So it’s Stadia, again?

I’m a mid-millennial, born in the late 80’s. I’ve seen all of the 90’s.

If I was going into temporal witness protection, going back in time to keep me safe from the mob I ratted out…would I want to live in 1995?

2005 is an easier sell. I graduated high school that year, and a LOT changed in those ten years. Would I want to go back to 1995?

Nnnnnn…that line “I say ‘your civilization’ because when we started thinking for you it became ‘our civilization’ which is really what this is all about” hits different in 2026. In 1999 it came across as generic movie villain drivel, now it’s headline news.

The grapuh of Linux suitability as a function of user skill is a U. At the bottom of user skill, you’ve got your aunt who needs a Chrome bootloader. Linux is perfect for them, maybe better than Windows.

As you get into the middle, you get into “I just need to use Photoshop” or “I just want to play Valorant”. It’s gotten to where software that doesn’t run on Linux is a deliberate choice, but they’re still out there. Gaming has been easing up in large part due to Valve, so the middle of the U has been rising, but it’s still a big dip.

At the top end you’ve got the computer science types developing all these internet and AI based systems almost all of which run on Linux servers in the back end. Linux dominates literally every computing platform except desktops.

Proof of humanity on Tinder. That’ll be the day.

Have you ever noticed how everyone going slower than you on the highway is an idiot and everyone going faster than you is a maniac?

…that’s why she uses clam shells.

The most perfectly cast part in all of cinema.

Candy Crush ads are on the home screens of smart phones. Pay the carrier to include it in their bloatware, job done.

Nintendo ran an ad for the Gameboy Pocket that showed the outline of a Gameboy printing through the back pocket of a pair of jeans with the slogan “KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS.”

Sex sells. Video game ads have featured pretty girls since video game ads. You can go back to the late 70’s early 80’s and find an entire genre of ads that boil down to “pretty girl stands next to arcade cabinet.”

But then the entire 90’s happened, and there was a huge set of ads that seemed to say “play video games instead of having sex.” Which is…weird, right? Almost all products sold to young men are sold on the promise of attracting women. Show man with product, show woman having interest in the man with product, “Product: It Makes You Fuckable.^TM” Video games postured themselves as something to do instead of your girlfriend or even more interesting than chicks. An ad for a 16-bit console featured a full-page centerfold with a few screenshots of video games scattered around with the slogan “If you look closely, there’s a beautiful naked woman on this page.”

I like how the cat isn’t wearing it for the injection photo.

To paraphrase Tim Curry, communism and capitalism are both red herrings.

Oh that big punch up between the Soviet Union and the United States, decadent capitalism vs brutalist communism. Who won? According to the scoreboard as of 2026: Israel.

The catch phrase I’ve always heard about communism is “the people own the means of production.” Has that ever been true in practice? Did Soviet citizens own any piece of the means of production? Did anything resembling “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” ever once happen under the hammer and sickle? Or was that the false narrative the idiot asshole in charge used to cow the unwashed masses?

Similar questions could be asked of my fellow capitalist Americans. Capitalism is allegedly about the free market, supply and demand, if there is a demand someone will provide a supply, probably multiple someones, competitors will compete, those who do it faster, cheaper or better will succeed until someone else does it even fasterer, cheaperer and betterer repeat until someone else comes along with a completely different idea, welcome to the infinite cycle of meritocracy where the cream rises to the top. How’s that working out? Some substance has risen to the top, not sure it’s cream.

A common problem I see between the Soviet Union and the United States: Weak systems for preventing psychotic despots from ruining it all.

Further expanding on this: My understanding of the Soviet Union: Something something the Bolsheviks, something something communist revolution, They just about have an election, that Lenin overthrows because it isn’t going his way. Lenin is King Shit Of Turd Mountain until his death, then the dumb guy from the ghetto he kept around because he’s good at hurting people, Josef “probably worse than Hitler” Stalin takes the throne. The entire run of the Soviet Union is essentially a dictatorship with a command economy and remains thoroughly miserable.

The United States, meanwhile, has gone through phases. Tides have ebbed and flowed, robber barons have come and gone, consumer protection laws have come and gone. Times when a very few, very rich men have been mostly miserable for most people; times when those assholes get knocked down a peg and the common man has a chance to make a decent living get better.

The problem is a few ultimately rich assholes in charge.

I can list at least one.

Can’t think of a communist democracy, though.

Can you trust what a Pixel is doing with its 5G modem?

That is true for Signal, the FBI extracted Signal message content from Apple’s push notification system: https://www.404media.co/fbi-extracts-suspects-deleted-signal-messages-saved-in-iphone-notification-database-2/

The only thing to learn is everything is bullshit and nothing has ever been okay.

(I was thinking of the likes of Shostakovich, born 1906 died 1975, but he did symphonies, not ballets? I think of Soviet performance art and I smell orchestra pit.)

I’m all ears for ideas.

Copyright and patent are a compromise.

Society is iterative. Every work of art or technology is significantly based on prior work. So if you go to the extremes, where “I intented it, it is mine forever and passed to my children” society stalls as technoligarchs never license their patents. If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don’t.

Give us a full copy of your work, enough information to make a full copy of it. This will be held in trust by the government. We will give you full, exclusive right to monetize your invention for a couple decades, and the copy stored with the government is the stake in your claim, the proof you need to win your lawsuit. After those couple decades are over, the idea becomes public property. Our inventors get to make a living, society gets to progress.

Copyright has gone cancerous, with terms lengthened far beyond a human lifetime to benefit major corporations and not individual creators. We need to fix that.

I’ve been using Fedora GNOME on a Lenovo Ideapad Duet 3i for awhile. It’s one of those Surface-alikes, it’s electrically an x86 laptop with a wacom touch screen and the keyboard is on a floppy rubber flap hinge that can magnetically detach to give you a tablet.

Gnome itself is better than un-fucking-usable. It doesn’t really make any intuitive sense, because Gnome is developed by Species 8472. There’s a gesture to open the onscreen keyboard. Because Gnome is designed primarily for use with the keyboard, they figure you need constant access to it even if there’s no text field available on the screen. Because you’re definitely pressing Ctrl+Alt+Meta+Alt-Gr+Shift+Super+T to launch the web browser or whatever makes sense in Fluidic Space on a touch keyboard. It’s a similar gesture to the one for opening the app drawer.

All onscreen keyboards available in Linux are quarter-baked. They barely function to enter text. They’re so poorly featured they’re more of a burden than waiting until you’re back at your desk.

There are no apps in the Linux ecosystem designed for tablet use. Nothing is touch-screen friendly and it never will be. Even the wacom tablet…

So here’s another issue, the little laptop I have has a wacom tablet feature so it’s stylus compatible. Badly. Part of the issue is it’s a weird, low-volume computer. Part of the issue is it’s a 1080x1920 resolution display. Yeah, it’s native portrait mode. Everything in Linux seems to assume a native landscape mode. So you can feel the little fuckist having an argument with itself. “You mean 1920x1080.” “No, I mean 1080x1920.” So you’ll get bizarre things like the touch screen or digitizer being rotated 90 degrees from what the display is showing. Getting second or third buttons on a stylus working is a lol no, pressure sensitivity comes and goes…we’re in the land of “we made whatever the fuck we wanted to this week and we’ll give Microsoft a special shim to make it work in Windows.” and Linux never gets the equivalent of that shim, so it’ll never work right.

Back to the apps, everything is tiny and assumes you have a three button mouse and full QWERTY keyboard. Reading a PDF document sucks on a Fedora Gnome tablet. Zooming in and out and scrolling around just…sucks. Because it’s not a touch screen app reading touch inputs, it’s a desktop app reading mouse inputs that were translated from touch inputs by a zoomer freshman equipped with “Jeff Foxworthy’s touch interface to mouse interface phrasebook v0.0.6”.

I think the thing with Signal is “Oh it’s secure. Very secure. You don’t get better security in an app you can just install and use. You can get better security but you gotta like, learn shit about security.” And that makes people use Signal without learning shit about security. So they make mistakes on their end. Those mistakes range in stupidity from “handed a cop my unlocked phone” to “didn’t know Apple and Google peek at all your push notifications.”