AMD GPU + KDE Plasma with Wayland finally gets me close enough to the smoothness of Windows, especially the per-display settings for fractional scaling and high refresh rate were sorely lacking on Linux. It’s not perfect yet (and neither is Windows’ implementation) but it improved the Linux desktop experience a ton!

I just went the ol’ VPN route and got a YouTube Premium family subscription in Turkey. It’s about 2€/month for 5 people; peanuts essentially. I wish I could avoid giving money to Google entirely but I’m mostly using Apple devices to consume YouTube content and my four friends who share the subscription with me do as well. So yeah, that’s the trade-off I can live with.

When I was still smoking I had a pocket ashtray. Saw them in some random anime a couple of years back and then bought one.

I use the Enterprise SKU of Windows 11 and you can fortunately still use the Domain Join option with that. Comes without that advertisement crap as well. The only caveat is that you can’t really activate Enterprise legally without a subscription and KMS but there are ways to circumvent that issue ;)

With how many B-52s that carried thermonuclear bombs and crashed, I’m glad the US didn’t accidentally nuke itself and other countries.

I can’t remember Skyrim or Fallout 4 releasing in that bad of a state and I’ve owned those games since release. Fallout 76 on the other hand… Yikes. I might also be completely wrong as years of playing with unofficial community patches may have clouded my memories. CP2077 had way more issues than just bugs at launch. Witcher 3 was buggy as well, but at least somewhat feature complete. I can kinda forgive jank in games if the product itself is compelling to me and I’m just a sucker for Bethesda-style RPGs. Will still be waiting for Starfield’s launch on GamePass before I buy it, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 had awful writing and that’s nothing that a patch can fix.

Japan was unwilling to surrender for a long time even though Japanese cities got bombed on a near daily basis near the end of the war. The US gambled on, for a lack of a better word, the wow-factor of the atomic bomb. They guessed correctly that Japan’s leaders would assume that there’s no way in hell the US could produce another one of these “special” bombs. They dropped the second one to basically say: “Hey, we got a huge stockpile of these things so we can do this as long as you like”. Or to put it simply: It was a show of force. When Nagasaki got hit Japanese leaders were in a council meeting about the Hiroshima bombing and the Soviet’s declaration of war on Japan and even after the news arrived in Tokyo half the cabinet was still insistent on their own terms of surrender. They didn’t know how many more bombs America had and that fear played a huge part in Hirohito’s decision to end the war after more than 14 hours of debate that day.

Yeah, part of the reason cars back then were so serviceable was because they broke down all the time. A modern car with regular servicing can last very long mechanically. The amount of electronic creature comforts, safety devices etc. are often what drives up repair costs and lead to some cars becoming uneconomical to repair. Cracked windshield? That’ll be 1000 bucks because the rain sensor for your automatic wipers will have to be recalibrated. Dead headlight? $2000 because we can’t replace individual LEDs, have to take the front of the car of to replace the whole headlight assembly and calibrate the adaptive front lighting system so that it follows road curvature again.