but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

Yeah. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy (I do software development for work) and I had a really bad time installing mint on my desktop. I got it to work after a day but that was far more than a casually interested person would put up with.

My characters often end up exasperated by how idiotic and chaotic the other _characters players are. That checks out.

“So the walls started bleeding, a thousand voices cried out in pain, and a sinkhole into the unseen depths opened in the kitchen.”

“Right.”

“And you, a normal human with no magical powers or special equipment, you jumped into the sinkhole.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It was there!”

“And then your character died, as one would expect from a hundred foot drop onto stone. And now?”

“I don’t understand. What else was I supposed to do??”

Thinking about it, a lot of things that I flag as idiotic come from putting emotions first. We’re all emotional creatures, but idiots are ruled by them. It’s idiotic to blow your rent money on candy, but the short term emotional high for an idiot is too appealing. It’s stupid to blow up at someone instead of admitting fault, but admitting fault feels bad, so the idiot can’t take that. Reading an essay is informative, but that’s boring work and the idiot might feel bad if they don’t understand it, so they’d avoid the whole thing. If the essay doesn’t agree with their worldview, that’s going to feel terrible.

There’s a book “a libertarian walks into a bear” that examines a real life attempt to do libertarianism. It ends badly, with bears and fires, and the town does markedly worse than the neighboring town that did normal government stuff.

Also, someone pitching “smaller government” is going to need to define what they actually mean and why that’s a good thing. Gutting public education, for example, I think would be a very bad thing that someone might pursue in the interest of “smaller government”

Snake case, usually. Some perhaps unfounded fear that something will blow up on a dash in a file name kicking around. Or I’ll do a weird typo/premature enter and part of the file name will be treated like a -flag of some sort.

In-groups to protect, outgroups to bind

Oh yeah GW1 was harder at launch because you only had limited NPC support, but the later expansions really expanded that (no pun intended) by adding more robust npc Heroes that could join your party and be customized.

Though GW1 came out 19 years ago, so a good chunk of potential GW2 players were in diapers when it came out. Gosh, I’m so old.

GW2 is very “solo” friendly. I put solo in quotes because there will typically be other people around, but you don’t have to talk to them or wait on them for most stuff. Like, earlier I was flying around one of the maps doing a little quest thing, and I joined in several events to fight monsters with other people. Didn’t say a word. It’s all very seamless.

I still play guild wars 2. It’s the only MMO that doesn’t piss me off. No subscription fee. Never raised the level cap. Only added a new tier of gear once close to launch and said that’s it. Plays like a real video game.

Because the level cap and gear cap doesn’t change, you can take a break and come back just fine. My characters I made years ago are just as mechanically viable as anyone else. (Knowing how to play them is a separate question. I’m pretty bad at thief, but some people are little immortal jerks with it)

It also feels more like a real video game than some MMOs. You can dodge attacks. Like there’s a dodge button that moves you and gives you iframes. There’s a lot less of the old timey “your character moved away on the screen so the monster did its attack animation way over there, but you still get hit”.

They also solved a lot of the anti social problems of old MMOs. You don’t need to form a formal group for most content. There’s no kill stealing. You just go into the world and do stuff.

There’s no mandatory quest chains. There’s the main story you can follow, but there’s very little MMO filler. There are “hearts” you can do that are kind of MMO busywork, but you can also just not do them.

I know the game is old but it’s still very good. I haven’t been able to get a lot of friends to play it. I think they think it’s like a shitty MMO where you just grind for gear to grind for more gear, and level up so you can level up and grind for more gear. It’s not.

I usually squash my local into a single commit, then rebase it onto the head of main. Tends to be simpler

I started a game of Fate this year and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s less crunchy and tactical than D&D most of the time, but it handles social conflict and losing conflicts much better. And does other stuff I like.

I tried to get my old D&D group to play other games but it didn’t go super well. In retrospect, there were game agnostic reasons why I didn’t really gel with that group, so it’s for the best I left. But I think converting people who only really play D&D and close relatives to something else is hard.

There’s a lot of stuff I don’t think I like from PF2e*, but from everything I’ve seen and read it seems like a better designed game.

*I haven’t actually played it. I really burned out on 3.x, and my impression of PF1e was it’s 3.75, so that was a non-starter. Spells-per-day, 1d20+stuff, vertical power growth + high opportunity costs, are the main things off the top of my head I don’t like from this part of the subgenre and I think pf2e holds onto.

I really liked Midnight Suns :(

I got to play video games with spider man and be in a book club with Captain marvel.

The deck building was pretty good. I wanted more cards and more excuses to use more heroes.

The fact that there’s no miss chance on attacks is subtle but a real improvement over the genre standard. And using the environment was a lot of fun, and very genre appropriate.

The rights everyone should have is irrelevant to the reality. You can’t steal a sandwich and be like “everyone should have the right to food!”. I mean you can, but you’ll still be punished.

Is this the hill for this kid to die on? Probably not. If they were trying to change the system for everyone to be more just, maybe.

You’re going to get in trouble and it’s not worth it.

Don’t do personal stuff on their network. What are you even trying to look at via the school network?

If you’re concerned about privacy while doing school stuff, use another device, or maybe a VM. Do they provide computers for students?

You might get off with a warning because you’re young (I assume you’re like 16), but bypassing network security stuff as an adult at work will often get you fired.

This is good advice. I used to really push how late I’d stay up and then get jolted awake by my alarm. Felt like trash.

Now I go to bed like 9.5 hours before I have to get up (midnight -> 930) and usually wake up before the alarm. Feels great.

I set alarms for my bedtime to train myself into it. Like, alarm goes off at 11pm and I start winding down whatever I’m doing (video games, usually). Now I just do it naturally.

But as you said, how do you actually do the thing?

I’ve luckily never had problems with executive function, so I can’t really imagine clearly what it’s like to not be able to just make a decision and execute. One of my friends swears by medication, because they got diagnosed as an adult with ADHD.

If you leave your house regularly this has a number of disadvantages. I can fit my phone in my pocket but most laptops are too large. I can operate a phone with one hand (eg: on the subway). 911 services I think work better with an actual phone. Gps stuff may also work better.

That’s just stuff off the top of my head.

I’ve never had a complaint about logging stuff in python. It generally does what I expect.

“Create a copy of your object and print that” is what I ended up doing, but I don’t think most people would say that’s intuitive. I expect if i print something at a particular time, I get what it is at that point in time.

Some languages are just worse to work with. like JavaScript. Console.log is like sure I’ll log your object but I’ll tell you what it is now, not what it was when you logged it.

Does it know how to navigate NYC public transit? That’s a big use case for me. I don’t need driving directions. I need to know which subway is closest.

Sometimes you feel like the shittier game took players from the game you’d rather be playing.

Sometimes you feel like the shittier game is kind of a knockoff, and it feels bad when that succeeds.

Sometimes a game is made by a horrible company with a history of abuse from its high ranking staff.