ProdigalFrog

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
 

The more power someone has over another person, the more they can constrain that person’s freedom – and it’s hard to think of a power imbalance more extreme than being dependent on someone for food, shelter, and other survival needs. Yet this is the norm in our society.

Human freedom is constrained by the fact that most of us are dependent on the economic ruling class for our survival. In today’s world this means that most people are dependent on a wage paid by an employer, which we do in exchange for working for that employer. In earlier eras many people were dependent on land that was owned/controlled by lords or other elites, and access to that land was only granted in exchange for paying those elites either in crops, currency, or labor. In both cases an economic ruling class controls access to resources the rest of us are deprived of yet need for survival, and this enables our exploitation.

But why is it like this? How was this dependency created? How is it that we, the vast majority of humanity, lost our freedom? That's what this video seeks to explore.

The main takeaway is that a person’s freedom is not secure if someone else controls their access to the means of subsistence and means of production – which in today’s world is much more than just the land. Therefore, to create a society where people are truly free, it must be the case that access to the means of subsistence and means of production are shared by all, and something that no one is alienated from. By contrast, if these are under the exclusive control of only a portion of the population – whether that be an elite economic class or even a socialist/communist political party – then that is a recipe for tyranny, exploitation, and unfreedom.

 

As this is a free w/ ads youtube upload, it sadly will not play on mobile browsers with an adblocker, and will force you to use the Youtube app so you have to sit through the damnable ads.

However, this movie can be played ad-free on desktop browsers with an adblocker (I recommend Firefox or Librefox with Ublock Origin).

Movie Description: Allied prisoners of war plan for several hundred of their men to escape from a German camp during World War II. Based on a true story.

If you haven't seen it, and happen to enjoy WWII films, I highly recommend it. It has a wonderful cast, and is one of the classics for a reason!

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Ah! got that mixed up, thanks for the correction ^^

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 days ago

Rock'n'roll racing got a pretty solid GBA port, it's a fantastic little isometric battle racer from the 90's

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

Regarding the voting account having no name, does that mean it will be a random string of letters and numbers? I get that it will still be possible to discover vote manipulation or mass downvoting with that, but I suspect it would be more difficult to detect initially or without some deeper analysis, since it's harder to recognize or remember a random string compared to a human made username.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (12 children)

There's ~~Proton~~ Photon, an actively maintained desktop ui alternative for Lemmy.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 days ago

It's extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there's very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!

The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that's quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn't infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.

H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I've played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I'm not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.

It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

What I saw over there was a large portion of his community pleading with him to delegate administrative tasks to the community, as it became increasingly clear the website was becoming too much for a single guy to manage (he was the only moderator of like 30+ communities that were full to bursting with spam, as well as the sole site admin). He never approved the many applications to help moderate, and said he was extremely slow to trust others, so never appointed a second admin, and instead just continued to silently work on the codebase as the site became unusable from spam.

I think his extreme distrust and desire to do everything himself combined with his medical issues led to extreme burnout, and ultimately its downfall.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 146 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Open source software in general. Seeing Blender become an industry standard was awesome, and it looks like the Godot engine may do the same for gaming. Krita has evolved into a truly wonderful painting program (and not half bad as a Photoshop replacement), and Linux itself has come so far, having become a genuine gaming platform.

Quite happy about all of that. :)

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 6 days ago

The giveaway for me was how the old turtle's song wouldn't seem out of place in Jeremiah Johnson 😄

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The remake has much better gunplay and graphics, and overall has been 'smoothed out', but personally I think the new casting choices were unbelievably bad, and take all of the soul out of the game.

If you can get past the jank of the original (and get the community patch to add the old music back in), I personally think the original is the better game by far, but I was a huge fan of the original, so I'm biased.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah, the clickbait thumbnail. I was confused since you said the headline was a question.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Was that comment intended for a different post?

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago

Could be an interesting base for DistroBox.

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