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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • This is exactly the feeling I had when I played Assassin’s Creed and picked up a flag that said “1/100”. That happened multiple times, since there are 400 flags in the game. And what do you get? Absolutely nothing but an achievement.

    I hold Mario Odyssey up as a shining example of how to make large optional objectives fun. You don’t really get much of a reward for getting all 999 moons, but at least the vast majority of them have fun puzzles to solve so that it’s actually rewarding to collect them. Contrast this with, say, Korok seeds.



  • The issue is, though you may make a distinction between “I’m using this slur as an insult and not against its targeted oppressed minority”, bigots make no such distinction. Hearing others use the slur and normalize it emboldens these bigots to use it against vulnerable minorities, backing up to “I didn’t mean it that way” when they get called out. The word’s legacy also tangles with a fair bit of racism, as children of minority races were often labeled “mentally retarded” for poor English skills or just so they could be shuffled out of class after school segregation was ended. It’s just a word, yes, but one with a lot of ugly history in the US at the very least.

    Plus, the dislike of the word really isn’t new, it just has more support these days. We have lots of other words to choose from, what’s the harm in avoiding this one?




  • Windows into I went to college for development and decided to check out this Linux thing. At the time, I wanted something as different from Windows as possible, so I went with Ubuntu with Gnome 3 (I know) for about a year. Tried out Fedora, couldn’t get my sound to work and accidentally uninstalled the desktop environment trying to fix it, slunk back to Ubuntu, tried out a Debian briefly, and eventually ended up on Linux Mint with Cinnamon and KDE.

    At one time I really wanted to try a bunch of stuff and probably would’ve hopped a lot more if Fedora didn’t shatter my confidence, but nowadays I want as little disruption between machines as possible. I have to use Windows for work, so I keep my Linux setup pretty vanilla so I don’t miss features between the two very much. I’ll probably still play with other distros every now and then on old laptops, but I’ve fallen into a “if it ain’t broke” mindset with my daily machines.



  • Proton is a godsend. Some games can be a little unstable, but I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t work at all. Even was able to install and mod a game from 2000. For what doesn’t work on Proton, Lutris can hopefully handle. Takes a little doing sometimes but I got Battlenet/WoW working almost prefectly with CurseForge.

    Nvidia drivers are a huge pain in the ass, though, and haven’t played nice with Wayland in my experience.




  • Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering. He provides so much insight to the constructed world around us and, more recently, has done a ton of work to digest complex reports to, as he puts it, “elevate the discussion” around manmade disasters so that the layman can have a more informed opinion.

    Pannenkoek as well. He’s pretty niche, making videos almost exclusively about Mario 64, but he has an incredible talent for teaching complex technical concepts in an understandable way. It’s often really hard for people that freakin smart to turn around and explain their knowledge to a layman, but Pannen puts a ton of work into visuals and examples to make sense of some really comprehensive stuff.

    Rebecca Sugar, creator of Steven Universe. They’ve always had a mission to reach queer kids and have taken inspiration from Mr. Rogers to help children love and accept themselves. Over the course of their career, they’ve really come out of their shell and fought for representation in cartoons, driving the whole medium forward while supporting their peers across the animation industry. They’ve been pretty quiet online since the end of Steven Universe, but it’s because they’re out there in person at LGBTQ+ youth centers teaching kids how to understand and express themselves. I didn’t know what it meant to have a role model until I started following their career.