Yeah, my experience has been that a lot of countries whose residents tell me racism is an American problem and we should stop trying to project it onto other societies happen to live in countries with huge problems with it that just aren’t explicitly spoken about in the same terms.

I had a Brazilian friend tell me race is not all that important in Brazil and that he’s tired of Americans assuming it is. I periodically have to ask him, “Do you read Brazilian news, bro?” and send some links that make it blatantly obvious that racism is alive and well down there.

You also just get people who have bought into very pervasive attitudes in countries that justify/explain away racism when it’s encountered.

Everyone I’ve come across from NZ says it like igg, so there’s that one, too. Aussies have a weird vowel to it that I hear at times, too.

The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan

Almost all, except for the oddball that is Strange Journey, taking place in post-apocalyptic Antarctica, instead. It has a lot of elements that differ from other Mainline entries, but Atlus treated it as such and acknowledged it with the recent Mainline 25th anniversary celebrations. I really enjoyed it and think it’s worth a playthrough, but it may not be the best starting point. I also don’t know how the remake holds up, I’ve read complaints about changes online, but SMT fans can be a bit touchy about their favorite games.

SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.

I’ll disagree on this one and just add that not everyone who enjoyed 4 found Apocalypse to be that good. From what I saw, people that really just love the battle system and doing things like building out the perfect team for tackling boss rushes and insanely challenging super bosses really enjoyed it. If you go in expecting more of SMT IV’s world and story, you may well be disappointed by it. I found the characters to be unlikeable, personally, and it seemed like an unnecessary rehashing of the story. I also recall some unavoidable boss rushes in the main story that made certain areas really grindy and killed my enjoyment for a good while.

Otherwise, I would say a pretty decent write up here.

You’ll only get more comfortable with Linux once you get on it .

I see what you’re saying, but I also think it’s actually a mark in Linux’ favor that is continues to run so well on older or underpowered hardware. It’s how I really got into it, being broke and able to eke out years more life on older computers when I could ill afford upgrades. These days, I’m happy that I can get off the upgrade treadmill for longer. The most demanding games I’ve installed are the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters and Grandia. I’m not a programmer, don’t have to render graphical stuff for work, etc, so it’s pretty great that I don’t have to worry about my budget desktop being unusable in 4 years because the OS devs have made it a practical impossibility to run on older hardware. I’ve got 32GB of RAM, and my biggest threat to usability is leaving Firefox running with a ton of open tabs for weeks on end, which can conveniently be solved by closing Firefox and watching my RAM use plummet.

Not everyone is going to be a gamer, graphics designer or programmer that really needs the latest and greatest in hardware. In fact, I’d wager the majority of people won’t notice an improvement outside of a few cases. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD, <16GB of RAM to >16GB of RAM and from an older graphics card to a newer one that supports 4K are pretty easy differences to note in normal use. Those aside, I think most people would be hard-pressed to identify an objective difference in the quality of their browsing and word processing experiences. Depending on how flexible people are with adapting to different workflows, even those could be minimized, to an extent. I have a desktop I bought second hand twenty years ago that served as my main computer into and beyond my initial forays in university. It has a whopping two cores, and I think I might have managed to get 16GB of RAM into it. It’d probably suck for web browsing and wouldn’t be terribly efficient for power use, but I bet you if I reinstalled things, it would work just fine for serving up my music library via mpd, playing it with ncmpcpp and writing term papers in Auctex, same as it did back then. Even if I put an older version of Windows on it like Windows 7, I bet it would struggle to run those same programs on top of the base OS. That’s legitimately impressive, when you think about it.

This presumes one has these options available. Yeah, there are local delis in the neighborhood, but they’re slicing Boarshead, not their own cured meats. A bakery that actually bakes their own bread is a 90 minute round trip, while the local farmer’s market is over an hour each way, one day a week to get eggs if you happen to be off that day. Also, closing that list out with Coke? I remember when I worked at a grocery store in high school, a 2L bottle was routinely on sale for less than a dollar. The same bottle is over $3 now.

Perhaps it’s changed in the years since I ditched Windows, but at least for a good while, just knowing what Linux was as a concept already represented a certain degree of awareness of tech that would have me surprised if they were unable to do any sort of troubleshooting. Whether or not they decide it’s worth their time to do so was a different matter, of course.

That said, while being too hostile to new users is detrimental to broader adoption, the level of handholding that many users want just isn’t reasonable to expect from a free OS being supported by volunteers. There’s only so many times I’m going to put up with something like:

“My computer says it has an error.”

“What’s the error?”

“I don’t know, it doesn’t work.”

on and on for a dozen messages or more only to realize the message is literally right in front of them the whole time and they’re just deliberately being helpless, rather than put in any modicum of effort. After a while, I’m looking up if anyone has found a method to throttle someone via the internet the next time I see one.

Yes, you do need a certain level of independence to run Linux. I’m not sure why we make so many excuses for self-sabotage with computers, though. These are ubiquitous devices, and they’ve been around for a fair bit. I could understand someone who retired in the early 90s never having gotten into them, but it’s absurd otherwise. So many people have an attitude with computers that would be like someone who’s never looked at a cookbook, a youtube cooking channel or even done a cursory google search for a recipe coming to a stranger and saying, “Hey, I’m bad at cooking, so I don’t get all this cooking stuff, but could you teach me to make beef bourguignon? Oh, and I need you to do it for free. What do you mean, ‘chop the onions’? I told you I’m not a culinary person, I don’t know this stuff. What, I need a knife for this? Oh my god, this is so complicated, can’t you just show me an easy way?”

Even the person with the best of intentions will burn out helping with this sort of stuff, day after day, in their spare time. When it comes to tech support, many non-tech people have an absolutely insane sense of entitlement to the time and effort of strangers volunteering on the internet. Unless someone whips up an absolutely idiot-proof UI for Linux that is entirely self-explanatory, users will need to choose between putting in some amount of effort in the form of educating themselves even the slightest bit, or paying for the privilege of having someone else manage their computing and be at the mercy of that third-party whenever it makes a decision they dislike enough, or just ceases providing support altogether.

Because words have different etymological roots and different endings can convey different grammatical or linguistic information in many languages? This is just a misguided train of thought comparing the endings of iron and helium and expecting them to be the same. The examples I cited either have Latin roots, or were deliberately latinized words, while Iron comes from an Old English root. Ferrum, the Latin for iron, comes closer to the broader pattern. It’s like saying, “I have a calculator that calculates, a ventilator that ventilates, so why is it a phone and not a callator.” or something.

Aluminium at least makes sense by analogy to other elements ending in -ium, like helium, sodium, potassium, cadmium, beryllium, etc.

Well, if it isn’t the chicken of the sea, back again.

I once had someone at school declare, “Oh shit, you’re hacking stuff!”. I forget exactly what I was doing at the moment, but I either had a Latex doc open in vim, or I had ncmpcpp open. Not nearly as exciting as whatever he was imagining.

I’ve been a hiring manager, I simply don’t see the value in them for most job postings. Maybe if you’re trying to get your first job out of school, or you’re trying to pivot into a new industry, sure. If you’re applying for, say, an accountant role, you’ve been in the industry for 20 years and the position you’re applying for is largely in line with your experience, just a step up the career track or a change in volume, I don’t see the point.

Heck, I see retail jobs asking for a cover letter sometimes to be a cashier and stock merchandise. Waste of time for everyone involved, and only serves as a filter for the employer to see who’s desperate enough for a job, or passionate enough about whatever is being sold, that they’ll put up with whatever.

Honestly, cover letters are something that needs to die out for most jobs, they’re entirely pointless. 99% of the time, it just seems like they want you to rehash the contents of your resume and grovel a bit for the company. Screw that.

You want someone with 5 years experience in a role, my resume shows I have ten years doing that job, make your call if it’s good enough to interview me or not. I’m not writing an essay about how excited I am for the opportunity to count widgets at your company, and how it’s always been a dream of mine to work inventory control for a company that changes the world by ensuring stock buybacks can regularly happen by overworking and underpaying their staff.

Biggest waste of time I see recommended for applications. I don’t apply to any job that requires them.