Plume (She/Her)

“There you are, installing Arch Linux on your computer, and all of the sudden, you’re a femboy. You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t choose this. Yet there it is.”

I could come up with a thousand reasons as to why this would never happen. Hell, I could even argue that the whole Steam Deck’s existence comes from a series of decisions that Valve made out of hatred for Microsoft. So, yeah, it’s not happening.

Still though, as a thought experiment, imagining a world where tomorrow, Steam is owned by Microsoft, it’s… interesting, to say the least. In the most horrifying way possible, but interesting nonetheless. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine anything worse happening for video games. Like to me, this is what a video game apocalypse sounds like.

You know, there is a lot that is to blame for why Firefox doesn’t get the market share that it needs, but I would blame a part on its community as well. I have never seen a community that is so reluctant to any change or basically any features being added to a product than the Firefox community.

Firefox developers:

Look! To try and make the browser easier to use for new users, we have added a pop-up remind you that hey, Firefox sync is an awesome feature of this browser. Because feature discoverability is hard.

The Firefox community five seconds later:

E N S H I T I F I C A T I O N

Mozilla isn’t perfect. Far from it. I have a lot of things to say about them and features that were never added or removed years ago that I’m still pissed off about and will continue to complain about until it is resolved, like fucking PWAs for example.

But damn, being a Firefox developer sounds really hard. Like, trying to please a bunch of people who are always complaining about the state of this browser, but also will, without fail, always complain every time you change or add features sounds fucking exhausting.

We say this every fucking year! Come on, this is getting ridiculous! Stop it! There will never be a year of the Linux desktop and if anything, this post shows why.

So much of the Linux community is utterly detached from what really matters to most users and focus on things that 80% of people won’t ever understand, care about or even use.

We focus on this and meanwhile, little quality of life features constantly get ignored when these are the real things that users will encounter and that will piss them off. They get treated as trivial. They get ignored in favor of other things.

Somebody mentioned it here. I saw it and I didn’t need them to mention it to want to say it. It’s already something that’s pissing me off. On Fedora for my Framework Laptop there is no way to adjust the scrolling speed on my trackpad which is moronically fast.

We are on the 40th release of Fedora, the 46th release of GNOME, and somehow this still isn’t baked in. I still have to go look around and use the fucking terminal to do something this basic. When some of them try Linux and will eventually push them to go back to Windows. And when users complain about this, what do we get? A bunch of elitists telling them to fuck off to go back to Windows, which I also saw as responses to this complaint about the trackpad.

Listen, Linux is an amazing project and I love it. I daily drive it. I don’t use Windows anywhere in my life. I haven’t touched OS in like two years at the very least. So many things that we are celebrating as brand new things that are finally working properly are things that already work by default on Windows and have been for years. We’re not going to convince people by mentioning that, “oh, we fixed this thing that’s been working forever on Windows.” It works on Linux now. People need more than this.

You want to know the sad truth? Here we go. We, collectively here, users of platform like Lemmy, are a vocal minority who are detached from the reality of most users. We care about ads, we care about privacy and so on, but the reality is most that people don’t. Most people won’t even notice that those things are there. For so many people, Windows is just the thing that stands between them and launching Chrome. It already works for them. There’s no reason for them to switch.

We are all way too invested in what runs on our computers and we forget that we are just us. Most people are not like us. Privacy scandals stop us from using stuff like social media and so on, but it clearly hasn’t stopped most of the world.

People heard about the shit that Meta was and is doing. Did people stop using Instagram? No, they didn’t. People know what Google is doing, how many of them switched to DuckDuckGo? A clinical moron turning the platform into a far-right haven didn’t stop most users from using Twitter.

The API bullshit didn’t stop most users from using Reddit. Sure there were protest, but I guarantee you that 99% who took part in the blackout just went back to it after. A lot of us didn’t. We left. We’re here now. But we’re still a tiny minority.

Ask a Firefox user did telling Chrome users that privacy was important ever worked? I’m sure you will get examples of it working but it’s a minority. Most people don’t give a shit and they use Chrome.

I don’t have a solution. I’m sorry, I made this long-ass comment but I don’t have much else to say. I don’t have a good solution to this problem.

Okay, I’m going to go on a bit of a rant now, and it’s nothing against this particular creator. But at some point I have to put my foot down and say: No. Fuck this video.

I don’t know who started this damn trend, but I’m so tired of these unnecessarily long videos. Your video should never be 4, 5 or even 6 hours long. What the fuck! Amazing documentaries have been made for decades and they never reached that amount of time. There is no reason why a video should be 6 hours long. I have other shit to do. At some point, just publish a book…

And I know, that sweet retention time. But you can’t convince me you had so much to say and that everything in this video is so important that nothing couldn’t be taken out. I don’t believe you. I don’t need to click on this video to know it could be two and a half hours long at best. And if really, you have that much to say? Cut that shit into a series, then!

Look, I already find it hard to watch a 30 minute video essay. Because most of the time, it doesn’t need to be that long and the person making it just won’t get to the damn point.

Like, let’s say I’m watching a video about a game. If I’m watching this, chances are I already know the game. Or at least, just give some brief context. You don’t have to “but actually… whats’s a video game?” me and then to go into thé whole fucking history of video games and tell me about how life was for the developer when they was a sperm in someone’s balls…

I’ll say this though, I used to make videos. I would write, record and edit the whole thing on my own. So a six hours long project? Yeah, I respect the hell out of that. But at some point, you need to think of the viewer. It’s unreasonable to ask someone to take this much time to do anything in their day. Cut it into multiple parts, I know chapters are a thing but YouTube remembering where I stopped watching is far too inconsistent for that.

It’s almost a guarantee that she is going to be raped multiple times in a men’s prison. And while you could say that she is supporting the people who make this happen, leopards eating faces and all that, and therefore, had it coming… no one deserves this. Being principled means standing for your enemies when it’s necessary, even if you know they wouldn’t do the same for you.

Does she deserves prison? I mean… I guess, if we think prison is good, then yes? But that’s a whole other debate. But I’m seeing it like this: On one hand: It’s a Trump supporter dipshit who stormed the fucking capitol and is getting what’s coming to them, fuck them. But on the other hand: It’s a trans woman being thrown in a men’s prison and is therefore going to be raped multiple times and/or be forced to be stuck in solitary the whole time. And that is not ok, at all.

And like every other DRM, it’s just going to be something that the people who bought the game and play it unaltered will be forced to deal with in one way or another… while those who modify the game, emulate or pirate it, won’t. I love DRMs. Nothing like feeling like a sucker for actually buying the game and not cracking it.