixed up because it can damage the latter (i.e., “here’s one time where the two weren’t separated and it caused healthcare problems as a consequence”). It’s not about whether the hepatitis vaccination thing was a propaganda effort or not, or if the vaccines themselves were real or not – it still lead to worse health outcomes because people became distrustful as a result of it.

The South China Sea part also seems not unreasonable in context. (paraphrased) “there was some existing distrust among Filipinos due to past actions by China, such as <recent action>” seems… on topic to say in a discussion about public trust?

It’s a small instance with fairly low activity (322 monthly active users reported). [edit: excluding this one] The only two local magazines I know with semi-consistent activity and >100 subs are @[email protected] and @[email protected] and even the latter seems to be only sporadically active right now. The head mod of the former mag (hitstun) has done some cool local CSS stuff though!

The thing about federation is that you can subscribe just fine to communities on remote instances, so that’s where you’ll probably end up getting most of your feed from.

YouTube: When The Government Asks For An Independent Consultation | Utopia

Procrastination is a hell of a drug

I worry that if mass graves due to covid weren’t enough to jolt near-unanimous support for protective measures, little else will. Would of course love to be proven wrong :(

edit: for the sake of clarity / not accidentally misrepresenting things, graves would be dug up there (as per the article) with/without covid, but the number of bodies being buried in that manner went to ~7x the amount during non-covid according to the article.