I don’t think that purity testing people is an attractive method of talking about free software? We should meet people where they are, and besides, if games are good, they’re good. Doom started out as proprietary software and got GPL’d. It’s also cool to think that reverse engineering software, like in the case of OpenMorrowwind, is a thing. Besides, I pirate proprietary software all the time with cracked DRM. The harm is in the restriction of user freedom, not necessarily in the existence of the laws if you view the laws as fake and don’t adhere to them. Let’s talk about cracking DRM and decompiling these games. Let’s talk about modding them. Let’s talk about making servers and playing them online together.

If I needed to say something in a two item list and wanted to say that the list could work either way, I would say something like,“meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat, either way” so I would be restating the list in the opposite order. But I also use the words vice versa. I just noticed that people say it when they want to sound smart. It’s not like it’s only said in order to sound smart. There are lots of phrases that are short, succinct, and have a very specific situation where they are applicable. These are the phrases that people have a tendency to use to punch up their sentences.

Milquetoast, vice versa, vice-sa versa (sic), erudite, illucidate, confusing size for importance (saying big meeting instead of important meeting), commensurate, je no se qua, anything in Latin, anything in another language, latent space, probability space. We use lots of techniques to try to punch-up our perceived intelligence, neurotypical people do it sometimes because they have a tendancy to associate station in a hierarchy with “good traits” like intelligence and use these smart sounding words to try to project authority… ? Maybe? Sometimes I use smart sounding words to talk over/around people when I don’t want to engage them for whatever reason. People after weird. I think it’s easy to see when people are dumber than you, and much harder to see when people are smarter that you; especially the degree to which (to which, being another smart sounding word particle. Particle when used to ike this, another smartness showing phrase.) they are smarter than you. My rule of thumb is that if someone’s dumb, that’s easy for you to tell, but if you can’t tell that they are blatantly dumb, they are likely to be at least close to you in intelligence. If they seem smart, they are likely smarter than your best case scenario guess (they are likely smarter than you think). Everything goes out the window when you start talking about people who learned English as not their first language. Also acronyms.

I think it would be a few months of Mortal Kombat on the off-roads to interstates and at all kinds of junctions as the assholes on the road fight each other to the death. After these guys (it’s always dudes) get out of the way, there will be a long period where statisticians say loudly over and over again that getting a licence before the age of 26 is the most dangerous thing a young man can do. They will run campaigns about it, with Republicans somehow convincing people that the safer thing to do would be to get the 16 year old boys in the country driving as quickly as possible. The higher up Republicans will be saying that the men who are getting into Mortal Kombat are the better drivers and that the ones that die are worse at driving and manning, so the roads are safer as a result of the Road Kombat Accord (RCA), especially for men, even more so for young men. The lower down Republicans will act like the RCA is a great honor to get to fight in and that Road Kombat is how our ancestors have done it for generations. Liberals will be sweating and wringing their hands while weakly citing the statisticians. The Republicans will Uno reverse this line of thinking into a no-brain slogan by the name of, “trust 'Ole Statty” so that liberals are afraid to tell people to look into the statistics for fear of getting told that they are in the pocket of 'Ole Statty. Republicans will tell liberals that they are in love with, “'Ole Holes”, glory holes that Ole Statty is said to frequent. Liberals will then get confused at this bizarre line of attack on their heterosexuality even though they don’t believe that homosexuality is negative or deviant and so all efforts to reverse the RCA will end. Most men would just sigh and not get their driving licenses until they turn 23, with the daring ones only waiting until 20. This would settle into a constant, relatively few, Road Kombats in the end; just a constant statistic of young white trash + minorites getting killed along with a bunch of 20-something’s. Most people end up assuming that the deaths were unavoidable and that there is no way to stop them. People state the stats as if they are the natural order. When people point out that the all-cause road deaths are lower in countries without Road Kombat, they will be treated as unpatriotic and ignored, becoming crackpots in the eyes of the many.

Let’s take the opposite approach: look at all the top echelons of all past societies, assume that this subset of people was the most free to live in any way that they so desired, then count how many of these people did sex work. I think that we can safely assume that the amount of people that willingly engage in sex work is zero.

I am curious about this. Would you please discuss it further? I like the idea of mental models that can be used in useful ways, or programmed in some way. The method of loci comes to mind. I have a mental representation of a semi permeable membrane that helps me intuit about which way osmotic pressure will push fluid in a given system. Some other useful mental models: SCP cognitohazard (to think of/perceive a cognitohazard is hazardous), mental models of triangles are useful for estimating load angles when rigging heavy machinery, tenth thicknesses are a useful model to determine how much radiation shielding is needed for a given radioactive source of x rem strength. Mental models can be very powerful tools, and the best part is that they have a very low cost of replication, being information. They exhibit the property of medium independence, being able to be replicated as a series of interactions that serve as the holding media of the information. Your brain holding the mental model of the item is an example. I have mostly pondered the mental models relating to straight lines and closed regular geometric forms. Help me ponder the orb.

Cream soda. I had a plastic dinosaur shaped cup to drink from one summer and was required to keep it the entire time. I drank a 2 liter of cream soda over a couple days then every single other thing I drank from it tasted like cream soda. Water, milk, other soda. For a whole summer. I don’t drink cream soda now. Weirdly enough, my brother, another dinosaur cup haver from that summer, loves cream soda.

Who is running herd right now? I need to know.

If you want a GUI, I would use Balena Etcher. You might be able to use raspberri pi imager too.

if is short for input file if is short for output file

This dd command from the command line is what I use because it is built in and perfectly bare bones for my needs. I like to use the command flag --status=progress to show a status bar while duplicating the data. A word of caution: the dd, or ‘data duplicator’ program is sometimes known as the ‘destroy disk’ program because if you flash the iso file to the wrong disk/drive you can mess up the drive. Use the appropriate level of caution because there is no undo button. You can use the lsblk command to list the block devices on your machine and use the correct device. Quick instructions: use lsblk to list your block devices and locate your flash drive. If the flash drive is mounted (the /sdb/ will have something like /media/files if it is) you can unmount with $umount /path/to/sdb. Once the drive is unmounted you can use the dd program to duplicate the data (iso file) to your drive.

I’m happy for you!!! Happy to hear you’re enjoying your freedom.

Hey man, we’re living parallel lives. I literally just did this yesterday. The command you’re looking for is gdebi. Try gdebi (name of the package’s file, uncompressed to a .deb) if you downloaded the .Deb from the website. tic80 will now be a usable command. To uninstall the tic80 command / program you can use apt uninstall tic80. It worked with and without sudo.

I was once like you. You can do it. I like Linux mint. Here’s how to install it: Go to https://www.linuxmint.com/ and see what it’s about. It’s friendly, it’s very Windows like, it just works. Go here for the install guide: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Pick an .iso file and download it. Go to https://etcher.balena.io/#download-etcher To download the program that puts .iso files on USB drives. Use the Balena Etcher program to burn the .iso onto a USB thumb drive. Put your non-redownloadable files with sentimental value in another drive and remove the drive from your computer. Do not skip this step, order another drive if you have to (INB4 new laptop, but don’t forget this with your other machines). Plug in the USB drive that has Linux Mint on it. Power off your computer. Wait 20 seconds. Power on your computer. Mash the F2, F10, F12, and F5 keys until you get to the bios screen, or get to the bios screen if you know some other way. Find the setting that says something like “boot priority” and put USB drive above your C drive. Save and power off. Wait 20 seconds. Power on. Press F12 or whatever key you need to to get to the boot selection screen. Choose the option to boot from the Linux Mint USB drive. This is where you can test drive Linux before installing. Try ctl-alt-t to bust open a terminal. The terminal is your friend, but not required for the install. Close terminal with the command ‘exit’ or ctl-d or ctl-c ctl-d. Double click the install icon on the desktop. Follow instructions. Choose to delete windows forever from your life and put Linux on the hard drive. Follow instructions, they are no harder than any other wizard you have seen to install software. Reboot. Enjoy. Here are some tips: The terminal is your friend. Commands for learning the terminal, because the terminal can teach you to use the terminal (man is short for manual): man man man apt man ls man cd man vi man nano man less man pipe man mkfifo man rm apt search game —> searches for the keyword 'game" apt update ----> this is how to update your cache. Use it to pull your software updates apt upgrade ----> this is how to apply the updates to your machine.

—End terminal stuff— You can use your machine in the normal way too, same as any windows machine. Look around and explore. All the stuff in the software center is free (gratis). There’s lots of stuff. No more .exes to get software. Look at www.fsf.org to discover why free software is important.

If you have trouble you can DM me. I will help if I can. Good luck, you got this.