December Days 02025 #18: Essayist

Dec. 18th, 2025 11:31 pm
silveradept: A head shot of a  librarian in a floral print shirt wearing goggles with text squiggles on them, holding a pencil. (Librarian Goggles)
[personal profile] silveradept
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

18: Essayist

Text is my most comfortable medium. It's certainly where I've put most of the points into my skills. And there's more than enough material in the archives, if you want to go have a look at other pieces of writing that I've done. Most of the time, I'm engaged in the essayist's form, although probably not formal or informal or styled enough to be a regular newspaper columnist, or some nationally-syndicated pundit. For one thing, about the only thing that someone can be a pundit about on the kinds of deadlines that newspaper columnists have is the news or politics, and you see that I can only manage it every so often. At best. I am the infrequent contributor to the discourse, and I would like to believe that my infrequency allows me to do something more than have a hot take and shout it into the aether as swiftly as possible, so that mine is the one that gets re-shared endlessly across all the social media platforms before someone else can have the same thought and post theirs.

Plus, weren't we all supposed to have pivoted to video a long time ago? The hot take in the microblogging form is certainly alive and well, and especially in places where the algorithm rewards that kind of behavior, and especially that kind of behavior if it originates from people who are trying to make their takes as antisocial as possible, so that they will be "engaged" with by others, because in that world, all heat is good heat, regardless of whether it's X-Pac heat or not. Pictures and short videos are the spaces where we receive all kinds of hot takes now, only some of them provided by people with journalism classes, or with the appropriate expertise to be knowledgeable and correct about what they speak of. Which is not to be crass and say that only the finest experts should be platformed, because I also think the finest satirists should be, as well, and those who are good at making us laugh at jokes that don't require you to be a racist, classist, sexist, misogynist, or otherwise punch down at people instead of punching up. Bill Gates getting a pie in the face? Spread it far and wide. Some elected official or influencer trying to tell me that the real cause of my problems is that we let women get out of the kitchen? Obliterate it, from both my timeline and from the platform, if you please. I know, however, that platforms continue to believe that their best options are to promote the people who get all the eyeballs, because the point is not to have content that is anything other than what will draw wyes to the advertisements that come with the content. Or ears, in the case of podcasts. If we had decided to do something more sustainable than capitalism and advertising, we would just have people doing things, secure in their ability to have a good life while doing the things they want to do, whether that's art or otherwise. (Sure, you can incentivize work that people don't normally like to do by making it possible to have a better life with that, but nobody should be a starving artist in a world where there's enough for everyone to live comfortably.)

That, and I claim very little expertise on most matters, and one of the chief requirements of being someone who makes their living on hot takes is to believe yourself an expert in all things such that you don't need to do much more than do a surface reading of something and declare you have it solved. (And, if you turn out to be wrong about that, to not acknowledge it and simply have new hot takes to provide to others.) It is not possible for me to inhabit that kind of space without doing significant damage to myself. Or that damage already has to have been done to me to get me to be that kind of reckless and brash about it all. I don't like it, and I don't want to encourage that in myself.

Just today, as I was helping someone at my job, and explaining that we don't have audible alarms for when computers are about to sign you out for inactivity because we don't want to contribute to the cacophony, the same noise that the person was indirectly complaining about, that person looked at me and asked me if I was a writer. "Not professionally," I said. (Yes, I've had my writing published, and yes, I have been paid for some of those essays and/or received contributor's copies gratis for it. No, I'm not a professional.) The person asked me what a cacophony was, and then if it was close to shenanigans. I said no, shenanigans is more like actions and deeds done, cacophony is related to sound. "But you do a lot of writing, I'll bet," the person said, before walking away. Now wrong, certainly, but that felt like I was being dissed for pulling out the silver-dollar words from my vocabulary.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have caught flak in my early years when perfection failed to manifest. I have also repeatedly caught flak from others in those years for earnestly trying to do well at my schoolwork, and also for being someone who wasn't afraid to show off their smarts. (Why would I be? I'm white, going through parochial and then public education, and because I'm sufficiently middle-class as well, I am already aiming for the university education. It's to my advantage to demonstrate my knowledge.) The usual form of the complaint is a variation on "Stop making the rest of us look stupid." The other form is a variation on "Okay, suck-up. Stop being a teacher's pet." When people talk about anti-intellectualism in the culture of the States, this is what they're talking about: our politics, priorities, and peers are consistently putting the message in our head that there is an upper limit to the level of intelligence any person should display, and showing more than the amount you've been allotted is a fast way for a thresher to come by and try to cut the tall flower down to size. As with everything in the States, of course, the amount of intelligence you're allowed to show is dependent on your perceived race, gender, and level of success at capitalism. Which is why rich cis white men without two brain cells to rub together and make a spark are hailed as visionary and successful businessmen with Big Important Opinions, who deserve their oversized salaries because of their great intellects, and who are clearly good candidates to be leaders of industry and politics, while a Black girl who could do the equivalent of Neo fighting Agent Smith one-handed against all of them together is treated as unable to understand even the most basic of concepts, except when she's supposedly scamming the welfare system and taking away money from the proper and deserving white poor. There's real cultural issues around showcasing the ability and willingness to learn, because that's often classified as "acting white." While there's obviously some amount of that necessary to survive, and to learn how to code-switch, the pervasive and racist stereotypes of all not-white people mean that someone genuinely showcasing their intellect as a person of color becomes the "articulate, well-spoken" exception to the racist stereotype, no matter how many intellectually savvy people of color there are around this stereotype-enforcing white person given the power to shape reality according to their prejudices!

The freedom I have to be smart also often means that I tend to jump in on things faster than I should, rather than allowing my coworkers to demonstrate their obvious capability and smarts themselves, and only coming in when I have to be the heavy about something, or when I'm asked to join in. When I realize I've done it, I apologize, but I don't have to weigh the consequences of every word and action that I take to determine whether or not I will be in greater danger for having done so. There are times where I've had to be called in to take over something from a colleague of color because the person refused to believe that my entirely-capabale colleague knew anything about anything and would only accept that the white perceived-man could help them do what they were doing. But, magically, when I showed this person the thing that my colleague had been trying to show them for the last several minutes, they listened and it worked. And when they left, they left with a snide comment about how nobody else in the library knew what they were talking about. (I'd like to believe it says I've managed to clear one of the bars, at that moment, that I recognized that entire interaction, right form the jump of my colleague passing it off to me, that there was definitely racism involved here, and I didn't give any credence to the barb thrown in departure. Not in a "give me the cookies!" way, but as in "Congratulations, you've met the minimum. And now, the next moment of your life.")

Because words are my most comfortable medium, I also like to use them as much as possible, and the rarer and less-common ones, too. I'm afflicted by the mindset that wants to use the most specific word that I have in my lexicon to describe something. While you can use the widely-applicable form of the word and get meaning across, I want to also express nuance and shading with the words that I choose, so that you understand that I'm enraged rather than annoyed, or enraged rather than furious. Because text is devoid of the emotional and non-verbal context, I have to try and make up at least some of that with word choice. Which sometimes means I get sniped at by someone who feels like the use of those words is showing off, ostentatious ornamentation of language, silver-tongued threads and tailoring holding together brocade and silk meant to shout "Look at me! I have so many intellectual resources to spare that I can devote them to these frills, fringes, and embroidery of language!" Someone who sees themselves in simple, homespun shirt and trousers, fitting loosely but covering everything important, reacts to the finery with various emotions. If you spun a wheel with all the possible ways to take it on there, you might have to land on 00 to find a reaction that's not negative. Among people who also like to use words, it's not as much of an issue, and I would like to believe that people who come here to read these words, as I pontificate about things that I may or may not have the requisite experience and expertise in, also like words and their usage and some of the less-common ones showing up.

I think I helped a coworker this week regarding words and their meanings, when one of them used "in my hubris" with the thought of chia seeds expanding themselves beyond the jar that they had been put in for a touch. I joked "Well, I'm not entirely sure which god it was that you defied there, but if that's the way of things…" At which point, my coworker seemed confused, so I explained: Hubris has a connotation of excessive pride or arrogance, and often specifically, pride or arrogance toward gods or in defiance of them. At which point, my co-worker said they've used the word to mean poor planning. "Oh," I said. "I might use 'in my ignorance' there, then." And the co-worker thanked me for helping out, and it seemed genuine, so hopefully, hooray, lucky 10,000 about this particular thing?

Required schooling was hard for me not to demonstrate the fullness of my vocabulary and that desire to match up meaning. Plenty of people who would tell me to "talk normal" or even ask "Do you even swear?" as a way of shorthanding the question of "Do you know how to sound like a normal person?" Which, yes, I do know how to swear, and have since I was of age to recognize the power of certain words. Not, perhaps, with the skill that R. Lee Ermey had, but because I thought of it as an odd question, when I used one of those words, the others laughed and made fun of me because it sounded like a Jeopardy! response rather than someone who knew how to curse inventively or instinctively, whien it was "Yes, of course I know how to use those words, and I'm not using them right now." University was less of an issue, because all the people at university are nominally there to broaden their horizons and collect knowledge that will be helpful to them in whatever field they choose to work in. Graduate school was where I learned most of my High Librarian, which usually comes out when I'm ticked off about something. It's one of those quirks I have - in an environment where throwing bleepable, unprintable words about decisions or people is not permitted or would be a bad idea to do, my formal register ratchets up significantly. My most formal language is almost always my most aggravated language as well. And then the creativity starts to come out, turning what might otherwise be a single, emphatic and profane word into a razor-sharpened and beautifully-decorated iron fan to flutter in front of my face. Decisions are foolish, regrettable, ill-thought-out, and the people behind them may have trouble finding their own backsides with two hands, a map, and a flashlight. All in the service of whatever newest initiative has come our way. (Some of my coworkers have commented on the sharpness of some of my remarks, while also noting that despite my meaning being clear and pointy, I didn't say words that could be easily perceived as negative. Figured speech achieved, I guess.)

Creative High Librarian often comes out the most when I'm penning articles to submit for a publication, because if I'm moved to write something for a call for proposals or a publication, it's usually because there's some aspect of it that I have complaints about. This is a failing of my organization, because they do so many things that they should be dragged through the mud over. Or it's a failing of a national or international organization who similarly deserve, in my opinion, to be roasted for. I would love to have more positive things to talk about in my profession, but the things that are positive in my profession tend to be practical (and therefore suited to the presentation format over the essay format) rather than political and policy-related. Which often gives the presentations a tinge of "despite the obstacles in our way, we succeeded at this thing," or "if we weren't too busy fighting crises heaped upon us by others, we could do this cool thing," or "if our policymakers weren't dunderheads about this, we could be doing this cool thing instead of these uncool things." So much of the ambition and optimism I had coming out of graduate school has been boiled off from all of the constraints that come from working in an actual library system, with its budgetary, community, and administrative concerns. I still harbor grand dreams, just in case an opportunity comes along to enact one of them, but for the most part, I've resigned myself to the understanding that my sphere of influence over everything is greatly reduced from what it should be, and that the practical parts of running a library often mean that there's no spare capacity for creative things or for exploring things that could be very valuable to our communities, if only we could offer them.

You could make an argument here that the ease in which I can create something that showcases all the negativity says something about how I don't see the positives in life, and you would be right about it. Strong emotional memories for me are usually negative, because easily and regularly recalling strong negative emotions are another one of my maladaptations, one meant to protect me from getting hurt again. If I remember that when I did this thing, I got scolded and told off for it, that makes me less likely to do it again, and since some nonzero number of the things that I get scolded and told off for are things that I'm not fully consciously doing, associating strong negative emotions either makes it less likely I'll do the thing, or makes it less likely that I'll do anything in the ballpark of that thing, which qualifies as a good result, too, in the avoidance of things that could lead to hurt. And since I've always been a "sensitive" person and prone to big feelings, you can see how that closes off some things for me if I try to approach them directly. And why I don't like to be perceived when doing things that I'm not fully confident in my ability to execute them at a level where I'm confident it'll meet my tastes and yours. ("Take a fucking compliment!" is something you could say at me, and you'd be right.) I have extensive experience working with text, and because of that disconnection, where you only read words and have to imagine what the person saying them is like (except for those of you who have seen and heard me recently), I can say things that I might not otherwise be able to put to audio of any form. It is easier to write the words than to say them aloud. And, quite possibly, it is easier for you to read the words and take them wherever they will best go than it would be to hear them and do the same. (We're funny creatures about that.)

I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, regardless of how it's received or perceived by others. It would not go over well for me, not being able to get my words out. And at the same time, while I have an extensive back catalogue of materials to look at, I still have to approach the idea of writing somewhat obliquely, and to gather the fabled courage of the mediocre white man to submit things to publications where I have crafted them, or to hit post on some entries. Indirection and trying to convince myself of the truth of "the worst they can say is no" is important in this regard. Often, what starts as writing up notes and snippets soon becomes a full essay, and then, when I've created the damn thing because my brain wouldn't let go of it, I may as well submit it, and see whether it gets accepted. It often has, and so I use those strings of successes as the benchmark of "well, I'm a mediocre what man, and I'm submitting, so, you, person with perspectives not generally heard, and who I consider to be competent and either a peer or better-suited to this than I am, will you also submit, please?" I will probably never actually know when this happens, but I think it would be thrilling to submit something for publication and have it sent back with a rejection of "this is a great piece, and we think it will go somewhere else, but we've just had too many people with perspectives and lived experiences we don't usually see submit great essays, too, and so we're going with them." I'll be disappointed that I didn't get in, but I will recognize that reason as one of the best possible reasons why I didn't get in.

And in the meantime, I'll just keep writing.

The Daily Spell

Dec. 18th, 2025 10:49 pm
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
I stumbled across this well-spell-crafted game whilst wondering around itch.io: The Daily Spell, a story about a sudden surge in magical beast manifestations in a fantasy city, told through daily word puzzles that resolve into the headlines of brief newspaper articles that advance the story. Quite delightful and very well done.

$rf$
scintilla10: hug by the snowy light of the street lamps (Stock - joyful hug)
[personal profile] scintilla10
Sharing a few gems that I've loved from the [community profile] ficinabox exchange. Crossposting to [community profile] womansplace for their [community profile] rec_cember reccing event!

All creators are still anonymous!

we can get a little restless [art]
DC Comics, Diana, SFW (but a bit suggestive)
Really vibrant, colourful style! A pin-up style pose, fabulously flirty.

the whisperings and the champagnes and the stars [fic]
Andor (TV), Kleya Marki/Vel Sartha, rated M
This is outstanding, and pulls no punches! Excellent dialogue and characterization, and smolderingly hot but spiky chemistry between them.

the Fairy and the Human [art + card game reskin + plushie pattern]
Original Work, Fairy Queen/Young Woman Who Unwittingly Entered Her Realm, rated G
Gorgeous! This link goes to the first chapter which is stunning art of the queen and the young woman, with really lovely composition and beautiful colours and textures. But the creator has also created an entire reskinned board game with fairyland creatures, a cute sticker set, and even a small plushie pattern. I'm overwhelmed by the creativity, so cool!

fuzzy matching: still a mistake

Dec. 18th, 2025 10:29 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

No, internet, I guarantee you that 100% of the time that someone searches for explain pain supercharged, results they do not want are anything you think matches the string "explain paint supercharged". Hope that helps! Have A Nice Day!

(Still not anything like as annoying as fuzzy matching on a[b|d]sorb in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, but nonetheless Quite.)

oursin: My photograph of Praire Buoy sculpture, Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, overwritten with Urgent, Phallic Look (urgent phallic)
[personal profile] oursin

Trust's £330k appeal to buy Cerne Giant's 'lair' - if anyone is unaware of the existence of the Cerne Giant, I should issue a NSFW warning for the images - 'the ancient naked figure sculpted into the chalk in Dorset' with a gigantic todger.

The trust said purchasing the land would allow the charity to restore and care for sections of chalk grassland, plant new woodland, and create habitats to support species under threat.

Well, we think there is some primeval fertility mojo all ready to support the threatened species, no?

The National Trust has looked after the Giant and the immediately surrounding sward since 1920. (I now want to poke about in the British Newspaper Archive to see what the reporting, if any, was like....)

And in related matters of burgeoning nature and the work of the National Trust, More than 300 seal pups have been born at a colony just a month into the breeding season:

Last year, 228 pups were born at Orford Ness in Suffolk, which is home to the county's first breeding colony of grey seals.
The breeding season began in November and already hundreds have been born with still about a month to go.
Matt Wilson, the trust's countryside manager, said the team believed the entire colony now consisted of more than 1,000 seals.

***

And another form of conservation: The Digital Future of Stained Glass: Data Standards and Interoperability – Why Recording Stained Glass is Important. (What this sounds like to me is a whole lot of people not talking to one another while doing very similar work and only now getting together....):

Existing data however is currently presented in wildly different formats across different databases, to varying degrees of detail and accuracy, and held on disparate websites managed by individuals. This means that the future of these resources collectively is highly insecure.

Screaming in archivist been there and done that.

The Merro Tree by Katie Waitman

Dec. 18th, 2025 08:46 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A determined artist faces potentially lethal criticism.


The Merro Tree by Katie Waitman

(no subject)

Dec. 18th, 2025 09:41 am
oursin: hedgehog in santa hat saying bah humbug (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Hasppy birthday, [personal profile] nomeancity!

December Days 02025 #17: Persistence

Dec. 17th, 2025 11:30 pm
silveradept: A librarian wearing a futuristic-looking visor with text squiggles on them. (Librarian Techno-Visor)
[personal profile] silveradept
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

17: Persistence

As someone who is comfortable with installing and reinstalling and restoring configurations and working my way back to what it was before, just with time and scripting, and exporting and importing, it's not the end of the world when an entity or a corporation pulls a milkshake duck, or decides they, too, are going to chase the snake oil bubble and start cramming LLM-related features into their browsers, or operating systems, or any other piece of software they can control. I will freely admit that it sucks to have to do all of those operations on the regular, or even on the occasion, but it is something that I have become used to, as I've been throwing things around here and there, and making it work better. The hardest part, sometimes, is re-learning where you've stashed all your configuration tweaks and where they get applied to. But the more it gets done, the easier it is to remember where all the pathways are, and what you want to do with them. Perhaps in some future world, I'll remember to save the configuration files first, and back them up, and then retrieve and paste them back in and all will be well.

And, when I make these kinds of decisions, as it turns out, sometimes I learn some new and interesting things, like the way that some apps, even if they don't exist in the package manager, are self-contained enough to run on the system. Therefore, I now have my preferred browser running on a system that doesn't have it in the package repositories. At least, not at the moment, since the new version is built on one version up from where my current distribution wants to be.

This is also a crossover post with the Adventures in Home Automation series, because, for the third time, I have managed to get my television with the attacked Raspberry Pi and the broken IR receiver talking to Home Assistant, and being controllable from there. In the previous incarnations of this situation, I managed to clone some git repositories, recognize that some of the things they wanted to do with containers and running the thing as they would like to wouldn't work, because they were asking for some much older versions of Debian, which were probably the newest versions of Debian at the time, but whose archive pointers had completely fallen off and were no longer available. One promising entity written in go worked for a little while, and then the go language changed versions, and the old script just went "nope" compared to the new version, and I don't program in go, so I couldn't fix it. The second promising entity was written in python, and in a previous version of Debian, I seemed to gather all the right libraries from the system tools and get very close to making things work, before I dropped a piece from a completely different script, meant to make it possible for a remote control to function as a game controller, I believe, into the other script, because it looked like it might work. And it did, to my surprise. So that was version two, running stably and with a systemd service for running on boot, happily working its way along.

Then the Debian version underlying the single-board computer's Linux changed, and that meant not only rebasing, but reinstalling, reconfiguring, re-adding, and otherwise bringing things back into the system I had, and reinstalling and reconfiguring the communication broker so that the SBC could communicate with Home Assistant (and the router, now that it had some Optware installed that would send information about router operations and connected machines over that same protocol, using that SBC as the broker for the messages.)

The last component that needed to work was the bridging script that reported information using HDMI-CEC to read the bus for status and then transmit commands from Home Assistant to turn that screen on and off. In the intervening time, the library that the python program used to communicate had jumped a major version number and changed its entire syntax in the process. Luckily, the error that appeared mentioned that a single flag could be set so that it would use the old version of how it was set up, and that saved me a lot of grief trying to figure out how to re-spec the script to use the new library. The flag may deprecate at some point, and then I will have to walk the script up from the previous version to the current version. Hopefully, when that's necessary, there will be a nice conversion guide posted somewhere that explains what the equivalent commands are, and where to put the components of the previous command in the new syntax. For now, however, the scripts themselves are sorted, thanks to adding one piece of code at the right place to the thing itself.

What's not working is that in this new version based on Debian Trixie, the library I had installed from the earlier version was no longer present. And that meant a significant amount of looking around to see if there was something suitable that would serve in its place. The testing repository, the one that would be in the next release (Forky), had the library I thought I had installed on the previous version. So, I did something that is recommended against, and added the testing repository and pulled the version of the item from there, expecting it all to set up and go.

No dice. So I uninstalled that particular set of libraries, because pulling from different releases is a good way to break it. Option two: since it's a python script, I can potentially set up a virtual environment for Python, separated from the system-managed Python installation, then install the necessary libraries through the pip package manager to the virtual environment, and run the script out of that, so long as said script can communicate out and have Home assistant pick up what it's laying down. That's easier to manage with some software packages like pipx to handle the creation and management of the virtual environment. I get the environment set up, and the library that I think will work installed, and the script bombs again with the same error as it had before, So the virtual environment approach isn't going to work, either.

All this time, I'm using my search engine skills to try and figure out what the error is, but there aren't a whole lot of posts on the subject, and most of the time, it keeps coming back to a couple of places, including a GitHub issue that seems like it's exactly about the problem that I'm having, and that somehow the problem was fixed in a subsequent release of the software, but I don't see how they got from point a to point b, as I read and reread the information and keep trying to figure out where the library is that I need to install from the package manager to get the functionality I had before.

This is one of those things where sometimes you need to let your brain background solve a task. Humans are, after all, persistence predators, and while flashes of insight are often cool, they often come more after you have been chewing on a problem for a while, letting it background-process while you work your way toward greater understanding. There was a study, I believe it was in one of my graduate school texts, where a professor gave students a list of riddles to try and solve over the course of a day. At the lunch break, the professor collected the tests and had the students do their lunch break activities, but at places along the way in the building, the professor had placed representations of riddle solutions, and the thing that was being tested was whether the presence of those solution prompts helped the students solve more riddles. I can't find the study, and so I may not be representing it accurately, but sometimes you go through an entire something and as your brain twists and turns on it, and eventually, you do some up with something that actually qualifies as a solution to the problem. It's the idea of "distracting" your conscious processes so that some other process can take over the solving of things, or the integration of information. Sometimes sleeping on it is the right answer to the situation.

In my case, the actual solution came when I finally realized that I was making an assumption that one of the forum posts explicitly denied was a good one to make, and that instead of installing a package from a repository with a similar name, but not actually containing what was needed to succeed, what I instead needed to do was follow the instructions that were given in the right place and compile the damn library myself. Which there was definitely a recipe for, and for the specific architecture and device that I was using. Download source, pass appropriate flags to the compiler, make, make install, all of the things that are involved in compiling a library from source, and guess what? As soon as I had compiled the correct library, the script worked perfectly as I ran it, with the "use the old version please" flag set for the library that did some of the work.

I felt very stupid afterward, because everything kept funneling back to these posts that said "no, that package is not the library you need, you have to compile the library from scratch, and this is the way to do so." I didn't want to do that because I'd rather use the package manager to produce the thing that I needed, instead of compiling something from source. Actually doing what the thing said only took a few minutes and would have avoided many months of grief and not understanding why things weren't working, even with the ability to search up the specific error message and find the post that described it accurately and said what the solution was. Once I managed to read the post correctly and drop the preconception I had, things went much more smoothly.

So this is about the persistence of solving problems, of trying to get to a solution that works for me, and sometimes the disappointment that comes when someone is satisficing rather than looking for a full solution. It's about persistence, because apparently I keep wanting to tweak and shuffle and suggest and do things until they're exactly right, instead of mostly right. It's also about how that persistence sometimes means it's hard to let go of the situation if it's not perfect and optimized and works in all cases. And how it can be annoying to have to deal with people who deliberately want to keep introducing nonsensical edge cases into your perfectly working system, or who believe that if you don't debate them on their nonsensical edge cases or absurd questions, they have somehow "won" and proven themselves smarter than you, because you refused to engage with bad faith tactics. As the somewhat ineffectual advice given would tell us, we can only control ourselves, we cannot control other people. (In pursuit of perfection, we seek control, and sometimes the control that would produce perfection is the control of others, and therefore, perfection will always be beyond us. In theory, this realization is supposed to help us not seek that level of control. In practice, there's still a lot of frustration that comes from not being able to do the things flawlessly and well, and sometimes even more aggravation when things are going out of our control and we don't even know why.) Given how often I end up having to engage with the absurd and the nonsensical, I'd like to believe I have a greater tolerance for other people being Wrong on the Internet (or in my workplace), but there's still sometimes that bit where I want to believe that with enough persistence, I will be able to prevail over the things that bother me, or the people that bother me.

It's also, though, about persistence, the concept that we first learn about when object permanence makes it into our head, that the world is not, in fact, limited to what we are experiencing with our senses, and that our senses (and our minds, if you want to get Zen about it) are misleading us about the nature of our reality. Just because the ball disappears behind the paper doesn't mean it winks out of existence entirely, only to return into reality when the paper is raised. (At least, at the Newtonian mechanics level. Quanta and their friends behave very differently, and we are finding more and more that the act of observation collapses all the possibilities into an observed real, such that whatever organ we are using to perceive the possibilities with inscribes what the result will be onto those possibilities.) The past and the future are constructions, only Now is reality, and only for the now that we experience Now. Many of those constructions are useful, and society rests on our ability to construct things about past, future, and pattern so that we can attempt to impose some amount of order upon the chaos, so as to make it livable and manageable. (That's karma, baby.) We persist in things all the time. Error. its opposite. The horrors persist, and so do I (or but so do I.) Nevertheless, she persisted. He's baaaack! So many things that we have in our history and our lives are about the application of human-sized amounts of influence and force until the desired result is achieved, sometimes even with a great array of things standing athwart, sabotaging, or attempting to cause failure in the way. Because we are not the kinds of beings that let go easily, or give up, and we do much greater work when there are more of us, so we can each take a turn at persistence while someone else rests up for their next turn. The idea about the arc bending toward justice is not a thing that happens by itself, it happens because there are people bending the arc into the desired shape. We will not complete the work in our lifetime, but neither are we excused from doing the work during our lifetimes. And through the ages, thanks to our persistence, we build and sustain things that are greater than any one person and one lifetime. (It's frustrating not to see when it finally clicks into place, but ours is not to know the day or the hour, apparently.)

Only a little while longer, and some of the decisions that I made in the past, decisions that were absolutely correct, will finally have discharged their consequences. It always seems impossible until it is done. Keep at it.

On actually enjoying games

Dec. 18th, 2025 10:02 am
flamebyrd: (Default)
[personal profile] flamebyrd

I quit two phone games recently and want to work through some feelings about it.

Farm RPG

I started playing Farm RPG a while back because I was looking for something that was like Stardew Valley but more idle focused.

On the surface this is the case, but it’s not so much an idle game as it is a clicker. Some resources accumulate over time once you've bought the upgrade, but for the most part you are clicking to obtain them. Fishing is a twitchy “click on the moving dot” affair. Farming involves waiting (minutes, hours, days) or expending an item, but is not very profitable.

There are villagers to befriend (not marry) and quests to complete, but there’s a cynical snideness to the writing that didn’t really work for me. Some quests require items you get from sending your animals to the slaughterhouse, which I didn't want to do and used workarounds that just take longer (weeks/months instead of days.)

All of this I could deal with but I’ve reached a point where I cannot progress in the story without putting the raptors I have raised in a fight club and I just don’t want to. They’re good raptors! The only alternative I could see would involve many, many more months of grinding.

And then one day I missed finishing my daily quests, took a step back and asked, am I actually enjoying this game? Am I looking forward to doing the daily tasks or is it tedious?

So I’ve stopped.

nb. there is a social aspect to the game which I turned off shortly after starting. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I engaged with the community.

Pokémon TCG Pocket

If you want the feeling of opening packets of collectible cards with cute art but don’t want the clutter or to spend actual money, this game is almost perfect! You can open 2 packs a day for free! You can make decks and battle (against the computer or online)!

You can spend real life currency on a monthly subscription to open an extra pack a day, or à la carte to reduce the time until you can open new packs. But I wasn’t even tempted.

I quit because quitting Farm RPG made me question if I actually enjoyed this game too, and I thought how long the app takes to load every time, how unlikely it is that I’ll ever complete my collections, how I always battled in auto mode because it was slow and not interesting to me… so I’ve quit.

--

What games have you recently quit? What are you Actually Enjoying right now?

I have been trying to read more but ironically most of the time this is more engaging than playing a game and leads to more time on my phone.

Glow Wild 2024

Dec. 17th, 2025 11:31 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I realised earlier today that I never actually got around to uploading photos from last year's Glow Wild. Since we'll be going to this year's on Friday, now seems like a good time to remedy that...

lanterns: a group of three badgers

+6 )

Woe (and cheering myself up)

Dec. 17th, 2025 10:29 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

I am the stage of being ill with a cold where it feels like I will never be well again, I barely even remember what it is to not cough, and all is doom. Woe, woe is me. [From experience, this stage is usually about two days before I actually get fully well, but try telling my feelings that.]

(brought to you by having to miss yet another hockey practice tonight, the penultimate one of the year, and being sad about it)

Cheering myself up with the news that Heated Rivalry comes to the UK on 10 January. I am going to be very normal about it. Meanwhile I await a delivery of Rick Riordan books from my dealer the buddy who got me into them, and Instagram is doing its usual creepily-accurate targeting, supplying me with Yorkshire Percy Jackson and advertising a PJ musical in Peterborough next spring.

Okay so more context

Dec. 17th, 2025 09:29 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
(Re: the previous entry.)

Dragonslayer Ornstein & Executioner Smough (also known as Oreo and S'mores, Biggie and Smalls, Pikachu and Snorlax, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and any other name the fandom can come up with) are one of the most iconic boss fights in the entire Dark Souls series.

There are much harder ones in later games (and in the DLC), but they're still legendary and still regarded as a Serious boss fight.

They're also a famous mid-game difficulty spike and cause of rage quitting. Conversely, if you can get through O&S, people often say you should have the skills to beat the rest of the base game.

The major issue is that it's a duo boss fight, with one agile speedster (Ornstein) who can zip most of the way across the room in a single move, and also throws lightning, and one heavyweight bruiser (Smough) who is slower but not that slow -- he has a charge attack to close distance fast that hits like a freight train -- and does huge amounts of damage.

So for the first phase of the fight, you have to try to keep track of where they both are simultaneously (not to mention where you are in relation to the room, so you don't back yourself into a corner and get trapped) and constantly manoeuvre to try to be able to get in a hit on one without being hit by the other.

If you kill one of them, the fight goes into a second phase where the surviving one absorbs some of their powers (so if it's Smough, he gets lightning, while if it's Ornstein he gets sized up and picks up part of Smough's moveset) and also restarts with a full and vastly increased health bar. Though there is a general consensus that the second phase is more manageable than the first phase simply because you're not having to fight two bosses at the same time.

Illustrative example of someone doing the fight:



(You can summon an NPC or other human players to try to help you, but the bosses get extra health to compensate and it's still tough. And also I have been having enormous fun trying to beat all the bosses without summons so far, and am averse to the extra complications and unpredictability of having more people -- human or NPC -- in the mix while I try to figure out a fight. Though I've also had enormous fun being a summons for other people on boss fights, so zero disrespect to people summoning*, it's an excellent game mechanic.)

As I may have mentioned once or twice, my brain has huge difficulty tracking multiple moving objects (which is why I can't drive or cycle on the road) and I have the reaction speed of a slime mould.

So yeah. I knew O&S are the big mid-game stopper and I was very aware that this could potentially be the point where I hit a wall and the game became flatly impossible for me. Or at least where I'd have to summon to get through it.

And that did not happen. I solo-ed O&S.

It took multiple sessions over multiple days before I mastered it, but that's standard for me on DS boss fights. And I had SO MUCH FUN. It's SUCH A COOL FIGHT.

I did a thing that was a real achievement for me and I am very proud, and especially given the shitshow this year has been, I'll take it.

{*Necessary disclaimer only because Dark Souls fandom has historically had a section who are toxic as fuck and would like you to know that you didn't really beat the game if you summoned or used magic or whatthefuckever else they disapprove of.}
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot - teensy pedantic note that a girl who was a teenage WW2 evacuee was not going to have been called Doris after Doris Day.

I read a couple more nostalgic (I literally read these when I was still at school) Elswyth Thanes (also the ebooks are v cheap), This Was Tomorrow (1951) and Homing (1957), and apart from a couple of fortunately brief scenes in Williamsburg (I get the impression is being done up as Heritage Site with Rockefeller dough?) set in England/Europe just before and at beginning of WW2. Apart from the 2 idealistic Oxford Groupers (it's not actually named but it sounds very like) who want to shed love and light on the Nazis, nobody is for appeasement. So unlike e.g. Lanny Budd's first wife and her second (Brit aristo) husband.... There is also weird reincarnation theme going on.

Latest Literary Review.

Some while ago I was looking for my copy of The Goblin Emperor and it was not in any of the places I thought it plausibly might be and then I spotted it while dusting the bookshelves in a non-intuitive spot and have been re-reading that. Have also read the online short story Min Zemerin's Plan (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1.5) (2022), which I hadn't come across before, and re-read The Orb of Cairado (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1.1) (2025). Does anyone know how I can get access to Lora Selezh (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #0.5), which was apparently a freebie for preorders of the Tor edition of Witness for the Dead???

On the go

Have started Dickon Edwards, Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1 (1997-2007) (2025) - possibly a dipper-inner rather than a read straight through, though sometimes diaries that one thinks this about grab one like the Ancient Mariner, I'm looking at you Mr Isherwood.

Up Next

As may seem predictable, I am on to a re-read of Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy.

I should probably also be turning my attention to Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs, for the Pilgrimage online book group discussion in early Jan.

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Kobold Press of high adventure in a Labyrinth of infinite worlds, and more.

Bundle of Holding: Tales of the Valiant

Micah Aaron Tajone Kalap Obituary

Dec. 17th, 2025 10:56 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Micah was a co-worker at the theatre. He was the sort of person who becomes a front of house manager by age 18.

Micah Aaron Tajone Kalap Obituary

As it happens, the bridge nearest the funeral home was just torn down. As a result, access looks like this...



(Buses are even worse)
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Can a community of otaku save their apartment building from gentrification? Should a community of otaku save their apartment building from gentrification?

Princess Jellyfish, volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura

December Days 02025 #16: Badger

Dec. 16th, 2025 11:17 pm
silveradept: A librarian wearing a futuristic-looking visor with text squiggles on them. (Librarian Techno-Visor)
[personal profile] silveradept
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

16: Badger

If you like, put on Badger Badger Badger. (Personally, I'm here for the Mosesondope.EXE Demoscene Edition, because of the visuals and the sound, but the original is also good and will serve.)

The key word for this entry comes from the Lucy A. Snyder piece Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes, and then the subsequent book, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (and other oddities) that took the single article and created more from that world, packaged up into a small set of pages.

I'll admit that replacing the operating system on a computer is not a task for the faint of heart. This is also another one of those cases where having a spare machine, or even a spare hard drive to devote to the installation, makes things much more approachable than they might otherwise be in trying to make things happen with just one drive and one computer and therefore one chance to get it right, without additional help from recovery utilities. For a good amount of time, I had Linux on one drive and Windows on another. Actually, I still do, it's just that Linux now gets the faster and better drive now, instead of Windows.

To make some of those situations less frightening, there exist things like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, that you can install and enable and then download a compatible distribution to get terminal access to that distribution. (It doesn't do GUI.) Or there were projects that basically set up an image inside the already partitioned drive, so that there wasn't any need to repartition the drive and worry about what might happen to data as it gets shuffled around. And most Linux distributions have a live environment on their install images so that someone can at least poke around a little bit and see what it might be like to use that particular distribution, how it manages software, what things it includes as a default, and what desktop environment it believes is the best one, and therefore is the one it puts forward as the default option.

Because just about every Linux distribution is Opinionated about these things, it can take a certain amount of trial-and-discard before you find one that you're willing to work with long enough to figure out whether you're truly compatible, or whether it still does things over time that will annoy you to the point where you find you have developed Opinions of your own about how you want your Linux to function, and then you will be able to read distribution documentation and hype statements to find out whether or not their Opinions match yours. I started trying to run Linux in my undergraduate university days, and the experience was so rough I jettisoned the idea entirely for my undergraduate period. By the time graduate school rolled around, and a Linux environment was the best option for me to do some of my schoolwork, instead of trying to flatter Apple by buying into OS X, sufficient improvement had happened that the process of installation and use was much more on the Just Works side instead of the problem-ridden situation I ran into. It could be that I selected very poorly in my first distribution choice, as well. In any case, graduate school and my first few years of independent living were relatively smooth in terms of making it all work out, and I had a Linux machine with a TV tuner that I could use to watch most of the cable channels I had available to me. in my apartment.

So, in the sense of not necessarily needing large amounts of technical skill and fiddling with configurations, and that most distributions contain an installation wizard to set specific environment variables, partition drives appropriately, and install the software, it's not that difficult to install Linux on a desktop machine. Laptops are a little fiddlier, and the single-board computers, like the Fruit Pi lines, are the fiddliest of the lot. That said, the desktop installers work 99% of the time for laptops, and the Fruit Pis generally have their own installers / image writer programs to ensure that everything gets put in the right place. Significant amounts of work goes into the installers to make sure that they function well, cleanly, and without errors, so that someone can feel confident that the potentially most dangerous part of the process is simple enough, and that all of the options they need to make sure their machine will come out the other side running optimally and with any and all of the tweaks or packages it needs to do so already enabled.

The story that provides the keyword for the entry is much more like what it can be to try and port Linux to a new set of hardware, or trying to figure out how to get all the drivers in place and running smoothly, and any adjustments that need to be made to the kernel to make it happen. All of which is arcane wizardry well beyond my level of current understanding. I am in user space, not in kernel hacking space. (And there you can see why I think "Oh, I'm just running other people's software" is an appropriate deflection for any kind of praise for things that I'm doing with that software.) It's a lot easier than it has been to install Linux on a dead badger, or any other animal of your choice, than it has been before, and it will likely get easier as time goes on and the installers and distributions are refined even further, and Linux is available for a wider range of possible hardware and components attached to that hardware. Because Linux people want us to adopt a distribution (and preferably theirs), they're trying to make it as simple as they can to get it done. So having done it several times at this point, and changed distributions, and mostly just used the tools available to do it with, I don't consider having installed a Linux to be a particularly praiseworthy thing for me in most circumstances. (It's recipe usage. Just follow the directions and you'll be fine, pay no attention at all as to how following recipe almost always has an underlying assumption that you know all the techniques that it's going to ask you to do.)

George, the original-model Chromebook, is an exception to this. It was still recipe-following, but I had to be a proper information professional to find and extract the recipe from where it was being stored. Pulling the same feat again with a different model of Chromebook is pretty impressive, since that still meant finding the appropriate spots on the circuit board to disable the write protection and doing the thing the recipe needed to do that disabling. (I think it was removing a screw, in this case, instead of using electrical tape to prevent a connection.)

Putting aftermarket operating systems on phones and tablets is still recipe following, but in my case, for Android things, it requires operating from the terminal to achieve the desired results, as well as manipulation of buttons or finding ways to ensure that the correct places are being booted into to use those recipe tools. And while I've had success at every item I've attempted, there was one time where I straight-up botched the process by flashing the wrong thing to the device! While this would normally be a straight-up brick problem, on this specific device (an old Amazon Kindle Fire), with some digging in the information and reading more of the troubleshooting parts of the recipe, it turns out there's a pad on the circuit board that if you create the right kind of short to it, you can force the device into a firmware-upload acceptance state for a little bit of time. Which involved the dexterity and care needed to disassemble the device to expose the pad, to have the right kind of wire on hand to create the short, and to have the terminal command only needed the carriage return, so that I could hit my window of opportunity and flash the correct item to the device. And then, after that, to reassemble the device, after confirming that it had, in fact, taken the correct flash and could now function properly again. That was an adventure, and it'll teach me to read things more carefully the next time I get a wild hare in my bonnet about doing various things. (That said, this device was old, it was not mission-critical, and while it was much improved for having been put on this path, it still wasn't a very powerful device, and the version of Android built for it was several version numbers ago. So botching the flash was a question of whether I could do the recovery, not whether I had to do the recovery. Much less pressure.)

[Diversion: There is at last one cellular device carrier who locks the bootloaders of all their devices and refuses to provide any means of unlocking them to their consumers. The problem is, unless the seller already knows, and/or has already installed an aftermarket operating system on the device, there's no way of knowing whether a used phone that you're interested in will be one that you can put aftermarket software on, or whether it will be one of these bootloader-locked devices from this carrier. It's remarkably hard to source new old devices because of this, and there's enough confusion between carrier unlocking, where a device can be used on any of the carrier networks in a country, and bootloader unlocking, to install software, that a device proclaiming itself "unlocked" is often carrier-unlocked, and unknown about whether it's bootloader-unlocked. I would happily source a device from the manufacturer to avoid such nonsense if I could, but buying direct from the manufacturer is often hella expensive, and needs to be paid all at once. (That, and they usually only carry their newest models of the niches they're looking for, so trying to sneak an older model from them usually is a no-go.) I'd rather test phones that I'm getting from the used market for their suitability before buying them, but that can also be difficult to do over the Internet, unless, of course, the seller knows what I'm asking for and can do those tests themselves and show me the results.]

There are two exceptions that I know of to the idea of making Linux easy to install and then just use, so long as you agree with the opinions of the distribution creators. The first is Gentoo, which, having now read the Wikipedia article on the distribution, seems to have a few more options for providing pre-built ways into a system, that then get taken over by the way that a Gentoo system really wants to work, and was previously installed: by compiling everything from source, according to preferences set by the user to ensure that the software that they used was exactly the way they wanted it to be (and that had been optimized for their hardware and use cases, so that it would go faster and potentially use less RAM on that system compared to others that had not been optimized.) Even I, supposed computer-toucher and polymath-in-training, have never attempted to stand up a Gentoo system according to the official instructions and handbook there. Just from how it is described, I feel like it offers a jam choice problem to everyone who doesn't already know all the answers to the questions it will ask in advance, and therefore can just set the flags and switches in the manner they desire and leave the machine to compile everything. (Plus, updating the system for Gentoo has to take significant amounts of time to do all the compiling, so I would hope that the performance improvements more than make up for the increased amount of time spent building all the packages from source.)

I have, however, tangled with the second exception to the rule, and stood up several Arch Linux systems using their official methods. Arch's Opinion on Linux is that they actively try to avoid having one, past making sure that packages are built according to their specifications, and that they do not particularly care for large amounts of abstraction. Past the basics to get a system up and running, they have no defaults, they have no recommended packages, they have no application suite or desktop environment that they install by default. There are now a couple ways to go about setting up an Arch Linux system, one with a guided installation and one that follows the official installation process on the Arch Linux wiki. The Arch Linux wiki is the reason that Arch Linux isn't a niche distribution that only the hardest of hardcore users takes on. The documentation on the wiki is excellent, although sometimes it is esoteric, and the documentation is frequently more helpful than the forum users, who often demonstrate the kinds of stereotypical attitudes that people have come to think of Linux users, and of people who generally are unhelpful until you do the exact thing they're demanding, at which point they may give you a curt answer with no explanation to help you understand. So, for someone who believes in their ability to follow recipe, having a nice detailed recipe to follow and to refer to when things get a little squirrely is just the thing desired.

Thankfully, despite the flaws of its users, Arch is a distribution that fits with the idea of how I wanted to work with systems. On other systems and architectures, the developers and maintainers make easy the pathways they want users to use, and make very difficult pathways that the user might want to take that aren't what the maintainers want. And the update schedule for many distributions is slower than what I would like it to be. Debian updates, but there's enough that's been changed in the interim that I wouldn't be surprised if they recommend reinstalling rather than version upgrading in place. Ubuntu releases every six months, and Mint follows that schedule. Arch (and Gentoo) and their derivatives are, instead, rolling-release distributions, where updates to the packages are available immediately, rather than at specified update intervals. By remembering to keep the system updated regularly, or at your own decision of intervals, you can control a rolling-release for your own schedule, rather than having to set aside time when someone else wants to update. And because an Arch install from something other than the guided script has very few decisions made for you, it's perfect for cobbling together all of your favorite programs in one distribution, never mind how they might have clashing appearances with each other, based on what toolkits they're using for graphical styling.

Valve Corporation, in creating the operating system for their Steam Deck devices, SteamOS, took Arch Linux as the base and provided significant support to the distribution to ensure that it could continue to be used as the base for SteamOS. And, as they have done with many other things, the corporation created a very nice wrapper around Arch so that they could run Steam in Big Picture Mode on the device, and still allow for people to use the Deck as a desktop-style device, or to game in high resolution and power if they hooked it up to a dock. Arch's aggressive opinions about keeping the decisions in the hands of the user make it a great base for Valve to build upon, since they can choose what they want to apply and only what they want to apply.

All of the pure Arch installs I've done so far have eventually wound up with certain kinds of problems that necessitated their reinstall or my choice to move a machine to another system. Usually it had to do with storage problems. On the one that had enough storage, the problem was essentially that the discrete graphics card in the machine was no longer supported by the proprietary drivers for the corporation that made it, and so the desktop environment choices were very limited, and even then, the machine was starting to struggle with doing all that many things. These could have been defeated in various clever ways, but eventually it was clear that the problem was going to only keep creeping up on me and getting thrown back after a little bit. So, admittedly, having done the thing, I eventually abandoned doing the thing for a more opinionated setup that still runs the Arch base, but goes from there to provide some better quality-of-life features, and which has a gaming edition, which is what I wanted in the first place. I'm not sorry that I did the Arch from scratch approach, it introduced me to some neat tools that I can use in the future if I ever need to stand things up, or use console commands to try and achieve various situations like starting up wireless Internet. And, doing the whole thing from the command line meant that I got a little more confident in my abiity to do things from the command line. (And, subsequently, understand why there are so many warnings on the Internet about not using combinations where you download code you haven't looked at and then pipe it directly into your shell. Even though I probably wouldn't be able to examine such scripts to see if they were malicious before executing them. I don't have that kind of specialized knowledge, I operate firmly in user space, and so I do a lot of trusting that the people providing this software aren't doing it for malicious reasons, and that they haven't had someone introduce malicious code into their project, whether by force or by social engineering to get themselves attached to the project and then push malicious changes. That it's worked out marvelously so far is a testament to what people can do when they cooperate with each other and are able to use tools at their disposal to sign their work and make sure that it's trusted.

Installing Arch isn't quite like installing Linux on a dead badger, that would have been if I'd managed to successfully get the Linux experiment I did in my undergraduate days to get up and running and doing what I wanted without a lot of frustration and aggravation. But it is something that rightly suggests that at least my abilities to follow recipe and to troubleshoot when something other than the expected result comes out of the recipe, so as to get it back on track and working again. This happens regularly, and in the distributions that I'm running now, the updater script they provide tells me when there are things that may need my attention, like new configuration files that I might have to tweak to make work again. It's good, it's powerful, I like the aesthetic of it, and the machines that need to run it can. (And I'm still taking care of all the rest of the fleet of devices as well, with their specific purposes in mind. Update day is usually an all-day affair for all of my items, but the nice thing about package managers and update scripts is that they do most of the work for me, and I just have to run the commands to make sure everything is in order.

So, if there aren't reasons why you have to stay on a particular operating system, maybe give a Linux a spin for a bit and see if you like it? Or several of the Linux-type items for a spin, and see if any of them appeal. Each time Microsoft decides a Windows version gets no further security updates, or Apple decides that certain computers no longer get macOS updates, or phone manufacturers decide they're done providing updates to their devices, there's an opportunity for a Linux to step in and keep the device going, so long as you can install it. And so long as you trust the community of developers who are interested in keeping that device going past the end of official support from the manufacturer. It's worked out for me pretty well since I switched to Linux as a primary driver of things, and now I can say that a lot of gaming is actually coming along nicely on Linux systems, so that's pretty cool.

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Lee

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