Do you believe law and ethics are separable? Does your “these systems save lives” not speak to the very reasoning employed to codify an ethical position into the law of the land?

I think the story goes that if you stick around too long, ignoring the red flags and warnings from your friends, one day you wake up in a bathtub full of ice and she’s on her way to the highest bidder with your kidneys in a cooler.

I should’ve clarified: “I actually loved that machine, referring to the HP*, …”

The HP was my first successful Arch machine, after various failures due mostly to impatience and incomplete knowledge; failing to install necessary drivers, not understanding how easy it is to just boot the live media, chroot back in and fix those sorts of things, and so on. It marked a point in my life where I just really went into crunch-mode, consuming as much as I could about as much as I could.

The Compaq was a hunk of junk, even when it was new. I can’t imagine servicing them was remotely pleasant, but I’ll give it credit for being the first machine I ever ran Linux on. Even if it did so poorly, “we all start somewhere.”

Just the battery for the thing probably weighed more than my next two laptops combined, and one was a 17" “Media” edition HP with the DVD ROM and the full keyboard with numpad. I actually loved that machine, and it ran Arch for a good while, before HP’s garbage thermal management (and, likely, aging solder) killed it.

I still have it because of sentimental stupidity and it being the only one I’ve ever stickerbombed the hell out of. I might need to craigslist a toaster oven just for hobby projects and see if I can bake it back to life. Would make a fine addition to “in case of LAN party” stack of old laptops I keep around for when friends are over and want to run some CS:S, Quake 3, Brood War or whatever.

My first was Slackware. I don’t remember much other than following instructions really well and coming away with a working, albeit slow, OS. There was a joke video making the rounds back then of someone opening their laptop in a library or something and the Windows startup chime playing so slooooooooow. That was unfortunately my embarrassing experience, in a community college class, with the KDE startup chime. I didn’t know anything about TWMs, the terminal, or anything else really and foolishly thought my secondhand, 90s Compaq Presario (?) laptop would run a full DE in the mid 00s.

Anyway I got Ubuntu running a while later, when the Beryl (Compiz) cube desktop videos were showing up everywhere, and it was much easier. Same time Live CDs got popular and you could test run the OS. Then did Debían for a while because I hated Unity and the end of Gnome 2. Riced out Arch with Xmonad after that, learning Emacs, Vim, TeX, Bash and so on along with the various coreutils. Arch(wiki) and some solid YouTubers got me finally learning to be a proper power user.

Now, servers aside, I’ve just got a Steam Deck and WSL. My next build, when/if prices get less stupid, will probably be Arch again unless I do the lazy thing and run with Bazzite or similar. I love Arch but I hate the occasional troubleshooting after I don’t update for a while, even if I have gotten better at it.

I’d have to run the numbers but, once the various productivity research gets upgraded a bit, I’m thinking it might not be too hard to abuse asteroids as a form of infinite resources. Or, at the least, as a pretty significant supplement to terrestrial resources. I’m just theorycrafting in my head right now but I’m expecting my space casinos to get nerfed soon enough and they’ll hopefully repurpose easily into a new astro-mining role.

No break for me but I’ve been doing “old dog, new tricks” by picking up some SMW Kaizo. I’m four exits out of seven in Shell’s Retriever so far. I think I’m doing fair for only being a couple weeks into playing romhacks and for last playing SMW in the 90s. I don’t think I’ll ever get around to “Baron of Shell” or any other crazy hard hacks but it has been fun working on a few of the “easy” ones.

I’ll probably get back to Factorio after I finish Retriever. Possibly not until after the sequel, Shell’s Redeemer, but I’ve previewed it and it looks substantially tougher.

As Minnels pointed out, Wube put in work to make the game controller friendly for the Switch. On Deck, the trackpads make it even better. I play with the default settings but, like the OG Steam Controller, the controls are further customizable through Steam’s own interface. There are a few community layouts people seem fond of, which probably map some toggles or whatnot missing from the default layout, but I think it’s incredibly playable as is.

I’ve been on a hiatus from Factorio for about a month now but I’ve set up a dedicated server on the aforementioned NAS. I think I’m going to go another another bender soon and use it as an excuse to learn a little LUA and maybe Grafana as well. I think it’d be fun, once my build is semi-stable, to let it run unpaused even when players aren’t connected and have alerts set up based on the tracked stats. Will see how that pans out.

Instead of a gaming computer, the last time I had some spare cash, I built a NAS. When I had a little again, but not enough to really build out a high end rig, I got the OLED Deck and immediately bought Factorio. I’d been binging Factorio content, recently found some channels like Dosh Doshington, DocJade, etc and knew I wanted in. For a PC game, that really wants a keyboard and mouse, it plays friggin fantastic on Deck.

More recently, because I was watching SMW romhack players a while back and Pangaea Panga just released Super Dram World 3, I’ve gone all in on learning Kaizo Mario games. Panga’s “Kaizo Kindergarten” is a great intro, along with “2Kaizo2Learn.” “Joy of Kaizo” is a beautiful dedication to Bob Ross’ “Joy of Painting” where level backgrounds are recreations of paintings from actual episodes of the show. It also features difficulty options and the beginner mode is pretty noob friendly. At least for someone like me who hasn’t played SMW since my SNES was hooked up in the 90s. Anyway, if you’ve fond memories of SMW it’s almost a crime not to revisit it and its hacks, either on a Deck or any portable emulator.

Sure thing. I got on a fuzz rock and stoner metal kick for a while and that album cover stuck with me. Then the usual compulsion took over and I ended up on a deep dive through old sci-fi, pulp comics, etc.