FM Chiptune Musician | DX Complex Staff | SEGA, MSX and Retro Tech Dork | He/Him

Formerly _NetNomad@kbin.run
Microblogging at _NetNomad@oldbytes.space
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com/

On mbin, it’s very easy to accidentally boost (retoot) posts, and mbin doesn’t seem to propogate undoing that. any boosts you see from this account when viewing on mastodon et cetera are finger fudges, sorry!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • the one driving factor behind libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, or the NAP. the idea is that the only justified use of violence or force is to respond to someone else’s violence or force. in simpler terms, “do no harm, take no shit.” the problem is how you define “harm” and “shit” which is how you end up with right libertarians and left libertarians who each see the other’s “taking no shit” as the initial “doing harm”

    if John Nestlé (name chosen for no particular reason) comes to town and takes all the water in the lake, bottles it up, and sells it, and then people start dying of thirst and fight to get their water back, who is doing harm and who is taking no shit? left libertarians say that the townsfolk are well within their rights to get their water back, but right libertarians would say John Nestlé’s business is well within it’s right to defend itself from them. both of those viewpoints come from the non-aggression principle, just going in with wildly different postulates. right now in america the capital-L Libertarian party is mostly right libertarians, so the term has come to be synonymous with them here

    if you consider hierarchies to be a form of violence and believe that the only justifiable use of hierarchy is to destroy hierachy, then you are an anarchist and a libertarian. but with the conmotation the word has come to take on, they would certainly avoid calling themselves that





  • 1974 D&D (OD&D) 1977 Basic Set (Holmes Basic) 1978 Advanced
    1981 B/X (Moldvay Basic) 1983 BECMI (Mentzer Basic) 1989 Advanced 2e 1991 New Easy to Master 1991 Rules Cyclopedia 1994 Classic 1995 Advanced 2e Revised 2000 3e 2003 3.5e 2008 4e 2014 5e 2024 5.5e

    Congratulations to D&D 5.5e, the 15th edition of D&D!

    (I’m not familiar with New Easy to Master and Classic so if those are just variations of Cyclopedia then it’s 13. but also individual “rules editions” had different revised printings aside from 1995 2e- my copy of Holmes is the 3rd printing replacing Hobbits with Halflings- so if you include those who the hell knows)


  • to me, the Super Nintendo was the worst Nintendo console. so much of the library is games that either had better NES prequels or N64 sequels if not both. despite having a buttload more colors than the Mega Drive, so many of the games ended up looking bland and lifeless, with the notable exception of Super Mario World which looks like a Fisher Price product. the sound chip sounds like someone is sitting on it, and that washed out sound is admittedly nice for RPGs but it ruins everything else

    and this isn’t me being a bitter SEGA fan! i think the NES and the GameCube were both signifigantly better than their SEGA contemporaries. just considering Nintendo consoles, i rank the Super well below the Wii U and Virtual Boy- those at least offered unique experiences






  • that’s the opposite of the point he’s trying to make. he’s not critiquing TNG, he’s parodying bad faith critiques of modern trek by showing how easy it is to turn those criticisms on the show those same people claim to love. he gets especially meta when comparing TNG to TOS, claiming “TOS would never do that” but every single example is something the original series also did. turns out star trek was always about compassion and inclusivity!


  • ELO is an interesting case. Pinning down the original members is already a bit tricky, because the first album was really just a side project of The Move, before Roy Wood left to start Wizzard in the middle of doing their second album. If we’re generous and say their third album was really their first as a seperate band, we end up with a group that’s fairly static throughout the 70s and that most fans would call the classic lineup. the only two truly original members, though, were Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, and everyone else in the and was technically considered an employee, which you can imagine led to all sorts of legal chaos

    in the late 80s Jeff decided to shutter the band. Bev Bevan wanted to continue but Jeff considered himself synonymous with ELO being their writer, so eventually the two of them agreed to let Bev tour under the name ELO Part II with a lot of the members of the classic lineup. In the early 2000s, Jeff wanted in again but the “employees” thing and some legal trouble between him and Part II left him wanting to start fresh. No one knows the full story, but Bev, who was seemingly still enthusiastic about touring, suddenly decided to retire. Part II had to rebrand to The Orchestra, no longer having a The Move representative, but kept touring. Meanwhile Jeff did an album and a short tour with his new ELO, which had their classic keyboard player but The Orchestra had basically everyone else from the classic lineup. Jeff’s ELO went dormant until 2015 where it went by the literal name of Jeff Lynne’s ELO. Keyboard player Richard Tandy recently passed away, and with violinist Mik Kaminski retiring this year from the Orchestra, ELO has not one but two ships, one of which has been completely and thoroughly Theseused and the other just one plank away.


  • if your local music store lets you try before you buy, i’d try everything they let you. different instruments are more or less intuitive to different people, and it’s hard to know unless you try. in your case, digging languages, i would for sure also learn basic music theory so you know "what* you’re saying instead of just how. it’s not neccisary to know theory to play but it’s fun for it’s own sake and hey! you might be inspired to write something! back when i was in school, the free exercises on tonesavvy (used to be called emusictheory) were the recommended way to get started

    for habit building, you just gotta carve out the time and do it. once the novelty wears off, there are gonna be days when you don’t want to practice, and a habit forms when you push through that. you don’t need to practice for a long time every day, ten minutes is plenty as long as you’re doing it consistently. a weird thing about playing music also is that it works kind of like muscle where you exercise to get stronger but you get actually get stronger when you’re resting. if you find yourself getting frustrated, you can just put it down, and you might be suprised to find whatever you were stuck on today is easy tomorrow. but that only happens if you play today and tomorrow. it’s also always better to practice slow and then speed things up once it’s under your fingers. that ensures you have good form and you’ll ironically get things up to speed faster than if you just tried to go fast from the start. the metronome is your friend

    good luck and have fun!


  • In celebration of 30 years of Pokémon, we thought it would be fun to return to the ultimate versions of the original Pokémon adventures in the Kanto region with these special releases.

    Interesting that they consider these to be the ultimate versions and not LGPE. Not that I disagree, but considering LGPE is more expensive and more in line with the Pokémon company’s modern design philosophy, you’d think they’d be pushing a special edition of those instead

    also interesting that these are completely devoid of online trading and battling. could be neat for the kids today to experience things the old way- I remember it was so much fun when a new game came out and everyone had their handheld on them down to battle or trade- but for the genwunners who would otherwise predominantly be buying this, there goes it’s main selling point


  • Meanwhile I’ll never stop hearing about how perfect Michael Burnham apparently was, even if her series showed her to be a perennial fuck up.

    THANK YOU. putting aside how many people weren’t engaging with the show in good faith in the first place, you had to have been watching a completely different show to walk away with that impression. the whole point of her character in the early show is that she thought she was an infallible protagonist but learned over and over and over and over that she isn’t. spock more or less looks into the camera and says as much in S2!




  • i used to be a voracious reader, but as i grew up i slowed down. getting books and then lugging them around was less feasible with Stuff To Do, and this is gonna sound super stupid but i have a hard time getting comfortable reading a physical book. for whatever reason I hold it wildly different depending on if i’m reading the right or left page so i’m constantly moving around

    i’ve started using libby and now i’m reading multiple books a month again. you need a physical library card but once you have it you havd access to all of your library’s digital stuff. in the US you can also get a state library card in some states online, giving you access to even more books. you can also find lots of classics online for free through project gutenberg, and the internet archive has a mix of free and rental books. the latter needs a special app to open them, though, and the only one i could seem to get to work was in italian