Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.

ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).

Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?

God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.

I think it’s because Spotify frequently includes the same song as being on multiple albums separately–for example, if a band has a greatest hits album, Spotify considers the greatest hits album as a different song, even though it’s identical to the song on the original album.

God, same. One of my little annoyances in life is that my internal voice is a goddamn motor mouth and I literally CANNOT stop it.

I can stare at a white wall and watch paint dry, and my monologue will start philosophizing about watching paint dry, where the phrase came from, why I’m doing it (to try and silence my internal voice), then go on a wiki walk about how trying not to think about something makes you think about it more and the classic example of telling someone “don’t think about a brown bear” makes them think about bears, then I’ll start thinking about bears and my monologue is suddenly halfway across the world.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and my internal voice starts ruminating about how Daredevil uses these to sleep, then goes off about fight sequences, and then superhero comics, and whoops I’m halfway across the world.

Even when I’m paying attention and listening, my inner voice is still motoring away, it’s just that it’s mirroring what is being said to me instead of going on its own wiki walk halfway across the world (though sometimes someone will say something that makes my internal voice go “wait a second, that makes me think of…” and then I stop listening while I go on a wiki walk).

I have ADHD, in case it isn’t obvious yet.

I see you read Piers Anthony too.

This is why I open the restroom door at work by nudging the wheelchair accessible door button with my side.

Funny, I tweaked my Linux PC at work to look like Windows XP. It’s so cursed, I love it.

Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.

I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.

…yeah.

Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.

Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.

One of my side projects at work is to record training presentations and I try to be so conscious about this–both trying to avoid the word salad slides, and also trying to make my lecture not just reading the slide word-for-word but actually explaining and expanding on the slide content (with my verbal lecture transcribed as a note in the slide and handed out for anybody who might be hard of hearing/doesn’t want to sit through a 30-minute video)

Y’know what? I’m gonna be even more of a furry now, just to spite you.

I haven’t accidentally deleted a bunch of data yet (which, considering 99% of my interaction with Linux is when I’m SSH’d into a user’s server, I am very paranoid about not doing), but I have run fsck on a volume without mounting the read/write flashcache with dirty blocks on it first.

Oops.

If he did, I don’t remember watching that episode. IIRC a big part of Ross’s technique took advantage of the way the fibers on the brush spread when pressed head-on into the canvas, and hardware store brushes just can’t replicate that.

Not to take away from your point, but Bob Ross had a few episodes where he deliberately restricted himself to only using a single tool for that week’s painting–as I recall, he used a palette knife exclusively in one episode, and a two-inch flat brush in another. (That said, it also reinforces your point a bit because there’s a HUGE difference between an artist’s 2-inch brush and the two-inch brush you buy from the hardware store, and you’re going to struggle massively if you try to follow along with Bob using a regular brush.)

I also pirated it, and yeah, I definitely got my money’s worth from it. I tried to have fun, but it’s the poster child for “mile wide, inch deep.”

Maybe they can reuse the environment for a better game in the future.

I’m going to go a little against the grain and recommend Fuga: Melodies of Steel and its sequel. It’s not exactly what you described, but the game is very adept on forcing extremely difficult and impactful choices on you naturally through its gameplay.

I upgraded for freaking Hogwarts Legacy…

But hey, it prodded me to pick RDR2 back up and beat it, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

UwU