Usually if this happens for me it’s an issue with the gluetun end, since all the big names love to throttle known VPNs. Fixes itself after a few minutes, but if I’m not feeling lazy a quick stack restart tends to fix it too.

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.

This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).

The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.

These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.

I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.

The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.

I’ve thought about switching to Technitium but dealing with network tools is a whole can of worms I don’t want to open up again until PiHole or Unbound shits the bed on me lmao. PiHole’s working just fine for what I need it to do.

I tried to break from Windows back in college after Windows 8 was such a disaster. Set up an Arch dual boot over a weekend and tried to use it whenever I could. Unfortunately found myself using the Windows partition far more often mostly because of gaming compatibility. Shelved it and suffered through MS’s bullshit ever since.

10 years later on the dot, I went on a huge degoogling/de-MS push this past winter/spring. Set up GrapheneOS on my phone, moved away from as many big tech services and tools as I could, changed my email, and eventually said fuck it and installed CachyOS on my brand new desktop to give it a go. It’s been my daily driver ever since. The whole degoogling push also got me to set up a home server and go down the entire selfhosting rabbit hole but that’s a discussion for another day.

The Steam Deck is what really reintroduced me to it and showed me how insane Proton is for compatibility, and with all the garbage big tech and fascists want to throw at us, this year was definitely time to make the switch.

Which reminds me, I should probably wipe that Windows partition that still gathers dust.

I love the new area, I do think the bosses are a bit overtuned (especially the two new superbosses, but those should be a huge challenge), but I was also super rusty and on NG+5 so I can’t really say for certain.

Super cool stuff. All 5 new bosses kicked my shit in after I’d been steamrolling the rest of the game, only beat the new area boss and called it there - the new tower shit is way too much for me. Might edit my save back down to NG+ and see how they feel.

Not a fan of the Breaking Death nerf though, I will say that. It really cripples endgame autodeath builds. One of those changes where even if it were a bug, it’d been around so long that they should’ve let it stay as-is.

Because this list is almost entirely made of and written by AI slop lmao

When I first set up my server this year it was a VERY easy decision between this and jellyfin. Why would I ever go with the corporate, closed source option?

I set this up a while back (and recently moved to Forgejo, see the update note at the beginning of the article):

https://nickcunningh.am/blog/how-to-automate-version-updates-for-your-self-hosted-docker-containers-with-gitea-renovate-and-komodo

Probably a tad overkill honestly but it works amazingly well, and turns every potential upgrade into an approval process so nothing will update when you don’t want it to.

Their usage is basically just the same old machine learning that’s existed for ages, long before the genAI bubble started. They really should avoid the buzzword for accuracy’s sake but it’s far removed from all the LLM generative dogshit.

Unfortunately not, just something I hear a lot from folks.

Adobe software, autoCAD, and anticheat are the top 3 reasons I usually hear. While there are alternatives for the first two, people who need these specific tools professionally don’t really have the choice.

Anticheat for gaming is a big one too. Personally I didn’t even consider switching until I finally quit Destiny 2 for good. If the main game someone plays just doesn’t work, they’re not gonna switch.

I’ve been eyeballing this, doesn’t seem too difficult for most compatible models either. Might be a little after Christmas project

Any service or tool with obvious genAI in its branding or the developer’s profile is an instant “no” from me. Linkwarden is a big one. Any advertisement post clearly written by an LLM I’ll avoid like the plague. If you’re willing to use hallucinations based on theft that use unbelievable amounts of water and energy, then I’m flat out not going to trust that your software has any value.

Also seen a handful of random tools with “Proudly made in the USA” or some garbage on the readme, and sure enough the developer always follows all of today’s big fascists on social media. Shocker.

Oh this looks promising. TS + Gluetun does tend to be super slow, so routing just the outbound traffic through the chained VPN is excellent. I’ll give this a try this weekend.

I’ve just accepted it for now while I pray they work on updating it to officially support anything that’s not keycloak lmao

I made the switch a few months back. Manually migrated my files over using the desktop apps for both, but it was maybe 200GB of junk so it didn’t take long.

OpenCloud is great. Much faster, much simpler, does what it needs to do. That being said, it is very new so documentation is lacking, and the desktop and mobile app are VERY basic (the mobile app doesn’t have a dark theme and only offers a limited photo sync right now, for example, instead of setting various one or two-way synced folders).

It’s also worth nothing that their compose file and OIDC support are both a mess. The compose file is easy enough to work around, plenty of folks have put together cleaner, minimal single file setups. For OIDC, I did get it working with Authentik but it loves to constantly log me out mid-session in Librewolf all the time. For some reason they use a hard-coded clientID for OIDC, and even worse the ID is different for web, desktop, and mobile. Very bizarre.

So it’s far from flawless, but it’s early in development and overall it’s still a better fit for me than Nextcloud.

I haven’t used Mumble since like 2010, looks like it’s still the exact same tool as it ever was, and that’s honestly all it really needs to be. Love to see it

Tbh I need to replay 2, I can’t even remember if I actually finished it back in the day. Didn’t play 1 either, though I never really hear anyone talk about it, everyone goes straight to 2.

I do think 3 was really good, it was definitely a bit too much but they still made it work. 4 was where they took those ideas and went off the rails with it for some reason.

I was interested in the reboot until the feedback starting coming out and yeah I’m not touching that one