I describe it to people I know as:

• Fallout 4 is, far and away, the best "game" of the modern ones. It feels much better to play in almost every way than the other ones. Especially the combat. There's some interesting stuff in it, but it's largely the mechanics that keep you coming back, not the RPG or world.
• Fallout 3 has perhaps the better realized world out of them all; the way it all fits together is great and there's a lot of rewarding exploration in it.
• Fallout: New Vegas is, far and away, the best Fallout game...it harkens back to the roots way more and is the best RPG -- by a long shot -- of the 3.

Obviously YMMV and others will feel differently, but that's how I've parsed out this series so far.

As a Manitoban, I think Wab will probably do a pretty good job. The NDP were likely on track for a win after 2 terms of the Progressive Conservatives, but it can't be understated how much the piss-poor handling of the pandemic and health care over the last 4 years was driving people to kick the PC's to the curb. Two generally well-liked Liberal party candidates (very small party here in Mantioba) lost their seats, very likely due to strategic voting just to ensure the PCs got out.

I look forward to the different perspective Wab will bring to the table, and when I looked through the elected MLAs of the NDP this year, I see a very diverse group of people, which will be very refreshing after looking at -- 95% of the time -- rich middle-aged white people.

It's amazing how Facebook managed to be the AOL that AOL never quite got too.

Governments are slow to respond, but it's hard to envision a future where they don't all migrate to running their own Fediverse servers. It's easy, especially if all you want to do is run a locked-down one and post info for dissemination, and you have total control (which gov'ts love). Easy to use, no platform lock-in, data is portable all over the place. The idea that our social infrastructure has become dependent on lunatic tech billionaires is nuts, and the sooner we can contribute to, but not depend on, those networks the better.

I recently picked up a Steam Deck and I can also vouch for it; the device is far more than the sum of its parts and is clearly something Valve was only able to pull off after a decade plus of various software/hardware integration experiments.

SteamOS is the star of the show, and it is both fluid and easy to use while also putting more customization and flexibility at your fingertips than any other game interface I’ve seen. The integration of custom operating system, custom game wrapper tech, and their standardized hardware has produced a device that offers the power and flexibility of PC gaming with a user experience that is getting closer and closer to the “never think about it” ease of use that consoles provide.

It’s not the most powerful; it’s really a 720/800P gaming machine, but games look great at that resolution and you can run a lot of games at comfortably playable frame rates.

I had some doubts after I bought mine when I saw the ROG Ally come out alongside hundreds of “OMG THE STEAM DECK KILLER HAS ARRIVED” videos; but it didn’t take long until I saw a lot of those same content creators return their Ally and come back to the steam deck because although the hardware is slightly more powerful, the user experience end is so much worse than it just wasn’t worth it. Not to mention some serious QC issues with it.

I’ve been a PC gamer for a long time; I think I’ve been active on Steam for 18 years now. The Steam Deck is the best PC Gaming experience I’ve ever had. The hardware is great, the controls (and mapping ability of those controls) are great, the interface is great…everything is just top notch about it. Do I wish it was more powerful? Well that’d be great, and one day it will be. But everything about the experience is so good, I don’t mind some of the drawbacks. It’s encouraged me to get into my backlog of games and genuinely enjoy exploring them again. The Steam Deck just makes it so seamless and easy to play your games.

In fact, I’m getting close to time to build a new PC, and the Steam Deck has really changed my thoughts on it. Seeing how far Proton and SteamOS have come…I just really want Valve to take another shot at the Steam Box. A lot of its shortcomings aren’t issues now, and add in some good Steam Deck integration and have it target 1440P/4K Upscaling, you could create an affordable box that taps into a successful and growing ecosystem. I’d buy one in an instant and just not bother with a new PC build in the years ahead.

That’s how much I genuinely believe that the Steam Deck/SteamOS experience is that good these days!

That's not really how the technology works. But a simple solution could be, both in kbin and lemmy, if the software could aggregate link posts that share the same canonical link URL and provide a summary for each community that's linked it. Then you'd see the link once, but could see the post from each community that's linked it rolled up underneath it.

Kind of like how some RSS readers have a feature that will detect "hot links" in your feed and surface the link with access to the feed items below it rather than having the feed items scattered about.

Just a friendly FYI that the Almanacs have essentially no skill in seasonal forecasting and rely on vagaries and generalities to try and convince readers that the wide net the cast to try and capture chance is actually skill.

Even physical sciences based forecasts can struggle to hit 50-60% skill on seasonal forecasts. Even in the highlights posted here:

• Of course the Canadian Prairies and NW Ontario will be cold; they're some of the coldest places in North America in winter, often even colder than many parts of the Arctic as the northwest flow along the western flank of the Polar Vortex helps to funnel some of the coldest air on the planet in Siberia across the pole and through the Canadian Arctic southwards through the Prairies.
• Newfoundland and Labrador routinely get blasts of bitterly cold Arctic air from northern Quebec and Baffin Island as passing lows lift northwards into Baffin Island and occlude into the Polar Vortex, but it's softened by the relatively warm waters of the adjacent Atlantic waters. Of course they won't be as cold as the land-locked continental regions to the west.
• B.C., especially the western half of it, is among the warmest places in Canada in winter with the cold air routinely kept at bay by a relatively mild onshore flow from the Pacific. The exception is when a particularly strong Arctic outbreak develops over western Canada and a potent high develops over the Rockies which provides a strong surface outflow that drives the Arctic air over the Rockies and out through the coast.

This "forecast" literally just describes essentially every winter in Canada. The fact this pseudoscience that is demonstrably unskilled gets so much visibility each year.

June was actually a bit of a slower month of board games for me and I was pretty busy overall. Lots more short games this past month.

The Bloodborne game by CMON was new to me and I really enjoy its efficiency puzzle. I also enjoyed starting to figure out Tiny Epic Vikings which I've been enjoying primarily solo, though it did take a bit to figure out its solo mode and the general strategies as it can feel pretty unfair at times, even if it isn't. I also began to revisit some of my PnP games, starting with Voyages & Aquamarine by Button Shy Games; those are both great and my kids really enjoy playing them with me.

Looking forward to more Bloodborne this month and finishing up my AH:LCG campaign with a friend. I'd like to play my Lacerda games a bit more -- Kanban EV and Weather Machine -- as well before a few outstanding Kickstarters start showing up at my door.

I was going to bring a similar analogy; the beauty of ActivityPub and these sites are that as long as they implement the standard in a similar way, they simply become different front-ends to view the same data. There isn't a versus as much as which do you prefer? It's going to be one of the great things about the Fediverse going forwards is the ability to create multiple ways of viewing the same data; each one will attract specific users and no longer will content be walled off between them.

You can practically hear the money he spent burning in a pit out back.

I think it's important to note that when the Mastodon migrations really picked up, the software was already 4-5 years old with organized development. Lemmy is only around 3-4 years old and kbin is only a couple years old (with very limited public use). That makes a big difference in what you can expect from them. With the influx of interest in these platforms, you're going to see far more help and contribution to the underlying code alongside better third party app support in the months ahead. These are both very young platforms and have a lot of room to grow in the next while.

Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though...it's kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.

Technology -- and the efforts of open source developers -- got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone's willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.

And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They're all embedded within an ActivityPub "container" that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don't really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub "container" as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it's all the same stuff, and you just need the application you're building to interact with the right parts.

That's why you can do things like follow people from entirely different "platforms" on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here's someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here -- it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing -- but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one "platform" into another.

The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I'm sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.

Last thing I'll say because I'm way too wordy...one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I'm on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that's optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I'm content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It's great!

So when beehaw says they're degenerating from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world, the way that works is that any content from those specific servers will not be ingested into beehaw's view of the fediverse. That includes content and comments. It's identical to how if a Mastodon instance setup for LGBTQ communities and a Mastodon instance set up for far right extremists decided to defederate from each other, they would just never see any content that originated from each other's servers. Since kbin.social is not sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world, we should be fine in sharing back and forth with those communities, and because kbin.social hasn't defederated from those servers, content will flow back and forth between them fine. beehaw users should be able to see content from kbin.social minus any contributions from the defederated servers.

It's a very powerful tool in toolbox for the Fediverse, and one that absolutely brings an eye to the moderation of servers when it's used. I think it's a bit of a bigger deal in this part of the Fediverse right now because there aren't a ton of options yet for federated link aggregators; it's pretty trivial now to move to a different Mastodon server if you disagree with the instances being defederated from the one you're on. That said, it's very much a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing; I think that it's fantastic that servers are able to engage or disengage with whomever they want. Most will get along just fine and it's not really an issue.

I also think that as part of a "community taking back the internet from billionaires" movement, defederation is one of our most powerful tools. If Meta comes into the scene and starts scraping the Fediverse and building marketing profiles and training their AI chatbots on our data, it'll take about 3 minutes until people are maintaining a blocklist on git* for all server administrators to simply block Meta from accessing the majority of the Fediverse. There is a challenge in deciding what the scope of "generally acceptable behaviour" is, but we did it before centralized social media and we can do it again. If anything, I think some of the challenges of the last 10-20 years was this idea that diametrically opposed communities should occupy the same "space" on the internet. Get a big general pool, and give flexibility for communities to push in a direction they want if they want to go outside that space.

Some of these things will iron themselves out as more instances of lemmy or kbin or whatever decides to interoperate with these two spin up. In the end, I think these are tools that allow us to develop healthier communities. In the long game, it won't matter for any one server if they can't access beehaw because good content will be distributed amongst a ton of servers. And if the people from lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works really want that beehaw content, then they can work to address some of the issues that beehaw feels are worth defederating them for!