The first part seems to be for people who are unfamiliar with the games. The political analysis begins at 19 minutes.

The games go into:

• Discussion of monopolies, how they are used to exploit, and how they use state force to maintain their position to prevent competition
• The Carrot character is an anarchist in the first game, who infiltrates the weather factory of the second game to document the exploitation of its workers. He then gives the player a quiz about US economics so that you can infiltrate a board of directors, but when he becomes a member of the board himself, becomes a liberal reformist.
• In the third game, the devs put an easter egg only accessible by editing a config file with an obscure code, which adds police branded riot gear to the marching fascist candy soldiers, in a reference to the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests.

I really like the premise, though if I might suggest, y’all might want to tweak that trailer so the intense movie trailer music doesn’t stop abruptly towards the end.

Adding onto his recommendation to join or create unions:

Unionizing your workplace brings almost immediate benefits to you and your co-workers (a living wage, benefits, more time off), it also lets us fight back against the regime with an effective general strike, just as it worked in 1886 (they wouldn’t have fought us so hard back then if it didn’t).

Below are some resources to Unions from around the world who can help train you to become an organizer and form a grassroots union with your co-workers:

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

You can play the game here on Archive.org, or you can download a copy from that page and play it in DOSBox Staging.

Here’s all the physical documentation you’ll need, such as the short story, how to play manual, and an in-world map (you’ll have to draw your own, but it’ll give you a rough idea of the land. If you find map making tedious, you could use a map someone else made).

Lastly, you’ll need this interactive copy protection wheel when it prompts you for a combination in game, right before entering a simulation.

Good luck! :D

A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Infocom.

It’s an old text adventure from the 80’s with a particularly cool and oddly relevant concept: You take the role of an AI that’s been meticulously raised in a simulation to truly become a general intelligence. The reason this project was undertaken was to eventually send you, the AI, into other simulations based in the near future to test the outcomes of various political policies of the new republican government, record your interactions, and report back to the engineers who created you.

The game’s designer said that he created the game in response to the despair he felt from Ronald Reagan being elected.

I haven’t gotten super far in it, but it has an incredibly well written short story in the manual that details all the events leading up to the start of the game, and so far the game itself is unlike anything else I’ve ever played.

If you’re not able to find an adequate solution for Obsidian, you may want to investigate TriliumNext Notes.

I’d actually never used Photoshop until yesterday (CS6 to be exact. Yarr! 🏴‍☠️ ), out of curiosity to see how it compared to this modded GIMP, so I don’t really have a good frame of reference on how they truly compare beyond what I messed around with briefly.

On a side note, I’ve seen on youtube that it’s possible to get the latest version of Photoshop working in WINE on Linux Mint, which could be an option if you decide to fully switch to Linux. I managed to get CS6 working in WINE, though it seemed to be a little slowish when making brush strokes (unsure if that was normal or not), and there was a couple minor visual bugs (a tooltip not going away), but nothing that would’ve fully prevented me from using it.

Woah! Had no idea. Considering that, I’m amazed this ability for GIMP isn’t more well known (or maybe it is, and I’m just unusually late hearing about 😅)

I figured I’d recommend the OG since it’s easily available from flathub, and even in maintainence mode, was likely feature complete for most needs. But cheers for mentioning TriliumNext as well, which hopefully will come to flathub as well soon!

Bananas Screen Sharing may one day be able to replicate that functionality, though at the moment it does not pass-through application audio (The dev mentioned they hadn’t implementet that because it’s difficult to do on Mac OS, but seems to be viable for Windows/Linux), but it does pass through the microphone.

SNES:

Sunset Riders and Wild Guns are fun little western shooters.

Genesis:

Rock’n’roll Racing is a fantastic racer.

GBA:

The Wario games are pretty superb for quick sessions

I’d heard of pixelorama a few years ago when it was released, but looking at it now, it looks like it’s come a long way, very impressive.

I think you might be confusing it with something else. Pixelorama is quite a recent app developed entirely with the Godot engine.

From a pure usability and features standpoint, if you are capable of compiling it, there is no reason to use Libresprite over aseprite.

LibreSprite’s only advantage is the GPL license and the ease of installation compared to compiling aseprite (if one does not pay)

The forks are based off an older version, and received less development compared to the OG after stopped being FOSS. A serious artist or gamedev would likely appreciate the additional features of the OG, but the forks are free, and still retain much of what made aseprite so good, making them more than adequate to learn with or any pixel art amateur.

When I played the first game, I eventually become a bit annoyed at how some systems worked, such as how frequently henry became hungry, so I downloaded a mod that extended the time between meals, which made the experience a bit more realistic and less annoying.

Though on the topic of degrading equipment, I kinda like shoes wearing out of it’s not too frequent, because for some odd reason I find it enjoyable to have to plan trips around such limitations 😄

James Lee was right.

Another reason to add to the pile in favor of citizen controlled media like the fediverse.

An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Dude.

This is the same guy who, just a couple weeks ago, publically endorsed the AfD (the far right nazi party in germany), saying “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

For context, this AfD (That is a real ad by them). Look familar?

Surely you must see these aren’t just a series of unfortunate coincedences?

I agree entirely, especially as modern systems massively ballooning the required knowledge and skill.

However, I do think there could’ve perhaps been a happy medium, where OS’s retained and continued to develop a simple, built in way to program easily and without setup to retain the spirit of what BASIC provided.

I guess I’m imagining a sort’ve evolved version of Hypercard, which seemed to be on the path of providing something like that.

The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call “programming for the rest of us”. HyperCard has made it possible for people to do things they wouldn’t have ever thought of doing in the past without a lot of heavy-duty programming. It’s let a lot of non-programmers, like me, into that loop.

David Lingwood, APDA

There seems to be Decker as a spiritual successor, which is pretty neat.