#Balatro (Steam, iOS, Android, Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One/X/S)

A deck-builder card game where you make poker hands, but Jokers and other cards give you crazy power-ups. I probably didn't explain that very well, but it's absurdly addictive. It's like the perfect Steam Deck game.

I wish I could be like "yeah I'm just not gonna do my job this time" and nothing would happen to me.

I run Steam on Arch as a Flatpak (because it tends to be pretty messy with dependencies so it's nice to have it all contained in one place) and it's always worked perfectly well for me too.

Yeah I don't hate Ubuntu, I used it as my daily driver for years, but it did get a bit frustrating how they seem to fixate on the new 'shiny' thing (Unity, Mir, the whole convergent desktop thing, now Snaps) and chase after it while other things are left to stagnate, then they seem to get it to where it's almost good, then drop it and go chasing off after something else.

Also, I find that these days there are just better options for a 'just works' kind of distro (like Mint or Pop!OS) so I don't hate Ubuntu, I just have no particular need for it anymore.

I really enjoyed it and the showrunner, Charlie Covell, is someone who's been kind of flying under the radar but I've really enjoyed everything of theirs that I've seen so far. They also adapted The End Of The Fucking World and wrote two really good mini episodes of Banana.

I'd be fine with switching over to Valve's crazy high-speed frog version of Wayland if it came down to it lol

I do love how they just kind of like picked up Linux and dragged it into mainstream gaming lol. Hopefully they're doing the same thing to Wayland now.

I write quite a bit, I have a laptop running Arch Linux (btw), and I use Scrivener for writing. It's a Windows app but it runs perfectly fine under Wine.

As for advice: sometimes I get caught up on the opening line, so to combat this I deliberately try to just write the worst opening line I can possibly think of. It gets it out of the way, and then whatever you write after that will feel like an improvement. Then you can just go back and fix it later once you know what the thing's actually about.

Speaking of Ursula Le Guin and envisioning a world beyond capitalism, I'll always love her speech from the 2014 National Book Awards:

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Also her book The Dispossessed might be just the thing you're looking for.

The Culture series was my first thought too lol. One of my favourite sections was when the Minds were debating if it's ethical to turn off a simulation that's so perfect it's indistinguishable from reality, and then one of them posits that they might be in a simulation so perfect it's indistinguishable from reality, and they eventually reach the conclusion that if they are there's nothing they can do about it anyway so they might as well get on with things.

That's my system, I just have topgrade aliased to update lol

If they both decide to step down around the same time, that's going to be wild few years.

I have a feeling it might go the other way, IE when he retires or whatever, everyone's going to want to be the "next Linus" and we'll end up with tons of different forks of kernels all following their own philosophy of what they think Linux should be.

I've never seen a Bush miss an opportunity to be on the wrong side of history.

Yeah I was gonna say, I'm a night owl and I love it because it's the only time of the day when people aren't bothering me with nonsense lol. They'd better not all go nocturnal!

Yeah I really like Zomboid because no matter how established you are, it only takes one fuck-up or unlucky break and you're done for. So the fear never really lets up.

I actually had an experience in that game that I don't think I've ever had in a game before - I was sneaking around at night looting houses, and I got to one house, perfectly normal looking and some instinct in my brain went "nope, there's something bad there" and I just walked away and went home lol.

Yeah, once in a while I get the idea that I should be using a 'fancier' text editor and go off and try something else, but I always end up back using Kate again. It does just what I need and doesn't get in the way, which is pretty ideal for me.

You'll probably like the most recent season, Russell T. Davies (the showrunner for the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant eras) is back as showrunner, and "fun" and "camp" are probably the two best words to describe the latest season lol.

Even if his vision for the future worked perfectly (which it won't) and wasn't abused (which it will be, rampantly and immediately), it's still a complete dystopian nightmare lol

This has uncovered my shameful Linux confession lol - I don't understand Docker at all. I think I'm reasonably okay with Linux stuff, I can put an Arch install together without using the archinstall script, I got NixOS up and running without too much trouble etc. but I just can't get my head around how Docker is supposed to work for some reason.