The term Ante in the game is used instead of “round” or “level”. It’s a measure of how far you’ve gotten. Each “ante” is made up of three “stakes”, point totals you need to beat in a set number of hands played and cards discarded.

There’s no aspect of choosing how much you risk, of “ante-ing up”, or how much you stake. You either beat the points goal (called “chips”) or you lose. There’s no playing of your hand against other hands, bluffing about how good your hand may be to convince others to fold, etc. It’s just you against the score goal. If you beat it faster than the amount of hands you’re given to work with you get extra rewards.

The game has no elements where you stake chips for rewards or anything like that. It borrows basic elements of scoring mechanics from poker, and uses a lot of poker terms for other purposes, but the closest part to gambling is the ability to buy random card packs between rounds (to customize your deck instead of just having the standard 52 card deck).

In between rounds you have access to buy various things to add further modifiers to your scoring, and to adjust the composition of your deck in order to make getting specific combinations more likely.

You can learn most of this in about 5 minutes with the demo, or by taking some time to watch someone else play on youtube.

And people pretend that only American ratings systems pull this kind of bullshit.

My grandfather would regularly mess up managing his diabetes nearly every Christmas we spent with him and end up in a diabetic rage. I honestly couldn’t recount any single one of his diabetic rages because they’ve all kind of congealed together in my head over time.

Three parts that stand out though:

• One of the rages was set off because he couldn’t find the pen he had been using to track his blood sugar levels (he liked to use one pen from new to dried out) so he had to use a new one.
• One of them, my father had to step between my grandfather and my mother and stare my grandfather down because my grandfather was fixing to beat my mother.
• One of them, someone in the family called the police on my grandfather because of his shit.

Those may have been all the same incident, but I remember the rages happening on more than one Christmas.

It’s hard to square that shit with all the good memories I had with him. I’ve learned over the years that he was a shit father before he had grandkids too. But he was (excepting the diabetic rages) a good grandfather to me and my cousins.

Life can be weird like that.

Ok, so now you’re looking at Lemmy plus Pictrs (I think that’s the image hosting software most instances use on the backend, but I might have the name wrong).

If you also want video support loke Facebook, that’s an additional load on the server for whatever you use. Probably piped?

Maybe all of that together is still lighter weight than Friendica. I’d be surprised but it’s possible.

So far we both seem to be going off of gut feelings and anecdotes, so if you (or anyone) has harder numbers that would be neat.

Then there’s the workload of the modifications to the code, especially what would be needed to manage potentially nuanced visibility settings for each piece of uploaded content. That would mean that you wouldn’t only need to mess with Lemmy, but how each of the other services work as well.

And then how do you manage federation while ensuring the visibility settings are kept?

By the time you would have a proof of concept that had the basic features down, it would be significantly diverged from Lemmy anyway.

You mention LemmyBB in your other response. I wasn’t aware of it before, but an “old school” forum is significantly more similar in function to Reddit/Lemmy than Facebook is. It’s just Reddit/Lemmy without nested comment replies, so everything is a top level comment (or displayed as one) in chronological order. Plus upvote/downvotes wouldn’t need to be displayed.

None of this makes what you’re suggesting impossible, but you’ve got many additional layers of complexity right out of the gate compared to just using what already exists for the job at a resource efficiency hit.

Would it truly not just be simpler to work on improving Friendica’s efficiency rather than rebuilding the wheel using layer upon layer of leaky abstractions and approximations?

Lemmy is easier to host specifically for the reasons that it wouldn’t make a good Facebook alternative. Hosting what is mainly text content and links is pretty lightweight.

There’s no benefit to trying to be clever with this by manipulating something not fit to task when there is already an existing solution.

Just use one of the Fediverse Facebook alternatives if you want a Fediverse version of Facebook.

“Cranking your hog” could be used as euphemism for male masturbation, but the “joke” is that it’s probably the most ridiculous way you could refer to jerking off.

It also could be used to mean cranking the throttle on a motorcycle.

So THE PACK (the “wolf” pack) is kind of a mix of taking the piss out of: edgy/hardcore biker t-shirts/culture, ridiculously over the top support groups, occasional “wife bad” boomer humor, and the fact that a lot of “strong male” branded stuff is just a hair away from being extremely homoerotic. They’re also legitimately just a fun group of general positive supportive posters.

I DON’T MIND DOING THE DISHES BUT I’D RATHER BE CRANKIN MY HOG WITH MY BROS

There’s a difference between tempering, and making sure the artillery is aimed at the most valuable targets.

We need this energy to stay pointed at the 1%, and to not get mixed up in the weeds. The last time we had energy like this was Occupy Wall Street, and the momentum was killed by attempting to expand the scope from the initial target of the 1%.

It is. But if the world and life were so simple we wouldn’t have anywhere close to the amount of problems that exist.

Houses require maintenance over time, and there are people who need a place to live but can’t afford sudden repair costs, which can be absorbed by a landlord. There are people who prefer not to own for a variety of reasons. Maybe they like being able to make repairs someone else’s problem, or they like the freedom of being able to uproot and move easier.

I have an uncle that makes fucking bank doing contract work all over the place who falls into that last example.

I agree that everyone who wants a home should be able to have and keep one, but there are bigger fish to fry (CEOs to shoot?) before it’s worthwhile to start in on smaller scale landlords etc.

The rich want us squabbling over differences of wealth at these lower levels. It helps distract people from the biggest offenders.

Don’t waste your effort. You see similar in every discussion on this site about landlords too. No nuance allowed.

The local guy renting out his late parents’ home at below market rate is just as despicable as the slumlord lackeys of the investment companies that don’t do any upkeep.

There’s an official The Thing game that has gotten a remaster that will be releasing soon. If it hasn’t already come out and I just missed it.

Yeah, welcome to the era from before they were ubiquitous.

Anal penetration and assplay sure, but specifically analingus? Not so much.

I’ve consumed a concernigly unhealthy amount of pornography since roughly 2006. Analingus being featured in porn, which is usually more extreme/deviant than reality, wasn’t a widespread outside of specific fetish content until maybe the mid 2010s.

The internet sure didn’t invent analingus, but it has only become widespread and supposedly normal more recently.

By keeping the bank from bankrupting you and garnishing your wages. The bank will happily take money from your accounts without your consent when the government comes asking for it. They will also take money from any accounts you may be cosigned on (my parents got so late on bills that the bank drained my account when I was a minor living with them, and there is no legal recourse for this).

Pretty hard to effect change when you can’t buy food because the government came by and took all your money out from under you.

Look. You’ve been provided advice towards what options are available to you. If you choose not to take that advice and to make this the hill you choose to die on, the government and the bank won’t hesitate to assist you with the choice to ruin your life over this.

Feel free to debate philosophy with the bank and the government. I’m out.

I know you can see my other comments. That isn’t what I’m saying at all.

You have to accept the reality of the system that exists, for the sake of survival in reality, before you can work on fixing it. This isn’t complicated, tacit acceptance of the shit situation, or advocating for non-action.

There are many indignities in life that you will have to accept for survival’s sake so that you are able to work on changing things.

Getting your wages garnished by the shitty system that exists, because you don’t agree with it and therefore decided to stop paying, doesn’t help anyone towards fixing it. It just makes your situation worse.

If only I could get my spouse to understand this better. Eating times seem to be her go to when time is tight and we need to shift things around. That really doesn’t work for me.

With the way it can effect me I’ve been concerned I might be diabetic, but my blood work consistently shows that I’m not and not close to at risk of developing it.

It doesn’t help that I’ve had numerous experiences over time with people saying they’d be fine to skip a meal or eat later who definitively weren’t. As a response I tend to worry about that more than I probably should.

Thankfully it only comes up regularly during road trips, and we’ve agreed that it only takes one of us to want to stop for us to stop (and go get food, bathroom, etc).

You have vitally missed my point. I’m not arguing that it’s something we should be happy about or not trying to change, just that it is something that is.

Unfortunately, we are required to exist in the world that is, rather than the world that should be. You have to survive in reality to be able to make changes to it.

You’re more than welcome to call up your loan provider and tell them you don’t accept the terms you already signed up for. Let us all know how that goes.

As much as it sucks, we most likely aren’t getting student loan forgiveness. It didn’t happen while Biden was in the height of his presidency, so it’s even less likely to happen now. It’s especially not happening now when the next guy up would most likely just repeal anything shoved through for it at the last minute before he takes office.

Switching to a government backed loan like you did should give you more options to potentially continue deferment based off your income, but that is something you would need to sort out with your loan provider. The term is “income based repayment”.

Is that meant to be a counterpoint? It doesn’t counter anything I said.

I acknowledged that it’s a shitty, predatory practice. That’s not something that I think any reasonable person could debate against. It still doesn’t invalidate any of my points.

There are many resources out there to assist, and in life we are regularly made to make decisions we aren’t adequately prepared for while we are still responsible for the consequences.

You’re never stopping predatory businesses from being predatory.

There are many ways to get assistance with student loans. There’s FAFSA before you start, there are federally backed ones that can’t pump up the interest rates, there’s income based repayment plans (that can go as far as full deferment), and if for some reason someone made the mistake of not using any of that there’s still options for loan consolidation/refinancing to better rates when better rates are available. On top of all that, most loan providers will work with you. They want your money, not the hassle of selling your loan to a collections agency for a lower amount.

None of that eliminates predatory loan providers, or the targeting of unprepared 18 year olds, but the impact can be blunted.

Beyond all that, at some point, some amount of personal responsibility must be taken for one’s actions. None of us will always have the capacity to fully understand every choice we make, or the knowledge to make those decisions from a fully informed position, but we all have to make certain decisions in life anyway and live with the consequences. Not fair, but that’s life.