Oh boy are you not going to like this, but someone’s gotta say it:

The Democrats are just as responsible for this shit show as the Republicans

The US has a two-party system, based on the assumption that the two sides will oppose each other and through that opposition come to a happy/sane medium. I’ve been watching US politics my entire life (I’m 46) and not once have I ever seen the Democrats do their damned job and oppose the rightward slide.

Biden had the House and the Senate and he knew what was coming. Anyone paying attention knew that Trump or some other fanatic would take the White House again and he did nothing.

Things the Democrats could have done with the power they had:

• Reduce the powers of the president
• Enshrine abortion as a human right
• Abolish ICE
• Medicare for all
• Elevate Puerto Rico and Washington DC to state status, thus guaranteeing Democrat dominance for the foreseeable future.
• Reducing the funding of the military
• Stop supporting Israel already

They did… none of that. In the case of genocide, they did the opposite and then threatened anti-genocide voters that they’d better fall in line or they’d get… the other genocider. Fuuuuuuck that.

Some of this is strategic. The Democrats will never make it impossible for the Republicans to threaten abortion rights, because it gives them a stick to beat the Republicans with every 2 years. Same goes for Medicare. Some of it is ideological: the Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to supporting genociders and opposing socialism for example.

“BuT tHe RePuBlIcAnS aRe ObStRuCtIoNiSts!” I hear you say. “They Democrats could never get any of that done with the Republicans blocking everything!” To this I remind you that they had the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and all the powers Trump is unilaterally leveraging to turn your country into a dictatorship.

The Democrats haven’t had a leader with conviction since Carter, and every successive generation is more cowardly and disconnected from the people than the next. It certainly doesn’t help when people decry the immorality of refusing to vote for a candidate that will do nothing but keep the seat warm for the next Republican.

If the Democrats are unwilling to do their damned job, they should step aside and let someone else do it for them.

What’s 1312a?

You can also do this with New Pipe.

0118, 999, 881, 999, 119, 725…3.

Well that’s encouraging. Here’s hoping they switch.

Shame they opted for Apache.

Croc can be especially good for this.

This comic is quite old and predates AI.

Sadly, no. That game is definitely keyboard-only. Though I have played successfully with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in the past.

Some games just don’t lend themselves well to a controllers based input.

FFS I hate how right you are.

The dominance of MIT and Apache over FSF licences like the GPL is really disheartening…

At first I thought: “that’s a great idea! It’d be good to have these lying around when the revolution comes.”

Then I remembered that I live in the UK, where the public are more likely to use these to round up and execute immigrants.

Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into ${HOME}/projects/handy-scipts and then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.

As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git push so that all your devices are synced up.

While the Deck is capable of running some big AAA games, I personally find that it shines in the low-power, “chill” games that you can play for a while, put down, and come back to when you’ve got some more time.

I’m a big fan of RPGs, so my #1 recommendation is Sea of Stars. Dragon Quest: Builders is also good, along with it’s sequel, which is arguably better.

A good multiplayer game with endless hordes of monsters vs. your magic is The Spell Brigade.

You may not know this, but the Deck can also be plugged into a TV or monitor, and with the help of a USB-C hub, can support a keyboard and mouse too! If you go that route, then I can’t recommend Dyson Sphere Program enough. Ooh! and Timberborn! It’s both adorable and beautifully designed.

If you’re more of a 3rd-person shooter type, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is fan-fucking-tastic (my favourite series of all time) and it’s currently on sale for £5. There are 3 games in the series, and make sure you start with the first one! You don’t regret it.

Finally, note that you’re not bound to the Steam store if you don’t want to be. If you install the Heroic Launcher for example, you can get DRM-Free games from GOG for example. Sometimes you’ll find that games are available on both platforms, but cheaper on one of the other, and GOG games don’t come with controls on how many people can be playing it at the same time.

Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?

Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.

16: I’ve had more headaches getting multiple monitors to work in Windows than I ever have in Linux. Try connecting 2 monitors of wildly different resolutions in Windows and witness the abject failure of windows to handle that elegantly. Your mouse can slip off into a “void” where no monitor exists, and yet your content can just disappear to, dragging the mouse between monitors slips the cursor way off and to the right, screenshots are a mess, etc. etc.

17: I only play games in Linux and I never use emulators… unless it’s for things like SNES.

18: I don’t know what you’re getting at with this one. Software is way more shareable in Linux. You just say “it’s in your package manager” or “install this Flatpak”. Windows and Mac on the other hand have half-assed app stores and a culture of "just go to ${URL} and click “download, ok, ok, ok” which inevitably leads to stuff breaking and no discernible way to determine what failed 'cause your machine is full of rando installations.

19: This is fair, though most high-profile stuff like CrowdStrike works for Linux now.

20: I cannot begin to tell you how much Windows and Mac don’t work. Like, at all. Just today I spent an hour on a call with another developer stuck in Windows trying to get a JDBC driver to work. The constant ambiguous error messages, useless documentation directing you to "just go to ${RANDOM_SITE} and install some-cryptically-named-executable.msi that craps out with error messages about missing runtimes… the whole operating system is hot garbage and that’s before you factor in the missing keyboard shortcuts, flaky monitor support, creeping AI, and ads shooting into your eyeballs. The only way Windows “Just Works™” is if you redefine “works” entirely.

#3 is what does it for me. There are few things more enraging than something I own refusing to do what I’m instructing it to do.

I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.

What’s the recommended VPN for a case like this?