Sure.

The mantra of “Everybody vote” is out there because it’s harder to contest, and the fact of the matter is when more people vote, Republicans lose more elections.

Picked one of your random article links. Here’s a quote.

To be clear, the Kremlin’s claims that Ukraine is a hornets’ nest of fascists are false: far-right parties performed poorly in Ukraine’s last parliamentary elections, and Ukrainians reacted with alarm to the National Militia’s demonstration in Kiev. But connections between law enforcement agencies and extremists give Ukraine’s Western allies ample reason for concern. C14 and Kiev’s city government recently signed an agreement allowing C14 to establish a “municipal guard” to patrol the streets; three such militia-run guard forces are already registered in Kiev, and at least 21 operate in other cities.

Dead by Daylight added mystical smoke grenades survivors can use that are a lot of fun - many are suggesting it might become an ability as part of the main game.

I’ll admit, AW2 has been a hard sell for me. Paranormal mystery always is, because it wants to invite you to ask questions, but it can pull answers literally out of anywhere. Why doesn’t anyone remember old events? Paranormal magic. How did Alan Wake survive at the bottom of a lake for all those years? Paranormal magic. Etcetera.

I don’t even mind games like Ace Attorney that set up a paranormal system like spirit channeling, but cleanly express all their rules and limits before they become involved in the mystery. I’ve watched some partial streams of AW2 but it felt so easy to get lost and have no expectations for it to suddenly defy.

We’re talking about TV shows and movies.

There’s normally one unrealistic conceit, eg aliens existing, that the audience believes. But then, the regular conceits like “The scientists studying the aliens speak like a bunch of robots and act like total idiots” become harder to believe.

I finished Crow Country, a cool survival horror game that looks a lot like classic Final Fantasy 7. Great game, actually had a decent story and the final confrontation was pretty eerie.

No big spoilers, but there’s a scene near the end of the protagonist descending a giant, disconnected ladder in total darkness that was chillingly effective.

I’ve heard this said, can you verify for me where the lawyer stands?

If his position is truly still behind his table, what if the witness/jurors are hard of hearing?

There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.

Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.

“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”

So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.

One plot point I liked of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The Tolmekians are growing a Warrior. Enemies are on the way. Their princess orders them to unleash the Warrior. Her second says it’s not ready. She ignores him, it’s sent out. It’s not ready, and melts almost immediately.

There’s no smaller surprise in the day for me than someone saying they’re uninterested in a Ubisoft game. What baffles me is the incessant need to keep vocally informing other people you don’t care about that thing, though.

I am not entering Train Simulator 2024 threads to loudly announce I don’t care about trains. Just scroll past.

I think campiness can be okay in short bursts but a lot of recent Japanese writing just overstays many jokes.

FFXIV (the mmo) for instance, often gets the balance right and most conversations involving the main heroes are about political drama, with the brief befuddled funtimes.

I just finished a horror game called Crow Country, and it gets some good laughs out of twisting surprise expectations; but it also keeps most conversations and general exploration serious.

Like a Dragon is definitely better with camp. It’s often very segmented to the side quests, and doesn’t just play up fanservice alone.

I’d like a Final Fantasy 7 remake.

Yes, a remake, not a pseudo-sequel lore platform action combat game with all the cutscenes slowed down to 0.02x pace of the original.

Honestly I wouldn’t even mind keeping visuals more basic for standard gameplay just so the rest can be updated.

Bazzite lets people choose between GNOME and KDE when downloading it. I had no familiarity with either, but received tips that GNOME is more user-friendly.

In terms of discoverability, I was investigating the OS’ settings menu pretty intensively, and saw no suggestions that I could add commands to the menu. My other annoyance was around having the right set of things available from the left-hand quick-access on the Files screen. On Windows, this is simply a matter of drag and drop. It’s possible I could change this on Bazzite’s base file explorer, but if so, it did not make anything readily apparent, even from investigating the available settings and everything in the default menus.

I’d definitely prefer Flatpaks for software, but not every program is available by browsing the Software screen. Programs that I attempted to install through BoxBuddy both took far more terminal knowledge and googling than should be necessary, and didn’t actually export to my programs menu as they claimed.

I’m okay with adjusting to a different experience. Less okay with things just not working as documented, or losing out on obvious discoverability options. It feels like an OS has less longevity when its documentation is not built in and relies specifically on message boards - many of which apply their solutions more broadly to Arch or Ubuntu than something as niche as Bazzite.

Bazzite seems excellent if you’re putting it on a gaming handheld. I had my own complaints when using it on a desktop.

I really really wish Bazzite’s file explorer was a bit better. The right-click options for file interaction are miniscule - definitely built for baby users. You can install another like Dolphin, but it will still use the other interface anytime a program needs to open a file.

And, of course, I ran into myriad issues trying to use BoxBuddy and its system of containers to run other (native) Linux software. Not something for amateurs used to “apt install whatever”.

Wish I could say the same. Several times I came back from sleep and the whole OS was suffering from graphical corruption.

The version of Lutris I installed used a file opening GUI to select the exact EXE to run. I was using simple unzipped folders, not installers.

Even if the fault of the game in question ends up being simple:

• It’s not fun to correct that fault on every single game I run
• It could be a slightly different fault on every single game

I am fine with one-time setup configuration for my OS to get preferences right, devices working, and settle myself to my steady workflow. I am not okay with doing laborious one-time setup for every single game I ever try.

I get that, and I like it. When it works. (Hitman 3, which I know works under certain distros/Linux hardware, did not load levels for me on Linux Mint 22) Even on Bazzite, Helldivers 2 needed command line args to avoid a white border around the game in fullscreen.

Plus, much as I like Steam, I like competition, and I buy games off of other stores pretty often. Some of those stores just give you a zip file to download in your web browser.

I knew I had whole folders of indie games that are just a folder with an executable, so I trialed those with Lutris. It needed a huge setup form just to run one of them, and when I finished, it wouldn’t run and gave no errors.

Having that as my experience for, as I said, a whole folder of games, wasn’t really in my interest. It takes too long for the community to say “Hey, I got Assassin’s Creed running! Just use Proton 8.13 beta, and add these 8 command line options”

It’s not just learning curve. It’s feature set, compatibility, and user experience.

Certain distros’ window managers may work just the way you like, or they might not and it may not be so simple to change it. The preferences menu on some of them is tiny.

That’s before getting into just how perfectly it will work on your hardware. I tried Mint 21 first on my machine, and even though my hardware is ancient, it didn’t support the wi-fi card at all. That stuff is kernel level. I even looked up version numbers and it was supposed to work.

(Mint 22 worked but that’s ridiculously late to finally start supporting this hardware. And, it could not run games as well as Steam Deck)

In the last month, I made a genuine effort to switch to Linux Mint, then Bazzite, as my daily driver. Mint could not run Hitman 3 for unexplained reasons. Bazzite frequently got graphical corruption issues when returning from sleep. Neither could run niche indie games and gave no error codes.

I knew I’d be doing some tweaking to get Linux working how I wanted, but it was missing configuration as well as being unreliable by default. I like the principle of using a non-MS OS, but I need it to work.