a very good dog

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy – as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother’s grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It’s insane.



  • The sad thing is like, it’s an INCREDIBLY mature piece of software. It’s well regarded for a reason. But if a piece of software requires that I fight with it to get it to behave how I want, that maturity has zero value at all. It kind of feels like a microcosm of Linux itself like 10-15 years ago, when I was tinkering with it in middle and high school. It’s functional, but it asks you as a user to change how you think about using something like it in the first place while also forcing you to make concessions that seldom seem worthwhile.

    And if Linux at large can get there, with things like proton and flatpak and Wayland and mature desktop environments and whatever else, gimp can too. But it seems like it’s got a contributor base of people that like it’s weird eccentricities, and take the UX development companies like Adobe and affinity (now canva) have invested and just shirked it on principal. And like, I get having an aversion to those sorts of companies/projects/developments, there’s a lot of dark patterns there that are concerning. But I also feel like the kind of Linux user that defends and possibly enjoys GIMP in its current state is content fighting with their machine and the software on it, and forgets that there’s value in taking joy in interacting with your computer. Good UI and good UX are implicitly valuable (not to mention the accessibility benefits, but that’s a whole different conversation), and I feel the FOSS space forgets all of that completely. It’s a shame.


  • The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the “app” paradigm – landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don’t understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard


  • the UI for GIMP is so horrifically bad that I basically refuse to use it. Not like, on principal or anything, if it improves i’d be happy to give it a shot, but because every experience I’ve had with it has been pretty immediately negative, and finding solutions to problems I have seems more effort than its worth. I want gimp to be good, it’s a mature piece of software with a lot going for it, but it also feels like its design is kind of up its own ass, in a sense? It’s weird.





  • I really enjoyed the original, and this remake is fantastic for bringing it to a new audience, but as much as I love seeing something I enjoyed get a new coat of paint there’s still something… Missing, from this adaptation I suppose? Not that it’s bad or it’s missing anything through any fault of its own, it’s just that something about spice and wolf is greatly benefitted from the warmth of older animation. I do prefer the new voice acting though, the performances feel more nuanced and true to the characters. It’s an interesting give and take

    In any case this episode is as charming as always but it’s definitely making me consider medium of animation more than I really have watching other shows.










  • Bitwarden because it’s super convenient, as well as Youtube Premium because I watch a ton of youtube. I also leech off my family’s spotify premium subscription, so I don’t pay for that personally but it is a subscription service I use. On top of that, I pay for a debrid service for pirating media since I’m sick and tired of the streaming service economy, which has been an excellent investment. And lastly I do pay for XBox Game Pass, though once I beat persona 3 reload I’m probably cancelling that.

    Once I find work I’ll probably subscribe to proton because I’d like to move a bit more away from google, but I’m not really in a rush to do that given my use of youtube premium and such. Kind of a longer term goal.