Before Phantom Liberty / 2.0: average game. Overpromised and underdelivered. Good at first but getting boring fast.

After Phantom Liberty / 2.0: very good game overall, fixes most old problems. PL by itself one of the best DLCs ever made, sad that such high quality was necessary to save the base game. It’s like the game was meant to be from the start.

Still not on W3’s level overall though, but if you can get it at reduced price it’s a really good experience now. Start PL before the meeting at Embers. After PL, resume that main quest.

The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what’s likely true and what’s not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to “funny” fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.

We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren’t rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn’t even on the radar for those fascists because they don’t even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we’ll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it’ll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.

So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It’s ging to get much, MUCH worse before it’s going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.

It does again show that these people are like irrational, unscientific, religious cultists. We, as in humanity, should aim to progress away from such a dark past, not regress back into one. That way lies madness.

Just FYI I installed the apk from the github repo (not the google play version) via Obtainium a few days ago and it tried to make a connection to 2 cloudflare IPs during setup of my account. Without prior consent or any mention. So just be aware that there is still some form of telemetry or unwanted connections happening, even though they removed the telemetry flowing to Mozilla’s own telemetry endpoint. K-9 had zero of this, it just spoke with your mail servers and that was it. So be careful and block outgoing app connections by default. I did not analyze the data being sent, just that there were those 2 unwanted connectiins happening.

First one I bought with my own money for my first own PC was the 3dfx Voodoo 2 (~1997). It was the best 3D GPU (addon to an existing 2D GPU) at the time.

Well that’s retro but I used to only screw in the side that’s easier to reach because that already secures it while also allowing you to more easily unplug it again.

Generally, the one is right who builds his argument on verifiable facts coming from trustworthy sources, or at least tries to as best as possible. There are police statistics about crime rates. In Germany for example, crime is actually going down. It’s very likely that Harris is right and Trump is not. This is usually the case, without even looking at anything specific. Trump lies and does baseless/unverifiable claims about pretty much anything, all the time. His followers then think he’s somehow right because he’s anti-establishment or they think that it’s all a giant conspiracy and Trump is the only one who knows the truth, again without any kind of verifiable facts behind it. This can then spiral into pure fact-free lunacy or high fantasy thinking, or cult-like thinking.

That crime is going down, is of course a fact that doesn’t fit at all into the right-wing world view or rhetoric of blaming and demonizing immigrants. So they usually then claim that those facts come from untrustworthy sources or are generally fake news or whatever, again without any verifiable evidence. Because they don’t want facts but easy solutions to complex problems, like minorities to blame for whatever problems they currently believe in. If they radicalize themselves enough, and this can happen fast on today’s internet within their own echo chambers, they might become so far removed that they become lunatic and/or violent, and then they become dangerous. Fascism is very similar to a cult.

I don’t think this will help much, even if the outcome is what most think it will be. There are already lots of radicalized people within the right-wing fascist bubble who will not believe anything that scientists, doctors, journalists, intellectuals, or people from a different political spectrum say. They only believe what their own bubble and their own media/leaders say. They are unfortunately already so far removed from any sort of objective fact-based reality that re-education will take a long time (maybe for the rest of their lives) and will not happen in time for the current elections in USA. Also, their rhetoric has already become quite 1930s Nazi-like. They are already using various dehumanizing or demonizing terms for their perceived “enemies”, like vermin or low-lifes. It will probably become worse over time, and since the rhetoric is already bad, it’s likely that violence will be the next step for them.

You don’t need to stop informing others, I think stopping is bad. Just tune it down a bit, don’t overexert yourself with it. Most will not care but it’s still important to tell it to them. At some point, they might realize why it’s a good idea.

Also, Google isn’t immediately killing Ad/Content Blockers like uBO, they’re doing it slowly. Which is much smarter. It will mean less resistance. Boiling the frogs (users) slowly has always been the best way of eventually reaching a certain goal, without too much resistance along the way. If you push the goal too fast and too hard, there will be massive resistance, backed by an immediate media backlash. You have to wait that out, spread it out, so that users and media forgets about it again. Also, uBO Lite for MV3 browsers is less effective, but many users won’t notice a difference yet. Next steps will probably be to make it less and less effective over time, while claiming it will be better for the users overall, like offer better security from malicious addons that almost no one installs anyway, or whatever.

Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS

Well it should be, because anyone who votes for Trump is voting to regress the country into an eventually authoritarian, fascist regime. It shouldn’t be a close race. It should be the majority voting to prevent that.

Won’t be like that much longer. Windows continues to become worse, Linux (desktop) is on a steep upwards trend. I’ve been using desktop Linux since 1998 and desktop Linux has always been at or around 1% market share, for 15-20 years it was just flat basically, which tells the story that only geeks and nerds used it, which is the story that everyone’s familiar with.

But these days? It’s approaching 5%, and most of that climb was just in the recent 5 years. That’s insane. At the same time, Windows continues regressing from about 95% market share in 2009 or so to something like 70% these days. And this tells the story that people are growing increasingly fed up with Windows (and rightfully so).

In all other areas, Linux is already the dominant OS. It dominates servers, supercomputers, mobiles and embedded systems. Since Microsoft doesn’t appear to get their sh!t together, it’ll soon dominate the desktop as well.

Is the situation in USA bad? Yes, in several aspects (and getting much worse if the current fascism movement wins out in the end).

Is the situation in China bad? Yes, in much more aspects.

Most important goal for USA right now is to ensure they’re not regressing into an authoritarian, fascist regime. Because then, the situation for US citizens will start becoming really similar to China or Russia. After that, goal is to combat climate change. And preventing World War 3.

Default recommendation for new ex-Windows users is to use Linux Mint, it’s very simple and includes most things you need. Mint also has great documentation and community resources (forums, etc.), especially for beginners. It’s also based upon the most popular distro, which is Ubuntu. So there’s a high degree of Ubuntu compatibility, which is a plus.

After the distribution choice, there’s the desktop environment choice. Here, I’d recommend either the default one from Mint, which is called Cinnamon (use this if you don’t have a preference), or KDE Plasma as an alternative. Both are very similar to Windows, but more powerful in terms of customization and features. (Well, of course anything on Linux is very customizable already due to the open source nature, but these 2 already offer a lot of GUI customization options without any tinkering). It’s not recommended for a beginner to switch desktop environments, you can do that later on when you’re more comfortable with Linux. If you’re curious about the other desktop choices, try them out in a VM or separate system. At the beginning, always use the preinstalled desktop environment.

Only slight downside of Mint is that it still ships with X11 by default, which is the older graphical subsystem as the foundation of each desktop environment. Wayland is the new one [actually it’s just a set of protocols which the compositor implements, but that doesn’t matter here]. Many distros already use Wayland, but it’s still experimental on Mint. For many users, this will not make a difference in practice, which is good, but Wayland is more advanced and has more advanced features which will never land in X11, and also higher security. If you have any non-standard needs regarding things like HDR, adaptive VRR, different per-monitor refresh rates, no tearing, per-monitor scaling, good touch support, and other “advanced” things like that, chances are you’re better off with Wayland. Most users probably don’t need to care that much though.

Anyway, should you need a Wayland-based distro alternative, or generally a second distribution recommendation, I’d say Fedora. It’s also rather easy distro, maybe not as easy as Mint is, but also very user friendly and more ahead of the curve in comparison to Mint (newer kernel, newer packages, more frequent updates).

Most users will be fine using Mint as their first distro, though. Mint will also soon be updated to Wayland as well, it’s just a matter of time. Be sure to keep your system updated.

Gaming is actually easy on Linux but since most games are specifically written for Windows and the Windows stack (DirectX, etc.) and also primarily tested on Windows and many game devs don’t test on Linux, there are sometimes things that might not work out of the box or you might need to try different options or compatibility tool versions (e.g. experimental version of Proton, or GE-Proton, or things like that). But Valve and lots of other individuals are constantly improving the situation and fixing compatibility issues should any come up. Compatibility is generally super high these days (like around 90%) so most users will not have any problems, especially not if they are playing any kind of recent or popular games where there’s a lot of focus to get them to run well, but some specific things or titles still might not work. For example some unethical game studios (most notably Epic Games, Bungie, EA, Riot) utilize integrated anti-cheat tools in their games (most notably Fortnite, Valorant, LoL, Destiny 2, Battlefield) which deliberately block all Linux users, even though the games would technically run on Linux as well. You can and should check protondb.com for general Linux compatibility reports of a Steam game, and areweanticheatyet.com for Linux compatibility of games which include anti-cheat components. If you’re not sure, check both sites. An anti-cheat component often only exists for the multiplayer part of a game, not for the single-player part. Most single-player games do not have or need any anti-cheat components. Generally, do not install games on an NTFS partition or re-use your Windows-based NTFS partition for games. This can and will cause problems. Always install your games on Linux partitions like ext4, btrfs or xfs.

If you use dual-boot (Linux being installed on another partition alongside Windows), be sure to disable the “fast startup” option in Windows (somewhere in the power management settings). And if you have an issue of the clock being wrong after you boot the other OS, then you maybe want to configure Linux to write the time back into the hardware clock in your local time format, which is what Windows expects to find there. But you can also reconfigure Windows to write its time back in UTC format (registry setting), which might be the format Linux expects to read from the hardware clock. Not sure what Mint does by default. I’d say only look into this if you have problems of the clock being wrong after you boot from Windows to Linux or from Linux to Windows. If the clock is always right, then you don’t need to reconfigure anything. Just keep in mind that Windows by default writes back its time in local format, Linux in UTC format.

If you want to install additional software: If you come from Windows, you might be familiar with visiting websites of software then downloading a setup.exe/msi from there. That’s NOT how you install software on Linux. On Linux, you first look if there’s a package available for your distribution (use the preinstalled programs/tools for that). The primary place for this is your distro’s package repositories. Then you might check Flathub (the default Flatpak (distribution independent) package repository). You will find most software there already. If you don’t find it there, check any Mint community repositories. Afterwards, check if there’s an AppImage available (those are basically one file which contains all files needed for the program, no installation). If you still don’t find anything, ask on a Mint forum. You usually DO NOT install a software from its source code form or any installer/setup scripts, especially not as a beginner. This is an easy way to make it either too complicated or to break your system. Always try to find existing packages for your distro first (use the preinstalled programs/tools for that), then try the distro independent Flatpaks, then AppImages. You should find everything you need like that. When you think of installing software on Linux, think of how you’d install software on Android or iOS, you use an “App Store” or install an existing package (similar to .apk / .ipa) directly. Any other method is NOT recommended for a beginner. On Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, software package files have the .deb extension.

I get that it’s a nice daydream to think of open source projects as existing in some kind of independent, ethereal vacuum just because the code is out there and accessible from any place on Earth. But every software project is (mostly?) dependent on the jurisdiction in one country, in this case it’s the US, and so their laws about sanctions and so on apply. And yes, this means that unless conflicts/wars between nations happen to cease, that we will eventually have completely separated blocks of politics/culture/military and also IT. Globalization is over. China will have their own stuff, Russia will have their own stuff, and US+EU will have their own stuff. And none of those countries should continue using high-tech products made by the other because they could be sabotaged and it might be hard to find, so it’s best to not use them at all and just cook your own stuff. It’s unfortunate, but bound to happen in the current state of the political world.

No.

Communication/Social Media isn’t for corporations to do what they want with it, or to manipulate their users. It needs a neutral, open platform. That means open source servers and clients and protocols.

I find it worrying how so many people noticed the decline of Twitter happening live and now continue to move to the next corporate, closed-down platform. Until the next time, I guess…

• Pomodoro timers (hit a keybinding, a 25min timer will start. Within that time, do something productive. After that time, you can do a 5min “break”. Then probably start the next timer. You can also adjust the timings of course)
• Treat the thing you want to do instead of your task as the thing you can do as the reward after having done the task first (kind of a gamification mechanism maybe)
• Develop a habit of always doing something productive (from your backlog) each day, unless you’re sick or so
• If the task seems so big or hard that you don’t even start, split it in parts. You rarely have to do everything at once. Splitting it into parts also allows you to not over-exert yourself, so you’ll have more time for the things you’d rather want to do afterwards

At this point, right-wing lunatics are already so far removed from reality that it’s safe to call them a sect.

It’s an important milestone as it’s the only effective way to make PC gaming available on operating systems other than Windows (i.e., reduce one of the Windows monopolies). Still, Linux gamers shouldn’t take it too far. I’d advise everyone to still not support game studios which are openly hostile towards Linux gamers. This especially includes the ones who rely on client-side anticheat tools and then use those to block Linux gamers even though the game would run perfectly fine on Linux as well. Please do not support such games or studios (e.g.: Epic Games, EA, Bungie, Riot). Thanks to Proton, there is still a massive number of Windows games that can be played instead.

Noroi - The Curse (2005, Japan) Supernatural first-person video documentary style POV, but with higher image quality than Blair Witch Project for example. No jump scares, just very creepy and unsettling. Slow burn, but good pacing IMHO. No weaknesses IMHO, hence on top of my list. Just a very unsettling and disturbing, almost real-feeling, horror movie.

Also good:

• A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, South Korea): less horror, more artistic, intelligent and original. Great story
• Shutter (2004, Thailand): my favorite jump-scare horror with cool effects
• Incantation (2022, Taiwan): great supernatural slow-burn horror with a cool twist
• Hereditary (2018, USA): great supernatural slow-burn horror, original as well
• Sinister (2012, USA/UK/CAN): great supernatural horror
• Event Horizon (1997, USA/UK/CAN): great sci-fi horror, very unsettling
• REC (2007, Spain): one of the best zombie style movies and also one of the most horror-like ones
• It Follows (2014, USA): kind of a stupid plot but it works. It’s original, well executed and unsettling (supernatural)
• Smile (2022, USA): an even more stupid plot, but also well executed. The ending is bad. But it still terrified me so it works at its core, and that’s all that horror films need to do (supernatural)
• As Above, So Below (2014, USA/France): the weakest one on this list but it’s very original as well, I like it because of that