Fox Mulder has his own candy.

I think it’s useful, when introducing people to Linux, not to just call it “Linux.” Because, thinking they’re all the same, they might go and install Arch or something.

Instead, tell them to try “Linux Mint.”

By some reports it’s over 5%, statcounter may be undercounting Linux.

Black cats: bad luck

Orange cats: dumb luck

I mean, unless the question was, “What are Lays potato chips made of,” which answers itself so it wouldn’t be used. But if the question was “What are Lays chips made of,” I could see how someone might not answer potatoes. And who even asks that question in poll anyway? I feel like there’s a universe of context collapse here.

Wait, which study was this? The page says it was from 2021. What was the question? What was the context? Who were polled and how? I am dubious.

On the other hand… https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

You might try setting Google’s Web subsearch as your main search engine, or else put your searches through https://udm14.com/, which does the same thing.

Katamari Damacy

EDIT: I could add a few more–

The original Legend of Zelda

Final Fantasy IV and VI; I was one of those people who bounced off of VII because of battle load times (I tried twice and both times that was what drove me from it)

A now-obscure Atari arcade game called Rampart

Another arcade game, an action RPG from Taito called Cadash, which could be played by four players on two linked cabinets (no emulation, even official ones, currently support this mode)

Demand? What?

You can just have a site that says things. You might just get a trickle of readers, and that’s okay. Not everything has to try to rule the world. You can contribute this little part of it, that might amuse or inform some people, and not pile up yet more value to a terrible corporation like Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or (while I’m ranting) Fandom.

Plain HTML doesn’t break. You don’t need to update frameworks. It won’t make the user’s browser consume a ton of their RAM. Even if your image hosting goes down, the text will still be there. The biggest problems with HTML are external. Google giving attention to Reddit over your site, or de-prioritizing it if it’s not “responsive to mobile,” and web browsers choosing not to reveal by default what terrible resource hogs big sites can be. Check about:processes (on Firefox at least) some time, I’ve seen Youtube, Facebook and Twitter consume over a gigabyte of memory by themselves, apiece. (Nota bene, Mastodon consumes a lot too.)

It’s okay to be small. That was what the World Wide Web was envisioned as, its motto: Let’s Share What We Know.

I’m an old E2 member!

Anyone remember Happy Puppy?

There used to be rotten.com, which posted extremely disturbing pictures and I don’t miss that part of it. But I do miss the Rotten Library, which used to be a bastion of suppressed literature.

My old stomping grounds, the indie gaming blog GameSetWatch.

Not consuming more than 10MB of RAM

City Trial is terrific, if’s among the best multiplayer games on Gamecube. There’s a channel on Youtube, Kirby Air Ride Online, where people use it as an eSport.

The premise is, from 2 to 4 players (including possible CPU players) roam a big city space (but not too big) on fast vehicles for from 3 to 7 minutes. Throughout that space powerups are constantly appearing. Some are weapons or health refills, but the most common ones are Patches, each of which is a small but significant improvement in one of a vehicle’s stats. Players vie to collect these patches, and also to change their weak initial vehicle for a better one, which also can be found randomly around the city. Random events occur, which provide various opportunities and difficulties.

Players can attack each other by colliding, using “quick spins,” or those weapons. If a player’s vehicle runs out of health it’s destroyed, causing it to drop lots of its patches (around half) and leaving that player to find another vehicle. Patches cannot be collected without a vehicle, so the attacking player can quickly score a lot of powerups that way.

After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a randomly-selected event. Many are races, but some have you attacking enemies or each other for points. A few involve flying. One’s an outright boss battle. The winner of this event is the winner of the whole match. You’ve been collecting patches and selected your vehicle for this moment, but you don’t find out the event ahead of time. You might get a hint as to the event during the city portion, but the game is known to lie 10% of the time.

With all that randomness, City Trial can be very chaotic, and never plays the same way twice. Kirby Air Riders is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most looking forward to!

Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.

I’ve heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don’t run Windows any more, and I don’t even know what Linux support for it is like.

I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!

It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.

I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.

I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.

And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.

It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?

City of Heroes, everything by Atari Games, the Wizardry series, the Ultima series, many others. I’m old, and I remember some of the games, and developers, we’ve lost.