That’s actually better. I assumed she was writing a prompt.

No, what you mentioned is just one of the options. They literally go over “bare metal” installs even if it’s just a skim. I always find their article funny because of that.

Does it really freak them out?

I think you might be underestimating how some people type really slowly when given a full sized QWERTY keyboard, numpad and all.

Then again the one limiting factor of phone keyboards (touch or physical) is that they’re designed for two thumbs, instead of just whatever fingers happen to be closer to the button you want. Though I’ll admit I do miss when Nokia, BlackBerry, etc, came up with unique solutions for how to get a small physical keyboard attached to a phone.

All. The. Time.

I’m not a very good speaker despite how well I write English (I just sound stiff and sometimes I just freeze up when I forget a word), but I know it better than my native language. Once I wanted to describe deer in a phone call, but I forgot what the word was in the native language… Cue me being clueless for a good few minutes before I figured it out.

Might be an unpopular opinion but

In the late 2010s or early 2020s, I wrote a short story in the Notes app on a Nokia C3-00. It was one of the budget offerings with a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi support, and it was pretty awesome for the time, and still is to an extent.

By that point I cycled through a few touchscreen phones beginning from tiny Samsung junkers to mid-range Chinese phones we would have called “phablets” a few years back and got used to touchscreens. I’m typing this right now on a touchscreen and it’s pretty nice, yeah autocorrect is wrong some of the time but it is solid most of the time, and I can type really fast. Typing on a phone with a small physical keyboard was eye opening in a way. It felt slow, and I had to actually put some effort into pushing the buttons to make them register. In all fairness, it could be the age of the phone making the buttons stiff.

Something else is how the labels on the buttons eventually wear out. If this was a physical keyboard I could just replace it, but a small panel of keys built into a phone? Yeah not really replaceable.

I get that all those very tall, very flat slabs of plastic and metal can get boring very quickly, but I guess because there’s not so much more left to perfect that form factor.

I’m almost 30 for fuck’s sake, I know it’s not rational

But I have this impulse go to a barber like that. It’s just a kind of refreshingly different vibe I guess?

Only if there are free and fair midterms. If they’re not canceled, they’ll be neither free nor fair. I live in a country where an authoritarian regime was voted in. Do you know what happened next? None of the elections were canceled, but all of them stopped mattering, they became circus shows that people only attend by force or to receive a not even that good reward for it. MAGA knows you want to pull them out of power and they’ve got the means to ensure their rule continues.

I wish Americans would just STOP waiting for the ballot box to right the wrongs. The time to do something is now.

I’ll raise you one and say I’d rather pirate games than use either of them. At least there’s GOG, itch, Zoom-Platform, putting aside games that never come there until a decade later.

How’d it get enshittified? Last I used it, it was essentially the same ol’ reliable one, but some things randomly break when you switch the launcher on HyperOS.

Yeah, no. EGS is a piece of shit DRM launcher, just like Valve’s own piece of shit, but it has the Epic logo. Heck, they even have free games and not even that is enough to kill the vitriol, so yeah it’s just “no steam no buy” all over again, or Steam would also be chided for many of the same things - which would be very dandy if it happened, after all, neither of them respect us enough to own our games without having to phone them home first.

I swear, the whole outrage over EGS can only be plainly and simply explained as the stupid “no steam no buy”. When a game remains exclusive to this DRM launcher made by an American corporation for 50 years, all is well in the world, but when the game becomes exclusives to that DRM launcher made by that other American corporation for a year, suddenly all hell breaks loose. They’re both the same toxin! Just blind devotion to a company that only did very pro-consumer things like make lootboxes really popular and making it hip and cool to give up ownership of your games.

For the record, the Tim should really just shut up. Or really, any American wealthy CEO for that matter, their grand standing over freeze peach isn’t worth the oxygen required to produce it instead of just… not enabling CSAM like normal platforms do?