Visual novels, and interactive fiction come to mind as things that are video game adjacent but aren’t necessarily games. Most of the first category I’ve encountered are either porn, horror, or… both – though they can be about anything the author wants to write about, of course, and the relative accessibility of the medium means people have pushed it in a lot of directions even though it’s kind of niche.

Interactive fiction includes things like text adventures and choose-your-own-adventure books. Most of the computer-based ones I’ve encountered involve traversing a node-graph of locations, manipulating items, and solving puzzles – though the gaminess varies a lot depending on the specific title. They’re even more niche nowadays, but people still make and play/read them.

The point is deterrence. The Congressman is basically saying “Fuck off already, or ELSE!”

Why in gods would you publicly state your intent to engage in such operations?

They’re announcing that they will pursue a MAD-style defense policy, and MAD doesn’t work unless you make it publicly known that you can and will retaliate.

Games need to figure out what color to show for each pixel on the screen. Imagine shooting lines out from your screen into the game world and seeing what objects they run into. Take whatever color that object is supposed to be and put it on the screen. That’s the basic idea.

To make it look better, you can repeat the process each time one of the lines hits an object. Basically, when a line hits an object, make more lines – maybe a hundred or a thousand or whatever the programmer picks – and then see what those lines run into as they shoot out from the point in all directions. Mix the colors of the objects they run into and now that becomes the color you put on screen.

You can repeat that process again and again with more and more bounces. As you add more and more bounces it gets slower though – since there are so many lines to keep track of!

When you’ve done as many bounces as you want to do then you can shoot out lines one last time to all the lights in the game. If there is an object in the way blocking a light, the color for the object you’re trying to figure out will be darker since it’s in a shadow!

It’s an old and simple idea to figure out what color something is like that by bouncing off objects repeatedly… but it’s hard to do quickly. So, most games until very recently did not work that way. They used other clever tricks instead that were much faster, but made it hard to draw reflections and shadows. Games with those other techniques usually did not look as good – but you could actually play them on old computers.

The registrar appears to have ignored the response from itch.io (source with additional details). I’m not sure what that means for them legally speaking – but not following the DMCA process correctly probably opens them up to being sued for damages.

It’s not a particular protocol right now, but it would be a URI that refers to a specific resource. A protocol could also be defined – e.g. a restricted subset of HTTPS that returns JSON objects following a defined schema or something like that – but the point really is that I want to be able to refer to a thread not a webpage. I don’t think that’s a silly thing to want to be able to do.

Right now, I can only effectively link to a post or thread as rendered by a specific interface – e.g. for me, this thread is https://old.reddthat.com/post/30710789 using reddthat’s mlmym interface. That’s probably not how most users would like to view the thread if I want to link it to them. Any software that recognizes the new URI scheme could understand that I mean a particular thread rather than how it’s rendered by a particular web app, and go fetch it and render it appropriately in their client if I link it. (If current clients try to be clever about HTTP links, it becomes ambiguous if I mean the thread as rendered into a webpage in specific way or if I actually meant the thread itself but had to refer to it indirectly; that causes problems too.)

I don’t think lemmy:// is necessarily the best prefix – especially if mbin, piefed, etc. get on board – just that I would like functionality like that very much, and that something like a lemmy URI scheme (or whatever we can get people to agree on) might be a good way to accomplish it.

Not that I’m opposed, but I’m not sure if it’s practical to make a fediverse-wide link that’s resolvable between platforms since there are so many differences and little incompatibilities and developers who don’t directly interact with each other – or even know each other exist!

Even if it isn’t though, it would be nice to be able to do something like lemmy://(rest of regular url) to indicate data from a lemmy(-compatible) server that should be viewable by all other lemmy clients without leaving your particular client and having to open some other website.