Yeah I’ve been doing that too! Stupid Kobo store lol

Oh yeah I wasn’t even thinking about that too!

Getting an eBook reader has made me so much worse for this lol. I ended up trawling through a bunch of public domain book sites so now I’m permanently carrying around a ~700 book unread backlog.

I agree that there must be other stuff living out there, but I don’t think they’re here. My belief that I can’t prove is that the Fermi paradox has a simple but quite depressing solution: that space and time are just too big and there’s no special undiscovered way of getting around it. I’m sure there are some staggeringly unlikely situations out there somewhere where two species have evolved independently at the same time to a similar level of intelligence at a distance close enough to reach each other, but for the vast majority of intelligent life the odds are so vanishingly small that they might as well be alone.

If we’re a typical example of an intelligent species, for example, we’ve been capable of space flight for less that a century and we just about got as far as the moon, and with all the inventions that came along with becoming capable of space flight we’ve almost destroyed ourselves countless times. It’s kind of a wonder we’re still here at all, and with climate change who knows how much longer we’ll last? TBH I think the best we can hope for is to maybe get a radio signal from some ancient place that’s probably long gone, and send one back knowing we’ll probably be long gone by the time it gets there.

Oh I was just making a joke reference lol.

I’ve been saying for a while that George W. Bush was the one who sold the doors and windows to the house. Trump is just the inevitable crack head that climbed in and started living on the sofa.

As a non-American, I can say that amongst the people I know it was the re-election of Trump that really did it. The first time you could write off as an anomaly - he managed to fool enough people at just the right time or something like that, and then you guys got rid of him after a single term. Pretty bad but shit happens.

But then after that he showed everyone exactly who he was for eight years straight and then he got in again. And since then he’s really been ramping it up to insane levels of fascist nonsense and nobody’s kicked him out or even made a serious run at removing him from power yet. When I talk to people the vibe is very much “What the hell is going on over there?”

TBH I don’t know why he wasn’t over as soon as the “Grab 'em by the pussy” tape was leaked. I feel like that would have tanked most candidates.

All I see is *******

It’s actually been quite nice here in Canada lately, in the last few years we’ve been quite politically divided but once Trump started talking about annexing Canada it seemed like everyone I know came together to be like he can fuck right off lol.

Our household is still refusing to buy anything American or go anywhere near the place until (at the very least) Trump is gone and the US can demonstrate that something like this won’t happen again.

AFAIK it’s not necessarily about Linux using Microsoft keys, it’s more about Microsoft shoe-horning their bullshit into everything they possibly can, including at the hardware/firmware level.

But if secure boot happens to brick your system forever because of this expiring key thing, is that worse than a boot chain attack?

That’s what I do. I never enabled it based on the assumption that because it’s a Microsoft thing, it would eventually fuck me over in some way. That attitude has served me well for may years lol.

The use of ‘in’ and ‘on’ for various vehicles in English is one that I always find interesting. Like you’re on a motorbike, or a boat, or a bus, but you’re in a car. Aeroplanes I think are kind of interchangeable.

Also the order of descriptive words for things is one I really find odd. “I’m on a big red old-fashioned London bus” = coherent sentence. “I’m in a red London big old-fashioned bus” = nonsense.

Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

Also how something like the word ‘jam’ can mean a fruit preserve, a door that’s stuck, traffic that’s not moving, playing music or cramming something into a hole lol.

Gnome vs KDE, just use whichever one suits your flow. Or not, grab Cinnamon or Hyprland if that floats your boat. Options are good!

I had an experience with Zomboid a while ago that I’ve never had with any other game. I’d had my character going for a while, had my base set up, all was going good and I was looting random houses. I came up to this one house that was completely ordinary but something in the back of my brain just went NOPE. There were no signs of anything sketchy from the outside but some sort of survival switch went off in my brain and was like “if you go in there you’re fucked” and I just walked away and left it.

Of course I’ll never know now if that was accurate or not, but I’ve never had that weird instinct go off from a game before lol.

Yeah that’s pretty much the vibe for Zomboid, the opening text crawl literally says “This is how you died.” It’s not a matter of whether you make it or not, just how long you last and what happens before they inevitably get you lol.

Also if you die from a zombie bite, you can respawn as a new person and track down the zombie of your previous character to loot your stuff back which is fun.

Not as far as I know. I haven’t played the latest update but I did a full playthrough on the last one and I finished it but it was such a slog. It’s like the opposite of the other Civ games, where you sit down for 5 minutes and lose an hour, with 7 you sit down and go “right, I’ll play for an hour” and then you check the time and it’s only been 10 minutes lol.

I did the same thing with Surviving Mars lol. Played it on Epic, liked it, bought the whole thing and all the DLC on Steam. Actually I did that with Dredge too now that I think about it.

I’m also an artist and I can see some use for AI, but I don’t use it to make any actual art. I use it to bolster up my weaker areas, which is basically all the admin stuff - marketing plans, budgets, setting prices, all the paperwork crap essentially. Which then frees me up to spend more time doing actual creative things.

I see AI art as essentially like a commission. As in, before AI if you couldn’t draw something, you’d commission someone who could draw it to make it for you. Then you’d own that piece of art, but you didn’t create it. You described what you wanted to someone else and they created it. Same deal with AI except instead of a person it’s, as I heard someone describe it recently, a magic 8-ball with infinite answers and some math to nudge it in the right direction lol.