They will be indispensable for documenting, for historians, what it was like when the United States still had law.

Ohhhhh! Games about killing Nazis! Okay yeah I get it.

Wtf is you talkin bout op

FoodCo® “Food”-Flavored ‘Food Product’™

“You CAN Eat It!”_©

(WARNING: DOES NOT CONTAIN FOOD)

deleted by creator

right now is my year of the linux laptop :3

When I told my best friend about mastodon, it misimprinted on her brain in a flash as “walrus chat” and now she can’t for the life of her remember its actual name.

yes, that’s what boosting is on mastodon. see how ineffectual their ‘boosting’ nomenclature is? that’s why they should be renamed.

also rebrand it from Mastodon to Trunky.

1. Trochaic meter is more addictive: 2 syllables with accent on the first. just like YOU-tube, FACE-book, GOO-gle, TWIT-ter, TIK-tok, SNAP-chat, RED-dit, WHATS-app, etc; there are a FEW exceptions like Insta, Messenger, Telegram… but they are the clear minority and were propelled in spite of their names. it’s part of why TEEN-age MU-tant NIN-ja TUR-tles and MIGH-ty MOR-phin POW-er RAN-gers was popular.
2. Trunky is full of bright bouncy sounds that pop, the T and the K both hit nice, the R is exciting and powerful, the y ends it on a high timbre, it’s cute.
3. A mastodon is an extinct lumbering beast from the ice age which is the antithesis of anything trying to break out as a hot new service. But this would allow the service to keep its pachyderm branding.
4. While at it, change “favorite” to “trumpet” (as in trumpeting praise), again it’s trochaic (TRUM-pet) and carries less cognitive LOAD than “favoriting” which feels heavy and committed. Just because you LIKE something doesn’t mean it’s your FAVORITE thing you know? this would decrease the friction of interaction (which is GOOD).
5. Also while at it, keep tooting as the analogue for tweeting, rename boosting to re-tooting for brand consistency, and add a bookmarking function called “Remembering” (because ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET, right? :D)

A mall is a private real estate instrument built by speculators to extract rent from businesses and it’s actually rather predatory. This is fundamentally not real estate and fundamentally does not exist to extract rent, so it’s more like “what if you took a mall and removed all the mall-ness from it”.

If malls were collectively owned by the stores that comprise them and pieces of the mall could appear and disappear at will of whoever’s participating… Is it actually even still a mall really???

Mint has been nice

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!

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.

Hmmm. Actually maybe it can be leveraged.

There should perhaps be a default instance that it funnels everyone into but makes a “power user” option available from a drop down where they can CHOOSE an instance. Make it an opt-in thing instead of a mandatory hurdle.

If they don’t like the way the default instance is managed (content moderation, defederation) they can think “oh wait, there’s a solution for this! Well, now that I know what I’m getting into it’s not intimidating anymore”

Mastodon needs this too.

…

Mastodon needs this ESPECIALLY.

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.