I’ve heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don’t run Windows any more, and I don’t even know what Linux support for it is like.

City of Heroes, everything by Atari Games, the Wizardry series, the Ultima series, many others. I’m old, and I remember some of the games, and developers, we’ve lost.

Something I’ve seen far less reaction to than I expected? While the Switch 2 looks like it takes standard MicroSD cards, it DOESN’T. It takes the fairly obscure MicroSD Express standard! I can’t even BUY an SD Express card locally right now! It seems likely, at launch, that Nintendo’s branded cards will be the only ones people can get that will work with it!

The Switch 2 has 256GB of onboard storage, much more than the Switch, it is true. But it’s also backwards compatible with the Switch, and lets users bring their old digital library over with them. I have a 256GB card in my Switch, it’s nearly full, and it doesn’t have my whole library on it! If I got a Switch 2, I’d have it filled up on day 1!

And the MicroSD card issue won’t be obvious to most buyers. Parents will get their kids Switch 2s, and wonder why their old card won’t work with it. It’ll look to them like the Switch 2 or the card is broken, unless they implement a physical lock against incompatible cards, and I don’t know if SD cards even support those. Also, SD Express cards are more expensive than standard ones.

This could end up being a debacle almost on the scale of the price (which, as others have noted, isn’t even Nintendo’s fault entirely).

There are so many weird things about GIMP, and it feels like they add more over time. I’ve moved a layer and then tried to draw on it and had nothing happen. Why? Because the layer was created as an array of pixels the size of the image, and when I move it there’s now a dead zone where there’s no pixels in the visible image. It turns out there’s a special command to expand moved layers to fill the image: https://docs.gimp.org/3.0/en/gimp-layer-resize-to-image.html

There are times using it that it feels like a maze to navigate to just get my changes reflected in the document.

The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it’s actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don’t need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.

The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there’s no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

Both were great, but both also took me a week to get through, a piece at a time.

Recently, McDonalds announced an initiative to remove all instances of Ronald McDonald from their stores.

So, Ronald McDonald removed all instances of McDonalds from around him.

This is from Graham “Grickle” Annable! He worked at Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts, written/drawn books, designed Puzzle Agent I & II for Telltale Games, has great Youtube cartoons, and posts great cartoons to social media too!

Strange Adventures in Infinite Space

Zork

Ultima

Also, if you agree to this and your wife dies due to allergies in one of your theme parks, they may use the TOS on this trial to rule you agreed to binding arbitration in court.

I saw pigeons at the Washington DC Amtrak station last year. Birds will bird.

Saying “American people” the way the Beastie Boys would say “Another dimension”

It just seems like it’s a lot of papering over a fairly substantial problem. While the example I gave was Handbrake, which does seem like it should be a unique example, every other piece of software that I check Flatpak versions of also had ludicrously wasteful storage issues.

I’m aware of dependency hell, but it seems to me that most software doesn’t have that as a problem, not if the libraries are sensibly maintained? After all, the fact that upgrading a library can improve all the software that uses it seems like it’s usually a positive thing. And the ballooning storage requirements of Flatpak make it a tool that should be used occasionally, rather as a primary way to release software. Using a filesystem that can detect duplicates would help, but itself also seems like a special-case kind of solution, and not a great solution to turn to just to avoid what seems to me to be a significant issue.

Wizardry inspired a lot of games, but the three games listed have greater influences elsewhere. (FF and DQ in particular are more like Ultima.) Sadly the games that were most inspired by Wizardry, sometimes called “blobbers,” have mostly died out: The classic Bard’s Tale games, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Etrian Odyssey and the Japanese Wizardry games hold the torch but are pretty niche these days.

The demise of the original Wizardry series is one of the greatest injustices in the history of computer gaming, up there with the closing of the original Atari.

DOS Wizardry has a significant bug that makes it one of the worst versions.

But it appears like we’re in a situation where it’s not used for specific situations, but for lots of different things. Just a few Flatpak programs starts to chew through a significant amount of disk space, and some programs are only being distributed as Flatpaks.

My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.

(My example software above is Handbrake. I’m sure someone’s going to “well actually” me about this, and I don’t even care. I don’t see how it can be justified, and I’m kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)