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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • How do you know if someone owns a Steam Deck? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

    So anyway, a couple years ago I bought a Steam Deck. And since I bought it, virtually all of my gaming is on the Deck. Prior to that, virtually all of my game time was on a Windows PC. So, for me personally, there’s been a big shift towards Linux for gaming.

    The other big change that’s coming for a lot of people I know: end of Windows 10 support. Honestly, the majority of people I know who still have a traditional Windows PC are using machines that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. These computers are perfectly functional and do everything the users need them to do, and they have no inclination to go out and buy a new computer just because. Especially in this economy. Additionally, there are quite a few people with computers that are capable of running Windows 11, but they have no desire to upgrade to a worse experience and an experience that is randomly different in a myriad different ways for no good reason. Both groups are ripe for the picking in terms of a switch to Linux. No, the year of the Linux desktop is not here, but the conditions for such a change are building. And this Steam data may present a picture of the larger trend. Who knows?



  • Really depends on the situation.

    If I’m just feeding myself, I have no issue with going outside and foraging for food. I don’t hunt, but I’m not the type that needs an animal based protein main entree in my meals, so it works/worked for me to collect wild vegetables, fruits, and fungi.

    And from there, I eat whatever is cheapest. Grocery store mark-downs and deep-discount sales would guide my decisions. If an acquaintance was giving away food, I’d take it. When the food bank is doing a giveaway and it was close enough for me to visit, I’d go there and take what they had to offer.

    At my poorest, when I had no access to a kitchen, peanut butter sandwiches were a mainstay. Tuna sandwiches were next best, but more expensive. At the time, powdered milk was a bit of a luxury, but it definitely helped wash down the peanut butter and was way cheaper by volume than fresh milk.

    A lot of stores and restaurants, at least where I live, will have condiment packages out in the open. Don’t go hog wild, but my experience is nobody cares/notices if you grab a few packs of whatever items are out: ketchup, mustard, mayo, honey, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, and pepper – in moderation – so those can be free to you to use for meal prep.

    When I’ve just been broke and/or saving money, my main protein was usually chicken. I’d just buy whatever was cheapest on sale, and try to stock up a bit or get rain checks. Then I could cook that in a crock pot and literally have meals for days. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, turkey usually goes on deep discount and there are almost always a myriad of programs that just give them away. If you have room in your freezer and a crock pot, then you can be set just from that.

    Add in some rice and/or beans/legumes to soak up the flavor when cooking meats.

    Eggs were also always a solid choice, pretty versatile because they could be hard boiled, scrambled, fried, mixed into other things like noodles, or used to cook/bake other dishes.

    Potatoes were another cheap source of carbohydrates, something that goes on sale often enough that I could usually find a deal, and if properly stored (cool, dark, dry) they can last a long time. Plus, they can go into the slow cooker with some chicken thighs and both ingredients benefit flavor-wise.

    So, meals would be whatever combination of those things you can physically obtain. Your meal items don’t have to have a name. If you have potatoes and mix those with scrambled eggs and mix in some wild dandelions, that’s still a meal even if that’s not going to show up in a recipe book. If you boil some noodles and add in some mayo and a pinch of rosemary from a bush you saw down the road, that’s still a meal. Basically, just get creative with what you’ve got.



  • What about people who wear solid color t-shirts that have long-ass slogans on them which are super specific and seemingly only apply to a single person on the entire face of the Earth often written in a variety of fonts and font-sizes and including bizarre details about their lives like the t-shirt that was given to me by my same-sex lover on the second Saturday in June of 2021 to celebrate the fact that I managed to clear an entire thornless blackberry bush of berries that we used to make the most delicious blackberry cobbler from that very same evening?



  • Kind of depends and changes depending on a lot of factors, to be honest.

    When I worked in an office, I discovered that headphones + music was the key to productivity for me. When I transitioned to work at home and had a more or less quiet home office to work in, I found that having music going was a bit irritating at times and totally not helpful at the best.

    So I guess the deciding factor is whether I have to deal with the ridiculous noises other people make or not?



  • I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

    But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.


  • I was the kid whose creating writing assignments over the years triggered more than one parent-teacher conference.

    But in all fairness, I absolutely loved horror movies and my parents let me watch pretty much whatever scary movies I wanted regardless of the violence and sexual content. And I turned out okay, I guess, depending on who you ask and relatively speaking. I mean, I have relatives around the same age who are already dead due to their bad decisions in life, so I’m just saying who cares if an 8 year old writes a story about crocodile-like aliens that eat their meals ass first.


  • I’ll be interested to read the other comments when I have the time/attention span.

    It could just be the part of the country where I live (i.e. deeply conservative rural south), but everybody I know who identifies as a Libertarian (going to hand wave over the reality of whether the pedants and purists would agree) is basically what’s termed as “Republican-lite” or “Conservative-lite” aka right-wing.

    If I tell you I’m a Libertarian, but my voting record is such that I’ve essentially only voted for Republican candidates in all prominent elections in the past decade (or sometimes more) and/or the majority of my political speech is in opposition to Democratic politicians and liberal policies, what does that suggest?

    If I identify as a vegan but I like to eat meat with every meal, am I really a vegan?




  • If that’s a Taco Bell 5-layer burrito, I don’t remember them being 29 cents (grew up poor, we rarely ate out). But by the time I was out on my own as an adult, I could get two 5-layer burritos and a drink for around $3 - $4 USD and some change. It was enough food to sustain me for a day if it came down to it.

    But yes, these days the 5-layers are more like dried out 3-layer mini-burrito abominations that cost $3 or $4 a piece. They are pretty much nothing like the large succulent many layered dollar / value menu beasts of the past.

    I guess if typing up this post is considered yelling and web hosting is basically all cloud-based these days and I’m an old man by 2025 standards, then yes, I am indeed an old man yelling at clouds. But mostly I’m an old man avoiding Taco Bell now that it’s completely ruined its brand.


  • People living in cities sometimes leave and many have not lived in a city their whole lives. Additionally, the power can go out at night in cities. For instance, where I live we sometimes get tropical storms, winter storms, and other disasters that can knock out power for hours (and even days) even inside the city – I imagine that’s not uncommon elsewhere. A lot of cities in poorer nations ration power or only have electricity available during certain hours.

    So, overall, I would say that it’s probably not the case that “most” people have never seen a full starry night unless you’re getting super technical and pedantic about the word “full” to where you’re specifically asking about a completely unobstructed view with 0% light pollution, in which case then I would say that almost nobody has seen a full starry night in that case, regardless of whether or not they live in a city.



  • Intentionally inflammatory posts? I haven’t noticed an uptick, honestly. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one and doesn’t mean I won’t notice now that you posted it.

    But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

    Mostly I assume we must’ve recently gotten an influx of new users from Reddit or someplace similarly toxic. Things usually get a bit unfortunate for a time when that happens.