I got a rice cooker. Rice is one of the easiest things to cook (compared to other staples like beans, kale, sweet potato), but I do it often enough (I eat it daily!) that it should help.
It is a pretty one from a good brand, and was on sale.
This (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/challengers-approach-third-party-app-stores-arrive-google-play) blog post by the EFF seems _extremely_ tone deaf as Google prepares to kill f-droid and all apk sideloading.
Google now will break people's phones and kill adblockers, but at least a different megacorp can get a share from the predatory microtransactions. Yay!
Mainstream culture is like "smartphones are bad, social media is bad". Everyone either believes it or at least knows that many people do.
But no one wants to accommodate you when you don't use either. Are they willing to communicate with you in another way? No. Are they willing to give you an alternative to the app? No. What is your plan for customers without smartphones? Don't have one (best case scenario, it exists but sucks). Etc, etc.
It's purely self-righteous whining.
(walking up to a forest)
What's up beeches?
Jobgoblins or Hobbygoblins?
Thinking about going through my bookmark folders and saving local copies of the interesting articles. Not like, a webpage snapshot, just printing a PDF or similar.
I have less and less confidence in the web's long term health. So far I just went with "in case it stops existing and I really need it, the wayback machine will probably have a copy".
So this is one of those cases where the fun battle pushes you to avoid it. But forcing the player to do it manually would be bad - after a few campaigns, the same scripted battles will feel boring. Making the autoresolve more punitive, similarly. And making it match player performance more closely, well, it depends on player (I am much worse at some attention and reflexes stuff).
It is some inherent problem with having tactical and strategic layers, and games like Age of Wonders or Endless Legend or HoMM also have it to some degree. (And I'm not a big fan of tactical layers in 4X)
Though in Total War battles are longer and there are many more "gotchas" from the UI that are punished severely. You don't pay attention when your cavalry pursues enemies too far, or miss when the enemy caster throws an avoidable but powerful spell, or don't see the enemy flanking your archers in time to do something about it... and simple lack of attention wipes your army.
Speaking of battle, I made sure to fight the boss battle manually because it is one of the most fun battles. Multiple stages, you get to build defenses and defend a point then advance, unique map, etc etc.
I had to restart it twice, as I learned stuff - like "hey enemies can and will come from the place you just vacated so don't leave your siege units there" or "oh this button just removes the unit from battle".
And then after I won, I reloaded before the battle and took the autoresolve because it way, way over-performed me. I lost a huge chunk of the army, it barely got casualties. You see, a battle where you have to pay attention to all sides as enemies come in waves is way way harder for me than average, even if my army is overpowered in raw numbers.
Also, my hybrid units are normally easy to use (melee that can shoot on approach, or ranged that can defend itself!), in this case needed constant babysitting to shift to melee and back, every wave and change of frontline.
I got bored of my Total Warhammer 3 campaign way before the end. I got to the point where I was strategically overwhelming, more money than I could spend despite running four armies, just a lot of busywork while I waited for the portal events.
Like most big strategy games (4X, but in particular Paradox games) this is a game that you have to figure out when you have actually won.
In this particular campaign, every 25-35 turns portals will spawn, and you can go to the realms of chaos to try and beat a boss, you need four bosses to win the campaign. But you can only do it with your faction ruler's army, and you can only beat one boss per portal event, so there is no way to rush it even if you have a bazillion armies full of top-tier units. I got to that point in the second portal event, so I really need to up the campaign difficulty (not battle difficulty though).
People ought to respect furries more. If someone is happier dressing up as an animal, that is their inalienable right.
As they say, everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the fursuit of happiness.
I also find it _extremely funny_ that several games, like the Two Point management games, Civilization, and Total War¹... simply release the Linux version without Denuvo. And nothing else to replace it.
Windows version has strongest copy protection, Linux version has no copy protection. Put a vault door in one version, leave the other wide open.
Pirates will do anything to play a AAA game except install Linux.
¹ Examples that I know because they are games that interest me, and I prefer games without DRM bullshit even if original
I have been looking at how people managed to consistently crack Denuvo (the strongest piracy protection for games, the one that was extremely rarely broken) on release day.
It is fascinating, they basically use some windows virtualization (hypervisor) to run the crack on a lower level than the kernel itself, and fake all the checks that Denuvo makes. It's as if windows is a virtual machine and the crack is running under it. Of course, to enable this you have to disable every protection windows has, so you better trust that pirate download a lot because it will have more access to the system than anything else.
Of course, I have no intention to test it, I don't do piracy _or_ windows. But I like knowing how it works.
He also claims this would allow them to sell games to poor people in third world countries, that can't afford a gaming PC. Mentions some stats about how most money comes from the first world.
And yeah, a large percentage of the world can't afford even a cheap laptop, are constantly on the limit of "can afford cheapest smartphone or not", certainly can't afford a fancy gaming PC to run AAA games.
But "cloud gaming"? LMAO.
Look the internet infrastructure in the rich countries wasn't good enough for it to work well. People without good PCs *very much* don't have good internet. And building that infrastructure is so much harder and more expensive than just giving people the hardware, I can't imagine gaming companies will do it.
I also doubt they are thinking of making the hardware subscription so incredibly cheap that it would make a big difference (even if people had the internet speed for it).
This is just capitalist wishful thinking, "what if everyone had to pay me rent".
So, the CEO of Take Two (a AAA publisher, of GTA fame) told everyone that the solution to the RAM price is cloud gaming, which he claims will boom in the next three years:
What a load of bullshit. If hardware is expensive, data centers are expensive (AI uses datacenters!), and subscriptions are expensive. The only reason for this change would be that companies prefer to give you an expensive subscription instead of an expensive product.
But also, as everyone pointed out, this idea has failed repeatedly. It is just... a bad idea. Companies want it to work, but it doesn't.
And I'm talking Brazil because well it is what I know best, but Brazil is extraordinary for a 3rd world country. It is huge (7th largest population, 10th largest GDP), "emerging" country, BRICS member, etc. So for almost every country, everything will be harder and less available.
Shit like the Kobo doesn't sell locally, so the only alternative is importing, or people that import to sell at a profit. Other smaller brands, obviously are even harder. Cool open hardware projects, lol, imagine paying R$1500 for something that is US$70 (again, the Kindle is R$650 and US$110).
And importing is hugely expensive, and risky, and takes a long time, and imagine returning a defective product in these conditions.
No, it is not about taxes or customs fees, not primarily at least. It is about not having built the entire economy around exploiting cheap foreign labor (we are part of the cheap foreign labor!), and about not being an overwhelming or more of the market so sellers don't have local warehouses or representatives or the same economies of scale, and about not having as favorable exchange rates (first world countries buy cheap from us, we don't buy cheap from each other, and we pay more from the first world).
One thing that frustrates me to no end is that in Brazil, the only remotely affordable e-reader is the Amazon Kindle. Starting At R$650, it is fucking expensive; minimum wage *per month* is R$1621. But for people that can buy electronics, and compared to buying a lot of books, it is reasonable. The cheapest smartphone models, that won't even sell in the US, are around that price.
For reference: that same Kindle in the USA is US$110, exchange rate as of today is 1 USD = 5.1 BRL, purchase price parity ratio is about 3 (meaning one dollar buys three times as much stuff in Brazil).
So we are paying 15% more, but compared to our purchasing power it is about twice as expensive. And it is at least half the price of any alternative, including stuff that is 60$ of the price in the US.
Some good amount of time was spent just removing all the dust.
Moving the CPU and RAM was the easy part, if a bit thrilling as always.
Screwing the motherboard into the case took a while, as I fiddled with screw support positions and got some extra screws I had stored (but couldn't remember where), and after I had finished I realized I forgot the IO shield in the back (which is a part I hate).
The M.2 SSDs were a bit puzzling, as the screw thingy was different from the manual (and I did have the manual for the right revision). It had a plastic plug instead of a screw, not unpractical if only I knew what the fuck I was looking at and why it was nothing like the picture in the manual.
The case front panel I find fun, so I did it twice (I forgot to pass the cables through the inside).
The GPU was completely new, I never assembled a computer with one. And this one was such a chongus, I wasn't expecting it to be this big when I ordered.
Today I spent the afternoon performing surgery on my desktop. The goal was to install a GPU, but it needed a motherboard transplant first.
The patient is well and already posting this message.
Ever since 1993, the Windows kernel is called "NT". This indicates that Windows has a neurotypical kernel, as opposed to Linux which has a bunch of neurodivergent variations.