Oh Kent, no. No Kent, no. Kent.

Perhaps Kent, being such an apparently difficult personality type, is just so lonely he has to think at least his chat bot loves him.

Kent is obviously a talented programmer, but that guy doesn’t seem to be right in the head.

It’s an old Czechoslovakian show called Pat & Mat. Took me a while to remember the name, it’s been a long time since I last saw them on TV. Really good and universal slapstick humor.

Oh, I like this. Nice.

Aww, it doesn’t have the open mouths of the original PC release. Phooey.

On a more serious note, it’s a great game and I love to see it on GOG. I still have my PSX discs somewhere.

Hah, the kids are alright.

For my desktop: openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll. I like to keep my desktop as up-to-date as possible, and openSUSE is pretty good. Sure, there’s the occasional udev update that breaks inputs in the desktop environment, but that’s the other side of the coin.

For my laptop and other uses: Debian. The old reliable doesn’t mind if I don’t update as often, and unlike rolling releases, updates aren’t wont to break anything. In a pinch I could use it on the desktop too.

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it’s definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

I may have won the George Game, but in doing so I lost the Game. Now I know how Pyrrhus felt.

I’m reading Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. If you can’t tell, it’s about the history of the Gulag system, a collection of Soviet concentration camps. Interesting stuff, though gruesome.

I recently also read through IAEA’s INSAG-7 report on the Chernobyl accident. HBO’s Chernobyl is a wonderful series, but the last episode bothered me since I knew it gets a lot of things wrong. After digging around YouTube videos for a bit, I found a lot of them confused and contradictory. Eventually I decided to go to the source and read the report in an effort to understand what happened. It’s a surprisingly understandable and not terribly long, and pretty much the most authoritative source on the accident. It’s amazing how many people make videos about Chernobyl who clearly haven’t read it. What really boiled my coolant, however, was how it was clear the Soviet nuclear institutes knew about the design flaws that caused the accident and even knew how to fix them, but they chose to do nothing. They. Fucking. Knew. They just blamed the operators and got away with it.

The HBO series is great, but it is really inaccurate.

He did love eating every new animal he ran across.

I was actually making a joke about the hydrotherapy he used to treat his condition. It involved getting doused with cold water. I don’t think anyone caught my joke.

He sounds like he needs to take a cold shower.

Some of the missions weren’t great, but otherwise it was a fantastic game. I do prefer the first one, personally, but the second one had some awesome power-ups.

I miss John Candy.

Yeah yeah, you got exactly what you voted for, Joe, no need to rub it in. Honestly, you guys are such sore winners.

It’s actually funny, I could never play Fallout & Fallout 2 as an evil character because it made me feel bad. At the same time, I’d fire up Carmageddon & Carmageddon 2 and just mow down everything that walked or drove with utter glee. I’m sure there’s a psychological explanation for this dichotomy, but I sure don’t know what it is, and I’m in no mood to make guesses.

I can’t say I’ve had those issues myself, so my recommendation may not be valid in your case. I’d say maybe give Fedora with KDE Plasma a try, and try switching between X11 and Wayland sessions if issues persist.

I personally don’t like Ubuntu, but that’s mostly because of Canonical making the occasional sketchy decision.

On the whole, distro choice doesn’t matter quite as much these days, as most distros should work fine out of the box. Whatever issues you have should technically be solvable with a bit of troubleshooting.

Sometimes Linux just doesn’t play well with your setup. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you!

Won? They will do it again. The only winning move is not to play their game. Choose Free Software.

I’m reading Stephen F. Cohen’s The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. For whatever reason, I’ve been somewhat fascinated by the USSR lately, and now I’m dipping my toes in to the Gulag system. This book tries to give some context to the survivors of Gulags and their lives after imprisonment. I find it interesting, though the book mostly speaks in generalities in stead of telling more involved stories of the survivors. Funnily enough, this book mentions a book I read some time back, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, many times and gives some welcome context as to how it was released and why it was so important. I’m really liking this so far.

Reading Russian history is emotionally taxing. The more I read, the more it seems to me that Russian history is just a steady march from one national trauma to another. It’s no wonder Russian culture is the way it is; the Russian people rarely catch a break.

When I was a child, the USSR seemed imposing, impregnable and eternal. Now, with age, I realize it didn’t really even last a lifetime. Maybe this cognitive dissonance is why I’m trying, in my own way, to understand what happened to it and in it, and why it fell.

There’s this neat life hack where you drink enough and forget all about the taste - and most of the previous night, to boot!

I don’t actually drink though, tastes like shit.