dvn

I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.

So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.

Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.

This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.

Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.

And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

I'm so sorry but this post was way too perfect for them, I couldn't resist

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

It's strikes me that it's not just Leo that does this - taking on a role in the family so the others are free to do their own things. I'd argue they all do it.

Donnie almost entirely shoulders the maintenance and security of their lair (though I like to headcanon that the others help out with chores. We see Leo doing some welding in Tale of Master Yoshi, for example). This frees up his brothers to enjoy their hobbies - Mikey to read his comic books and play video games, Raph to tinker with his bike and hang out with Casey, and Leo to read and meditate.

Raph strikes me as the Guard or Shield of the family. Especially on missions, he's the one that watches their backs and keeps them all safe. Which leaves Leo free to focus on the strategy and overall logistics, Don free to let his big brain tick over the science and Intel they need, and Mikey free to bring some levity to the situation so the stress doesn't get on top of them.

And Mikey? I'd argue that Mikey's intentionally the goofball of the family. He's far from oblivious, as the above quote shows. I think he deliberately adopted the persona of the 'clown', in order to make his family smile and relieve the tension that having 3 very intense brothers tends to foster. Mikey's busy being the 'funny one', so his brothers don't become snowed under with their own heavy thoughts and self reflections.

sure you can use neocities or carrd or strawpage or whatever whatever but also. make your own from scratch!

there's plenty of free website hosters, github(owned by microsoft), gitlab, and cloudflare have "pages" services which are all free and you can just host whatever html pages even use things like static site generators as well to help yourself from copying and pasting.

if you have your own domains you can also use those, and other than digging deep into web requests or stupid shit there's no way to know you're not hosting it yourself.

i use cloudflare pages, but github/gitlab pages is probably much easier, and if you dont like it, you can just pick it up and move it somewhere else. if you have a custom domain as well you dont even have to tell people "move to the new website". you're not tied down to any service and the site is what you have

It's very flexible too! for beginners you can just put raw html and css and upload it and it'll show, if you need more than this, you can just add more.

my website, ranid.space, also uses cloudflare pages (it can be easily done on the other two), and it's generated using Astro with templates i've created, it has a [shitty] blog Content Management System with an Atom feed, there's pages with javascript, and i even have SEO optimizations (i was really bored okay i really dont care if i show up on google).

it is as simple or as complex as you want it to be.

it is literally JUST hosting your own website you have full and entire control over. note it's a static website so you cant really do things like live updates without connecting it to another server, however for posting to a blog once in a while it's perfectly fine

It requires hosting a couple files, such as audio, on other sites, but it seems like you can do basically whatever on it.

i still recommend things like these pages hosters because if you do end up using static site generators it can use things like github actions to- actually hold on. i just looked this up no fucking way lmfao nevermind it totally works for it too.

(it's called marketplace but it's free and open source idk why it's called that)

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #521 )✅️

Share, donate, help us survive. 🕊️❤️

In a corner of Gaza, my family and I are drowning in destruction, with the echoes of suffering surrounding us. I sat beside my modest tent, hastily erected after losing my home in the latest bombing. The faces of my family tell stories of patience and resilience, with lines of time etched upon them, as if they were records of unforgettable events. 🇵🇸⏳🍉

I once lived in a small home, filled with the laughter and voices of my children. Today, I have become a witness to the agony of displacement. The bombing forced me to flee with my children after a shell struck our home, leaving behind years of memories and simple belongings I never imagined would become unreachable. 🏚️💨

Every morning, I leave my tent and go to work, using a clay oven to provide food for my children. Meanwhile, my youngest son heads to the charity kitchens that offer aid, waiting for long hours under Gaza’s scorching sun. Despite the exhaustion that weighs down his frail body, he carries the food mixed with his tears and returns with a fake smile, hiding behind it the burdens of his struggles. 🍞🥀

At night, when everyone else is asleep, I remain seated at the entrance of my tent, gazing at the dark sky, reminiscing about days gone by… about my home that was once filled with warmth. Yet, I still find remnants of hope in my heart—a hope that one day peace will return, and my children and I will live in a new home, filled with joy. 🌙🏡✨

In moments of solitude, I find peace in prayer and supplication. I plead to God to protect Gaza and its people, to wipe away the dust of sorrow from our hearts. I always repeat🇵🇸🍉🌿

"We are here to remind the world that we are stronger than war, and we will rebuild our lives anew, no matter the cost!" 🙏

donate to tarek’s family

donate to provide iftar meals

donate to the water initiative

he’s 21, the same age as me. before the war he was studying to be a translator and he dreamt of voice acting, just like so many of you reading this. (he’s pretty good too actually.) he would probably not call himself a poet but every few days he posts something so beautifully worded that he might as well be a poet laureate. he recently wrote: “gaza is sick of being praised by anyone. gaza is tired that its image is on satellite tv. gaza is sick of its name in the sad poems. gaza is tired of the repeated endings.” the message is clear — sentiments are not enough, his people need HELP.