After I parted ways with faith as a kid, the holidays have always seemed very… ‘adults who still believe in the tooth fairy’ sort of thing. I haven’t actually celebrated since I was very young, and tbh it’s either a faith-based thing (which I don’t believe in, obviously) or it’s a cash-grab for corporations to unload back stock while acting like they are actually ‘so excited for the holidays’.
While I didn’t see a decline or hesitation around my neighborhood generally the last few years, my folks have been less and less giddy as time goes on. A couple years ago they bought their tree on the 24th. It’s like the excitement has weaned and they are just doing it because ‘we have always done it’, which again imo is stupid because you are stressing yourself out (and physically hurting yourself) by decorating the house, buying a tree, etc for something that they are only doing because they feel obligated. I’d happily take an extra $100 as a gift and free up an afternoon by not having to buy, haul home, decorate, and 10 days later dispose of, a tree. Same with house decorations, the neighbors aren’t going to care if we don’t spend 2 days cursing under our breath, stapling our fingers and almost falling off the room.
I dunno, it’s just so foreign to me. Any other time if a fat man burglarized your house, ate your snacks and left mediocre gifts as compensation that you’d return the very next morning anyway, you’d be pissed. But apparently it’s totally normal because it’s cold outside now.
I have been progressively disliking Windows since 7 - I feel it peaked with Vista, tbh, I was incredibly excited for that OS and even was a beta tester and provided feedback. I hated 8 (never owned, but I worked on customer’s machines that had it and 8.1). I dove into 10 the day it went gold and it’s been a ‘oh fuck, what is this shit’ ever since. 11 I tried for a month before reverting to 10 (yay disk imaging!) and I don’t know what I’ll do when 10 goes eol in like 18 months (for this desktop anyway, see below).
I’ve used Win from 95 all the way through 11, and I started trying and in some cases using Linux distros starting back in… 03? Knoppix was my first, then Ubuntu and it’s various flavors, straight Debian, Arch and it’s many spinoffs, Fedora… I want it to work. It’s the project car in the field with “potential”. It could be great. But every time you try and work on it, you find something weird, some oddity, some gotcha, and give up and let it sit. Until next time. Rinse and repeat.
I installed W10 Enterprise LTSC a month or so ago on my ThinkPad (non-gaming), as it is supposed to get security updates for much longer, as I understand it. I tried to put Fedora on the ThinkPad, but the Snapdragon X55 modem doesn’t work, and that is the reason I got this machine, so that’s DoA. There are fixes but they are for older versions of distros and literally none of them work (again, install *nix, try to make it work, get frustrated, revert). It’s like, unless you’re in this very boring typical user status, as soon as you step beyond that, it’s nothing but frustrating. And I hate that - again, I want this to work, but it just doesn’t. I have years of similar stories, and I’m just like… I’m trapped in this cycle of wanting to enjoy a system that fights me every step, for one reason or another. So after almost two decades of it, I’m like ‘it just doesn’t work until I see proof otherwise, and I’m going to be stuck until that changes’.
Re: FH4, ms store and steam versions are incompatable, and I’m not replaying 3.5k hours to get back to where I’m at (eat shit and die, devs, it’d be easy as fuck to do but you’re little shitstains and lifting a finger that you don’t absolutely have to is far too much effort, we know). I know this because I got the steam version on release to find out that all my progress is magically gone. Thank fuck steam has refunds now.
Halo Wars 1 is on steam, but 2 is not :( (and it’s the far superior game, imo).
I’m basically looking for a system that scans my existing games, gives a “yes it all works” or “no and here’s why”, that I can use to actually migrate. Other comments deep in the tree go over this but tl;dr I’m so tired of being excited and hopeful and drop a week+ into it just for a showstopping problem and I revert to the windows system backups. I’m tired of being the guinea pig, ya know?