I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.
AND YET, Pictures of Matchstick Men is a psych masterpiece.
Coldplay springs to mind. The Coldplay who released Moon Music last year is an entirely different band to the one who released Parachutes in 2000. I know of few other bands who’ve gone through such an enormous transformation. And while the newer stuff may not resonate with me the way the early stuff did, it’s fair to say that it’s worked for them.
As a teenage metalhead of the 90s, little has distressed me more than literally everything Metallica have released since St Anger.
I really, really dug Load and ReLoad. They were different to what had come before, but they still had a hard rock edge to them that I loved. Then Jason quit, and The Corporation Of James And Lars hired the formely mighty Rob Trujillo and set about their plan to record the same indistinguishable wall of noise over and over again until people stopped bothering to even pirate their music.
It was watching The Bear that made me finally appreciate that fine dining isn’t about filling yer belleh, and more about the art of food; how the senses meld together.
I’m too poor to eat at places that offer that kind of experience, but at least I now understand the point of it and appreciate why it can be so expensive.
Yeah, I have Steam installed on an SSD in my Kubuntu machine, but it’s kinda small, so I have the library pointing to an internal 2Gb HDD. It runs RDR2 flawlessly.
As a recovering Apple user, the hardware really is very, very good.
I have an M2 MacBook Air that is, quite frankly, the fastest computer I’ve ever used. Running Window in a VM within it gave me the fastest Windows computer I’ve ever used. I’ve had it two years and still get all day out of the battery. It can export a two hour AIFF recording of my radio show from Reaper in around 10 seconds. In the two years I’ve had it there have been perhaps three occasions where I wished I’d opted for a Pro instead.
I also have an iPad mini which is a ridiculously useful little tablet, when used in conjunction with my MacBook.
However, over the past year I’ve been drawing further away from their ecosystem, to the point that I mostly only use the MacBook to present my radio show because it’s fanless so doesn’t cause any noise issues when my mic’s open. And that’s as a direct result of Apple being a trash company run by corporate fuckheads who would sooner capitulate to fascists than actually fucking stand for something.
So yeah, very few of us do actually support them.
Very nice!
We had an apprentice at work a few years ago who had never seen those movies. The first was released the year he was born.
I shrivelled into a corpse as he told me that.
You can already run Graphene entirely without Play Services. You have to install them yourself after you set up. It’s just that if you do install them, they’re sandboxed.
I’m not an expert by any means, I moved directly to Graphene after 15 years of iPhones without really touching Android in between, so I mostly scrabboed about, found a path that worked and stuck to it.
But the way I use it is with Aurora to install apps from the Play Store. You can use it anonymously, or you can log in to your own Google account.
In terms of other Google services, you can install then, whereby Graphene will run them in a sandbox. You have control over how much data they can have. For me it strikes a happy balance between knowing that I have some semblance of control, but also having the convenience of things like Maps. And Google’s camera app is much much better than any of the others I’ve tried. Which is annoying.
You don’t have to run any Google stuff at all, if you don’t want to.
He also tried to execute him, but yeah, generally cool.
Vin-di-CATION!
I bought a Pixel 9 with the sole intention of putting Graphene on it. I wasn’t massively down with giving Google money, but my provider offered it to me for £30, then £30 a month on contract. Can’t argue with that.
If you have a Pixel, then GrapheneOS is the sensible choice. Not least because it currently only works with Pixels anyway.
One of the lads at work was freaking out because he had tickets to a festival on his phone, and it wouldn’t charge. I spent three minutes digging in the port with a wooden toothpick and wouldn’t you know there was fuck all wrong with his phone.
Also, Apple don’t seem to have an appetite for supporting gaming on macOS, beyond a few big name titles announced once a year to reig ite interest.
I’ll never forget buying my first MacBook in '07 and asking the guy how much it would cost to bump the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb. He told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be better off looking online for a cheaper price.
Well, in the intervening years they certainly have closed that loophole.