I think a lot about this one time in a game of modern day magic. The players wanted to contact another group. They knew the other group was double warded against magic. An anti-teleportation spell on top of a general anti-magic spell. Serious business.

The players wanted to some time and resources trying to punch through these wards to teleport directly to this other group. I told them the odds, they said ok, and rolled. The dice said no. They mulled about for a bit, and then said they wanted to try again. I said ok. They got their spells together, spent their resources, and rolled. The dice said no, again.

I said, “Do you want a hint?”

They said, “Yeah”

I said, “You just want to talk to them, right?”

“Yeah”, they said.

“Why don’t you just call them on the phone?” I said.

“…oh.”

Sometimes players get tunnel vision.

Contrary opinion: I really enjoyed it. I 100% want to hang out playing video games with spider man and lifting weights with Captain Marvel. The book club story arc was silly and fun.

I don’t remember the UI or currencies being bad. I enjoyed playing all the missions. I did extra just for fun instead of rushing for the plot. I don’t remember any micro transactions, either.

The different characters have pretty different decks. The game encourages you to use different teams, but I mostly used the protagonist, captain marvel, and the girl from the runaways. Captain marvel I think gets a lot of armor and energy beams. The runaways girl has a big random factor in her cards. The blonde girl moves enemies around more, and I think Spiderman can play off scenery better.

I had fun. I’m sad they’re not making a sequel despite the teaser at the end

I don’t know if any political system would stand up to a concerted effort to sabotage it. If socialism was the dominant paradigm and some small country tried to do capitalism, it very well might have been sabotaged. It wouldn’t follow to say capitalism can’t work after shooting all the leaders and buying all their media

I’m going to have to ask this again it seems. Where has 100% socialism worked for longer than 10 years for a country?

it’s confounded by the US, a powerful state, being deeply ideologically opposed to socialism. Maybe shit would have worked without the US sabotaging it

Yes, it’s very common. There are many reasons.

Sometimes I’m just excited to share something. Could be something trivial (“i saw a cat on the walk over and it looked right at me and said ‘meow’!”). Could be something bigger (“They finally fired Useless Bob at work”)

Sometimes people want to vent. Talking about something can be emotionally soothing.

Sometimes people want help or advice. “I can’t believe I’m spending $20 a day on lunch. The stupid sandwich I got wasn’t even good. What’s your strategy?”

Humans are social creatures.

Unless the conflict was like “someone close to me is giving birth” tier, he could have scheduled better.

Ah yes, the classic “these things share one property so they share all properties” argument.

Blinking closes your eyes. You can safely drive and blink. Thus, you can drive safely with your eyes closed.

Distracted driving is pretty irresponsible and dangerous.

Just this morning some guy blew through a stop sign and almost hit me. He had his cell phone in hand. Maybe he was on a meeting, too.

Capital has to pay people money if they’re expected to spend it

Well, yes. Capitalism and friends don’t care about a healthy society. They care about the owners having all the riches. This is inevitable without intervention.

I don’t know. Some CEOs are pretty stupid

Update: installed mint. Seems work. Had a problem where it couldn’t see the HD. Had to change an option in grub

Pasting what I found online to fix it:

“”" thank you so much! what was the solution!

for anyone might read this in the future: in the bootmenu where u can select which version of linux u wanna boot u can press “e” and then u need to add intel_iommu=off at the end of the line of the “linux” row - i had some double dashes at the end for me it did the job when I add them before the double dashes.

Then I could see the harddrive and install mint mate on my old macbook air

also needed later on to set the parameter permantent by opening a terminal and used this command sudo nano /etc/default/grub

edited this line like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash intel_iommu=off” then save and exit nano and this command for updating the boot thingy

sudo update-grub “”"

So far most things have worked fine.

It’s a little annoying when steam wants to redo the vulkan compilation thing every time, but it seems to work fine if I skip that.

Modding I’m not sure how it’ll work yet. Some stuff probably just works, if it’s like “edit this file” or “replace that file” but I haven’t tried yet.

Yeah, you’re probably not wrong, sorry.

Plenty of rich people are shitting up the internet, though.

Whatever’s built into pycharm or vscode for looking at diffs. Command line for push pull squash etc

Not on its own. If someone’s using it a lot and giving other hate signals, I’ll suspect that they know what they’re doing.

Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you’re looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

With Linux mint, with one machine, I had to explicitly open the driver manager and tell it to use the drivers for the wifi. It wasn’t obvious but I’d read it on some random forum and remembered. Once I knew that was a thing, it was easy. Opened the driver manager, plugged in the install media (USB stick) when it asked, and then told it to use the proprietary drivers.

I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels like the Internet was better when it was limited to enthusiasts and people in higher education.

Letting every idiot post every word that comes to mind for the whole world to see was probably a mistake.

My old desktop I went with Linux mint. I had some trouble with the installer that I didn’t solve, but switching to slightly older but still supported version of mint worked. Games worked out of the box with steam.

I was playing a MUD for a while (I’m old, but aardwolf is still going). They have a special client you can use. That worked just fine through WINE.

On my newer desktop, I tried mint. I foolishly didn’t test much on the live disk, and only after installing did I realize HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, didn’t work. Proton also crashed explosively. That was a bad time.

I then tried pop!_os and that has worked fine. I haven’t played much yet on it- just my usual guild wars 2 and binding of Isaac, but it’s been fine.

There was a weird issue with audio crackling in gw2, but I think I fixed that by changing a setting somewhere.

I also recently installed mint on a ~2014 MacBook Air. Not for gaming, but so it can get security updates and stuff. I needed to fuss with grub - something I never would have figured out on my own by someone on stack exchange had figured out - and now it works fine. Haven’t done any games on it, but I bet it could run really light stuff better than it could have as a Mac.

Generally, I’m a big fan of it not nagging me. It doesn’t ask me to use OneDrive. It doesn’t want me to make an account anywhere. Pretty much everything can be changed if you’re determined enough. I’m pretty easy to please though, so all I’ve done for customization is add a clock widget to the desktop and turn off edge tiling.

One thing that I expect might be a headache is mods. A lot of mod tooling I think makes assumptions about windows. There’s probably a way to run like vortex in the same environment as whenever proton puts the game, but I’m not sure how to do it. You can also probably find where the game files are easily and edit them. I’m hoping the community starts adopting Linux more so people write guides (and please write them on the public web instead of making 20 minute videos or burying them in discord)

Luckily Baldur’s gate 3 (which also runs fine) has its own mod manager, and that works fine.

Oh, I did have a weird thing once where the desktop environment had a keybind that was interfering with a game once. I think middle click, maybe? I forget exactly what it was, but I just unmapped the keybind in the desktop env and the game was then fine.

I don’t think giving that kind of arbitrary power to a small number of private entities is a great idea.