Bitwarden.

I’m with Posteo.

I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.

But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They’re one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don’t specify beyond that, so I’m going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.

To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD

The TES series in general for its massive, expansive lore.

But Morrowind in particular has absolutely incredible world-building with incredible creativity and originality. There is a reason why so many people keep going back to the n’wah simulator and it’s because the world is so rich and fleshed out. So much of the following games was built off Morrowind’s stunning work.

They need lifetimes in prison for treason and domestic terrorism.

The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube’s video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.

Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.

A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

Good point.

How many times is this game going to get remade…

It all makes sense now.

Subnautica 2 is so screwed.

I cannot think of a piece of software that I want on my computer less than something like this. Literal voluntary malware.

Microsoft is so incredibly fucked when the AI bubble starts to burst. They’ve abandoned so many of their other projects and customers to go all-in on it.

They’re correct, though.

Honestly? Aloy from the Horizon games. She’s maybe not the most rounded character, but she is a very strong, determined, stubborn, and intelligent person. She knows what she wants and will stop at nothing to get it. I think it also helps that the games don’t really have many choices or multiple endings, which I think was a good design choice. The story belongs to Aloy, not the player.

Also she’s not a protag (sorta, you can play as her) but I would like to give a shoutout to Lae’zel from BG3. I suspect a lot of players haven’t explored her character questline much because of how prickly she is at the beginning, but her character development is extensive and, at times, heart-wrenching. A story of someone getting the entire fabric of their life and soul torn out from under them.

MacOS updates don’t cost money. They’re also completely optional (even security updates) and major OS versions introduce new features.

The US has surrendered almost all of their manufacturing power and knowledge, absolutely kneecapped their education system(s), and stripped away most of its incentives and soft power projection. Trump certainly put the final nail in the coffin but the process has been ongoing for decades.

The US doesn’t make anything and a lot of what it does make is bullshit like the entire corn industry. Much of the “value” in the US is speculative and, for lack of a better way of putting it, a complete and utter fantasy. As soon as that house of cards starts to become unstable and the world moves away from the USD then the US economy is going to implode so hard that it would make a black hole blush. They have less and less to bring to the table except their buying power and that is tumbling quickly as their wealth inequality shifts dramatically.

And that’s before you even factor in the self-sabotage with things like the random tariffs every 15 minutes and constant threat of being arrested and thrown into a camp. There are companies in the US that have to do their business outside the US because they can’t feasibly import product into their own country. It really is difficult to express just how badly the US has backed themselves into a corner.

Shareholder-led design.

I use Win11 on my main computer for work and school reasons. I need maximum compatibility and reliability and it has met those goals. Back in the day, I used to use Linux on my old laptops and I dual-booted it on my main PC. It has been awesome seeing how far it has come and I would like to get back into it some day.

That being said, a huge barrier for Linux and prospective new users is the community. The Linux community is highly combative and toxic and it absolutely sours what should (and could!) be a great experience. Almost every interaction I had while troubleshooting had some level of condescending attitude or outright hostility and there were numerous times I was directly insulted for asking for help - the most recent being a couple years ago when I was trying out a distro and had sound driver issues.

AMD Ryzen 5 7600x, RTX 4080 Super 16GB, 64GB system RAM, and like 10TB split up over multiple drives both SSD and HDD. I don’t remember what PSU I put in but it’s an 850W Gold from Corsair. Case is a Fractal North XL in white with glass side panel.

Usecase is 3D modelling primarily. I mostly work in Blender so getting a capable GPU was a must and the large amount of system RAM is nice when I’m working with textures in Substance or editing large files. I may upgrade my CPU as I move into more CPU-rendered tasks but right now I’m doing just fine.