tomkatt

Just be sure to get the edge release if you care about gaming or have current (like newer than 2021) hardware. Mint's main release is on an old kernel, 5.15 I think. Mint edge release is running kernel 6.5, which is from earlier this year.

Face it, they can do whatever they want with your computer and you’re powerless to stop them.

Not my computer. They can't do shit if it's not installed.

This is why you should not trust them regarding Recall. They will not let it go. It will be forced on you eventually.

“The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of ~~mishandled~~ manhandled customer service.”

Just a typo.

It's a deeply complex game dating back thousands of years. It's extremely compelling, difficult to learn, and you could spend a lifetime mastering it. I can understand why the church fears it. Who has time for a sermon when you could be studying Tsumego and learning Joseki?

Microsoft will just enable it via an update once all the fervor dies down. They haven’t abandoned the plan, and won’t, not while your data is pure profit for them.

Hell with them, no more Windows PCs in my home. I’m sick to death of everyone and their mother trying to both advertise to me and sell my data without my permission and at zero benefit to me.

But Snyder is an artiste! 🙄😒

Thanks, had no idea. I initially read it so long ago that “shadow libraries” weren’t much of a thing (if they existed at all yet?) and actually wrote my own scraper in Python to download it.

Worm is exactly the kind of chaos that would exist with supers. Attempted mitigation and control, but those with selfish interests and villains often coming out on top, much like those in power and wealth in the real world. WtC has a lighter perspective to tell its story, but Worm is straight up “what if the most horrible person you can think of could also kill with a glance/touch/etc. With no consequence?” And worse. Here there be monsters, quite literally, and humanity is losing the battle.

It’s an absolutely incredible series and I’ve read the whole thing twice at this point, but it’s often very depressing, and the bad can be really bad.

If you want to read Worm there are web scrapers online that can convert it to an ebook format for easier reading, rather than needing to browse the parahumans site.

I really like Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series for this. Hero teams are governmentally regulated, and state or federally mandated, and have to work with local authorities whenever possible, often acting as first responders specifically regarding super villain events. They’re required to plan and mitigate collateral damage. Heroing is literally their job and they have standard and on-call hours, as well as patrols and the like.

Socially heroes and villains are treated kind of like celebrities, and there are sort of unwritten rules about no killing, and no going after civilian identities or people’s families outside of costume as that’s grounds for both villains and heroes to look the other way regarding the aforementioned “No killing” rule.

With the knowledge that villains are hard to impossible to fully stop, emphasis exists on imprisonment and rehabilitation, and over the course of the series some villains and heroes end up changing sides.

There’s one hero in the series who is a federal agent with the ability to replicate clones of himself and is embedded in most hero teams, as well as being secret service, generalized security, and informant as all clones have the knowledge of the rest. Nobody he works with outside of the President of the U.S. even knows how many of him are out there.

On top of this, besides the typical hero teams, there are more “B grade” teams that are not specifically super heroes but act as emergency responders and construction crews for both hero events and fights as well as generalized incidents, and things like heroes without borders that act as global humanitarian aid on a volunteer basis, similar to Doctors Without Borders.

Vigilantes are frowned upon, and can end up liable for crimes as they’re not sanctioned to use their powers to fight.

It’s a very interesting series, and deals with a lot of “real world” consequences of super heroics, including long term injury and death, PTSD and other trauma, and the impact of things like super powered terrorism and extremist groups, as well as anti-super sentiment.

——

Besides that series, I’d also recommend the web serial “Worm” by Wildbow (John McCrae), but that one’s a doozy, both in terms of content (it only goes from bad to worse and things never really get better) and length (it’s absurdly long, maybe equivalent in length to 15-20 full length novels, broken up into fairly long chapters and sections).

The fact this is even necessary makes me want to shit a brick.

"Do you want to make an online account?" No. "Okay, please set up your local account."

That should be it. And honestly, even that's egregious to me. Signing into online bullshit should be opt-in, not opt-out. Thank goodness I don't use Windows anymore, finally wiped the last Windows machine in my house this past week.

Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?

My plex server is headless, running Almalinux. Doesn't take much, I have it running on a very old NUC8 (NUC8i5BEK). The box is also running Asset UPnP and AudioBookshelf server too.

Personally, unless the server will also be the client (as in, you'll be watching from the server box and not a streaming box, tablet, TV app, etc), I'd skip any GUI and just install it from the terminal, save your resources for what matters. Desktop environment is pointless for a server machine.

If you were buying a cheap machine to handle it today, I'd probably recommend a Beelink (or other) mini-PC with a Ryzen 5000 series chipset (5500u/5560u models with 16GB RAM can be found very cheap, generally $215-$240 new these days). The 5000 series in particular are very power efficient for something you likely will leave on all the time, and have both 6c/12t and 8c/16t variants, though the 8 core ones will probably be more like $300-$320.

Whatever you buy, if it comes pre-installed with Windows, delete the OS. I wouldn't trust preinstalled on these boxes, and in any case Microsoft is getting really sketchy with this whole Windows Recall thing anyway.