That little guy? Its name was Thing. Am I so old that only I remember? Was it too hard for them to look that one up?

Fun fact: if you actually do this then you’ll turn the game on to discover your Nintendog ran away due to neglect.

Yes, I’m serious. Take care of your virtual pets, people!

Pretentious coffee jackass here: if you have one of those little cheap-o frothing wands you can whip that instant coffee with a touch of hot water and some stevia to make a sort of knockoff dalgona coffee. Tastes awesome iced with a bunch of milk!

No shame in enjoying what you enjoy :)

For chat: IRC, Stoat, Fluxer, Root, Zulip, Matrix, Slack, Teams, Guilded.

For voice/video: Mumble, Teamspeak, Jitsi Meet, also several of the above.

Perfect 1:1 drop in hassle free replacement with the exact same feature set? No, there isn’t.

Viable alternatives that aren’t too bad to learn? There are many.

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

I found a Pi Hole blocklist that filters out known ai slop websites but even then they’re still clogging up my DDG result. Such a pain.

Also: Phantasy Star is great! Have you played the Sega Ages release? It adds some really cool stuff to make it more playable.

As someone who has had stitches a few times: always go in ASAP! Apparently there’s a time limit on how many hours after an injury they they’ll give you stitches.

Learning that the hard way wasn’t fun.

Glad you (eventually) healed up and fuck this healthcare system.

You can take it from my cold, dead, cheese covered hands!

I’m a pretty avid old video game enjoyer and own multiple CRTs. Also had the pleasure of owning and maintaining a 19" Sony PVM until I traded it to a friend for a mountain of GBA games. Still keep a 13" hooked up for the occasional VHS or old game.

That said, I feel like a lot old sentiment toward emulation and modern display tech is rooted in internet opinions from 2010 or prior.

Yes, older and cheaper LCDs with a Bluetooth controller on old emulation tech pales in comparison to a Super Nintendo hooked up to the cheapest CRT ever. But both display tech and emulation tech have come a long way. High quality upscalers, ultra deep blacks, low latency game modes, insane refresh rates, FPGA, Retroarch run-ahead, cycle accurate emulators, and a dozen other breakthroughs have made retro gaming on modern panels extremely enjoyable.

Have you tried any of the various shaders available? I find that a good shader set gets pretty so close to my CRTs that I honestly can’t tell the difference. I have a Retrotink for hardware scaling and it also has very good shader options.

There are options now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinden_Light_Gun

I use bookmarks for that. All the browsers I use support them.

For those unaware: RSS is still a thing and still works. You don’t need fancy platforms and algorithms to follow sites that post stuff you care about. Just an RSS catcher.

On F-Droid, Capy Reader does a great job and supports full article downloads to circumvent the sites that only put previews on RSS.

Texan here. This is all correct.

I truly wish I had the mental fortitude to push through the issues I have expressing myself to just, via sheer willpower, precisely describe my emotional state while in the middle of grappling with it.

An easy way to say “I’m not, I’m not sure what is wrong, and explaining anymore than this is going to somehow make it worse in my mind. What I really want is for you to pick up on the fact that I’m struggling and just be supportive but explaining all that in this moment is overwhelming.” Even getting that out can be difficult in the moment because internally I haven’t unkinked the knot enough to figure it out. Sometimes I’m not yet aware that I’m not okay.

So “I’m fine” comes out.

Thankfully my wife is very used to paying attention to the nonverbal cues of her husband (me) after many years of happy marriage. Communication is so much more than just words. If you’re in tune enough to ask then it’s safe to assume something is up.

Sorry your relationships have been with people like me. Hope you find that right person for you :)

I’ve been on and off with Linux for about 15 years and just want to counter some of the people trying to troubleshoot or criticize to say: it can be really tough.

We need our computers to work and we expect things to function correctly.

I’ve used dozens of distros over the years. I was a super early Arch adopter, mained Gentoo for about three years, ran my own BSD server for programming projects, and still maintain several small home Linux servers. And even I sometimes want to pull my hair out trying to get semi-new hardware working right in my distro of choice. I spent three hours today fighting Nvidia and sound drivers and eventually just had to give up on that machine after being told that what I want just flat out isn’t supported in Linux on the hardware I have.

Take a breath, set it aside until you’re ready to take another crack at it, and know that it’s a journey. You’ll get there or the software will catch up and meet you halfway. No shame in being frustrated :)

It was cheap but effective! Also thanks, always nice to find another DF fan.

Ha, yeah it is indeed officially licensed. Imo one of the cooler things they done with the license.