So I’ve been running Linux for a few months now. Making the switch was pretty intimidating at first but I have a couple thoughts now.

1. Back up any important documents you really don’t want to lose, you should be doing that anyway. Everyone is different on this of course, but personally when I went to do that I realized that I didn’t actually have anything I needed to back up. Most of my stuff personally is already saved somewhere in the cloud, and we can nitpick about whether that’s really a robust enough solution, and the ethics of the big tech companies holding onto my data and such, but that’s where everything was for me. And pretty everything that wasn’t is all stuff that I can easily get from the source I originally got it from anyway.

If you have important work documents, or big collections of music movies, pictures, etc. yeah, that’s a bit of a chore, but again if it’s anything that can’t be easily replaced you should make backups anyway.

2. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got nothing left to lose. You have your backups, and while it’s intimidating to hit install that first time, trust me, it is really hard to totally brick your computer to the point that you can’t just wipe everything and either try again or even reinstall windows if you really need to. You may need to spend a couple hours googling on your phone and borrow some time on a friend’s computer to create a new bootable flash drive or something but unless you really try to you’re not going to totally fuck up anything.

3. Like I said, my parents have been running off of a flash drive for about a week now, you can do that too, test things out in that safe little sandbox, you basically can’t break anything from that live USB.

4. If you know enough to get yourself in trouble, you know enough to get yourself back out of it again, and you’ll have learned something from the experience. I’m actually at the point now where I’m kind of excited to eventually really break something to give me an excuse to try out another distro as a daily driver. I’m not trying to break something, but if it happens, it’s an opportunity to try new stuff.

5. Maybe I’m weird, but setting up a new computer, figuring out the settings, and personalizing it the way I want may actually be one of my favorite things. When I do that I always seem to find a fun new thing that I didn’t know was there before.

Yeah, it’s absolutely a weird curve like that

I’m kind of in the second batch where things get hard, I’ve managed to keep myself from diving headfirst into some crazy hard to maintain distro and biting off more than I can chew, but it’s really weird not knowing how things the way I did on windows.

My parents are older, in their late 60s and 70s, neither of them are particularly tech-savvy. They’re not totally helpless, they’ll usually do an alright job of basic troubleshooting like making sure things are plugged in, turning it off and on again, even look around a bit for settings and try to Google their problems before calling me.

They’d been using a copy of office 2003 or something like that age since that was new, they had the disk and didn’t feel any need to upgrade to a newer version. At some point they “upgraded” their computer to windows 11 which finally seemed to break compatibility with that old version of office.

Of the two of them, my mom is slightly more technically savvy. They had started using Google docs at her job before she retired, so she was able to switch to that with no major issues.

My dad couldn’t quite get the hang of that. I put libre office on their computer and told him it was just like Microsoft but free, and he’s been using that just fine since then.

Their computer, while technically compatible with Windows 11, seems to really struggle with it. They’re old retired people, they watch YouTube, do basic word processing and spreadsheets, check their emails, and go on Facebook. It’s not a beefy computer and they don’t need one, I’m pretty sure there are smart toasters or something these days that can do everything they need.

On a whim I stuck a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint on it in their computer about a week ago, and have had them test drive that. It does everything they need, they’ve had no issues with it so far, and even running off a flash drive it’s been running smoother than windows 11.

So when I go visit them tomorrow I’m gonna be making some backups and installing Linux on their computer.

Pretty much the one program they use that’s not a web browser or office software they use is Hallmark card studio (2007 I think) to print their own cards. Not gonna be the end of the world if they can’t use that anymore, but fingers crossed I’ll be able to get that running in wine. Wine HQ lists its compatibility as garbage but I don’t think anyone has tried to do it in a few years and wine has come a long way recently, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

So if these two old people can learn to use libre office and Linux, no one has an excuse.

In addition to my advice on your bloody Mary abomination chili

Around 10 or 15 years ago, I learned this chili recipe from this comic I probably found on Reddit. It has always served me well, and it is the basis for how I make chili today

To this recipe I also add some chili peppers, usually jalapenos (because otherwise it’s not chili)

A can of chipotles in adobo

I’ve tweaked the ratios spice blend a bit to my taste and added a bit of cocoa powder and cinnamon.

It should probably be noted that I tend to make bigger batch, often working with 2-5lbs of meat (and I prefer coarse ground or something even finely cubed meat as opposed to regular grocery store ground meat)

I usually have 2 or 3 different cans of beans in mine because I like beans

I’ll usually do 2 or 3 bell peppers, usually of different colors

Some bacon, some chorizo

Screw that “a shot of beer” it gets a whole can. Occasionally wine instead if that’s what I’m drinking while I’m cooking.

Often some coffee and/or various liquors (whiskey, rum, tequila, or Brandy)make their way into the mix at some point. Sometimes there’s beef stock involved.

I also pay really fast and loose about what canned tomato products go into my pot, whole, crushed, diced, sauce, doesn’t matter too much, it’s all gonna cook down into unrecognizable red-brown deliciousness by the time I’m done. Just try to get roughly that sort of ratio of tomato products to beef

For bonus points, get your cowboy on and do this in a pot hanging from a tripod over a campfire.

Normally I end up letting this simmer for up to around 6 hours. If it starts looking too thick/dry, add some liquid, usually beer in my case.

Credit for the original recipe: cookingcomically.com

Yeah that’s basically what I’m describing.

I think you just have more of a precise, technical way of describing it probably because you’ve actually professionally worked with color and received some formal training

Whereas I’m a guy with some self-taught Photoshop skills who paints minis, so my color theory is a little rough and ready.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag

By this point my dad was divorced from his first wife, married to my mom (they’re still together) who was pregnant with me. I’m still 7 years into my first and no signs of that going south. No kids on the way, but don’t want them.

Couldn’t afford them if I did though.

They owned a house, I kind of do (sort of a complicated situation of buying my mother in laws house, lots of handshakes and verbal agreements, but she’s kind of dragging her feet on paperwork. Wouldn’t be able to afford it without the family discount, so not a terrible trade off)

I didn’t get drafted during 'nam, so I got that going for me. He never actually left the country though, he ended up stationed in Kentucky, so arguably he just got free room and board and a bit of free job training for a few years.

My mom never had to work a full time job after they got married, my wife and I both work full time and still never seem to be able to save much money.

I remember my dad once talking about how he almost bought a brand new Bronco II (he was somehow talked into a Ford Tempo instead, which was a huge mistake, that car was a piece of shit) when he was probably about my current age. The idea of buying a brand new car is absolutely wild to me. I’ve never been able to afford a car that was less than 10 years old.

Mentally and emotionally I think I’m doing as good or better than they are. I have more and better friends. I’ve managed to do, I think, some much cooler things than my dad has (my mom has some pretty cool stories from a couple times her family visited relatives in Poland and when they managed to get one of them to visit America, not an easy thing to arrange during the cold war, especially when the family in Poland was basically dirt-poor)

I have a dog, they didn’t at this point in their lives.

My dad had a little bit of a fucked up home life growing up, but he turned out mostly alright, and my childhood was pretty stable, and I also turned out mostly alright.

It was really cool growing up with the internet before it enshitified. I’m glad I got to experience that.

By this point in their lives, the cold war was or nearly was over, the US came out on top, and it seemed like things were gonna be all sunshine and rainbows from there on out. By contrast… Well you’ve all seen the news for the last 2 decades or so.

If you absolutely must use bloody mary mix for some reason

Brown up your beef, saute up some diced onions and crushed garlic and the peppers

Add it all to a pot, add the bloody Mary mix

Season with some cumin, and (if needed, some bloody Mary mixes can be pretty heavily seasoned) salt, pepper, garlic & onion powder, chilli powder, maybe some herbs like cilantro, oregano, maybe basil

Maybe a bit of flour to help thicken it, otherwise you’re gonna need to be very judicious about how much mix you use or it’s gonna take forever and risk the flavor getting weird trying to reduce it down and concentrating the seasoning in the mix.

If it’s coming out a bit too tangy and acidic, a bit of sugar or maybe brown sugar can help cut that

If you can, consider using some fresh or canned tomatoes, or even plain tomato sauce, that’ll probably get you a better texture, but I suspect that if that were an option you could, should, and probably would skip the bloody Mary mix

I’d also maybe consider adding some bell peppers to the mix to make it a little chunkier. Maybe some corn.

Maybe some bacon, chorizo, some diced meat in addition to the ground, etc.

I like to add a beer, but starting with bloody Mary mix that’s probably gonna thin things out a bit too much. Wine and stock would be other options but with the same problem.

End of the day, chili is a stew, and the origin of stews is pretty much just throwing whatever you have in a pot and letting it simmer, there’s not too much to it.

Not a Cincinnati guy, but I have eaten chili there and made my own, and I’m gonna second that

But I do add some cocoa powder to my regular chili recipe, and people rave about it. Sounds a bit weird, but consider, for a momento the existence of Mexican Mole sauces that often contain chocolate. I’m not adding much, it doesn’t taste chocolatey, but it does add something nice to the whole flavor profile.

Adding it to Cincinnati style chili wouldn’t be traditional, but I could definitely see it working very well with the flavor profile if you didn’t care about making it authentic

You are right that paint is kind of its own thing and doesn’t really fit into the RGB or CMYK systems

But I would say it’s overall still subtractive. The paint and whatever you’re painting on isn’t giving off any light on its own, its just reflecting whatever ambient light there is (which is usually more or less white) and subtracting from that.

You could maybe argue that it’s more replacive (is that a word?) than additive or subtractive. It just kind of is what it is. It’s just replacing the substrate’s reflectivity with its own since it’s opaque like you said.

And when you mix paints it tends more towards that grey-brown because like you said it’s not layered, it’s more that each pigment is right there on the surface next to each other reflecting and absorbing their part of white light.

So if you mixed cyan and magenta paints together, instead of light passing through layers of cyan and magenta until all the red and green are filtered out so that only blue light reaches the white paper and is bounced back to your eye, you’d have cyan piments reflecting blue and green, mixed in right next to magenta pigments reflecting red and blue. So both are reflecting blue and the resulting color will probably look blue-ish, but the cyan is reflecting some green, and the magenta some red, so that pulls the color more towards grey (somewhere between white and black, even if you mix all 3 it cant really get down to true black or true white because some light is always going to be absorbed and some reflected)

You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird

I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue

Put another way, let’s say white is 100% of each red, blue and green light, and black is 0% of each. Every other color is made up of different percentages of those three.

Your monitor is counting up from zero, you just need to add the colors you want.

On a white canvas you need to subtract from 100.

Cyan is basically negative red, magenta is negative green, and yellow is negative blue.

Like others have said, it’s about additive vs subtractive color

And to start off with, probably everything you know about color is probably over simplified, or even outright wrong. Light and color and how your brain interprets that information is pretty complex stuff. Even this explanation is gonna be glossing over things.

Starting from the basics, white light contains all of the colors of the rainbow.

Your eyes, however, are mostly only sensitive to red, green, and blue light, most people only have receptors in their eyes (cones) for those 3 colors. They do pick up a little bit from the surrounding parts of the spectrum but not much, and your brain sort of fills in the gaps from there. If your red cones and green cones are both getting stimulated by light, your brain will interpret that as yellow or orange depending on just how much each is picking up.

So your monitor is starting with no light across all 3 colors (black)

And then adding light to get the desired colors.

But if you’re drawing or painting, ou’re starting with a white canvas, not a black monitor, so how do we go about getting the colors we want!

Well we’re going to put paint or ink on the canvas to absorb the colors we don’t want.

Back in elementary school art class you probably learned about complementary or opposite colors. Unfortunately the colors you learned were kind of wrong. Close enough for kids mixing finger paints, but not exactly.

The opposite of red isn’t green it’s cyan.

The opposite of green isn’t red, its magenta

But the opposite of blue is in fact yellow, so one out of three is something I guess.

What does that actually mean though? Well yellow ink absorbs basically all of the blue light while still reflecting red and green.

Cyan absorbs all the red light, while still reflecting blue and green

And magenta absorbs all the green light while still reflecting red and blue

So by mixing and matching those 3 colors, you can dial things down from 100% white light to a mix of red green and blue that your brain can interpret as other colors.

In theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren’t perfect, and even if they were it would get expensive to use that much of those 3 pigments which is why most color printers are CMYK, with “K” standing for black for reasons I’ve never bothered to look up and I’m not gonna start now.

So your monitoring is adding light from 0 up to make the color you need. It’s “additive.”

And paint is dialing things down from 100 to the desired color. It’s “subtractive.”

Hopefully that all makes sense, color is weird.

Philadelphia - it’s just Gritty.

I don’t know if “celebs moisturize with children’s foreskin” is totally detached from reality.

Now it probably isn’t what a lot of the people who get worked up about this are thinking, but there are beauty treatments and products out there that do in fact use ingredients that are sometimes derived from infant foreskins.

My dad retired a few years ago, he spent basically his whole life driving to work and anywhere else he needed to go himself.

Where we live, senior citizens can get a pass so they don’t have to pay bus or train fare.

So now he takes the bus everywhere, sometimes he basically just goes and rides it for fun, doesn’t really even go anywhere in particular, just gets on a bus and rides around for a bit, gets off at some random stop, and waits around for a bus going back the way he came from.

Weird hobby, but I guess it beats collecting stamps.

So I think that makes a pretty compelling case. If you make it free, people will use it

Have you tried turning off and then on again?

Fixes way more things than it should.

The exact wording is if you are an

“unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance”.

So a legal prescription to opioids shouldn’t be a disqualifier, unless you become “addicted” which could maybe be up to some interpretation, but if you stick to what your prescribed it would be pretty hard for anyone to prove an addiction

Weed is in a weird place, and I’m not 100% up on the latest stuff with that and how rescheduling will change things, but since it’s still schedule I, as far as the feds are concerned there is basically no legal use for marijuana so pretty much any use is a disqualifier. I don’t know how rigorously they check that against people who have medical cards.

Another weird one

Another one

I was home sick one day, my sister was at school, the phone rings and I answered it. It was an automated message, something about the school being aware of a school shooting threat and that there was no danger at this time.

It was really light on details, I called my mom who worked at another school in the district, she had no clue what was up. I couldn’t really find much information, it kind of trickled out over the next couple of days.

A lot of parents went to pick their kids up early, my mom texted my sister to see if she wanted to be picked up she didn’t really care, enough kids left early that classes were basically put on hold and they were just goofing off and watching movies and such. There were a bunch of cops and news crews showing up at the school so she figured she was probably about as safe there as anywhere that day.

Anyway, eventually the details started coming out, there was a kid who was planning a shooting, it was still a long way off if it was ever going to happen at all, but he tried to recruit another kid, and that kid turned him in.

The would-be shooter didn’t actually go to our school, he was homeschooled. His parents had pulled him out because of bullying a few years prior. He was a few years younger than me, so I don’t think I was ever in the same school as him, I think he would have been a freshman when I was a senior.

Now my school didn’t exactly have a major bullying issue, it happened a bit, like it does in every school, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who had it especially bad.

Now this kid was fat, he may have been almost as wide as he was tall, and I’m sure he got plenty of bullying for that, but this is America, we had plenty of kids in our school who were just as fat, and again, no major bullying problems. Hell, I am/was pretty fat myself, and a bit of a weirdo to boot, and I was actually fairly popular in high school.

But apparently the real reason this guy was bullied was because he was just a real racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole. If anyone deserved to be bullied, it was probably him. He basically was a bully himself, he was just too pathetic for anyone to take him seriously.

And yes, it does sound a lot like I’m describing Eric Cartman.

He did have one gun (that his parents apparently bought him) but no ammo, as well as a bunch of mall ninja swords and such, and a bunch of airsoft and pellet guns. Of course the local police made a big deal of showing off his “arsenal” when they confiscated it. I almost wanted to see his fat ass trying to lug all of that shit into school with him. I doubt he would have made it up the front stairs of the building before getting winded.

But it doesn’t end there.

Remember the kid who he tried to recruit who turned him in? He of course got all the congratulations from the mayor and police chief and such that you’d expect. And then he tried to break into the would-be shooters house to steal his Xbox.

And at some point during the various trials and such, the would-be shooters mom got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food while he was in juvie.

A friend of mine, T, lent another guy, E, some money. Not a huge amount, but fairly significant for a high schooler, something like $50

E decides he’s not gonna pay T back, so like mature, responsible high school dudes, they decide they’re going to meet up at the park after school and fight over this.

T is not a big dude, and doesn’t really expect to win this fight, so he goes and gets his friend, M, to come along, not to participate, just to watch over things and make sure he doesn’t get killed. M is well equipped for this job being over 6ft tall and built like a brick shithouse. Nice dude.

E, apparently, also had some friends coming along with this, and they show up after school dressed like some kind of school shooters, wearing fatigues and trench coats and shit

And more importantly, sporting weapons- sharpened screwdrivers, a baseball bat, etc.

M does his job, and takes those from them, throws them in his backpack, with a jacket or something covering the protruding end of the bat.

Of course word of this whole shit show gets around, the school got wind of it, and had called the police.

So as this whole group is walking off of school grounds, cops show up and start rounding them up.

M of course gets nabbed being the one with baseball bat sticking out of his bag, as do E and his friends.

T, however, lucks the fuck out, because his older cousin happens to be driving by just as the cops are showing up, and gets him into her car, assuring the police that he was with her and not involved in this. Miraculously none of the other parties rat him out, so while the police managed to piece together that there was one other person involved, they never figured out who he was.

M gets sent of to an alternative school for a year, and is allowed to return after that on the condition that he joins the football team. Our football team did not win a single game our senior year.

The others get various similar punishments- suspensions, alternative schools, etc.

One of E’s friends, on being informed by the cops that this was over $50, flipped out a little, possibly flipped a table, and sat down and calmly told the cops that he had been misinformed, and that E had told him it was over significantly more than that.

The really wild part though, is how the high school rumor mill exaggerated this, there was a version of the story I heard where M attacked a cop with a samurai and tried to escape on a motorcycle.

It should also be noted that these guys all actually remained on relatively good terms after this.

And these were, overall, pretty decent, even boring, nerds otherwise. A couple of them have some of the usual sorts of childhood trauma and such (except for T, who has some serious, grade-a childhood trauma, I still see him regularly, he had some rough patches along the way but is in a really good place these days) none of them really ever ended up in any significant trouble again after that.

And the area we lived in was a pretty safe, boring, middle class suburban area. I’m pretty well qualified to say that because I now work at the county 911 center, so I get to see what kind of shit is happening where, and that area of our county has nothing going on. If any one of the towns there has a dozen serious incidents (not counting stuff like noise complaints, traffic stops, parking issues, minor traffic accidents, routine medical emergencies and fire issues, etc) in a week, that’s probably going to be one of the busiest weeks of their year.

I just recently started it for the first time.

If you’re into this sort of game, it’s really good. I haven’t exactly played a ton of similar games to compare it to, but it’s pretty hard for me to imagine a game that would do what it does better. I think if it had launched in the state it’s currently in it would have absolutely blown peoples minds when it launched a decade ago.

Also since it is, at its core, a decade old game, it runs really well on my computer which is mostly made up of 10+ year old components (and on linux! I did have a little audio stuttering issue that was fixed by just adding a launch option in steam, pretty sure that was just a quirk of my particular hardware)

The story is a little weird, not bad, just maybe not what I would have chosen if I was the writer, and the story is secondary to the building and exploration in this kind of game anyway.

I could nitpick some things about the UI if I really wanted to, and the usual issues with procedurally generated content where you have a big universe to explore but it feels kind of empty (which is also kind of the point) and some of the planets start feeling kind of the same after a while.