With Star Wars, they didn’t even do the main film franchise well. Episode 7 was okay, but 8 was such hot garbage I read up on why and found out there was no overarching plan for the trilogy, and different directors for each. No wonder they pulled a J.K. Rowling to completely change the rules of their own systems to meet the needs of the (bad) plot, and shit all over their own franchise. Skywalker might as well have been given a Super Time Turner to save the day in 8.

Disney Star Wars films are bad fan fiction, not canon.

For me, it completely messed up my whole-word and multi-word reading by shape. Like, I don’t read by syllable because I’m not pronouncing the words, I’m just reading the meaning of the whole word directly from the shape of the whole word (or several words), if that makes sense?

Like, when I’m reading, my inner monologue is only “saying” a handful of key words in each sentence, as it fluidity skips over “mentally pronouncing” all the filler/context words.

This completely breaks that. It splits each word into two chunks, neither of which is the word, so I need to show down to “mentally say” both chunks of each word to read them. Like, it’s still fast, I guess, but I’d estimate it slows me down by ⅓-½ish and disrupts my reading comprehension significantly.

I assume that if I read like that for a few hours, I’d likely get used to it, but why bother?

On the other hand, I think that could be a great reading tool, I imagine especially for people with dyslexia, but probably most fluent but slow readers.

2025 is (finally) my year for Linux. I’ve used Linux periodically fire 2 decades, but I’ve always used Windows as my main boot partition on my desktops/laptops.

I recently fucked up my Windows install, which is a whole other story, but point is I need to reformat and start fresh. I’m so sick of Microsoft’s shit, and I’ve been super impressed with Linux on my Steam Deck, so I’m going to be installing CachyOS soon.

My wife’s aging laptop is being killed by Windows bloat, too. Works great until Windows decides it needs to lock up 100% CPU, 100% memory, and 100% disk bandwidth to install a Microsoft Edge update. (True story.) She doesn’t even want/use Edge. This machine is used 100% for media streaming and web apps, so Linux is a perfect fit.

I have a friend in a similar situation. Both my friend and my wife I’m thinking an immutable distro will likely work best for them.

The big thing that’s been holding me back for years is that my desktop rig is my work computer, and I need OneDrive and the latest desktop version of Excel, but I’m so sick of wasting time with Microsoft’s bullshit that I’m just going to install debloated Windows 11 in a VM. I just need those two apps, so that’ll be plenty.

Epic winning this case might just open that for them.

On the other hand, do they want to enter the mobile market? They’re a privately owned company, so they don’t have the same shirt sighted pressures to chase exponential growth endlessly, like cancer. They are already making money hand over fist.

Bluetooth headphones do this, too. It’s infuriating. Let me turn off battery saver mode, god damn it! (I assume this is on the headphones, not on Android, though?)

For some reason, TalkBack triggers this, too, so most Bluetooth headphones are useless for that purpose. Something in a recent update broke TalkBack in the Kindle app so it won’t read continuously the “old way” (that worked) and instead uses “continuous reading mode” that pauses just long enough to put Bluetooth headphones to sleep every sentence. And I don’t think Google cares because Amazon has implemented their own TTS system in the Kindle app that’s slow as fuck for anyone used to speed reading with TTS, but it’s the way everyone is recommending now for Kindle. I’ve switched to pirating books so I can read them in Moon+ Reader instead, since it works.

A lot of those same students would vote responsibly, if given the chance.

As a former high school teacher, I was very impressed with the political engagement of Gen Z. They are aware of issues and largely feel hopeless and ignored. If students could vote, schools would be an excellent place to teach students how to make an informed vote, and then take a field trip to voting centres to show them how easy it is to vote, too.

As it is, you’re partly correct that 16 y.o.s largely don’t pay close attention to party platforms, despite generally good awareness about local and global issues, but it’s because it seems useless to them since they can’t vote.

There’s also research supporting that people who vote when they are first eligible to vote are likely to become lifelong voters, and those who don’t will likely not. One of the biggest issues in Canadian politics is the demographic mismatch between voters, so “old people issues” are grossly over represented on party platforms—and fair enough that they are! They’re the only ones who consistently vote.

Lowering the voting age to 16 would be a statistical artifact on most election results, in how few ridings would actually change hands, but the knock-on effect of building civic engagement for life would be an amazing change for Canadian politics. You would be surprised with how mature 16 year olds can be when it matters.

I meant medical school debt, yeah. I forget medical debt is a thing, as a non-American.

Good. Let them drown in their medical (edit: school) debt.

If there were consequences for refusing care, then fewer hateful bigots would apply, and more of the highly competitive spots in medical training programs would go to better prospective doctors.

There can be no tolerance for intolerance in a just society.

Completely agreed. Nothing was added by this blog post, for anyone who wasn’t following it, but it was a decent enough summary. Then that last paragraph comes out of left field.

Ross has championed this for all our benefit, at great personal cost.

This is made up, right?

This is what I came to recommend. Spruce pellets are cheap and locally sourced, and they disintegrate to sawdust when wet. (They’re compacted sawdust to begin with, so that makes sense.) You get a litter box with a tray full of holes over a bin, then when you school the poop, you just jostle it around a bit extra to encourage any lingering sawdust to fall through the holes.

We use puppy pads underneath to catch the sawdust, so the clean up takes no time. We empty and refill it every week or so, with 2 small cats.

Not all cats are happy to switch, apparently, but we didn’t run into that. Our cats were rescues, and they only use wood pellets at the SPCA to reduce costs and because it’s healthier for cats (they breathe in less dust).

Some wood pellets are treated with chemicals of some kind to affect how they burn, so we get ours from a horse supply shop since they only get animal-safe pellets.

The Wii U is fantastic. Lots of great games that run smooth as butter on the Steam Deck without any fancy setup required.

Oh, that’s not how it was marketed? Weird. That’s the first I heard of it…

/s but not really.

That is incorrect:

The Agreement does not apply to US citizens or habitual residents of the US who are not citizens of any country (“stateless persons”).

I’m not a lawyer, but that website says that this treaty is about asylum seekers declaring themselves as refugees in the first country (out of the two) where they land. Refugees can’t pass through the US en route to Canada, and apply as a refugee in Canada (and vice versa).

Americans (citizens or habitual residents) can still apply as refugees in Canada, according to this treaty.

Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.

And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.

I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.

Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.

Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?

I was debating doing something like this; install my build in the crawlspace below my desk. It’s just an exterior wall, so running a big enough channel through the wall would mess up the insulation. :(

That’s a sweet setup.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit since I read it this morning, and I think the only reason they were able to get rid of STV is because it was only STV for Calgary and Edmonton. With a single party still able to sweep the rural ridings, they were given solid majority governments, which shouldn’t be the case with “real” STV.

I have no idea how we’ll get either half of the LPC/CPC to enact STV, when FPTP has them oscillating between consecutive usually majority governments, but I expect STV will be hard to get rid of once we’ve had a single election with it. Not much incentive for minority partners in a coalition government to accept moving back to FPTP, right?

I knew about the Debian > Ubuntu ordering, but I take it Debian is still often used as a desktop environment, which is what I thought.

Oh, that’s very good to know. That’s a big limitation. That might make moving to Linux at all DOA for me. I’d likely need to do everything for work in a VM, but then what’s the point?

Unfortunately, I’m tied to Excel 2024. I make heavy use of new functions, like SORT that aren’t available in any other desktop app, and the web client doesn’t allow for VBA scripting, so it’s not suitable, either.