I didn’t get a lot of what people were talking about for awhile, but mostly it just got me to hide things from my parents from a young age and make my own money so I didn’t have to ask them for things…an attitude that of course created its own problems.

As for the tamagotchi-watching, I could see that feeling humiliating. At the time I think I just felt trusted. Sort of like when the other neighbors would ask me to watch their cat while they were gone. That kid’s parents never did end up ever letting him have a living pet ¯_(ツ)_/¯

You’re not alone. My parents regularly determined that anything trendy was clearly an invention of Satan sent to bring children directly to demon-worship. My only experience with one of these was like many of my experiences with technology growing up — the only child across the street with the “rich” parents had one, and he asked me to watch it over a weekend when he was on vacation somewhere.

It was never fun to me. It was a beeping obligation.

It absolutely is. We only encourage gun and violence culture in real life, especially by authoritarian figures and their representatives. Allowing such in virtual spaces where no one can actually be hurt or killed runs counter to our patriotic ideals.

…well I’m definitely turning that on for my Linux machine then. Thanks for the tip.

I think this is something macOS does best — using shift+option hyphen is a bit quicker than alt+0151.

Odd, I see them used all the time, and I’m neither. So I guess either my experience is an outlier, everyone I talk to is secretly an LLM, or maybe the meme is pushing an easy conclusion because people in general are bad at picking up on LLM responses and want an easy punctuation mark so they don’t have to think.

They’re pretty trivial to make in any OS — having a dedicated key isn’t necessary.

Weirdly it usually turns hyphens into en dashes instead of em dashes from what I’ve seen, which makes no sense at all.

Eh, I’d allow it; it’s tangentially related and a complaint about capitalism. Win-win.

I mean sure, if you just want to skip Bearshare

That game was the most fun I’ve ever had playing a video game. Lots of other great games have happened, but the low barrier to entry (buy-to-play instead of subscription) and the reward for slotting a useful 8 skills that worked well with each other and well with the other 7 or so people in your group cannot be beat.

I completely forgot the 12-inch one existed.

Okay, the old ones that apparently have both do have the Thunderbolt symbol on the ones that are, though, so what’s the problem?

Why would you need them on a MacBook? They’re always* Thunderbolt.

Edit: Better explained by GamingChairModel below. I entirely forgot one series of MacBook, and also forgot when the older ones did have the Thunderbolt symbol on them.

Sort of the thing that makes me think this one still has a ghost of a chance, but then I’ve liked the games The Chinese Room has made before mostly for their writing and music. I’ll probably be disappointed, but them at the helm doesn’t kill it for me like it probably does for people who wanted more of the original.

Is there a preferred metric to measure this by? I didn’t play the first one, but Wikipedia says “polarizing but ultimately positive,” and there’s an 80/100 metacritic score, for whatever that’s worth.

Your word picture is just so funny that I want to root for the game’s success just to be the person that quotes this comment and @s you, even if I tend to agree with your assessment.

And maybe I’m using it wrong, but it just…doesn’t work. I use spotlight search on my MacBook to find programs and things and it just finds them. It’s fast enough to be faster than me opening things off the dock.

I try to use the search on my wife’s Win11 computer and half the time it sends me to a website for a program she already has installed.

Like if you want to imitate, even badly, the imitation should at least be functional.

Ah okay I would likely have missed those days since until this year I kept hoping windows wouldn’t completely shit the bed for my gaming PC.

I’ll have to take a look sway; think I’m still figuring out what I like best and GNOME felt familiar to the MacBook I like using for productivity (although now that I think about it, even Apple has a system-tray-like thing on the top of the screen). KDE was also fine but if I have a choice I usually like picking something with a spotlight-search equivalent; GNOME’s just looks more like spotlight so it activates the dumb part of my brain that likes familiarity.

Thanks for sticking with me through this conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to convey over text that I’m more ignorant than asshole on most Linux things.

Swear I’m neither of those things, but you’re talking about the system tray as in that little bucket of icons that sits in the lower-right of a taskbar usually?

This seems like it’d fall pretty neatly in the “you use it, so you think it’s required basic functionally; other people don’t, so they don’t care about it” realm. I do not miss the bucket. It doesn’t seem like awesome functionality (to me) to have to access application features through a bucket of tiny icons instead of the application itself and to be unable to access those features in the application.

I can see how frustrating it’d be if there’s something you like to use or have to use that only works if it can be in a system tray, but it’s not a ubiquitous feature requirement across all applications, so maybe GNOME is for people that don’t care for apps that require this and all the other mainstream OS options are for folks that do? Man that’s an annoying sentence to read; no wonder people get so angry about what seems like pointless minutiae.

I assume I dislike it because my work machine (windows, no choice there) always has about 30 things in its pointless icon bucket that can’t be closed by a basic user and do nothing beyond cluttering the taskbar and getting in the way. I get nothing out of a bucket of icons that exist only to silently scream “I’m running in the background still! Just in case anyone cares!” Not having to see that crap on my personal machine is a relief rather than a frustration for me.

Fair enough. I don’t know what those are, so I guess I can’t miss them.