I mean if you tend to plug things in at the same computer a lot it’s pretty easy to always plug things in right the first time, even when not looking because you just kinda know what way it’s meant to be. And laptops usually have all theirs pointing the same way so you know one you know them all. If something has text on it, it’s usually oriented in such a way that when plugged in you can read it. Or they have a little face and you know which way the face is meant to be facing

I have a similar “power” and while I’m not flawless, it’s only really new or unfamiliar devices/computers that trip me up. Or plugs that don’t actually have any identifying features and/or unusual ones

Wordpress even has activitypub integration now! Hooray! Here’s hoping automattic do good on their word and bring it to their other projects like Tumblr

Also as much as I like gimp, it is unfortunately not that widely used due to super specialised and hard to use compared to the industry standard juggernaut that is adobe’s creative suite. You’re probably going to get laughed at in any professional industry if you suggest seriously using it.

It’s not a dedicated game and idk if servers even run these anymore, but the original popular “battle royal” was minecraft hunger games servers and they did kinda run like that - no stats obviously, but throwing you empty into a bounded world where you’d have to survive and craft and kill monsters and each other. I think some of them might’ve even had like your sponsor drops where you’d get potions or enchanted stuff

I want a modern difficult farming Sim with an in depth relationship mechanic and no fucking combat. The old harvest moon games are good, but I’ve kinda played them to death and for some idiotic reason they removed stuff like rival marriages from the remakes. Rune factory has combat, and so does stardew valley (in addition to having a relationship mechanic that’s just, really shallow), and it seems like all the farming Sim games that don’t have combat are like baby’s first farm Sim and are all cutesy and aren’t very difficult

Like it feels like this would be an easy thing to do, right?

There’s the sonic racing series which has a few ports on PC. I haven’t played them on PC, but I’ve played them on the switch and they’re pretty Mario kart-ish both in playstyle and mascot racer charm.

Also you can play as The Heavy.

So’s Norway - quite a few places on the west coast (the most inhabited non-Oslo part of the country) rely on the fact that the gulf stream keeps them unusually warm for their latitude

I’m already seeing things that would normally grow fine out in the garden suffer from abnormally late and early frosts and mild summers. Rip my tomatos and onions. Everyone’s complaining about 20+ degree springs in the mainland while I’m screaming that it’s still snowing in late May.

I know plastic is scary but guys, you don’t need to replace your entire plastic container selection - you could just, decant your food into a different container before microwaving it? The microwave is what’s doing this, not the fridge.

I’d recommend getting a small borosilicate/Pyrex dish like This. I’ve been using two of them my entire life (did none of you get taught that microwaving plastic with food make it go funny as a kid?) And they last a good while. Provided you don’t drop them. I think IKEA sells them and I’ve seen them around in my local kitchen store in non-pyrex brands. Also they’re oven and dishwasher safe too!

Also I don’t reccomend hunting for vintage Pyrex here - old pyrex chips super easily and constant use and slamming the lid on will chip the edges to hell and back. The European formula isn’t actually the same as the old one so it’s fine but unless you like glass chips in your cupboard and super sharp edges, don’t go for it.

Pyrex/borosilicate dishes work pretty well here. Both Pyrex and IKEA do little single serving casserole dishes with a lid that work fantastic. Been using them for decades now

Alternatively you could upend a plate on-top of your bowl

Then don’t - get a small glass/Pyrex casserole dish with a glass lid and decant your leftovers into that every time you go to heat something up. I think IKEA sell some nice sized ones.

If you don’t drop it they last for decades and that’s what I’ve been doing. I do not reccomend looking for vintage stuff though - the reason why they stopped using the original original glass formula is because it chips easily and yeah, something that gets used on a very regular basis with its lid constantly going on and off is going to start chipping something awful over time

Take up knitting and knit yourself some washcloths and dusting cloths! Pretty common here in Scandinavia (you can actually just get cotton machine knit ones in the supermarket but I’m not sure those are a thing elsewhere) and they’re pretty much baby’s first knitting project because it’s just, a square

Where I live sous vide are pretty common in the readymade dinner section - wonder if they’re better for you than microwaving and if we should maybe be doing that instead

I think a more interesting (and less dubious) example of this would be Vocaloid and to a greater extent, cevio AI

Vocaloid is a synth bank where instead of the notes being musical instruments, they’re phonemes which have been recorded and then packaged into a product which you pay for, which means royalties are involved (I think there might also be a thing with royalties for big performances and whatnot?) Cevio AI takes this a step further by using AI to better smooth together the phonemes and make pitching sound more natural (or not - it’s an instrument, you can break it in interesting ways if you try hard enough). And obviously, they consented to that specific thing and get paid for it. They gave Yamaha/Sony/the general public a specific character voice and permission to use that specific voice.

(There’s a FOSS voicebanks but that adds a different layer of complication to things like I think a lot of them were recorded before the idea of an “AI bank” was even a possibility. And like, while a paid voice bank is a proprietary thing, the open source alternatives are literally just a big file of .WAVs so it’s much easier to go outside their intended purposes)

Or gacha/live service games, where you’ll get enough installs and overall revenue to push you over the 200k threshold, but never enough installs for the 1 mil discount, in a genre where it’s not uncommon for one person to have the same game on multiple devices (especially if you have a PC or console port), and for games to have a cycle of low revenue dead months that doesn’t always coincide with new player counts due to the whale rule.

Like consistently? Or just one or two days a year? Because I feel like bringing out the electric heaters a few times a year is way better than just giving up and using fossil fuel all the time

Also I’d mention that heat pumps are super common over here in Scandinavia so I have my doubts that it’s an issue with the medium and not something else. Maybe you guys have like, heat pumps that are more designed for the heat rather than the cold?

I’d also add that like, for a lot of Scandinavia heat pumps work just fine? Like does America just have some really bad heat pumps or something?

I think the only reason why you wouldn’t install one here (aside from obvious cost issues) would be if you already have a robust heating system built into your home, like a hot water system. And if that’s the case, you can use the heatpump of the earth - geothermal! Use the power of the earth’s molten core to heat and cool your home!

(… geothermal isn’t as ubiquitous as I make it sound it’s just, really fucking cool)

Ok using your Google analogy - there’s a reason why “librarian” is a job and “Googler” isn’t. One requires years of skill and practice to interpret a request and find the right information and do all sorts of things, and the other is someone kinda bashing keys to make Google give them what they want. You wouldn’t put them in remotely the same class

There is a very real chance they spent more time on this piece than other artists they were up against spent on theirs. I generate thousands of images a month

… you’ve never actually made art, have you? The sort of stuff that you enter into contests takes months to make, from the actual painting to rough sketches to reference gathering, and that’s just the basics

Clicking a button a thousand times isn’t really comparable

Hey as someone who kinda grew up in that scenario, I really reccomend you show your kid what a windows dual boot is

Your kid doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They have friends and inevitably your kid’s going to be in a situation where their friends are like “hey, want to play this game with us?” And they can’t because it’s got a kernel anti-cheat that doesn’t work with Linux. They’re going to try and get into a hobby, only to find that the software everyone uses doesn’t work on Linux and the alternatives that do are badly maintained and frustrating to work with. They’re going to encounter a programme they need for school that just straight up does not work on Linux.

Sure you might be able to find a work around to all these things but like, can your kid? Because I speak from experience when I say that feeling like you have to be constantly running to your dad every time something doesn’t work doesn’t foster a sense of mastery, it makes you feel like you can’t do anything on your computer because you’re too small and dumb.

The teacher probably isn’t “afraid” of the Linux box, they’re probably frustrated that they don’t know what’s going on and can’t help if something goes wrong. The programmes they’ll probably teach your kid aren’t a perfect 1-to-1 match to their Linux alternatives and they’ll be left sitting in the back confused and upset while everyone else is learning about stuff in word and excel that you can’t do in libre Office. You’re not going to be known as the cool hacker dad, you’re going to be put in the same category as the crunchy mum who doesn’t let their kid eat sugar and needlessly restricts something that’s just so petty to the layman.

Stardew valley - it sells itself as a harvest moon inspired farming Sim but as someone who grew up playing a lot of harvest moon, I really can’t help but be super disappointed in it. Harvest moon games have a complex and more importantly moving relationship system - you start to go after one marriage candidate, the others will pair themselves up and have kids alongside you. People move in and out and you need to really get to know people in order to progress the game and unlock things. Stardew valley? Super flat in comparison. All the candidates you don’t marry feel super flat once you lock yourself out of them. There’s not much locked behind friendship so there’s less reason to get out there and really work on befriending everyone.

Also fucking combat - it’s a supposedly nice and peaceful farming Sim, yet combat is an unavoidable part of the game. I didn’t sign up for combat! It’s not fun it’s just annoying.

Or if you’re using for purely notes, OneNote is like, right there. In your system tray. For free.