So you got all your friends, family and coworkers and acquaintances using Signal?

Only the ones I like.

Joking aside, yes. I’ve found that just letting a friend or relative ask exploratory “how bad cash WhatsApp be?” questions for about five minutes gets them to start the switch to Signal.

I can’t take any credit, Meta decided to lean in hard on spying on people.

I actually happily “die on the hill” defending the Stallone version of Dredd.

It’s a poor adaptation of the comic, but a pretty good science fiction film.

It doesn’t hold a candle to the Karl Urban film, but if Stallone’s version had come out earlier than it did, I think it would be remembered more fondly.

Waterworld?

“George not even trying hard.”

“They looked up at the mountain with aw.”

I’m so quick to install a custom ROM, I forgot the Meta spyware comes pre-installed on many phones. Ugh.

If it’s a Pixel anyway, GrapheneOS has a few nice security and privacy features that LineageOS doesn’t have (yet?).

I think both are pretty great and much better than most alternates.

Interesting, what issue are you having on steam deck?

I didn’t have any issue, I just hesitated to buy it without the “verified” badge. Thanks for the info! That’s exciting. I’ve been wanting to play Black Flag.

Edit: I see my wording above was misleading. I will update.

Well, now I’m excited for this.

I was quietly hopeful, since Peacemaker is so great, and James Gunn is a huge comics nerd in all of the best ways.

But including Guy Gardener and Mr. Terrific is a power play. There’s so many things this could be, and all of them sound fun.

Edit: Oh shit, that’s Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardener?! Perfect casting. Is this real? That sounds too good to be true…

Edit 2: Yes. Nathan Fillion is playing Guy Gardener

Perfect casting.

That update though: “… completely removed…”

I assume this is because someone at Meta realized this was a huge breach of trust, and likely quite illegal.

Edit: I read somewhere that they’re just being cautious about Google Play terms of service. That feels worse.

To answer your top level question:

If it’s not Linux from Scratch, then we don’t know exactly what is running, and we need to consider that.

We made rocks think. There’s some trust decisions involved.

Should I blindly trust every app I find on F-Droid? No. The article correctly lays out reasons why.

Most of them also apply to Google Play and to Aurora.

Your decision which to trust depends which threat protections you need the most:

• Google Play provides stronger protections against people who are trying to run up your credit card through Google Play purchases. Many of the protections cited in the article were developed for this reason. Google Play store apps can fraudulently charge your credit card. But Google works hard to prevent this, with mixed results.

• Aurora serves the same apps as Google Play and effectively benefits from the same protections.

• In addition, Aurora adds additional context about malicious corporate behavior. Google has slowly added some, but not all, of these to Google Play. But at the end of the day, Google is being payed to look the other way by some corporations.

• Like Aurora, F-Droid includes details meant to protect you from abuses by corporations. I would argue that F-Droid’s protections are stronger than even Auroras.

• F-Droid does not include a method to charge your credit card. This makes a number of security differences in the article much less important, to most people. Of course, there’s more harm that an app can do than credit card charges.

Because I am aware of many harms caused by individual bad actors and corporations, my preference order goes:

• F-Droid - Preferred. I find the arguments in the article weak, and a bit out of date. I also feel that F-Droid had dramatically less need for the protections discussed, because there’s no mechanism available to F-Droid apps to run up my debi lt card.
• Aurora Store - Acceptable. Some useful apps aren’t of F-Droid.
• Google Play Store - Unacceptable to me. Aurora provides the same apps, but gives me better insights into the privacy impact of each app. Google Play is getting better over time, but the Google team has financial incentives to present trading my privacy for convenience as a good idea.

Why remake it though?

I know it doesn’t run (trivially) on SteamDeck. (Sorry, poor wording. I recall it wasn’t SteamDeck verified, last time I had my finger on the “buy” button.)

I know I’ll be buying a copy when any version releases with a SteamDeck verified badge.

So I imagine the conversation:

“Boss, getting this verified is going to be as much work at a full remaster!”

“Okay. So what?”

“So what?”

“Does anyone here not want to spend months updating this fantastic title that will probably sell like got cakes?”

“…”

“So let’s do this.”

Edit: Or it could be the micro-transaction thing others mentioned. I hate that it’s more probable. I guess I could wait and emulate the original later, if so.

Oh, good one!

Pitch Black, in particular, is one that is hard to explain to anyone who didn’t see it under ideal circumstances.

I feel like folks ask me:

“Isn’t that just another dark sci-fi edgelord apocalypse movies?”

I mean, technically, I guess, yes - but it’s so well done that it becomes something more.

Square hogs! The square hogs are one of my all time favorite movie details. They’re so goofy, but still enhance the world building.

Wow! That’s so cool.

Gordon’s mastery of film absolutely shows through, in spite of the… Everything.

Watching Space Truckers was, for me, surreal like leaning over to look at a drawing on someone’s refrigerator, only to gradually realize that it’s a Picasso or a Rembrandt, just from their “crayon” phase.

Space Truckers still absolutely is what it says on the movie cover, just executed with a surprising mastery that even a casual movie fan like me couldn’t miss.

Watching it the first time was such a delightful surprise.

Okay, I’ve got one that no one has mentioned.

Space Truckers.

Without clicking the link, just imagine what it might be.

No self respecting 90s technology person respects that movie.

How dare you?!

Oh…wait. “self respecting”. Okay. Fair enough.

Perfect movie.

But I’m biased, because my religion gives me the ability to navigate turbulent wormholes, too. So obviously I found it relatable.

There used to be a fan edit version of Farscape edited down to a few key minutes per episode, and it was surprisingly good.

(And surprising how many minutes of each episode could be cut without any meaningful loss…)

This is a perfect example for this thread.

So much of that film officially cannot work:

The pacing is frantic and weird.

It relies on familiarity with the source show while being stand-alone and released too late. (Well, maybe it realizes that “Swiss Family Robinson in space” isn’t rocket science.)

Various wild science fiction elements are slammed together, some very late with little foreshadowing.

But - the cast carries it off (particularly Garry Oldman and Lacey Chabert).

I have the hardest time explaining why anyone should watch it, but it’s solidly enterainting, and all the bits that shouldn’t work still somehow work.

I unironically enjoy the old 2005 Fantastic 4 movie. It was cheesy as fuck, I don’t deny that.

I hated it when it came out, because all super hero movies were cheesy as fuck, and it felt bad seeing another.

But in hindsight, Fantastic Four movies are better when they’re cheesy as fuck, because so was/is the comic (more often than not).

My only remaining complaint is that the sequel was too chickenshit to give Galactus a giant purple fork hat. I noticed happily that the shadow of the fork hat made it into the trailer, for the new movie.