Haha! My definitions are arbitrary now that I think about it. Tons of gray area, since it’s all fiction to begin with.

My definition of ‘soft’ would be any magic system that lacks exact rules or a concrete cause and effect relationship with scale. Flexible power from a vague connection to a god, planet of origin, or elemental source would be soft. Even softer if there are dozens or hundreds of vague sources with unpredictable effects.

Specific, quantifiable effects from a concrete source (a specific spell, ritual, or x amount of a substance) would be hard.

Malazan Book of the Fallen is fairly soft due to complexity and overlapping systems. A dozen or so themed sources of magic(warrens), several older sources of power (holds) and several powers specific to certain species.

Some characters can access several of these sources and one character semi-accidentally creates a supplemental system that might be more rules based. Geographical location matters and the warrens/holds are also physical realities separate from the main one with their own hazards.

Also, there are mysterious elder entities and there’s always the possibility of ascending to godlike powers through a parallel system of high houses roughly aligned to warrens and mysterious buildings but defined by an in-universe tarot deck that can be altered…

Thanks! Your post is how I got a head start on this!

If the lessons that I’ve learned about lightbulb replacement are applicable, then the nationality of the developers on the bus will impact the answer to your question.

I wish you luck with your campaign!

The sanctions apply to the BSDs too. The only difference with sanctions that I could imagine would be if one of the BSDs had (through happenstance or other factors) a lower starting proportion of Russian developers relative to Linux. If that were the case, then the impact of sanctions on that BSD would be proportionally smaller.

I saw that, too. I haven’t had a lot of headaches with MTP using my Android devices, but I’m always surprised at how there always seems to be a plan to make my devices worse than they already are.

No argument here. It is insane to me that if I want content that isn’t locked into a particular ecosystem, I have to seek out public domain material or pick from the small subset of books that is sold DRM-free books in an open format. For anything else, money can’t buy flexibility. For most books, the only options for digital are accepting the DRM, waiting until copyright expires (good luck with that one), or privateering with out a letter of marque.

Very user-hostile, but very unsurprising.

Kindle hardware can be very nice, but almost every software decision is designed to keep users within their walled garden.

No epub support, no third party app support, no ability to load non-store audio, and now this. What a waste. These things could be so much more useful than they are.

Mercator k55k knives can be had for less than $50 on Amazon. Many Opinels are available on Amazon for under $20. Great knives if they’re what you’re looking for.

Woof. The logo was always a hint about what they were planning to do to the customers. First the K and the G came for the letter o…and I did nothing because I am not the letter o.

I’m lucky I manually ran a few jobs before I started using rsync in scripts. When I didn’t think things through, I saw the output in real-time. After that, I got very careful about testing any scripts and accounting for minor changes in setup.

For me, it was getting a handle on rsync for a better method of updating backup drives. I was tired of pushing incremental changes manually, but I decided to do a bit of extra reading before making the leap. Learning about the -n option for testing prior to a sync has saved me more headaches than I’d care to enumerate. There’s a big difference between changing a handful of files and copying several TB of files into the wrong subfolder!

I’ve never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.

I’m typing this reply on an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My experience is very positive, but with some caveats. Some positives, some background to contextualize the positives, and some negatives.

Positives: Great screen, nice battery life when in use, fast, runs the programs that I use on a daily basis for work. Good support for the specific hardware that I have. I enjoy using it as my go-to laptop. Fedora isn’t something that I use on any of my other linux boxes, but I didn’t have much trouble setting it up and it works well with my other devices. Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium, every DE and window manager that I’ve bothered to test - they work fine. I’m currently running Sway with no issues, KDE worked fine too. Sound, bluetooth, camera all work. Again, my 9-to-5 day job is fully doable from this computer and I enjoy using it.

Background: I’ve been tinkering with Raspberry Pi devices for years and I made do with a PI 4 as a daily driver for a few months once. That experience helped me to focus on native linux solutions that didn’t depend on WINE or x86-specific programs. I can’t remember every decision that I made during that time, but I definitely changed my workflow a bit, started doing more in the terminal, and started using programs that were less resource-heavy. That carried over to how I use other devices. I also don’t game much.

Negatives: Gaming is limited on this hardware. I can play minetest, tuxkart, and some light emulation. That’s about it, but I don’t mind. If you’re trying to run windows programs, you’ll be out of luck. My linux experience on this laptop prior to the Asahi shift to Fedora was a bit buggy because it was a beta version and sound wasn’t supported(other than bluetooth). Everything works fine now, but my understanding is that this is very model-specific. I would probably be having a bad time on newer mac hardware. Power management is so-so and it depends heavily on your choice of desktop environment. If you close your lid and don’t plug in the laptop, you might find out that the battery is dead when you try to use it a day later. No multimonitor support - the USB-C ports are more limited in function than they are when running MacOS.

Also, my only experience is with a niche distribution, so bear that in mind. For me, Asahi has been excellent but don’t expect to be able to run your favorite distro on the hardware. Time will tell if the progress made by Asahi will lead to greater support for Apple Silicon by other distributions, and time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project. I preferred the Arch version, but I had no real choice but to jump to Fedora when the developers did. Not a big deal for me.

Hahaha! It was a good bet on my part.

You clearly haven’t met all of my friends.

Fair point, but I still need a quick way to tell people about upcoming funerals. On the plus side, I’m between the wave of friends’ baby photos and the wave of grandbaby photos. Which is nice.

I don’t integrate it with anything else, but facebook remains my best option for getting current contact info for anybody from my past. Even after the enshittification, it remains an effective Rolodex. Rolodex…I am old.