It’s not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I’m not defending this. It’s a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I’m just saying Nintendo isn’t breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

You definitely can start this way. When I started, I got some help from a physical therapist–I had really messed up my back, and in addition to helping with the acute issue, they also selected a set of exercises and numbers of reps for me that I could do at home, and that was a great starting point for my exercise routine. It was pretty short and focused, so it was easy to find time to do it every day, and the practice of keeping at it was really helpful. My health insurance covered most of the cost of the physical therapist; I had to pay a copay, but even then it was just a couple times a week for maybe two months, so not exorbitant. Insurance is generally willing to help with this stuff for a little while because they know that if your health improves, it’s likely to reduce their future costs. So it’s worth looking in to whether yours would help with something like that just to get yourself going. I don’t think you need to have an acute problem to take advantage of that; I think having a specific goal for improvement is adequate. (They want measurable goals, like “I’d like to be able to jog five minutes without getting winded,” or that sort of thing. I believe mine was “I’d like to be able to spend a day out walking around a garden with my family without being laid up the next day by my back.” Which reflects where I was at the time. But, y’know, anything that reflects where you currently are, and something that you might be able to achieve in a six-to-eight-week timeframe, is probably a good goal.)

Doing that regularly also got me listening to my body, and that got me to gradually expand my routine–I eventually understood that some of my back issues were propagating up from hip issues, so now I work on those, and some of those are coming from limited ankle mobility, so I’m also working on that, and working on that has got me doing “goblin squats” that has gotten me to stop thinking of dumbbells as something to avoid. I’m also getting closer to being able to do pull-ups; I got a pull-up bar because just hanging from a bar sometimes can really help with a bad back, but at some point I started thinking about how much more I enjoyed moving when I was a kid and took gymnastics classes, and back then I actually had the strength to do things like pull-ups. So now I can do some resistance-band assisted pull-ups, and hopefully in a year or two I’ll be able to do the proper thing.

Picturing enjoying movement is something that really motivates me, actually. Like, I used to enjoy biking and ultimate frisbee. I don’t, now, but I think I might enjoy them again at some point. I think I might also enjoy parkour, if I can get into that kind of shape, but I recognize that may not be an achievable goal at this point. I had a kind of enthusiasm for brief bursts of very intense movement, like sprinting up a flight of stairs two at a time, or climbing up onto a loading dock in a single giant step.

At this point I do a basic set of dumbbell weight exercises, squats and lunges, push ups, a back stretching and exercises routine, assisted pull-ups, and a walking/running aerobics routine. It’s not a ton, but I’m really in vastly better shape than I was when I started a few years ago. I do have a handful of equipment–the dumbbells, a floor mat, a couple of foam rollers, an exercise ball (for trunk lifts, which are good for a weak lower back), a doorway pull-up bar, some resistance bands that I basically just use with the pull-up bar, and the biggest thing is an elliptical machine for when the weather is too bad to do the aerobics outside. There are ways to do it without a machine, like jogging in place or doing rapid shallow squats, but the machine is kind of nice–it’s hard to explain, but it really helps to have the exercise take place in its own little isolated space, or even just in its own mental space. I actually also have a little lighted sign that I made (it’s a recreation of the neon sign for an exterminator’s in my home town that always tickled my fancy back then–it’s got a giant neon rat in the middle) and I like to turn that on in my room specifically while I do my exercises there (everything other than the aerobics and pull ups), just because it kind of marks out the distinction of exercise time. It helps make it a ritual, and that helps make it a habit. As I say, hard to explain, but it feels like it matters.

I will say, this routine has also helped me lose some weight. I’m down about 45 lbs (~22kg) from this time last year. That’s mainly down to diet changes, but I did ramp up my exercising while doing this to be sure that I was losing fat rather than just losing muscle. I’m still a lot heavier than I’d like, but I’m definitely proud of how far I’ve come. I’m improving in other measures, too, like my resting heart rate is down from around 100 to around 80, which, again, is not where I’d like to be, but represents movement in the right direction.

So, I do think the physical therapist helped a lot with getting me started, but most of my work I’ve done at home, and without too much in the way of equipment.

Would I have done better, faster by going to a gym? I dunno. I definitely know that friction is a big factor. If it’s hard to actually go do the thing, then it’s easy to make excuses not to go do the thing; needing to actually travel to a gym definitely counts for that. There’s kind of a balancing act in making my routine easy enough and pleasant enough that I’ll actually do it, but also challenging enough that I’m still gradually improving. Sometimes I need to let myself slack off at something a little as an incentive do just do the thing. And sometimes once I’m actually doing the thing I don’t need the slack after all.

Bit of a rant, I guess. Sorry, it feels like so much of this stuff is, like, techniques for outwitting part of my own brain, and it feels like those are things other people might be able to use, but I’m not sure how transferable they really are. Hope it helps.

Good luck with your journey! I know I’ll need luck on mine.

I never actually played Fable 2 (it never came to PC) but 1 was decent for its time, and yeah, 3 kind of fell apart. (You get to what seems like the halfway point, then the rest of the game plays out in a few minutes, entirely through menus, and is super boring.)

But mostly I’m finding it hard to imagine how a new take on this would stand out in today’s market. It’s, let’s see, a third-person action game with RPG elements tacked on. The setting is…generic western fairytale fantasy. I’m not saying the game couldn’t be good, but what would be distinctive about it? Having people call you “chicken chaser”? What is the contribution of the “Fable” pedigree here, apart from Molyneux baggage?

The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span–it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we’d be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.

5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.

I should preface this by saying I don’t actually have a steam deck yet, so I haven’t tested these on there. So I’m only commenting on the games themselves. These are listed as deck “verified” in the steam store, though.

One I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Yoku’s Island Express. Breezy summer vibes, not much difficulty. It’s kind of a pinball metroidvania.

Tinykin is another game with a very cozy/low stakes feel. It’s an exploration/collectathon platformer with cute environments made up of household objects.

Littlewood is a life sim sort of game, kind of like Stardew Valley, but it’s extremely chill. There’s no time limit or anything like that.

And others have mentioned these, but Toem, Alba, and Donut County are all very good and gentle games too.

Oh, and Tchia. That one has some dark moments at times, mostly in cutscenes, but when you’re actually playing it’s mostly gentle and island-y.

Maybe also Wuppo? It’s a strange one. The story and humor and animation are pretty great in that one, but there are some boss fights that can get a little frustrating. It’s mostly a fairly chill platformer, but then it’s got kind of bullet-hell-adjacent bosses. I still really like the game, but it’s not quite as purely relaxing as some of the others here.

Pikuniku is kind of in the same position as Wuppo, but I liked it a bit less. The humor feels a little more forced or stilted, and the frustrating bits are because the controls are kinda floaty. My niece really liked it when she was 8, though, so it had that going for it.

Hope this helps! I’ve been looking for this kind of game a lot the past few years

I feel like there’s a buddhist lesson about impermanence here.

Thanks, Stefon.

Yeah. I thought it was important context that they had backpedalled, but I did not intend to downplay the severity of the issue.

Citizens United would be a decent candidate. Once it was established that donations were protected political speech, it effectively legalized bribery, and made oligarchy essentially inevitable. Most of the missteps since then have been motivated by folks trying to simultaneously play to populist talking points but also placate billionaire donors. The left needed an actual positive message, like the kind Bernie Sanders was pushing, that would energize folks and unite the overeducated with the working class, but that was never going to be acceptable to the donor class, and so candidates like him always had to be shoved aside for someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs. And someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs was always going to be a really tough sell and not really a solution to the needs of the moment.

That doesn’t really account for the rise of the tech bro fascist accelerationists like Mencius Moldbug and the Dark Enlightenment, which is a big part of the current moment and accounts for how the far right was able to hoodwink some billionaires into voting for a social collapse that seems very likely to hurt them also. But Citizens United still seems like a fair candidate for a point at which some of the last paths away from this outcome were foreclosed.

Supposedly they’re unblocked again, but there’s been no explanation from Xitter about the issue. Definitely seems suspicious that this happened while DOGE is having trouble with whistleblowers using Signal, though.

https://gizmodo.com/x-briefly-blocked-then-unblocked-signal-links-as-federal-workers-seek-security-2000564966

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data.png

I think it’s reasonably likely. There was a research paper about how to do basically that a couple years ago. If you need a basic LLM trained on a specialized form of input and output, getting the expensive existing LLMs to generate that text for you is pretty efficient/inexpensive, so it’s a reasonable way to get a baseline model. Then you can add stuff like chain of reasoning and mixture of experts to improve the performance back up to where you need it. It’s not going to be a way to push the state of the art forward, but it’s sure a cheap way to catch up to models that have done that pushing.

Hey, it’s not just that! It’s also decimal 88 in the ASCII table.

You are agreeing. They said we must be INtolerant of intolerance.

The open display of oligarchy at the inauguration has a bunch of people suddenly turned off of corporate social media sites in general. It’s a meme, basically, but one that could have a positive effect. I’m happier about this than the people flocking to BlueSky.

Sure, but you’ve got to build that habit of checking the app. Gotta lure people back for more little hits of dopamine. The men aren’t going to subscribe (or at least stay subscribed) if they aren’t getting that illusion of lots of options for people to date.

There are a lot of reasons people might want to switch to Linux from Windows, but I don’t think it’s usually the GUI that’s the main problem on the Windows side. I think it’s pretty reasonable to want the GUI to work in the way you’re used to but still want an OS that doesn’t shove ads at you, install AI without your permission, bug you about Teams and OneDrive, reboot every time it needs to update anything, etc.

I had a thought along the same lines. I was thinking we should coin the term “immunition,” and tell people it was a way to arm your immune system to defend itself. It’s not even all that misleading.

Tell me you use an ad blocker without telling me.

Oh, I was using Keepass2Android as a password vault, but was a little frustrated with it because occasionally it’ll forget to synchronize with the file before adding an entry and leave a “conflicted copy” I have to deal with manually. If KeepassDX will also do TOTPs that sounds perfect.