Rose

These days I’m usually just confused about autosaves. Especially in games that don’t have clear checkpoints. I don’t mind taking explicit saving away but don’t oversimplify it by trying to pretend saving isn’t even a thing that happens. Nothing more fun than pointlessly replaying 30 minutes.

(Technology that is needlessly oversimplified just sucks. I hate that if YouTube jams on my smart TV, there’s no option to, you know, shut it down or restart it. You have to literally go and pull the plug. Samsung thinks we’re bunch of idiots but they’re a bunch of idiots I tell you)

Also, explicit saving is still better. To quote one local game journalist, when the PC-focused game magazine expanded to cover consoles: “I want to save the game right away, not after I’ve been run over by a zombie in the subway five times.” /old person whinge of the week

Just do your best plumber / car mechanic impression. “Gee, this codebase is really messed up, looks like I need to basically replace everything.”

(“That can’t be true, that’s what every other programmer I showed this to said. Are you all lying?” “No, we’re not lying, this really is a screwed up codebase.”)

I started out with Slackware 3.0. It broke all the time. Tried Debian. Was happy ever since. Tried Ubuntu on laptops but later decided it’s just Debian with extra steps so I went with Debian after all.

I’m always like “du shows disk usage of files, and df shows how much of disk is free”.

“YESS! YESSSSS! GIVE IN TO YOUR EMACS SIDE!!!”

Google Search really sucks these days. I can’t find any images of Richard M. Stallman as a Sith lord, even though I’m sure vi fans have made several edits by now. …It’s been a while.

The only “real” computer (that is, a non-SBC one) I’ve installed Linux lately on was a work laptop. Touchpad, GPU and Wi-Fi worked straight off in Debian. Though I think it only installed Nouveau, never bothered with the real Nvidia driver. And it had some weird thermal regulation issues. Once it somehow left the filesystem in “plz boot in single user and fsck with a toothpick” state. The day before my internship ended, the thing crashed hard for some reason and took the filesystem with it. (Never use btrfs I guess?)

Last time Clock was interesting was in the Windows 3.0 days. Windows 11 clock is just beyond meh.

Since Windows these days can’t be arsed to have an analog clock with second hand (which is what I need for properly setting clocks on all of the devices that don’t have internet access), I just made one myself one day.

Original definition: using AI to create a small bespoke kinda-crap-but-it-works apps or games for personal use. It’s a shitty proto but it’s interesting.

(My reaction: ooo not my jam but that sounds neat I guess)

Modern definition: it’s a multi-quadrispillion dollar industry and it’s the future according to some very important board members.

(My reaction: …capitalism ruins fucking everything)

Somewhere in my giant box of cables I have an adapter for attaching MIDI cables to the joystick port. When I actually used a MIDI keyboard with it, I had… variable success.

The first time I had a MIDI keyboard that just worked, it used USB as transport. (And it has worked great since. I think it’s the only USB Mini plug device device I still regularly use.)

Crazy thing is, MIDI is absolutely ancient. You’d imagine it’d work fine on the gameports, but nope. Legacy PC ports are cursed. Except audio jacks and serial ports, and VGA if you’re really into screwing things in place.

Linus was a bit of a trendsetter what comes to standing desks. In an interview he also commented on the walls, saying the paint colour is also used in mental institutions because it has a very calming effect on the human mind. (Goodness knows Linus needs all the chill he can muster.)

I used my first Wacom tablet for a long time. 15 years or so?

It used serial port. Kids these days often don’t know about serial ports, I guess.

Linux support was rock solid though, all the way. (Edit: however, I think toward the end they basically said “serial tablets are unsupported now, but you can try to enable the support and recompile and see if it still works”)

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as wheel, is in fact, GNU/Wheel, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus wheel.

Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.