It’s going okay so far, but my area is forecast to have highs in the 100s later this week and I’m not sure how that’s gonna affect me, since I only really know how to dress in layers for work (I’m a trans woman working an office IT job where I do occasionally step outside or carry computers from one bldg to another)

Like, I’m gonna be wearing a thin cardigan over a tank top and I know I’m gonna sweat. Oh, and my hair instantly goes frizzy when I sweat. I’m dreading it.

absolutely! I mostly only play older games for this reason. I absolutely love some of my old N64 and GBA games because I can clear them in a day or two. Even the older RPGs like LoZ:OoT seem a lot smaller than the open-world stuff out there today, and I actually like that I can learn the entire world and know almost everything about them. They’re finite and I think that’s a plus. Eventually, I’m either gonna get bored and move on, or I’m gonna clear a game. The first feels like defeat, like I did something wrong. The latter feels refreshing and mints the game as a nostalgic memory in my mind; I still look back at the day I finished Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with such bittersweetness; I was sad that it was over, but really proud and happy to have reached the conclusion. And I think you miss that with infinite content, and open worlds. And I also did miss things in my first playthrough of LoZ:OoT but it only took me a couple more (years apart, so nostalgia definitely washed over me every time!) playthroughs to catch them.

I think open-world games can be really fun: games like Minecraft are great examples of that, but the emphasis there isn’t on a story being told to you, but on you creating whatever you want. You’re not as scared to miss things because you have all the time in the world to explore and not everything is gonna be up your alley (some people don’t even “beat” the game, or even go to the Nether or End). But I don’t think I’d like a Minecraft where you have a definite Legend of Zelda-style story scattered out across the infinitely-generated landscape. That’s just not for me.

Yes, kind of. However, I was raised Pentecostal and strictly conservative, and have lingering religious trauma that I’m working through. For a while (from my teens through my mid-twenties) I described myself as atheist. However, I got into witchcraft and the occult a few years ago as kind of a time-waster hobby, not really sincerely believing in it at first but just having fun with it, and that grew into learning about other religions and becoming genuinely curious about spirituality and religion. Now I’d describe myself as a Unitarian Universalist. I’ve still never been to a Unitarian Universalist church in-person because there’s not one near me, but I attend online stuff occasionally and whole-heartedly love the way they do religion. And I feel welcomed there despite all of the things that would have gotten me dirty looks at any of the churches I grew up in. In terms of belief, I’d say I’m agnostic and I like to “put on” and “take off” beliefs (or “suspend disbelief”), which I got from doing chaos magic. I think magic and ritual helps me organize and make sense of my mind more than anything else… if anything, just having a meditation and journaling habit has helped my mental health, especially since i re-started those habits after starting my gender transition. And yeah, it also maybe helps with everything else gestures to the world at large…

And yeah, I just realized this is the most I’ve talked about my spirituality to anyone since going down this road. One of my big things is that my spirituality is a very personal thing and I keep it mostly to myself. Nothing against people who proselytize (I’ve come to understand and forgive people who sincerely believe they’re saving my life by “ministering” to me, like some of my older relatives who genuinely care about me and who are probably happy to hear me say “yeah, I’m kind of getting into a church now”) but I don’t feel compelled to tell people about my shit because I definitely have no answers. That’s my whole thing, I have no answers. I’m just kind of reading everything and trying everything, for no purpose other than to just understand people and myself a little better. And maybe it works for me, but I also know folks who definitely don’t want or need religion and that is 1000% okay, and I hope I don’t disturb them. So I only really speak of my stuff when people ask.

even just an older version of Windows or Linux

Maybe this is obscure enough: I used Debian PPC on an old Apple PowerBook G4 back in 2011 to get me through my last semester of community college. My main laptop had finally died (The CPU had overheated, it was an old hand-me-down that barely ran XP before I loaded linux on it, and its fan had always ran hot). I found the PowerBook on ebay for 30 bucks and decided, after 10 minutes of research, to give it a shot. Of course, MacOS on it was a no-go, as it no longer got updates and most software for MacOS was no longer packaged for PPC. It was my first experience using a different/non-mainstream architecture, and it was rough.

The main things I needed, like Firefox and Libreoffice, worked well enough. I got gameboy and N64 emulators working, which was enough gaming for me at the time. My main issues were getting Flash to work just so that I could use one website our college used for one of our classes. I remember spending hours trying to get a third-party Flash plugin working (I think it was called “pepper” and having all kinds of trouble with it. I also remember just wanting to watch a movie or TV show in VLC, and although VLC worked like a champ, there were some formats/codecs that would just lag hellaciously on it, and when I researched, the answer I found was that they just didn’t play nice with PowerPC architecture (or more precisely, the drivers for the onboard graphics for this PowerPC cpu… some combination of it all) and that nobody really wanted to work on the issue. Because hardly anyone was using PowerPC on their regular computer by then.

Every time I went to install something, there was a 50/50 chance that it wasn’t available in the repos. I’d hear about new software coming out - the linux community seemed to really be growing then, and ElementaryOS was taking off and with it, a lot of modern-looking linux apps and stuff built on Electron was coming out - but it was usually not out there for PPC. I couldn’t use Spotify, I don’t even think the web version worked. I couldn’t play Minecraft (lol I think the laptop would’ve died if I’d even attempted that). I’d grown fond of Sublime Text Editor (look, i’ve grown up a lot since then) and it wasn’t available. I was basically limited to FOSS apps that someone, anyone, had been kind enough to build and put in the repos for my silly little dying architecture. Or FOSS apps that I was brave enough (with my limited linux know-how at the time) to try to compile (I think I compiled mupen64plus for it? I think that was the only one I had to do)

So yeah, it was a pain. But mostly you could use regular GNU/Linux with your core apps and any FOSS stuff without issue.

Oh, and Youtube didn’t really work, until they switched to the HTML5 player. Then it worked, but would lag on any resolution over 480p.

I upgraded to a Thinkpad X60 that summer when I finally landed a job and to date, that Powerbook is the worst computer I ever owned. (I didn’t mention them since this is a post about Operating Systems, not hardware, but it had hardware issues: it was heavy, the screen flickered if it wasn’t at a certain position, it got incredibly hot when charging, and the fans were noisy as hell).

I still think it’s fun to run linux on something other than x86 - I play around with ARM linux on other devices, including Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS on an old phone. But for my desktop linux experience, I think I’ll stick to x86 from here on out, thank you very much.