Agreed - working as intended, and it’s not just LDS. I’m in FL and churches here have been opposing publicly funded safety nets for my whole life, in favor of voluntary, often church-led, donations.

I have a 10 year old CPU and I think Baldur’s Gate 3 has better performance than Battletech sometimes.

Witcher 3 doesnt need leveled enemies or loot. There is already a wide enough variety of monsters and equipment to convey player progression, and the leveling only exists to make sure that Geralt is as vulnerable to human enemies at the end of the game as the beginning. That’s great! That’s the kind of world it is. I just don’t think you need constantly increasing hitpoints & a loot treadmill to keep it that way.

Moto x rocked. Last phone I ever really liked owning. My galaxy phone is just a tool, comparatively.

This was super handy, but these days you have to carefully prune your notification permissions, or it would go off all the time

Smaller, narrower phones generally. Blackberry keyboards (and slideout keyboards) in particular.

Loved the various hardware oddities of the moto Z line: a rear fingerprint scanner that was easy to use while holding the phone, and of course the magnetic attachments. Used to carry two batteries that could hot-swap, and a game controller in my bag.

For a moment there, it looked like predictors of twitters final demise were going to be proven wrong - or would at least have trouble making a clear distinction in light of how durable twitter has been. Instead Musk is about to toss brand loyalty in the trash and paint a clear line for before-musk, after-musk. No version that succeeds twitter will ever be the twitter that rose to success, but now even a layperson will know the difference . May as well be an obituary.

If it helps, I’m left-handed, so it’s grouped in a sort of arc from the bottom left corner - apps for quick one-handed use are inside the arc, and the rest is either informational or the start point for a more involved activity like web browsing. It looks ‘cluttered’ because I didn’t really lay it out as a generic or intuitive interface, but specifically to match my needs and habits. I think a home screen should be utilitarian - ‘pretty’ is for lock screens. Hope I didn’t send you down too deep a rabbit hole - Although sometimes that can be fun, so good luck!

Sure! It’s by u/jmlan on reddit, they also have an Etsy.

I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.

I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it’s a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where ‘using the computer’ is a minor task of one’s workday.

That’s ok lol, it’s just a phone! My goal is to treat it as a tool, vs just scenery and this is more configurable than the standard Android grid. I don’t think anyone is being mean, but the extreme range of opinions is pretty funny!

It’s definitely not for everyone! I like being able to group functions by size and position, vs just a bunch of app bubbles, and the cubist look is oddly satisfying.

It’s useful for me to get the whole picture, or whip open a productivity app, in one tap or swipe, so I can get back to whatever else is happening. So, on a 6.2in, everything is very readable.

Same. I even self-host it now, no getting caught up in massive data breaches for me!

For the moment it is still a massive repository of useful esoteric knowledge. I’ve stopped using it for anything active / current, but so long as it exists and is searchable I don’t see that I’ll be able to move away from accessing it entirely.

Twitter, however, is dead to me.

The sequels trend towards fewer, longer stories with a bit more characterization as compared to Foundation, but it never really stops being a series about moments in a larger history. I’d say give either prelude to foundation or Foundation and Empire a try, but odds are if those don’t grab you, none of them will.

(importantly for those who don’t know already, the publishing dates vary widely across the series - with Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation released in the 50s, and the surrounding prequels and sequels arriving decades later. This can manifest as a jarring shift in writing style if you read them in chronological order instead of publishing order.)

An interesting time to be reading Forward…. Was that because of the TV series? Are you reading them in sequence?

I’m reading Michael Crichton’s The Sphere. It’s an odd one - Crichton rarely spends a lot of time on character, but Sphere in particular is barely interested in the people at all. It’s situations and implications, a sense of mystery and dread, that the author is interested in, and he whips from one dilemma to the next so quickly its a little disorienting. that can sound like praise, but I’m not sure it is. This is an early work, and it feels rough now and then. Without strong characters, the only voice you really hear is Crichton’s, and his tech-terror-explainer ‘tone’ can be a little tough to swallow in large amounts. all the same, I’m desperate to see where it goes, even as I suspect it will all be over much faster than most of his later novels.