I’m not so sure. Like I say, we saw several studios say “Well since Proton works so well, we’re going to stop supporting a separate Linux version. Linux users are to install the Windows version under Proton, and we’ll only support that.” Because almost all player communities are mostly Windows. As much as us Linux nerds hate it, we’re a small (but rapidly growing!) minority, and developers would rather support the thing most people use and just ladle what everyone else is drinking into a sippy cup for the special kids than have to make a whole separate jug of kool aid. I don’t think we’ll see a reversal in that until Linux-based platforms represent an actual majority of the install base and do so for awhile. Nothing is more permanent than a bodge job that works for now. Not to call Proton a “bodge job” but you know what I mean.

ARM is yet another leap, possibly a farther one, than Linux.

Cinnamon is the second of five attempts to defuckulate Gnome that I’m aware of, and my personal favorite.

A big barrier to Linux adoption is lack of software, and immutable distros locking you out of the traditional package managers like APT or DNF or Pacman and limiting you to what is provided on Flatpak, I think might trip some folks.

I learned how to Linux on a Raspberry Pi. That is, in fact, what they’re for. I’ve got one (a Pi 2) that sits on my LAN with a hard drive attached as one part of my backup solution.

Okay chat, today we’re playing Dress Slacks, we’re going for the hemmed cuffs%

Whang!'s playlist on the Lost Evil Farming Game He does a lot of other stuff, old internet bullshit, gross out body horror, etc. but the lost media stuff is fun.

A playlist of Ashens’ talks at the Norwich Games Festival. ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNaDU7vnvSQuJ4SeFRiW8RmPZhY6Ga7Rb) Stuart Ashen, Ph. D., author of the book Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of and star of the hit film Ashens and the Quest for the Gamechild, has also spent most of the 21st century kneeling in front of a brown sofa making fun of shit he bought at pound shops.

RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst playlist. They’ve done a bunch of stuff, Best of the Worst is their hanging around, watching old videos (shitty B movies, instructional tapes, scams, cult propaganda, bizarre art major bullshit) and discuss. If you like MST3K you’ll probably like BotW. Playing Dangerous is in one of the earliest episodes made.

So, when Proton came out, and Windows games Just Worked on Linux, a lot of developers gave up making or maintaining native Linux versions of games, and the way you make games for Linux is make them for Windows and run them in Proton.

Are we now going to make games for Windows x86 and run them in Proton, on ARM? And are we going to get to a point where we start actually making games for the hardware and OS we play them on, or are we just stuck with compatibility lasagna?

The Evil Farming Game

I"m gonna get the details really vague, Whang actually took notes, go watch his videos on the subject. The story goes something like this:

Someone turned up to r/lostmedia or something asking about this video game they sweared they played. It was a farming game like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, but the player character murdered his wife, and in addition to tending the crops, you have to move the corpse around to hide it from the cops, and also there was a fishing minigame.

Cue a couple of "I think I have it on an old hard drive"s later, and it turns out that it didn’t exist as a game. Some game streamer had kind of made it up as a stream of consciousness while playing some other game. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a game where…”

Bloggo’s Pow

I learned this story from Ashens. Back in the day, a British anti-piracy group called FAST or the Federation Against Software Theft ran a campaign of comic stips with an anti software piracy theme. Imagine Don’t Copy That Floppy by way of Jack Chick. They apparently offered a bounty on anyone who was committing software piracy, so they published cartoons of kids turning in their math teacher because he copies video games, etc.

In one cartoon, they find a vendor at “the market” who is selling pirated games. One of our badly drawn heroes says “These games look pirated. And this one definitely is” and he holds up a box labeled “Bloggo’s Pow.” According to Ashens, pirated games were thenceforth known as “Bloggos”

According to Ashens, FAST was first of all incorrect in the use of the word “theft” as at the time according to British law, copying a video game did not count as theft, because you didn’t deprive anyone of their property. Software piracy was a crime, but that crime wasn’t theft. He also made the point that the FAST tracts tended to either offer threats of punishment, or appeals to greed with the bounty they offered (which there’s no evidence was actually claimed). I mentioned Don’t Copy That Floppy, which features a famously cheesy rap dance component but it then settles down and goes for an empathy-based approach, they interview game programmers who say if everyone stole games, they’d have no income, which means they couldn’t afford to make games, they’d have to go find other work. And that worked a lot better.

The Game They Made Up In Playing Dangerous 2

Playing Dangerous is a movie probably best known today for being featured on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. It can be best summed up as “Die Hard, but the protagonist is a 10 year old boy.” It seems it was written and filmed as an R-rated movie, then edited to make it PG-13 (a man gets shot in the face in the first ten seconds of the film) and then marketed as if it’s a Home Alone ripoff. The kid is some intelligent beyond his years computer whiz named Stewart, which forms the basis of the sequel.

Playing Dangerous 2 slops back and forth between “Supergenius kid has an internship at a computer research company” and “10 year old honors student attends computer camp for 10 year old honors students.”

At one point, Stewart is hanging around the “lab” with his mentor character, Guy Who Works There, and they’re playing this video game that I guess they made. When you see the screen, the background looks like a 90’s arcade side scrolling beat-em-up, there’s a Score counter and an Energy meter in the upper corners, and Stewart is green screened in very prominently in the foreground shooting at the camera with a Nerf gun.

It does, and yet doesn’t, look like a video game. There doesn’t seem to be any gameplay, you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a first-person shooter and Stewart is an enemy, or if Stewart is the player character and they made the weird choice to have him face the player. But, it does work as a thing a middle aged dude would come up with to occupy the attention of a kid he’s supposed to be teaching computers to, and it also works as what a mediocre film director thinks a computer game looks like. Obviously a film director would choose to have his star face the camera, he’s performing.

Ahoy’s video about Polybius is very excellent.

I have a cat. Toilet lid is shut unless actively in use otherwise there will be the worst kind of wet cat loose in the house because she’s dumb and clumsy.

Anything found on aliexpress, temu or wish. Manufactured trash/industrial runoff that’s likely dangerous to breathe near.

Television news. In fact, most of the shit on television these days.

The idea cancer for toddlers section of youtube, which I think they have since cleaned up. The “finger family pregnant elsa kills hitler spiderman” era. Which was kind of fascinating to study, because no one was in charge. iPad children weren’t making decisions, they were just letting the colors and sounds happen, and actual people deciding to make the content, sometimes to the point of wearing costumes and shooting live video, were making what the algorithm deemed popular. At least one woman pulled a bright blue dress over a fake baby belly while her husband scribbled a toothbrush mustache on a Spiderman mask and didn’t think “What the hell are we even doing right now?”

Reaction videos can be done right. There’s a vocal coach on Youtube who listens to and comments on the vocal techniques in use in famous songs, the most fun ones are the ones she’s never heard before. It’s also really easy to do this kind of content lazily, play someone else’s video and remember to say “oh shit” occasionally.

Possibly for this reason, Mint is a great choice for “keep my PC going so I can get to the google and the email and the facebook without having to buy another $1000 machine.” Mint is my go-to to keep a Pre-TPM computer on the road.

If you’ve got actual work to do, don’t.

I’ve got Bazzite on my TV PC, and it’s pretty cromulent for that, but Flatpak alone doesn’t have everything I need to do actual work.

I can burp. But not during a swallow. Esophagus is half-duplex.

I’ve always had it with soda, and I thought I had swallowed in such a way that the CO2 was all trying to fizz out at once. Feels like you’ve stubbed your esophagus.

The experience of managing a consumer-grade LAN appliance:

Open web browser

Start typing 192.168.0.1

It auto-inserts 192.168.0.12 because that’s the IP address of your NAS, and you’ve logged into it to adjust something at some point in the last six months. You register it has done this as you’re releasing the Enter key.

click Back.

Type the IP address again, this time carefully deleting the 2 it oh so helpfully inserted.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck. It loads to a completely useless stats page that has no information that anyone has ever needed to know.

Click LAN Setup.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

Parse the wall of acronyms before you, click the link that says DHCP.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

It continues in that fashion until you get what you need done or your network stops working and you have to get a pen and press the Reset button on the back of the device.

You know that fat British guy that someone is posting shorts of on Youtube/Tiktok? “I was working for a company and their main product wasn’t selling. They asked me if they should lower the price, I told them ‘no, make your entry level product more shit.’ So they took their entry level product and added roofing nails to the seat cushions. Overnight, sales of their main product skyrocketed because no one was buying their entry level anymore.” That guy? He said he likes Samsung’s folding phone because “I’m old and my vision is failing, so I like the larger screen of the Fold. But you can’t sell that, because it’s not cool to sell products for the old and infirm.”

I want it to work like a hit and miss engine. Big ol flywheel, the exhaust valve is held open until the RPM dips low enough then you get a power stroke, just a nice controlled fusion event that releases a whackton of energy, bring the RPM up a bit…

I would swear I saw Tom Scott interview one lab that was planning on building a fusion generator that worked like a diesel engine. Like, the fusion reaction drives a piston.