Captain Aggravated

Fedora KDE, because my preferred distro Mint Cinnamon doesn’t at the moment have good support for things like FreeSync.

A place to start might be a friend or family member who is into video games.

Gaming hardware can be a little costly, so you may want to visit with someone and play a selection of games before deciding which direction you’d like to start in. I’ll also point out that video games are often the very most fun when shared with friends.

If my 30 year old woman friend came up to me one day and said “Hey I’ve never really played video games before and I’d like to give them a try, but don’t know where to start,” I think we’d talk awhile first to see if I can find what games are interesting to you. I see a lot of people in this comment section recommending Stardew Valley, which is a game I deeply like and respect though I have seen people bounce right off it, including someone recently here on Lemmy. So while I would recommend giving it a look, if you do bounce off it, don’t just go “video games aren’t for me,” maybe cozy games aren’t for you.

Some questions I might ask are:

Are you looking for a more relaxing or more exciting experience?

Would you like your play sessions to be challenging, contemplative, creative, or competitive?

Are you more interested in story, or gameplay?

How important are flashy fancy graphics to you?

Where will your gameplay sessions fit into your life? Do you want something to do during your daily train ride? Will this replace your daily television hour? Is it what you’re going to do all Saturday afternoon?

Do you see yourself playing games on your couch, at a desk, or on the go?

Do you want to enjoy games alone, or with friends? Will you gather in one place to play together, or play across the internet?

Do you have a genre of fiction you like? Are you into historical drama, sci-fi, fantasy, slapstick comedy?

How do you feel about horror? Both the psychological Lovecraftian existential crisis type, and the “oh god a 10 foot monster with 50 mouths for a mouth just jumped out behind a tree and roared” type?

Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I’m thinking about.

The thing I’m more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I’m in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you’ll get an OH MY GOD out of me.

Nah I guess I’m gonna build shit until it’s time for a dose of buckshot.

Lemmings of Lemmy: What’s your blood type and eyeglass prescription?

I’ve been shaving with a DE razor for about 15 years now, and I haven’t found it any easier or harder to cut yourself with them than the modern “Mach 84 Spike TV Edition” cartridge razors.

I’ve seen a few seconds of gameplay, but I’m not sure what that game “is.” Is it fun?

I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.

Do you use other social media? If yes, which services? What are your screennames and handles? What street did you grow up on? What was your Elementary School’s maiden name?

Young people want to live their own lives, and part of that is choosing their furniture. You finally get a home of your own and the freedom to furnish it how you want and…oh I’m supposed to have all this old crap I don’t really like.

Then your dad starts up with his shit. “Don’t throw out that ratty yellowed old doily. I remember that from when I was a kid.” “Okay, you take it.” Here’s a cabinet of gramma’s china. They bought it for her out of a mail order catalog in the 30’s so it’s more sacred than god’s glans.

We’re also entering the era when the grandparents who are dying and leaving behind their furniture bought all their furniture from Sears and it’s not much better than stuff you can get at Ikea, 40 years out of date, and seen 40 years of tobacco tar, cat piss and grampa farts.

I mean, you don’t ask yourself why the heirs don’t wear their grandparents’ old clothes.

My understanding of things like the IME is that its reason for being is mostly benign, it lets enterprise-level IT departments do things like boot computers from across the network and stuff like that. It has no real use to home customers on their private PCs, but it’s included on all systems to simplify engineering; it handles a lot of the early boot process. And it’s always running. The privacy enthusiasts out there who carry a copy of TAILS on their keychains just in case aren’t fond of the fact that there’s a proprietary OS with unrestricted access to memory and networking just sitting there with no way of auditing or monitoring what it was doing.

This has been a thing for AWHILE now, and the whole coreboot thing…Intel, board manufacturers etc. keep their data so locked up that it’s a challenge to build anything that works, so it’s a miracle we have things like Coreboot at all. They largely concentrate on laptops IIRC, and it’s rare to see full fat desktop motherboards that work with Coreboot.

By “desirable motherboard” in this context I mean a standard ATX (or standard size variants) motherboard with a currently supported socket and chipset commonly available on the consumer market. To run Intel 13th or 14th gen, or Ryzen 7000 or 9000. I don’t know if you can just buy an MSI or Asrock etc. board and expect to run Coreboot on them.

What’s the advantage of coreboot? Soothes paranoia mainly. Both Intel and AMD platforms have little black boxes in them that run a separate little OS beneath Windows or Linux that has Ring 0 or similar low-level access to the hardware and could theoretically man in the middle anything done on the machine. Intel’s is MINIX based, it’s called the Intel Management Engine, and it genuinely is a little bit bile inducing reading what it has access to. AMD does have a simlar technology.

In terms of performance, system stability etc? Very little. Once the kernel is loaded and in control of the hardware the BIOS doesn’t effect much AFAIK.

I’m not very familiar with it but I’ve not heard much about even AM4 boards being supported. I think of Coreboot (or it’s completely binary blob free fork LibreBoot) and I think of either Purism or System76 and in both cases for their laptops.

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This kind of thing (the “main” operating system is built atop a secret basement full of god knows what) isn’t restricted to x86 either. On a Raspberry Pi, Linux running on the ARM cores is a second class citizen to ThreadX running on the VideoCore processor.

My understanding is there are few desirable motherboards that support Coreboot.

Don’t like Intel Management Engine? or processors that shit themselves? go AMD.

I took a drive today. Around my old stomping grounds, streets I haven’t driven down in years if not decades. Past the hospital where I was born, past the high school I graduated from. Down the highway where my driver’s ed teacher when I was 15 kept bitching at me to lift my head off the headrest. I made sure to drive that stretch of road with my head on the headrest.

I drove past my great grandmother’s old house, where some of my earliest memories were formed. It’s been standing abandoned long enough that trees are growing through the porch now. Past the Yamaha dealership where I bought my first motorcycle, which is now a machine parts warehouse. Past the airport where I got my pilot’s license.

I stopped at the lake by my old college and walked the trail around it, stopping at some of the little fishing piers, benches to look at the lake and the woods. I stopped at the foot bridge over the creek that feeds the lake and just looked upstream and listened to the water babble over the tree roots.

The entire time I was out, my mind could only do two things: hum Auld Lang Syne and envision swimming straight out to sea.

On a related note, the above text felt like an answer to this question.

I always say the moon landings were faked dozens if not hundreds of times and only done for real a half dozen times.

Pilot here. You want to know how important weather data is for safe air travel?

It’s yes% important.

The only question anyone has on their minds is, does it still have the UX of a road accident?

It is my understanding that Inkscape does not support the CMYK colorspace and is thus a non-starter for any work that involves printing.

I want to find the man who put sound effects in Microsoft Minesweeper, whenever that happened? When it went from grey Windows 95 looking to the blue background and the smiley face disappeared. I want to find the guy who put those sound effects in the game, and I want to hand plane his scrotum off and then send him home with nothing holding his testicles on but his fruit of the looms.