• 11 Posts
  • 193 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I have one that I like to imagine as secure as fully randomised passwords. It’s four words but, because I’m a cool pwnz0r, the second and last word are written in leetspeak. The phrase is super easy for me to remember and the leetspeak portion has become muscle memory by now. But I only use it for my password manager. For everything else it depends if there’s a good chance I’ll need to login via my phone (no pw manager there). If yes, I use one of my couple rather-safe passwords. If no, I’ll let KeePass2 go to town with a random one.

    Oh and I’m subscribed to the haveibeenpwned leakletter, so i know as soon as possible when definitely to change my password.









  • it’s hard to totally land that message when the game offers no alternative.

    I’m of such split opinion when it comes to this argument against the game. I’ve read it so many times now and I kind of agree that there should have been some nuanced choice that changes the story in such a way where Walker tries to redeem himself? If I recall correctly, the only choice that actually made a difference for the end, was what you did in the very end scene with the mirror, right? And, of course, the choice not to play the game.

    Then again, would it have been better if the player had had the option for a less shitty (not necessarily good or positive) path? Sometimes in life, especially during war, the only things that happen to you are shit and even what you do might be out of your control, because you only have one option that results in staying alive or because your mind is so focused on the task at hand that you can’t even consider other ways of tackling a problem. This might be a bit graphic, but I think Spec Ops puts you in the passenger seat with a maddened driver. You tell the driver your destination (finishing the game) and he just hits the pedal and, no matter how much you protest, he roadkills every person on the way there. The car doors are unlocked and he occasionally stops, giving you an opportunity to get out. When you finally arrive at your destination and complain that he killed all those people, he goes “If you had left the car, I would’ve stopped.” I don’t know, I feel like I have a point here, but I can’t put it into words.

    Also, there are games like Animal Crossing that aren’t criticised with “Well, the message (of positivity and being rewarded for hard work and cooperation while being friendly) falls a bit flat, since the player doesn’t even have alternative options, aside from not playing the game.”

    So, yeah, I’ll leave it at that now, since I think my comment is plateauing in its insightfullness.


  • Better ground transportation could be a big game changer. At the moment I could either fly to London for a couple hundred quid at a convenient time of day within 4-5 hours door-to-door, or I could spend a substantially higher amount on a train ride that takes three times as long and requires me to change trains at least twice in the middle of the night.

    This is such an annoyance, not just from an environmental point of view. Even here in Germany, where we really do have a pretty great train network (mind you, the network is great, not necessarily the “adhering to time schedules”-part), it’s sometimes cheaper and faster to fly from city to city than to ride the literal Inter City Express trains, whose sole purpose it is to quickly connect far-away mid-to-large cities.





  • I can see how most people would be turned off by having yet another website have their email address (even if it’s honestly just for sending them the newsletter), but, at the risk of sounding like an advertising agent, there are solutions to that.

    rambling that might sound a bit too much like advertising, feel free to skip

    You can set up more or less complicated rules so that mails from imanewsletter@newsman.gg are automatically put into a folder that you created for newsletters. But that still leaves you open to them using a different address like marketing@newsman.gg to sneak past that filter. Also, if (more like “when”, honestly) their database gets leaked, you’re going to receive a lot of spam mails from less reputable people. Or you create different email addresses for different websites and auto-forward those mails to your main account, maybe?

    Alternatively, and that’s the service I’ve been enjoying for the past months, you can use the mail service Port87. To be frank, it’s still a bit buggy at times and it doesn’t seem to work for every sender (for some encoding reasons, as far as I understood, DHL delivery mails just don’t get loaded properly), but the idea is that you have built-in the ability to create sub-adresses and you only give out those sub-adresses to sign up for things. So my main address might be crowbro@port87.com, but I would sign up as crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. From what they know, my “real” adress is simply crowbro-newsletter@port87.com. Even if that database gets leaked and I suddenly receive mails from “my bank” about needing to refresh my credit details, I would immediately see that it’s in crowbro-newsletter@port87.com instead of crowbro-mybank@port87.com and this likely is a phishing attempt. I’m gonna end this here, because I really don’t want to seem like I’m just trying to advertise the stuff I use.


    On the general topic: I feel for anyone who is trying to get into journalism and stuff like voice acting right now. Any article that reads a little weird and too stiff (same with voice-over in YouTube videos), I almost immediately scoff off (is that a word?) as being AI-generated and not worth my time. I wouldn’t be surprised if, doing this, I already skipped one or two pieces of media that were actually from humans but those humans were still novices in their field.