I have a tortoise and he’s great. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them for everyone, but if you like reptiles they have a lot going for them. Calm, quiet, low maintenance, vegetarian (no crickets, mice etc.) and have a lot of personality. If you take care of them they can be a friend for life.

I like to take mine into the yard in an enclosure and chill in a hammock nearby. He even likes to cuddle into the crook of my neck on the couch. Not exactly the most active pet, but his calming energy helps my anxiety. When he’s splooted, basking under a heat lamp I am almost envious.

I don’t have experience with MSI recently, but I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I’ve seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.

I used the communicator chime for a long time, but these days I’m basically permanently in do-not-disturb. My phone only makes sound when a close contact calls, or for a timer/alarm. Anything else can wait.

Intel has been struggling overall, and lately has been letting some of its Linux engineers go. Nothing absolutely fundamental has been affected yet (AFAICT) but I guess Clear Linux didn’t make the cut.

It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they’re separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what’s up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.

I love that song and yeah, nailed it.

I’ll bite. Austin, TX circa 2007. Sublet. Moved my (now) wife and one year old into a one bedroom, one bathroom house the size of a shoebox. Cooled by a single window unit, had to steal wifi, and roaches crawled in through the gaps under the doors.

Ironically, it’s now a fond memory. First place I lived with my new family, it was just for the summer, we had cool neighbors and were like 200 feet from a bunch of really cool local businesses.

By myself, probably Apollo 13 - I used to watch it like once a day over the summer. With my dad, we watched Predator every time my mom had to work late.

It’s more of an issue with torrent seeding. You need to be able to accept incoming connections to seed, so you need a VPN/router to allow incoming traffic to a certain port to reach your torrent client.

So, not a problem for leeching, but if you are trying to meet ratio requirements, could be a big problem.

Not something I did, but someone did for me just yesterday that was very nice.

I was driving home through rural-ish Texas and had just stopped at a bakery to get some coffee and absentmindedly left it, along with my wife’s favorite water bottle, on the roof of the car when I started to pull out.

Guy in a pickup across the street pulled into the turn lane and stopped in front of me (not a busy road) rolled down his window and pointed over the roof of his car.

I was super confused for a moment, but got the picture and was able to pull off again and grab the water bottle. The coffee was KIA.

Anyway, thanks to that random stranger.

Probably due north.

Not sure it’s really relevant to OP, but I’ll vouch for Moonlight. I use it to stream from my beefy desktop to my laptop/Linux tablet that both have weak little integrated GPUs. It’s not perfect, need a strong internet connection, but it’s 100x better than Steam’s integrated version and for remote desktop access too.

A handy tip is that you can fake second monitors without any extra hardware so you don’t have to give up a connected screen either.

Hey, that’s great. I’m not sure it’s a way to reach full communism, but good on them.

Perfect example. Insurance is an entire industry of blood sucking middle men producing absolutely nothing.

Good luck to your friend. Sorry they have to support a useless leech corporation instead of, you know, paying that money to actual workers.

It’s really hard to generalize about leftist groups. The communists that feel this way have formed co-ops, or are cooperating with anarchists to do something like syndicalism (focused on unionizing existing businesses).

But the methods to start and grow businesses in a capitalist country inherently rely on acting like a capitalist. Getting loans requires a business plan that makes profit, acquiring facilities and other businesses requires capital. Local co-ops exist because they can attract members and customers that value their co-opness, but it’s very hard to scale that up to compete at a regional level. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to view it as an engine for vast change.

Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.

I thought it was great, premise and execution.

Use the ‘scaled’ sort for your frontpage. Helps keep the smaller communities you sub to from getting totally drowned out by some of the larger ones.

It only looks that way if you’re dumb. There are only two types of society in this world: racist, and racist but trying to deal with it.

It’s why I have a lot of schadenfreude for Sweden/Scandinavia as well. Enlightened multicultural social democracy for everyone… Until migrants show up with the wrong race/religion then suddenly a fascist contingent of your population materializes and there’s a “security crisis”

Platoon is my favorite as well. Love the contrasting cultures of the soldiers, think it really reflects where America was at on the war (old school, liquor drinking “patriots” backing violence vs. pot smokers just trying to get home alive). Oliver Stone is also an actual Vietnam vet too, Charlie is basically a self insert if I remember correctly.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.