Lentils make for a great meat replacement in a Shepard’s Pie. You adjust seasonings a bit, but at this point I might actually prefer it to regular ol’ Shepard’s Pie.

I describe it to people I know as:

• Fallout 4 is, far and away, the best “game” of the modern ones. It feels much better to play in almost every way than the other ones. Especially the combat. There’s some interesting stuff in it, but it’s largely the mechanics that keep you coming back, not the RPG or world.
• Fallout 3 has perhaps the better realized world out of them all; the way it all fits together is great and there’s a lot of rewarding exploration in it.
• Fallout: New Vegas is, far and away, the best Fallout game…it harkens back to the roots way more and is the best RPG – by a long shot – of the 3.

Obviously YMMV and others will feel differently, but that’s how I’ve parsed out this series so far.

I’ve been using Forgejo for about 6 months now and I’m really impressed with it. Covers all my needs!

As a Manitoban, I think Wab will probably do a pretty good job. The NDP were likely on track for a win after 2 terms of the Progressive Conservatives, but it can’t be understated how much the piss-poor handling of the pandemic and health care over the last 4 years was driving people to kick the PC’s to the curb. Two generally well-liked Liberal party candidates (very small party here in Mantioba) lost their seats, very likely due to strategic voting just to ensure the PCs got out.

I look forward to the different perspective Wab will bring to the table, and when I looked through the elected MLAs of the NDP this year, I see a very diverse group of people, which will be very refreshing after looking at – 95% of the time – rich middle-aged white people.

It’s amazing how Facebook managed to be the AOL that AOL never quite got too.

Governments are slow to respond, but it’s hard to envision a future where they don’t all migrate to running their own Fediverse servers. It’s easy, especially if all you want to do is run a locked-down one and post info for dissemination, and you have total control (which gov’ts love). Easy to use, no platform lock-in, data is portable all over the place. The idea that our social infrastructure has become dependent on lunatic tech billionaires is nuts, and the sooner we can contribute to, but not depend on, those networks the better.

I recently picked up a Steam Deck and I can also vouch for it; the device is far more than the sum of its parts and is clearly something Valve was only able to pull off after a decade plus of various software/hardware integration experiments.

SteamOS is the star of the show, and it is both fluid and easy to use while also putting more customization and flexibility at your fingertips than any other game interface I’ve seen. The integration of custom operating system, custom game wrapper tech, and their standardized hardware has produced a device that offers the power and flexibility of PC gaming with a user experience that is getting closer and closer to the “never think about it” ease of use that consoles provide.

It’s not the most powerful; it’s really a 720/800P gaming machine, but games look great at that resolution and you can run a lot of games at comfortably playable frame rates.

I had some doubts after I bought mine when I saw the ROG Ally come out alongside hundreds of “OMG THE STEAM DECK KILLER HAS ARRIVED” videos; but it didn’t take long until I saw a lot of those same content creators return their Ally and come back to the steam deck because although the hardware is slightly more powerful, the user experience end is so much worse than it just wasn’t worth it. Not to mention some serious QC issues with it.

I’ve been a PC gamer for a long time; I think I’ve been active on Steam for 18 years now. The Steam Deck is the best PC Gaming experience I’ve ever had. The hardware is great, the controls (and mapping ability of those controls) are great, the interface is great…everything is just top notch about it. Do I wish it was more powerful? Well that’d be great, and one day it will be. But everything about the experience is so good, I don’t mind some of the drawbacks. It’s encouraged me to get into my backlog of games and genuinely enjoy exploring them again. The Steam Deck just makes it so seamless and easy to play your games.

In fact, I’m getting close to time to build a new PC, and the Steam Deck has really changed my thoughts on it. Seeing how far Proton and SteamOS have come…I just really want Valve to take another shot at the Steam Box. A lot of its shortcomings aren’t issues now, and add in some good Steam Deck integration and have it target 1440P/4K Upscaling, you could create an affordable box that taps into a successful and growing ecosystem. I’d buy one in an instant and just not bother with a new PC build in the years ahead.

That’s how much I genuinely believe that the Steam Deck/SteamOS experience is that good these days!

That’s not really how the technology works. But a simple solution could be, both in kbin and lemmy, if the software could aggregate link posts that share the same canonical link URL and provide a summary for each community that’s linked it. Then you’d see the link once, but could see the post from each community that’s linked it rolled up underneath it.

Kind of like how some RSS readers have a feature that will detect “hot links” in your feed and surface the link with access to the feed items below it rather than having the feed items scattered about.

Just a friendly FYI that the Almanacs have essentially no skill in seasonal forecasting and rely on vagaries and generalities to try and convince readers that the wide net the cast to try and capture chance is actually skill.

Even physical sciences based forecasts can struggle to hit 50-60% skill on seasonal forecasts. Even in the highlights posted here:

• Of course the Canadian Prairies and NW Ontario will be cold; they’re some of the coldest places in North America in winter, often even colder than many parts of the Arctic as the northwest flow along the western flank of the Polar Vortex helps to funnel some of the coldest air on the planet in Siberia across the pole and through the Canadian Arctic southwards through the Prairies.
• Newfoundland and Labrador routinely get blasts of bitterly cold Arctic air from northern Quebec and Baffin Island as passing lows lift northwards into Baffin Island and occlude into the Polar Vortex, but it’s softened by the relatively warm waters of the adjacent Atlantic waters. Of course they won’t be as cold as the land-locked continental regions to the west.
• B.C., especially the western half of it, is among the warmest places in Canada in winter with the cold air routinely kept at bay by a relatively mild onshore flow from the Pacific. The exception is when a particularly strong Arctic outbreak develops over western Canada and a potent high develops over the Rockies which provides a strong surface outflow that drives the Arctic air over the Rockies and out through the coast.

This “forecast” literally just describes essentially every winter in Canada. The fact this pseudoscience that is demonstrably unskilled gets so much visibility each year.

If you want an older alternative that runs well and could arguably be considered better than Diablo 4, check out Grim Dawn.

This is a great explanation; I’ve been a Mastodon user about 6 months now and was having trouble figuring it all out. One question: is there a way on /kbin to see just the users I’ve clicked “follow” on? Or is it all doled out into magazines based on tags or random?

I was going to bring a similar analogy; the beauty of ActivityPub and these sites are that as long as they implement the standard in a similar way, they simply become different front-ends to view the same data. There isn’t a versus as much as which do you prefer? It’s going to be one of the great things about the Fediverse going forwards is the ability to create multiple ways of viewing the same data; each one will attract specific users and no longer will content be walled off between them.

Oof…I spent some time looking and it really seems like there aren’t any great options on Android. Going web-based might be your best bet there. Feedly is a good free option that has apps on pretty much every platform that you can at least try it out and it might work well enough for your needs.

Other popular web-based options are Inoreader & Feedbin. I used Feedbin until I moved towards local syncing and self-hosting. Both of those are paid up front though, whereas Feedly has a free tier.

You can practically hear the money he spent burning in a pit out back.

Depends on the solution you want? Web-based? App-based? What platforms?

There’s no such thing as the isallobaric wind!

I think it’s important to note that when the Mastodon migrations really picked up, the software was already 4-5 years old with organized development. Lemmy is only around 3-4 years old and kbin is only a couple years old (with very limited public use). That makes a big difference in what you can expect from them. With the influx of interest in these platforms, you’re going to see far more help and contribution to the underlying code alongside better third party app support in the months ahead. These are both very young platforms and have a lot of room to grow in the next while.

Fallout 76 always seemed to me to be an engine modernization project that the needed a game attached to fund it. It’s in an okay spot now, and it was properly derided when it was released, but I don’t think most people understand the amount of work it’s taken to update the low-level internals of how their engine works. It’ll be very interesting to see how Starfield plays.

The check-in feature is the unsung hero of the updates. It won’t be the most-used feature they add, but it’s a very smart addition. It leverages the privacy controls they’ve developed over the last several years, along with location-based automation, to provide a basic service that people do every day. The benefit, though, is that it will let people know if something’s gone sideways. Because it can be set up beforehand and remain discreet, I imagine there will be a lot of women who welcome the feature, and I’m certain it will, at some point, save lives.

The other stuff is neat and some nice changes, but I really do think check-in could quietly become a key feature that draws some people to the app.