Doesn't PixelFed allow marking accounts private though?

"...because you don't understand sourdough"

Made me spit up my coffee.

Oh shit, I hadn't heard of that. I'll definitely check it out; thanks for the recommendation.

Might be too coarse. I think Hoffmann recommends a much finer grind than what people normally recommend for French press, something closer to medium than anything that would be called coarse. Might be worth grinding finer and keeping everything else the same, then see what happens.

Likewise!

Ah gotcha; that's helpful. That's not been my understanding of this content, so I'll have to look into that, thanks.

It's heavily inspired by Chrono Trigger...heavily. It's got dual-techs, the writing feels very similar at times, the equipment has predictable scaling as the story progresses, and lots more. The dialog is a bit saccharine for my taste; I've far preferred Chrono Trigger's. Chrono Trigger has pleasant and supportive characters, but it hasn't ever felt over the top. Sea of Stars also has some modern niceties, like timed presses for defense and offense, some interesting spell-boosting mechanics, it's very pretty at times, etc. And it plays on jrpg tropes at times in a fun way, and didn't feel like it overstayed its welcome. Since you love Chrono Trigger, my best guess is that I think you'd have fun with Sea of Stars. It won't blow your mind by any means, but I don't think you'd regret spending time with it.

It does serve as a wonderful example of exactly what they are talking about, funny enough.

I actually enjoyed the game on the whole. If you're a fan of Myst-likes, you may still enjoy it. But if I remember correctly, that particular puzzle I just looked up the exact solution as soon as I understood how to solve it; I'm not going to let any game waste my time like that lol

Big thank you for writing all that out. There's a lot of dynamics here I am not knowledgeable about, so I appreciate you providing links as well. I'll have to read more on this before getting back to you. After your explanation, I have a much better understanding of the intended value of STAR. My gut is still saying that STAR will not allow 3rd parties into a polarized political environment, but I have no data to back that up. I just feel that people will vote 0 for the candidate they least want, 5 for the one they want, and 3 for the one they're ambivalent about and that will devolve STAR to a two-round ranked choice that favors the two biggest political parties. Again, that's definitely possibly me just not fully understanding the system. I'll have to read more, crunch numbers, and see what numbers others have crunched and get back to you. Definitely very interesting and I love the concept of rating politicians independent of each other.

I may be off here because this is the first I'm reading about STAR, but it seems worse than instant-runoff ranked-choice voting because of the "top two candidates based on first results are the final two candidates". It seems like ranked-choice but broken to keep the States in a two party system.

For instance: Let's say there are 4 parties: blue, red, green, and yellow. Let's say the majority of people have red (27%) and blue (26%) as their top pick, so those are automatically #1 and #2. Green is a close third (25%). The remainder (21%) vote for yellow, then green, then red, then blue. STAR would say every other candidate is eliminated except Red and Blue, and then redistribute the other votes. Instant-runoff would say: eliminate yellow and redistribute based off their second choice. In this example, all those votes would switch to green and green would become first. Then blue would be eliminated, those votes redistributed, and then you'd have to see what would happen. Instant-runoff to me allows for the opportunity for a meeting in the middle - everyone potentially agreeing on their second choice; while STAR seems like it will just continue to encourage people to put their primary pick up top.

That's a fairly simplified look at the whole picture though. Fingerprinting is a whole other beast, and Brave and Firefox and associated forks have varying and incomplete protections. For instance, only the Firefox-forked browser called Mull seems to effectively randomize data for canvas fingerprinting, whereas Firefox and Brave don't have protections against it at all. Saying you're essentially invisible on the Internet following your steps is pretty inaccurate. There's way too much money in this shit; web services are fingerprinting on everything they can.