You'll probably like the most recent season, Russell T. Davies (the showrunner for the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant eras) is back as showrunner, and "fun" and "camp" are probably the two best words to describe the latest season lol.

Even if his vision for the future worked perfectly (which it won't) and wasn't abused (which it will be, rampantly and immediately), it's still a complete dystopian nightmare lol

This has uncovered my shameful Linux confession lol - I don't understand Docker at all. I think I'm reasonably okay with Linux stuff, I can put an Arch install together without using the archinstall script, I got NixOS up and running without too much trouble etc. but I just can't get my head around how Docker is supposed to work for some reason.

My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.

I get blocked from Google and reddit on Mullvad, but I see that as a Google and reddit problem, not a Mullvad problem lol.

In the UK a few years back, Boris Johnson refused to show up to a debate on climate change, so Channel 4 replaced him with a slowly melting block of ice.

It annoyed him so much he tried to privatise the entire TV station lol.

I was hoping to sneak that in, get people balling on one conspiracy theory to get in on another one lol

As a non-American, sometimes you open your phone and there's a meme with no context about a candidate being shot in the ear, or people eating cats, or transgender aliens or babies being aborted after they're born or the president trying to buy Greenland and you just kind of go "Oh, America" and go about your day lol.

I once tried to get a conspiracy theory going that Flat Earth was a fake conspiracy started by the government to cover up the real conspiracy - that the moon is flat. That's why we only ever see one side of it and why we were able to land on it. It didn't take lol.

I ended up just making an alias for s=kitten ssh and then added my desktop to .ssh/config so now typing s desktop does the trick!

Yeah every once in a while I get restless and start thinking I should learn how to use Mutt or something, but I always end up going back to Thunderbird/Betterbird lol

I had the opposite for some reason! Thunderbird started giving lots of weird errors, especially with Gmail, but Betterbird worked fine so I just ended up switching over.

I've been using Filen, seems to work pretty well, it's got a Linux version of the desktop sync client (comes as an AppImage IIRC) and I dunno if they're still doing it but they used to have a good price on lifetime plans that were ~100GB that you could stack, so I got a good amount of storage without having to pay a monthly fee.

Yeah you can't go wrong with Ursula Le Guin IMO. I loved The Left Hand of Darkness too.

Also 'cause I love sharing it, her 2014 book award speech is worth a read as well:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

+1 for the whole Culture series of books. My personal favourite is Look to Windward but they're all good.

The best five-book trilogy you'll ever read, even though there are six of them.

The only thing I can think of is sending actors out to pretend to be Americans in American TV shows. Australia & New Zealand are strong in this field too, but I think we've still just about got the edge on it.

According to this, it's been around since the 70's and was originally just a catch-all for files that didn't fit in the other default directories, but over time has come to be mostly used for config files. I assume it would cause utter mayhem to try and change the name now so I guess it just sticks. Someone suggested "Edit To Configure" as a backronym to try and make it make more sense if that helps anyone lol.

I think they're falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can't last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it's all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.

Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can't be helpful.

When using Windows, I occasionally encounter this weird phenomena that I never experience using any other type of OS, whereby it generates a problem that's so stupid on such a fundamental level that there's no way to really work around it.

Like when I recently tried out Windows 11, I made a manual restore point in case it fucked itself up doing a big update. Which it did, and then when I tried to restore it I found out that it only keeps one restore point, and that after it broke itself doing the update it overwrote my manual restore point with its own automatic restore point, ensuring that the fuckup it just did was the only thing to restore to. I tried restoring it anyway to see what would happen, and it said it couldn't do it but didn't explain why.

Like when an allegedly modern OS so utterly misses the point of both system restore and basic error messages, I don't know what to do with it really.

Yeah it'd be nice if there was a really standardized Linux distro that gave developers a baseline to aim for, and then those of us who use the nerdier distros could just figure out our own stuff from there. I think Ubuntu was on track for that for a while, but they tend to go off on these tangents (Unity, Mir, Snaps etc.) which sometimes work against them, and now distros like Pop!OS and Mint are starting to fill that space a bit more.

Basically it's this lol

Yeah Windows out of the box is really dumb/myopic. If it's not Fat32 or NTFS, it doesn't exist lol.

I remember being really surprised when I learned this lol. My SO had an old Windows work laptop that they'd forgotten the password for, and just out of curiosity I tried running a live Linux USB to see if we could access anything, and discovered that we could see everything from every user on there, and that login passwords really didn't do anything at all. It was a real "we should encrypt all our drives" moment.

Yeah that was my first thought too. While I kind of get the spirit of it, in practice this is so absurdly dangerous IMO. Even if someone has the best possible intentions, there are so many things that could go wrong with this, especially if you include things like long-term effects that aren't immediately apparent, or interactions with other drugs, especially if you're taking other home-made pills with potentially unknown ingredients. While it can be frustrating to hear about a promising new medicine that won't be available for years, there's a reason why they spend so long testing these things.

IMO the better (but much more difficult) solution is reforming the medical industry so that it's easier for people to see a doctor and actually afford to get medicine. I'm not usually a fan of big government stuff, but medicine is one of those things that just needs to be kept under supervision I think.

The A is for "Actually this game is $90 now instead of $60."

I'm trying to not be too mean, but there's not really a non-mean way to articulate my feelings about the new patch so:

IMO the new inventory system is an affront not only to general game mechanics and user interaction principles, but also to the very basics of logic itself. After trying it out for about 45 minutes I very calmly and neutrally said to myself, "I have to turn this off now and step away from this game for quite a considerable amount of time" lol.

I could, but even the base version here is $90. I'm good to just wait, honestly.

Yeah I feel like you could tie these crises into player actions pretty organically - like if there's a war and a big enough percentage of Civs get involved, then it triggers a World War crisis, or they could tie something into the global warming mechanic from Civ VI, or have a Cold War come up from excessive espionage actions, stuff like that.

Which is a weird move IMO, 'cause normally you're supposed to steal the homework of someone who's doing a better job than you are.

I don't like denuvo but for me it's the price that's the deal-breaker. Nearly $170CAD for the full version is absolutely bonkers, and I simply can't justify it. So I guess I'm picking it up in a Steam sale in 2028 or something when it's $40 with all the DLC.

Literally every site in my regular rotation is completely unaffected lol.

It's wild, I'm one of those patient gamer types but there are certain games that I'd make an exception for and buy as soon as they came out, and Civ has been one of those games as far back as I can remember. But this is gonna be the first one I'm not going to bother with. Between this and the absolutely bonkers price, I really can't justify it. Maybe in a few years when the Denuvo is removed and you can get the full thing for like $40 or so, but no way am I paying $167 CAD for the full edition on day one.

I would take it down just on the off-chance that her ghost might use it as a portal to return from the nether realm, Ghostbusters 2 style.

I mean it probably won't happen but why take the risk

I died in that game from reading a book that was too sad lol

Yeah same here, I'm on lemmy.ml using Mullvad and never had an issue. If an instance ever did block it though I'd just leave, that's also why I never use reddit anymore lol.

One thing I've been trying lately that's a bit different: I happen to have an old SSD that had an enclosure with it (kind of like this) which essentially turns it into an external USB drive.

I then used Rufus to install Windows on that drive, using the "Windows To Go" option and also checking the option to not allow Windows to access the internal drives. That way, my laptop can just happily run Linux by itself, and if I need to use Windows for anything I can just plug the drive in, hit F12 on boot and choose to boot from that drive instead. The added bonus is that Windows also can't mess with anything on my regular system or monkey about with the boot loader.

I've only had it on there for about a week but it seems to be working perfectly fine so far!

Oh and also Rufus gives you the option to start with a local account already set up, so you don't have to do the MS online account bullshit. And then after install I used ShutUp10 to turn off as much telemetry as I could.

And also if your goal is just to emulate old games you might not even need the extra boost anyway!

I dunno, isn't £588 more than a 512GB Steam Deck would cost? That seems like the safer bet to me.

I was lucky I got to see them back in... 2011-2012-ish I think, when Kim Deal was back and they did that tour where they just played Doolittle. And then I saw them again later when Paz Lechantin was the bassist. Both times ruled in different ways!

Honestly Season 9 is a banger for me too TBH.