Awesome, I love it, Lucy. Thank you for creating it.

I would just disagree with the little to no story. I feel like dungeon crawlers have the most compelling stories because they are deeply attached to gameplay rather than exposition.

It took me a while to realize he was a crazy con man, to my fault, it was only when he started meddling with stuff I had some understanding. Around the same time, he was investing in movies and making cameos: Thank You for Smoking, Iron Man…

But people were already pointing that out from his time on Paypal. And you can find stuff even before that. So no,

He was crazy/con man even before Tesla.

There is no excuse. Just because there was a time that he posted rainbows and talked about climate does not sane wash his actions, it is just that he was targeting another kind of people. Just like companies rainbow their logos during pride month.

Cool! Thanks for sharing your methods. I like your stick figures and your lines.

If I try to do that with a mouse, it looks like an ECG.

Some people might say the last panel was not necessary, but it was what made me spit my coffee.

It depends on your threat model (how much you want to share).

Any device would leak a bit of information, either when it pings the satellite or cellular network, and some devices even ping nearby devices.

go back to a “dumb” computer (maybe not such a bad thing!)

It is difficult to find anything “dumb” nowadays. If you go to the vintage route, make sure they have a common cable, and that you can export/import the files using some easy to read format like GPX. To avoid getting stuck in proprietary bullshit.

That is even more important if you like to plan your route on your PC and send to the device.

keep my Garmin devices but take them offline

This will leak less information than your mobile device. Depending on the device, you can find open-source software that can make your life a lot easier for transferring files and reading them.

use a phone-based app like CoMaps

Can be an easy route. If you have your phone on you all the time, you are already leaking some information anyway.

or possibly a wearable fitness tracker.

Some of them require a proprietary app that definitely will phone-home with your info.

You can try GadgetBridge to avoid that https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/ but the supported devices list is small.

Maybe even an all-in-one platform like Garmin, but where the company really puts privacy front-and-center

No, sadly. The best you can find are community made open-source apps alternatives trying to bridge the gap.

Garmin used to show their source code back in the day. https://developer.garmin.com/open-source/linux/

They have a demo available. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3404260/Dead_as_Disco/

From what I played, the attack matches the music automatically, and you do not need to worry about pressing buttons on the beat.

You can attack with no concern about timing (mashing, for example), and the animation will always hit to complement the music. Like, if the music has a quick ta-ta-ta, pressing the attack will show your character quickly punching 3 times matching it.

I don’t know whether it is nostalgia or my memory failing, but Batman: Arkham combat is in a sweet spot that is hard to match. I remember enjoying Sleeping Dogs and Shadow of Mordor, but Mad Max was a bit repetitive. People also suggests Sifu and Ghost of Tsushima, but I haven’t tried those yet.

Previously, the advice was to translate your posts into one or two languages before posting. It seems that even rough content generated by large language models (LLMs) can help people fit in more easily.

I like how slop became “rough content” after translation.

tl;dr: it is probably Deadlock, use a VPN to force a different the server/route.

@hello_there Does your computer support wifi6? What time of the day are you playing Deadlock?

As others mentioned, you need to isolate the problem. The usual suspects are:

• Computer to router - check the Wi-Fi strength,(@tal’s mtr, linssid, nmcli… there are many out there. Use something that would monitor for a while, since you said that the spikes happen every 10 seconds. If you are willing to move your computer, or get a longer cable to your antenna, or to buy wifi6 antenna with a long cable: you can get a phone app to do the strength test and check for better spots nearby.
• Router to “outside” - if you use all in one solution, just make sure it is working properly, either connect to it thought your browser. Or be lazy and do the power cycle, waiting 20 seconds before reconnecting the power cable (or whatever is your ISP guideline).
• Route to game servers - Try to play other online games, take note of the server location you are to experience the problem. As there are always some issues with the route, like a flood in a region, a truck that destroyed a cable, or just ISP incompetence.
• Route to the Deadlock servers - You can enable settings to show more details, or open the steam overlay. It will show you locations, and if it hopped in multiple servers. Take note of the servers the problem happen and the ones that do not.

The other suspects do not happen so often, but:

A faulty Wi-Fi device, but the 10 seconds interval is a bit weird for it. And you would see a bunch of errors in your logs. If you want to rule that out, get one of those wifi-usb dongle with a big USB extension, or one of those fancy ones from TP-Link or Netgear that comes with big cables and antennas.

If you think it might be a fedora update, you can rollback to test it. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/manual-rollbacks/

I am inclined to think it is Deadlock because I played it for a while, and from my list, it was the only thing inconsistent and extremely erratic. From one day to another, it would go from small spikes, to something that looked like randomizing my ping between 45 and 350 every couple of seconds. One of those days it was connecting me to Amsterdam servers, with a hop in Buenos Aires first. And sometimes it would change depending on the time of the day. The game is not released yet, and their servers are still experimental.

Sadly, there is no way to force a server at the time, not sure if they implemented that yet. And there were plenty of people complaining on their forums about those problems. There, you might find a case similar to yours with a different solution, but what worked for me sometimes was to use a VPN and chose a location in the same city as the server closest to me. When that failed, I would try a different city for the VPN.

It is nice that most of them have demos.

Jackal is good, I recommend if you like games like Hotline Miami. It is similar but more forgiving, and you have some weird powers. (There is a button “download demo” on the right panel).

I need to give the others a try, I am curious about Shadows of the Afterland.

I noticed that most people I bump into that says they are not into politics, they mean partisan politics. Often from places where they are disenfranchised about their civics.

But if you bring up “holly shit, did you see the price of milk is 7CAD?”. They will be more than happy to provided their cents on why and think about solutions.

The author surely likes that the mascot is a dog. It feels more of a read and analysis of the terms of use than a deep dive of the tool but it was a good reading and I liked the suggestions.

I also liked the “reminder”.

Edit: you should share this in some community as a post, every time I see this kind of website (pure content no-nonsense) it is shared is in the comments. 15 years ago this kind of stuff was easy to find, but nowadays, I only see them in comment sections. Even the search engine recommended around here would list a bunch of junk in the first pages.