The first thing I thought when I played it was mechanically, this is exactly what I wanted Oblivion to be.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Thanks for the tip! In the short term, I’m content to just not connect it, but I definitely want to look into blocking it just to prevent a repeat with guests. It’s also super handy to know that I can connect it to the local network without connecting it to the broader internet, in case I decide to do some (self-hosted) home automation.

I’m suffering for that right now. Sony Bravia.

Firstly, I didn’t want to buy a smart TV, but that’s pretty much all that’s sold anymore. I also didn’t intend to connect it to the internet, but a well-meaning guest wanted to watch TV at night, and thought he was troubleshooting, not realizing he was in the TV menu and not the streaming box.

The TV updated, and IMMEDIATELY got worse. Formerly, if I turned it on, it would go straight to the streaming box. Great! As shitty updates do, it changed the settings, and would instead open to the TV’s menu, so it could advertise streaming services. It also forgot that the TV input is HDMI 1. It became strictly worse, in the rare edge case of every fucking time you turn it on.

I don’t trust it to not automatically connect, or to forget my login credentials, so I go to do a factory reset. It’s literally an option in a menu. The TV gets stuck in a boot loop. Talking to support, they think it broke the mainboard. A factory reset bricked the TV.

It’s under warranty, but this is fucking crazy. NEVER connect your TV directly to the internet.

Fun and completely unsurprising fact: this is already the case with Ronald Reagan. He’s buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which charges admission.

These people never stop grifting, even in death.

I’ve had “When Will You Die” by They Might Be Giants in regular rotation.

We’ll exhale, we’ll high-five

We will know at last how great it is to be alive

We’ll be lining up and buying tickets

And then we’ll be jumping up and down on your grave

He died as he lived: blaming systemic issues and right-wing violence on minorities.

yay anarchism

For what it’s worth, I was in a similar boat. I wanted to try WMs/compositors, but the configuration seemed daunting. Then I gave Dank Material Shell a try and it just configured the vast majority of the system very nicely. I still had to change some window rules in the config file, but even that has a GUI now. I also heard great things about Noctalia, and I’m sure there are others as well.

I still think KDE is a top-tier option, to be clear. :P And adding tiling to KDE is also a great way to get the best of both worlds, just from the other direction.

Seeing Copilot in Notepad of all places is what finally made me quit Windows for good.

I’m on EndeavourOS, which like CachyOS, is a derivative based on Arch. They smooth over a couple of the things that make Arch difficult: the installation, and initial packages.

Part of what makes Arch difficult is that it updates its repositories very quickly. That’s good in many ways, because you get new features and new drivers more quickly, but sometimes things are buggy or break. From what I’ve heard, it’s honesty fairly rare nowadays, but it’s still a best practice to check archlinux.org before proceeding with a major update.

Anyway, I’m in a very similar boat. I’ve bounced off of Linux for various reasons in the past, but between Linux getting better and Windows getting worse, Linux is the “just works” option for me. It’s not perfect, but any snags I’ve had have been smaller, less frequent, and more often fixable.

Windows had trouble with it too and in more irritating ways.

Honestly, I’m embarrassed how long it took me as a human being to realize that things don’t have to be perfect to be better. I would be way harder on any change than I was with the status quo.

Anyway, yes, especially after having more and more issues with Windows 11 in particular, for me and my use case, Linux is genuinely easier to use day-to-day. Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes, no contest.

There’s an artist who did that, and created a series of Trees of 40 Fruit!

I think the trick is that it works better the more closely related the trees are. These use only stone fruits.

She’s in the same camp as Giuliani: A shitty person, who would have had a much better reputation had they just shut the fuck up.

She was always an awful candidate, and the DNC made a HUGE fucking mistake supporting her. But, after Trump, libs would probably joke about her the way they joke about Al Gore. “If only they had won, we would all be at brunch!”

Instead, she pops up every year or two to punch left, remind everyone she sucks, and then does fuck all for anyone until next time.

There’s a fan project recutting One Piece like that, and Dragon Ball Z Kai was an official series.

I think anime has switched almost entirely to a seasonal format for related reasons. Filler just doesn’t serve a purpose if you don’t need to regularly fill a time slot on a live channel.

Wasn’t he just saying he wishes his wife were Christian?

ICE is ruining Halloween, the shutdown is ruining Thanksgiving, but Trump has one surefire way to save Christmas.

People are saying “no one should live in poverty,” not “no one should live in poverty, by which we mean no one should make money for their labor.” You’re tilting at windmills.

Let’s also throw in being a creep.

He provided a song for the 2001 animated film Osmosis Jones. This is an animated, family-friendly buddy-cop movie about a white blood cell and a cold pill teaming up to take down a virus. In the song, “Cool, Daddy Cool,” he explicitly states his attraction to underage girls and his fondness for statutory rape.

Young ladies, young ladies, I like 'em underage see

Some say that’s statutory (But I say it’s mandatory)

Exactly what just happened to me with Tabletop Simulator. Every single fucking Magic card that I or anyone I played with was saved.

Even better, I couldn’t delete the files to get rid of the low storage warning. Changing the directory TTS uses didn’t work. Deleting the folder didn’t work, no matter how much I tried, because clearly MS knows better and I must have done it by mistake. I had to log in and use their web interface just to fucking say “yes, delete it, yes, I fucking mean it.”

Not that I’m upset about it or anything.