Look at Oysters Rockefeller over here showing off their 50g’s

Considering how you thought they weren’t joking, I’d say yes.

It certainly is. Unfortunately for all of us, it’s more complicated than the Dems and “lesser of two evil” voters (of which I was one) have been lead to believe as well.

Or they would have… you know… Won.

But hey, if we want to learn the wrong lesson from this again, far be it from me to stop us.

Technically it is

Its like I told my dad right up until he passed away. Don’t worry about the growth, focusing on it wont help anything, it will probably sort itself out.

Yeah, why would anyone care about an ultra wealthy individual who bought his way into governmental power and does nazi salutes and has a far right ideology that will certainly cause massive harm for the country and likely the world?

Like, focus on the important stuff, amirite?

You are not wrong, but I don’t really think abusing the disenfranchised to the extent that they aren’t getting paid at all while food rots away is what I would call a “good path” to living wages.

First off, no one is getting living wages for the work yet, and we have no evidence to suggest they will.

Secondly, even if this does lead to that, maybe we could have found a path forward without all the unnecessary added suffering?

I dunno, it just feels really fucked up to be spinning this like the only outcome is “living wages” when all it has actually done so far is cause additional harm.

That’s fair, bet they are nice ass pants.

There is definitely a good chance of that. Bethesda was heating up at the time and definitely catapulted the series to international success and fame.

But, and this is just the rambling of an old man, I’m not too concerned about a games popularity. Fallout 1 and 2 are a couple of my favorite games of all time, and basically everything Troika put out are absolute gems. VTM Bloodlines is still a game I go back and play every couple of years or so.

So yeah, there was a good chance Troika would have still gone under, and Fallout would have languished in obscurity, but I’m pretty sure one of what would have been my favorite games of all time vanished into nothingness when Troika lost that bidding war.

Still, I can cry myself to sleep on one my other favorite games, New Vegas.

Maybe, there are a lot of shames in life, and it would have been great to see what they could have done with more dev time. But Bethesda said “we will let you do it if you can get it done in 18 months” and Obsidian said “hell yeah!”.

And given that situation, I am actually glad they spent the effort on the writing and player agency over bug fixing. A “better managed” development might well have been far less ambitious.

Now Troika games not winning the bidding war for the Fallout license, that’s a damn shame.

There is a hard “yes/no” answer to this.

It looks like a first person shooter, so you might expect it to play like a fun FPS game. Is it fun in that way? No, not really. Mods can fix this a bit, but it will never be Doom 2016.

It is published by Bethesda, so you might expect it to have fun exploration like Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim. Is it fun in that way? Kinda, but it’s a bit theme-parky and the explorable world is less “open” than other Bethesda offerings. What you find is always fun, but the “getting there” part is only so-so. (Kinda the opposite of other Bethesda games this way)

So why is it still talked about so much and called a masterpiece then you might be asking? Well, in the spirit of the great CRPGs, the narrative agency is insanely good. Where many RPGs give you the illusions of choice, New Vegas is the ultimate “choose your own adventure”.

While there is no “wrong way” to play a game, if you want to see why people love New Vegas, try to stop thinking about RPGs from the BioWare “paragon/renegade” dichotomy, and instead try to really consider, “what outcome do I want to happen”, and New Vegas will surprise the shit out of you with how much agency they really give the player. In this way, it is one of the GOATs. (And I’m not talking about the exam)

Yeah, Obsidian has a bad habit of that. Crazy thing is they still managed to make one of the greatest RPGs of all time, crippled and short on development time.

Its a bit “theme parky”, but the writing and narrative agency is just so good it’s unreal.

Laughs in A Tale of Two Wastelands.

The point was obvious…

Chinese censorship is planned and targeted, with the intent to control and suppress dissent. It works hard to maintain a narrative and prevent excessive and rapid shifts so as to achieve a long term goal of control.

The billionaires running American social media (with a special shout to Musk) are mercurial and subject to the petty whims and feelings of the owner.

So while yes, obviously both change and the heads of the CCP are also occasionally subject to emotional responses, the differences between the two are stark and obvious. So no, “everything technically changes” is not a valid counter to the significant differences in intent and volatility.

Claiming you don’t understand the point they were making is just being intentionally obtuse.

“Kinda sorta” is definitely the best way to put it.

You understand that your bully acting like they care about how another bully treats their victims might be… perturbing though right?

Like obviously neither bully is justified. But the hypocrisy of it all might feel like rubbing salt in the wound.

Even more so when that wound is actually your dead friends and family… from all the bombs…

On the incredibly infinitesimally insignificantly microscopically small chance that Trump somehow accidentally but actually stops the genocide, I won’t bother looking that gift horse in the mouth. I’ll just be thankful and move on to the litany of other problems.

I would be skeptical of Lucifer’s insight on this. By his own admission, he has never actually used Bazzite, and is basing his opinion on a single argument he had with one of the many dev’s in another post. To quote Lucifer directly :

I don’t have an accurate sense of how much you’d have to learn about bazzite, so I’ll have trust you on this

Obviously switching to Linux will cause you to encounter new terms you won’t be familiar with, or terms you are familiar with used in new and novel ways, devs and users will be opinionated and have arguments over these terms (and everything else an opinion can be had on frankly). And Lucifer’s concerns on this front are not without merit, but he is overstating the severity in this case and painting a wildly inaccurate picture. And you don’t actually need to gain a deep understanding of all these terms anyway. (Right away or at all depending on your goals)

But through all of that, what really matters at the end of the day is how useable is it, and how solid is the community surrounding it. And on that front I can say Bazzite has been hands down the easiest distro I have ever used for plug and play Linux gaming, and the community has been endlessly helpful and beginner friendly. I’d recommend it fully, and if you hop into their Discord, or read over their homepage and guides, it quickly becomes apparent how hard they work to make it beginner friendly.

There are some good alternatives, Mint for example is a very easy distro to make the switch from Windows. As is Pop_OS!. And with how easy steam has made running games, it’s harder to find a bad choice in general nowadays.

To shift topics, I’d say the most important thing to a “smooth switch from Windows” is less the distro you choose, and more the Desktop Environment. (Which, for the point of this recommendation, is the catch all term for what your OS “looks like”, where the “Start Menu” is, where your “tool bar to switch apps” is, etc) For a new Windows convert, I’d say find one that uses “KDE”, as it is very similar to Windows. Bazzite offers this when you are downloading the installation image. But it’s quite popular, so many others will anyway.

Sorry for the extended rant, hope this initial mess didn’t make you less likely to try Linux! I was a Windows convert just a couple years ago and can say it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made! Feel free to ask any questions, or hop over to the Bazzite Discord to get some helpful insights!

Yeah, and if you click enough links on Wikipedia you always wind up at logic, math, or philosophy. At some point, you are going to have to read new words to learn new things. And it will get increasingly technical as you go deeper.

But bazzite devs don’t just leave you up shit’s creek with a turd for a paddle. They still make installing and gaming on Linux far more accessible than the majority of other distros. With a significantly smaller learning curve. And provide solid guides for new users that use beginner friendly language.

And therein lies the crux of my problem with your argument. Scaring folks away to seek out another distro where they will almost certainly have to learn more to get started is hurting your stated cause. You claim to be fighting the good fight against “unreasonable barriers of entry”, but you are causing more than you are solving. Over a very ignorable term.

When it was just you arguing over the value of the term with the dev, okay, whatever. But when you throw a new user asking for help out to sea because you had an argument that has no bearing on the significant reduction to the barrier of entry to Linux gaming that Bazzite provides, you are shooting your own goal in the head.

You didn’t care that they used a single term that might cause confusion, you didn’t care that a person who was looking for help on getting started with Linux gaming was asking about installing one of the most beginner friendly distros, you wanted to win an argument and hold a grudge.

Maybe you don’t even see it yourself, the road to hell is paved with good intentions after all, but the obvious outcome of your actions directly go against the goals you claim to have.

ETA: The Bazzite homepage also makes numerous references to it being “installable on all your favorite devices” so it becomes quickly apparent to most folks that it isn’t hosted “in the cloud”. And it has this fun definition of Atomic - Bazzite is Atomic meaning that after every update the previous version of the operating system is retained on your machine. Should an update cause any issues, you can select the previous image at boot time.

I get that you don’t like the term cloud native image, but it is really a very small piece of a very user friendly pie.

No one thinks it’s a case of “weird racism”, but it does seem politically and/or financially motivated. If it was a legitimate threat, they could have informed the public as to the actual threat. The fact that they didn’t implies doing so would undermine the decision.

Beyond that, most folks are not mad TikTok is getting banned, they (myself included) are mad that obvious and legitimate threats to the public relating to social media and data harvesting are being ignored. And to avoid having that conversation, TikTok is getting a blanket ban.

What if it actually is a very credible threat from an outside actor? Is there a world where that’s possible and acceptable to you?

So to answer this question, yes, that is possible and acceptable in two (not mutually exclusive) worlds. One where the actual threat is revealed so it is obvious why it needs to be addressed. Or two, where the government is (or better yet already was) acting in good faith to protect Americans from the other more obvious threats of social media and data privacy violations.

Without one or both of those worlds, it is extremely difficult to assume this was a decision made in good faith. Afterall, they didn’t create rules to prevent TikTok from harvesting data, nor create rules that propaganda needs to be monitored and labeled. They didn’t draft up a Digital Bill of Rights to protect Americans, and then ban TikTok for violating it. They just dropped the ban hammer with a “trust me bro”.

And given that, it also shows how far the government is willing to go to avoid holding American companies accountable. Which, imho, is the crux of why so many folks are peeved with this ban.