There’s a scene in The Thin Red Line where a squad of American soldiers are lying in grass with Japanese machine-gun bullets flying all around them, and Adrian Brody’s character notices an interesting flower next to him and starts poking at it with a real look of appreciation on his face.
War movies all lost luster if they ever had any after watching a lot of real footage due to Ukraine. It’s just all romanticised crap. Can’t stand anymore a minute of that weepy music and slowmos like there’s some kind of point or art to the bloody, shit stinking, bloated corpses, meat grinder
Oh the movie I’m talking about was not a love story. It was revealing how bad war is to a lot of people. The book version got banned and burned by the Nazis, when the movie came out Nazis attacked the movie theaters and the moviegoers. The name is “All Quiet on the Western Front” and it’s very powerful. Here’s a few quotes from Wikipedia:
he volunteers to go on a patrol and kills a Frenchman in hand-to-hand combat for the first time. He watches the man die slowly in agony for hours. He is remorseful and devastated, asking for forgiveness from the man’s corpse
The book was also banned in other European countries on the grounds that it was considered anti-war propaganda; Austrian soldiers were forbidden from reading the book in 1929, and Czechoslovakia banned it from its military libraries. The Italian translation was also banned in 1933
I love the idea of paying one-time to play offline, but it’s not currently very possible to do in-app purchases on a ROM like GrapheneOS, which you mentioned in the post as being something users (myself included) have. Will there be a way to pay outside of the in-app purchase dialogue to get access? (i.e. donate through bmac, then link account to app temporarily to confirm) I’d definitely like more of my money to go to you, rather than a play store fee.
Additionally, will there be a direct APK download at all, or will it only be available through the Play Store? (obviously privacy-preserving frontends like the Aurora Store exist, but it’s nice to have an APK download too 😊)
Thank you for making privacy the default setting, while still letting users share more if they want to. This is something I always love to see!
I’d 100% sign up for the beta right now, but since my GrapheneOS phone doesn’t have the ability to use the Play Store beta features, I’ll hold off on that so I don’t take someone’s spot :)
Depending on how the legislations now post-DMA go, it might be possible to also handle payments throughout our Portal instead of app stores. The app stores, especially Apple’s, has still a bunch of rules in their ToS about this where they might remove the game entirely if you’re not using their payment system. Android is slightly more lenient on this regard though.
The cuts Patreon already takes (a whopping 14% in total, after which we then play VAT) already affects us enough that I would definitely love to rather have my own systems, but also they offer a lot of convenience to the users that we couldn’t at this point.
But overall it would be great if we could provide a direct payment system straight from Portal, as we could price that one also significantly cheaper than using Google’s or Apple’s systems when we don’t need to pay their cuts. It’s something I really want to do to be able to make the pricing as affordable as possible, and everything depends on if it’s both feasible and allowed by the app stores. But can’t promise this, as there are a lot of factors in play whether it’s feasible to provide our own systems and if it’s allowed by the biggest stores.
When it comes to direct APK downloads, maybe if we can get a good pipeline for those. I think the most realistic option is that we’ll pick the one for an “extra release pipeline” that we can automate most easily to our current systems. Could be Aurora Store, F-Droid or some other depending on what kind of automation options they offer.
I’m not an expert on what automation options they might offer, but I know Aurora Store will essentially just pass through anything you do on the Play Store since it’s just a frontend, and for F-Droid you can host a repo where you place any updated APK to automatically make it available to anyone linked to your repo.
I know alternative payment options are probably a nightmare to properly set up and integrate, so it may not be worth the increased cut of revenue you’d get, but I’m really glad you’re considering it!
I look forward to trying the game when it comes out :)
I’ve been wanting a game like this for years!! As soon as Pokemon Go came out I thought it would be awesome to have a similar game that was offline or less Network dependent that modern AR games.
Like you level up and gain experience by walking around but you don’t have to live in a city or busy area to play. You don’t have to have the social element of say Pokemon Go or Wizards Unite to play and have fun.
The entire point is to have a game that ties the fun elements of gaming with the real world effects of exercise!
Thank you for this I’m excited to keep up with the progress 🙂
But the odds of the player managing to do so are proportionate. In theory, if 8 players each decide to go for three rounds, one of them will win, but the losings from the other 7 will pay for that player’s winnings.
You’re right that the house is performing a Martingale strategy. That’s a good insight. That may actually be the source of the house advantage. The scenario is ideal for a Martingale strategy to work.
It sounds like they’re deeply invested in their hobby (which is great) at the expense of other things (which is not great), which I’d say is relatively common. It’s a shame that it isn’t a hobby that you share, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.
When you say “let’s just sit and talk,” what are you trying to talk about?
It’s only a country in the vaguist sense. It’s a historical artifact. Charlemagne’s last gasp. It’s beyond funny that they have a vote in the UN, despite being effectively a tax haven and ski resort.
It’s such a bizarre thing that Macron is a prince there.
Doh, I thought it was Liechtenstein. I rember three small things from my kids geography quizes… Monaco, Vatican city, and Liechtenstein. So in my mind it had to be one of them. Lol.
This is the best article I've seen yet on the topic. It does mention the "how" in brief, but this analogy really explains the "why" Gonna bookmark this in case I ever need to try to save another friend or family member from drinking the Flavor-Aid
The biggest Trump supporting Fediverse server (truth.social) actually disabled federation from the get-go. It’s still just a Mastodon fork, but they could federate at any time! Plus, if you have an account on there, you’re legally entitled to the source code of their web service.
I’d love some suggestions. I have a 1440p 32:9 monitor that can act as separate displays, but since Synergy, input-leap, and the other software KVMs don’t work on Wayland, I’m having a bad time :(
I find most people who complain about echo chambers are just mad that they aren’t allowed to barge in everyone’s door and start shouting their bigoted opinions like it’s some moral imperative we all give equal time to all opinions/ideologies.
Are positive, liberal LGBT communities echo chambers? Are they not allowed a collective space to hang out without having to explain themselves all the time?
It depends. Defederation for good reasons is good, defederation for bad or false reasons is generally bad.
As an example, having a strict and democratic defederation/federation policy has contributed to Hexbear having the most active trans community on Lemmy, and it’s a good thing that there’s an actively protected trans space free from bigotry.
At the same time, defederating from instances for political reasons under the guise of other reasons is generally a bad thing.
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