I love that Linux exists, but I really don’t appreciate the bullshit PR speak about how regular users can switch from Windows with little-to-no friction. The second something doesn’t work as expected, even a minor thing, they’ll be at a complete loss about how to even investigate the issue, let alone correct it. Windows competency doesn’t transfer to Linux for even the most basic under-the-hood stuff. The less honest you are about that, the fewer people will try Linux a second time, and the more people will write off the entire endeavour as being the domain of computer experts/enthusiasts.

Also fails to mention mastery of nunchucks?

It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.

Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.

It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.

And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.

Haha bless 'em. He’s a handsome chap!

AIMP ^{[Windows/Android]} has been my Winamp replacement for ~15 years. I’ve never found a player that comes close to rivalling it.

P.S. I have no idea what the licence is for AIMP, I just know it’s free and is excellent. You don’t need Winamp.

I feel only slightly less ridiculous asking for Steam Controller support in games 😆 But I will keep asking because I fucking love that controller.

As in real life, it’s pretty sound advice to ignore, block or otherwise disengage from trolls and other forms of belligerents. Even in the '90s when I first started using the internet, the phrase of the day was “don’t feed the trolls”. But people just can’t help themselves. They will even reply saying “I know you’re a troll, but…”.

The Steam forums are a great example, where every other thread is a fake “is this game woke??” screed. The fact that you can be rewarded for being a cunt there with jesters (which translate into points that can be spent to buy profile items) just makes it a thousand times worse. You get ‘paid’ to be a troll on Steam. It’s insanity.

The only anti-troll weapon that works or is needed is oblivion. Let their steaming turd of a post curdle in solitude. Don’t even downvote it. Being downvoted is a victory for them, an acknowledgement that they exist and that they’ve gotten your attention and that they’ve annoyed you. Shadowban them from your mind. Block them so that no future posts of theirs will infect your screen. Report them so mods can remove/ban them. Just don’t engage directly with the post or the user. Don’t say “blocked and reported” in the troll’s thread/post. Just do it silently.

We grew up watching those dudes get butchered in increasingly-grotesque ways by a diverse conglomeration of psychotic murderers and animals, both natural and supernatural.

I’m good with my plain black t-shirt that’s long enough to serve as a dress because I’m fat and need uberlength shirts to make it over the curvature of my Moo Deng pregnancy and still have enough fabric left over to not leave me looking like I’m wearing a cummerbund made from pale hairy human skin.

Fat guy dress > being split vertically, starting at the willy, by an industrial saw because I unknowingly spent a summer afternoon in a swimming hole that once hosted a cruel gang of teenagers who pretended to befriend a lonely man with a deformity and subsequently caused him to drown in it by shoving him off the rocks into the water even though they knew he couldn’t swim.

This is the only way Bill Gates can go to the grocery store unaccosted.

This is what it feels like to be on disability even if you never go to the chocolate factory 😆

This is why I keep my front door key in my foreskin. Either I evade the pickpocket, or I make a new friend. I cannot lose.

As a younger man, I was able to unlock the door hands-free. These days, I need to fish the key out of my floppy beige KKK hood like a sock trapped in a duvet cover on laundry day.

What happened to my precious meme? 😭

You just use two forks, with the prongs on one fork filling in the slots of the other. They call this practice ‘spooking’.

TERFs

Coasters for a DnD night!

I actually played a wee bit of 1983’s Crystal Castles (Atari 2600 version) earlier this year when I was trying out emulators 🤣 I loved that game when I was a kid, I get a major nostalgia hit when I play it. I’m sure some of the other games I tested were older still, but that’s the one I remember because I was born in that same year.

I remembered it being one of the first games I ever played. As I fumbled my way through those first few sessions, I could physically feel my neurons flowering and blooming and creaking to life like a bunch of microscopic mind-rhubarb. It was the beginning of a life-long love of gaming.

If they had added fast travel, it would have been a really solid game (to me, at least). The excruciatingly-long driving sessions were interminable, and it was this that made me abandon the game in the end, even though I was already about 2/3 of the way through it. The characters, acting and story were really good.

It’s quite repetitive, but no more than any other middling open world game. I happen to enjoy stealthily murdering people with a giant combat knife, so the repetition didn’t bother me. The constant criss-crossing around the map to go to/from objectives bothered me a lot. 90% of the checkpoints in each quest could have been a phone call.

I wonder if there’s a mod that lets you teleport to map markers 🤔 If so, I would play the game again.

Why do all of this dude’s video thumbnails look like the creepy waxen models on Kinder products?

Home Depot

• Lying if you’re a politician. You should be in a state similar to “under oath” in court, but at all times.
• Advertising. I should have the legal right to not be advertised at. I should have the right to not have to accept advertising in order to access services, especially so if I already pay a subscription to that service. I cannot put into words how much I loath and despise advertising and advertisers. I hate them. Hate, in the real sense of the word.
• Loot boxes in video games, whatever age group the game in question is aimed at, but especially so in kids’ games.
• Microtransactions in video games for anything other than non-essential/non-advantageous items, like cosmetics. Even then, their presence should upgrade the PEGI rating to adult/18, regardless of the actual content of the game. This might help prevent their inclusion at all.
• Whatever the fuck is going on in Gaza right now.
• Shielding police or soldiers from prosecution for crimes they’ve committed. If you stand in the way of the due process any other citizen would face, you should be heavily penalised for that. Like, the murderer soldiers who carried out Bloody Sunday are currently being protected by the British state and its lackeys, and I cannot fathom why. Cops in the US who murder people are frequently protected by unions and get to retire rather than be fired etc. All of that shit should be illegal. Get the fuck out of the way of due process.
• Naziism and related nonsense like Holocaust denial. Germany already has laws about this, but that shit needs to be legally smothered in its crib everywhere.
• Conspiracism surrounding public health issues like vaccines and masks.
• Climate denial.
• Slave labour in prisons.
• Private prisons.
• PACs and donations to PACs.
• Lobbying.
• Joe Rogan.