Exactly.

“they can’t do that that’s illegal”

Who’s gonna stop them? The law ain’t doing Jack FUCKING Shit. If there is no group or individual who is both willing and able to inflict consequences, THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES

Oh indeed! And that’s why I love GOG! I actually try to check GOG first just in case I can buy a game I want there before I go through with buying it on steam. I would actually gladly pay MORE for the GOG version because it removes bullshit like DRM!

In your position I’d be donating some of that money that’s otherwise sitting around doing nothing. But then again, I avoid tv and streaming shows like the plague and have actual niche interests that inspire me. I see people struggling, feel a fundamental urge to help them, and sometimes DO when I can afford it… And that shit is like a DRUG to me. Generosity feels fucking amazing @_@ oxytocin, adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, it’s ALL there!

Do you perhaps fathom how unhelpful and standoffish single word replies are? Conversation is an exchange. If you are not at the very least matching their verbosity and sharing information that is also related to what they’re saying, you’re giving them very little to work with.

But I usually have the opposite problem: my prose is purple as hell. I’m ridiculously verbose and I over share to an absurd degree.

Yes

You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?

They:

1. identified a gradient of human wants
   (Video games exist; I want them on my computer)
2. Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
   (Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer)
3. Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY

When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.

Fatigue.

We’re too distracted by struggling to survive our small local daily struggles to even SEE the big picture.

If there’s a time bomb in the room ticking down before your eyes, yeah that’s a big deal. If, in that same room, you’re also being attacked by a pack of rabid dogs though, chances are you’ve stuck a pin in the whole “what about the bomb” thing.

And if there’s a sniper outside the room preparing to shoot you without even a moment’s notice that you KNOW is there and that you can’t even see AS WELL, all you can hope for us that all the moving around you’re doing to avoid being dragged down and torn apart by the rabid dogs will throw off their shots.

They have BLINDED US WITH TRAUMA.

Normal people are fighting for their lives on a daily basis JUST contending with their landlords, their bosses, their financial institutions, their utility expenses, their groceries. They don’t see the ways in which these challenges are driven by the federal government’s policies on a national scale.

https://youtu.be/ZYkBf0dbs5I

Barbara’s barbarian rhubarb bar

Run? Or perhaps more like crawl…

Linux devs will NEVER suffer kernel level anticheat, so all games that require it will refuse to run. This is more of a problem with gaming industry culture at large, really. But it’s still only going to affect people who use Linux at the end of the day.

I have mint running on my laptop now.

Pro tip for anyone who wants to try Linux and maybe attempt to set up dual boot with Windows:

TURN OFF BITLOCKER ENCRYPTION IN WINDOWS FIRST.

IF you don’t, here’s what happened to me:

Mint live USB instance booted easily at first. I started the install process and selected dual boot. Mint setup then proceeded to prompt me to enroll a MACHINE OWNER KEY… And then realized that bitlocker encryption would prevent it from setting up dual boot.

It said, to paraphrase, “exit mint setup, log back into Windows, disable bitlocker, then you can come back and install”

Well that was a fucking lie because YOU CANNOT GET BACK INTO MINT!

WHY? Because mint FORGOT the MOK!

When you try to get back into mint from the boot selection menu, it says

Something has gone seriously wrong: import_mok_state() failed: Not Found

the upshot is that you computer will never let mint live USB session ever boot again UNLESS you disable secure boot in BIOS and rename grub to mmx64.efi in the ISO image.

And if you DO those things chances are mint will never present you with the option to detect and set up dual boot with you extant windows instance ever again.

I went ahead and nuked my windows 11 instance on my laptop because it was being a bitch and clearly was never going to be a good neighbor to mint. I have no major regrets because mint is nice and I like it. It just didn’t turn out how I would’ve ideally intended. But one way or another Windows 11 HAD TO GO. So, in the broad sense, I wanted to switch to mint… And I have! All good.

it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn’t even try dd flash mode at first.

what’s crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!

I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said “ohhhh no you fucking don’t, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!”

… okay so uh

i’m probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but

something weird happened.

i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.

it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.

well… it got to the point where it said “hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation”

okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there’s anything in this windows instance that I still want.

so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i’d want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick

… nope.

it says ‘something has gone terribly wrong’ and ‘failed to load UEFI’ or something

but that’s not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch

that’s all background stuff, here’s the important crazy thing:

the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.

EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT’S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES

the linux mint iso can’t even FIT on it now

i can’t even reflash it

i … but … how do i even …

WAT

yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven’t had it since like 2021

but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I’m gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!

i appreciate the encouragement ^_ you know, maybe. I’m haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it’s an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i’d end up stranded and unable to get back but … mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE… hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.

i tried mint on an old laptop for a little while and it was nice. i’m thinking of adopting linux for daily-driving when windows 10 stops being supported entirely. But i’m considering going with Bazzite when that time comes, maybe…

Actually I’m starting to feel convinced the Democrats saw “The Producers” as inspiration.

“You can make more money with a floploss than a hitwin!”

As long as they keep losing elections, they can keep making money disappear (via laundering it). They sop up all the donations and laugh all the way to the bank, burning LITERAL BILLIONS OF DOLLARS on their cousin-in-law’s “strategy consulting firm” and tons of completely ineffectual “vote blue” spam, and pay themselves six-figure “speaking fees”.

The solution isn’t to just stop voting, though. Voting is merely the least inconvenient, easiest to access tool in the toolbox and the people who left it unused are morons no matter how much ELSE they are doing ABOVE AND BEYOND that. Voting is the bare minimum; you have to do that AND local party organizing, civics, community engagement, nominating candidates for local races.

But if you don’t vote TOO, it’s like you neglected to wipe your ass. The stink follows you and embarrasses everyone with you.

Actually, for that matter, I DO actually want to incorporate your point.

The problem is the proverbial horse died of thirst.

You’re right in that it’s not correct for me to simply leave it at “you can lead the horse to water but you can’t make it drink”, because the truth is SHE DIDN’T LEAD THE FUCKING HORSE TO WATER AT ALL IN THE FIRST PLACE!

She silently held up a sign that said “maybe water”

Trump held up a sign that said “no water for anyone except you” (which was patently a LIE, there was never any water at all with him) while also making beckoning noises and holding a sugar cube in his other hand.

The fact that the horse literally couldn’t even read in the first place doesn’t change the fact that she didn’t do her fucking job and that he used empty populist rhetoric to lure the horse to a place where there definitely was NEVER going to be any water whatsoever.

We tried to nudge the horse to where there might have been water. But it’s just a dumb fucking animal and wanted sugar cubes. Now it’s dead (and it didn’t even get the sugar cube it was being bribed with) and

…

yeah. We have better shit to do than keep beating this dead horse. It’s too late for it to learn anything.

So, departing from that metaphor, in a very real sense I’ve been making preparations to help people survive and perhaps someday even evacuate. Complaining about the circumstances is not the ONLY thing I’m doing, not by a long shot. But I do complain. Because I’m stressed and need to release the metaphorical pressure.

If you know of any mutual aid groups starting up to construct an underground railroad now that the horse is dead and we have to rely on ourselves, I’d sure like to know.

all the people who refused to vote for kamala must be so pleased with how little palestinian genocide is about to happen. aren’t they? well? aren’t they?

no?

gee it sure sounds like their whole little plan backfired in the worst possible way come to think of it, ACTUALLY.

memetic contagion.

like “very demure very mindful”, “hawk tuah spit on that thang”, and all manner of “skibidi”-related impulsive vocal tics -_-