This is all absurd, obviously, but:
The new subscription can be stacked with a Plus, Gold or Platinum subscription for access to more features, the company notes.
$499 and you don’t even get everything there is to get? You still have to pay for more? What in the fuck?
What a coincidence, I just started getting back into geocaches myself!
Anyway, all the advice here is great, but I’d also like to point out that we are on the fediverse. There aren’t that many people here, compared to other platforms, and the demographic is certainly skewed one way. You can definitely use these in your favor, but don’t get discouraged when you’re “only” pulling a few hundred, when that pretty solidly puts the community into one of the big ones (again, comparatively speaking). Things are just a bit more quiet here.
Calling Devolver Digital the “Cult of the Lamb publisher” is like calling Pixar the “Toy Story 4 creators”. It’s not untrue, but they’re also known for publishing a lot of other things. But I get why they picked this game for the headline, it’s in vogue right now.
I haven’t even read the article yet and I’m at full sail.
Edit after reading:
The new rails look gorgeous, and I need those new S-bends immediately. And those smooth curves!
And this:
We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this.
is how you know a game dev is in touch with their audience.
Although this confirms my suspicions from last week that 1.1.x maps will be incompatible with the 2.x update, which is a shame but completely understandable. That just means that I have to hurry up and launch my first rocket before that happens! (I swear I’m making actual progress and not just staring blankly at my machines at work)
In a way, I’m glad to hear this. I mean, for one thing I’m cheap, but more importantly, I never got around to playing the DLC for BotW. I 100%'d the base game (well, minus the koroks) before the DLC even came out, and I’ve tried numerous times to get through the DLC when it did come out, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I know it’s totally just a me thing, but when I’m done with a game, I’m done with it. So I’ve been waiting for the TotK DLC to all come out, then I’d play through it all in one fell swoop. I guess this means I could have started playing months ago, seeing as I bought it months ago, but whatever.
Seeing as the post is written by the person who made Space Exploration, it seems they’re targeting entirely different niches here. Where Space Exploration is about challenge and increasing numbers of interdependencies, Space Age seems to be just the natural progression of vanilla Factorio, as in, just keep expanding. Having never played Space Exploration nor made it past Purple Science, I’m interested to see how this expansion will develop.
As others have stated, it’s usually as simple as downloading a torrenting program and finding something to torrent. There are many programs, and many sites dedicated to hosting torrented files, both of which would probably be breaking the rules of this instance if I were to link them. But for the sake of intellectual curiosity, if you look them up, you can find them easily. (If you’re interested in what torrenting is and why it’s different than just downloading, I’ve moved my paragraph to the bottom to ease the wall of text.)
As for internet privacy, there’s no one singular repository of information or “holy bible” as it were to adhere to. Internet privacy is something you just pick up over time as you get used to the Internet and indeed make many mistakes on your own. I’ve done my fair share of clicking shady links and losing access to my accounts in my day, and as they say, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So don’t be so hard on yourself, you’ll learn in due time, one way or another. Don’t be afraid to ask more questions and make your own mistakes, it’s only human. Right now, as long as you’re partially aware of some of the dangers of the Internet, you’re already leaps and bounds ahead of other people, and that’s a-okay.
Anyway, as for the intricacies of torrenting, it’s actually a very interesting and seemingly complex but actually simple system. Torrenting is also called peer-to-peer transferring, which as the name implies, is done by transfering information between everyone! Like others have said in this thread, you’re not just downloading a file from some server somewhere, but you’re getting many many small pieces of information from potentially hundreds or thousands of different people. It’s like if you tried reconstructing a book by going to your friend John, and he photocopies the first chapter, then you go to your friend Mike, and he photocopies the second chapter, and so on. Files in a torrenting network are broken into small blocks, which are downloaded from other peoples’ computers, and then reconstruted as one file on your own computer! This does imply that, while you are downloading a file while torrenting, you’re also uploading it! When you receive information from others, your computer then also turns around and broadcasts that information to anyone in the torrenting network who still needs it. When you’ve fully downloaded the file, you can also choose to continue uploading and broadcasting the file for other people to download from. (This is called “seeding” and is typically seen as either a nice thing to do, or downright mandatory in some circles.) You can probably see now why piracy is so prevalent here, as it’s downright impossible to squash an entire network of people all sharing files amongst each other, and law enforcement can’t prevent everyone from doing it. (And if you’re taking proper precautions like using a reputable VPN, they won’t even know you’re torrenting anything at all!) It’s a very interesting system, one that I think is super neat, but it does have its positives and negatives. Hope you found this as interesting as I do!
Torrenting is simply a special method of uploading and downloading files. I can elaborate if you wish, but I’ll leave it at that. It’s worth noting that torrenting is typically used to distribute illegal media-- there’s nothing wrong with the act of torrenting itself, but because of the method of which torrenting is achieved, it’s mostly used to download/upload pirated movies, games, music, etc. Lots of legitimate things can be torrented, such as Linux distributions. If you’re ever considering torrenting media which may be illegal, make sure you’re fully informed. (Many will argue about the ethics of pirating media, I think this is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
As for metadata, “meta” means “self-referential”. So Meta data is data about data, which is to say, it’s information about itself. Metadata describes many aspects of a file. If you’ve ever opened the properties of a file and seen that it was “created January 1, 1980”, or “1.2 MB”, or “authored by Big Books Inc”, etc, that’s all metadata. In terms of privacy, some files could possibly have metadata such as the name of the user who created it, their geological location, the device the user used to create it, etc. I personally don’t think it’s something to be extremely paranoid over, but it is something worth looking a bit more into if you care about online privacy. Also worth noting that most image sharing sites and services strip images of their metadata when you upload them.
My expectations were low, but holy shit.
Great video on Benford’s Law here. Matt goes into a good amount of detail outlining why this occurs, why it doesn’t always apply, and what it means if data does/doesn’t follow the Law.
If you ever find yourself in a pinch and are absolutely needing a VPN for any reason and are willing to spare a couple bucks, I highly recommend mullvad. They were highly approved of on /r/piracy, and they have all the features top-of-the-line VPNs do: doesn’t keep logs, multiple devices per account, servers in dozens of other countries, yadda yadda.
But the reason I liked them most was that they didn’t operate on a subscription service. You simply bought however much time you wanted, in increments of months at $5/month, and you used it. Your credit card or paypal was not on file, you simply buy time and ran through it. If you wanted more time, you bought more time. They even accepted cash in the mail, which sounds absurd to me. Whenever I need a VPN urgently, I just chuck them $5 and I’ve got 30 days time added to my account, and then I do whatever I need to do. Very convenient.
But you’re right to never trust free VPNs. They gotta make money somehow, and you know what they say, if they’re not selling a product to you, they’re selling you as a product.
HOLY FUCK I AM SO FUCKING HARD
…small concern though: I currently use the rail planner a lot, usually to map out how I want my outposts to look at long distances. If the rail planner, particularly shift + click, is actively looking for rails to snap to, I hope it won’t greedily try to snap to rails I don’t want it to. I’m sure the devs already have this considered, but I just want to make sure that if I have multi-layer train crossings, and I’m trying to plan them out before I actually build them, that I’m able to path out rails behind an elevated rail without the rail planner assuming I want the rail to connect to the elevated rail. I hope that won’t be an annoying issue.