I kind of did this once! Essentially I got laid of from a job but happened to have a good money buffer and life was quite inexpensive at the time, so I just thought “fuck it” and went as long as I could without working, I made it about a year.

It was awesome! My mental health has never been better, I wrote most of a book, got pretty decent at Blender, started working on learning to make games… and then I had to go back to work and it all went to shit lol, that was several years ago and I haven’t touched any of it since.

I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I’m not allowed to break lol.

Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn’t cause too much trouble.

Actually it was a two-parter, S09E5&6 (of the reboot), called The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived.

Here’s a clip of the relevant bit!

There’s a Doctor Who episode with that idea in it too, the Doctor saves a girl in Viking times but brings her back forever, and when he meets her in mediaeval times she has a whole library of books that are just her memories that she’s written down over the years.

It seems like a lot of people complain about Doctor Who not really having any canon or rules, and contradicting itself constantly (sometimes within the same episode) but I don’t think that’s necessarily a failing because it’s not trying to do that at all.

The trend these days is for a lot of shows, especially sci-fi ones, to be sort of ‘internet-proof’ and be designed to withstand the people who go through frame-by-frame looking for little errors and contradictions to pull apart, and Doctor Who ignores that completely and just aims to be big fun campy dramatic nonsense, which I think it mostly succeeds at. I think the only cardinal sin for that show is don’t be boring, which IMO it pulls off more often than not.

And it’s fine to not like that of course, but I don’t get it when people try to call the show out for not doing something it’s never really tried to do, at least since it came back in 2005.

Yeah I think seasons 4-12 are the kind of ‘safe’ era, but you can go a few seasons either way and still get some bangers, it’s just a little more patchy.

I thought the general broad strokes of what happened were fine (IE with

), I just thought it was rushed and done in a kind of sloppy way. I really didn’t like

'cause I fucking hate that character lol.

My first car was an ancient Renault that was plagued with electrical issues, to the point that it was actually pretty funny. I was also a penniless student at the time and I don’t know how to fix cars, so I just sort of put up with it.

It used to drain the battery when it was parked, so I kept a spare battery in the boot and some jumper cables and used to have to jump-start it every time I switched the engine off.

One time I was driving at night and the headlights started dimming until they were nearly off, I turned the radio off and they came back on again.

Eventually I finally took it to the scrap yard, they said it was worthless but they gave me £10 for the tape deck lol.

Technically the worst car I ever had, but also one of my favourites.

If it helps at all, I’m typing this on a Lenovo Ideadpad 5 that has a Ryzen 5 and 8gb that’s running up-to-date Arch (btw) and KDE perfectly well with no troubles at all. I haven’t owned the Yoga Slim specifically, but I’ve had a few Lenovos over the years and mine have all run various forms of Linux quite happily.

The Steam Deck sort-of has it on some games already, but it’s a bit hacky. I did get 60fps Cyberpunk going though, which was a nice surprise. It’ll be great to get a proper unified way of doing frame-gen though.

Yeah same here, I thought it was one of the few cases where the adaptation was better than the book. It cuts out a lot of the waffle from the books and patches up lots of holes, especially with characters like you said.

Our local library is really cool, it has a recording studio, a makerspace with 3D printers, and a service where you can borrow tools. You can even borrow a radon detector!

I’m still using my old Pixel 4a because I refuse to get a phone without a headphone jack lol

I like Ventoy, it’s handy but I don’t think it’s indispensable so probably what I’ll do is go back to using Etcher (which is open source AFAIK) until this resolves itself one way or another. I assume either the dev will respond properly with an explanation and everything will be fine, or someone will get fed up enough to fork it. I feel like it’s probably nothing nefarious, but it doesn’t really hurt to be overly cautious in this case IMO.

Currently I use Borg Backup with Vorta as a GUI. I don’t really do anything automated/scheduled, I just back it up manually to an external SSD every few days or so. I pretty much do my whole /home folder, except for a couple of subfolders that aren’t really necessary (and Videos, which I back up separately.)

I do eventually want to upgrade to a NAS, but I’m waiting until we move to start setting that up. Also I don’t really have an off-site plan yet which I know is bad, but I need to figure that out.

Yeah that’s my main issue with them too. I like the idea in theory, but in practice I find it tends to create this weird environment where something’s always broken because everything updates on a different schedule and nobody cares if their update breaks anything else.

We went Aldous Huxley when we should have gone Iain M. Banks lol

I think we’ve still made amazing progress, just in different areas. For example, communication. In the 40s, if you were in the US and needed to contact someone in, say, Australia, the options would either be to send a letter and wait maybe weeks or months for a response, or possibly a prohibitively expensive phone call.

Nowadays you could click two buttons and have a six-hour HD video conversation if you wanted to, essentially for free. And you could send them documents, videos, money, whatever you want basically instantly. Heck, if you really wanted to you could both create realistic 3D avatars and hang out in VR if that’s your thing lol

Yeah same here! I had no idea it was that much now.

House of Leaves feels like reading some sort of forbidden text.