The first game to legitimately scare me. I went in completely blind to beat the game in one sitting in an overnight play session in complete darkness, with good headphones.

My only stumbling point was early on, I incorrectly thought the way to advance was to stack things to climb higher in a sort of rudimentary physics puzzle (that’s never a solution in the game) when I was supposed to just push a button that was pretty much in plain sight.

You can cheese your way out of any scariness by ignoring the game mechanics (looking at certain things reduces your “sanity”, but looking closely at the scary stuff takes away a lot of the fear of the thing), but if you go into it with the intent to play it straight, it’s a fantastic game.

Completely agreed. Nothing was added by this blog post, for anyone who wasn’t following it, but it was a decent enough summary. Then that last paragraph comes out of left field.

Ross has championed this for all our benefit, at great personal cost.

This is made up, right?

This is what I came to recommend. Spruce pellets are cheap and locally sourced, and they disintegrate to sawdust when wet. (They’re compacted sawdust to begin with, so that makes sense.) You get a litter box with a tray full of holes over a bin, then when you school the poop, you just jostle it around a bit extra to encourage any lingering sawdust to fall through the holes.

We use puppy pads underneath to catch the sawdust, so the clean up takes no time. We empty and refill it every week or so, with 2 small cats.

Not all cats are happy to switch, apparently, but we didn’t run into that. Our cats were rescues, and they only use wood pellets at the SPCA to reduce costs and because it’s healthier for cats (they breathe in less dust).

Some wood pellets are treated with chemicals of some kind to affect how they burn, so we get ours from a horse supply shop since they only get animal-safe pellets.

That is incorrect:

The Agreement does not apply to US citizens or habitual residents of the US who are not citizens of any country (“stateless persons”).

I’m not a lawyer, but that website says that this treaty is about asylum seekers declaring themselves as refugees in the first country (out of the two) where they land. Refugees can’t pass through the US en route to Canada, and apply as a refugee in Canada (and vice versa).

Americans (citizens or habitual residents) can still apply as refugees in Canada, according to this treaty.

Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.

And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.

I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.

Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.

Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?

I was debating doing something like this; install my build in the crawlspace below my desk. It’s just an exterior wall, so running a big enough channel through the wall would mess up the insulation. :(

That’s a sweet setup.

Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: XIGNCODE3

Monitoring the full file system is a nope from me. I get that they want to protect their game, but there are non-invasive ways to do that.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit since I read it this morning, and I think the only reason they were able to get rid of STV is because it was only STV for Calgary and Edmonton. With a single party still able to sweep the rural ridings, they were given solid majority governments, which shouldn’t be the case with “real” STV.

I have no idea how we’ll get either half of the LPC/CPC to enact STV, when FPTP has them oscillating between consecutive usually majority governments, but I expect STV will be hard to get rid of once we’ve had a single election with it. Not much incentive for minority partners in a coalition government to accept moving back to FPTP, right?

I knew about the Debian > Ubuntu ordering, but I take it Debian is still often used as a desktop environment, which is what I thought.

Oh, that’s very good to know. That’s a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I’d likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what’s the point?

Unfortunately, I’m tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren’t available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn’t allow for VBA scripting, so it’s not suitable, either.

oh, shit:

The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf

You’re right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it’s not a deal breaker.

No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.

Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I’m asking about; I’m capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don’t know it at all well enough to go completely “off script” and just tinker with confidence.

It sounds like you’re suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?

Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn’t been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don’t want anything Ubuntu-based.

Thanks for the reply!

A few thoughts:

I was thinking Win 10 EOL won’t matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I’m setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg’s onedrive, so it doesn’t need internet access. (Assuming there’s a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a “solved” problem by now—i remember this being hard 20 years ago.)

And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.

But yeah; maybe what you’re suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that’s likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.

Another question now comes to mind; I’m going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I’d hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.

Hit the nail on the head.

Millions and millions of print books are destroyed all the time, and very rarely is anything of value lost. Libraries, thrift stores, and used book stores get inundated thousands of books donated to them, most of which nobody wants. Unless you, personally, are going to take on sorting, transporting, and storing dozens of duplicate copies of books in poor condition, and have some purpose for them (presumably?), then get off your high horse about the destruction of bulk-purchased used books.

Individual copies of mass-published books are not precious. Only rare books are important for preservation. And, even then, digital copies are much more practical for long-term storage than physical books. Anna’s Archive’s preservation project as a shadow library is only possible because data storage is very cheap, infinitely replicable, and practically free to transport.

Nope. Ebooks are a license, so the First Sale Doctrine does not apply. Buying ebooks is nearly useless, legally.

The podcast is called “Better Offline” for anyone else searching.

I really like the 3 episodes I’ve listened to so far. Thanks for the rec!

Not sure if I’m learning much from it, but it’s nice to hear someone explaining what’s wrong with AI hype and stock-market-driven capitalism clearly.

Exactly right. Look what two generations of undermining public sector education has done for conservatives south of the border. The UCP is salivating at the prospect.

Signed: teacher who fled Alberta, largely for political reasons. I thought I was taking a pay cut to leave, but I just checked and I earn more in this province now, too. Alberta did not give raises at all close to covering inflation since I left!