Is that real? XD

Oh man, that's fucked up!

And reindeer are not indigenous up here, though we do have a breeder down the road 40 miles. What he does with them I have NO idea.

Yup real. Have some more.

well that was massively upsetting.

what?

Wild animals can be annoying too like when the wolves eat your dog or the boars dig up your whole garden, lawn included or an eagle takes your cat.

okay, so that never happens here XD

No, but I hear tell gollums try stealing rings from hobbitses near where you live. o.0

My favorite art store is gone. After 70 years they couldn't take the online competition and the insane rents of Southern California. What's terrible is this was a mom-and-pop store that had a lot of character and the people knew what they were selling -- most were artists themselves. It wasn't just a box store... it was an experience.

The last few years every great mom-and-pop store that I frequented in the area has shuttered. Many of them "local institutions" having been in business 40, 50, or 60+ years. Now it's just fast-food, pharmacies, and banks, and Starbucks.

Wow, finding out this place was gone is depressing.

I hear ya. One of my family's favorite restaurants closed a year or so back due to poor business after being open for 50+ years and surviving a tornado hitting part of it.

Seeing it closed then bulldozed really hit home...lemme tell ya.

It's strange, but since our society is built around shopping instead of cultural institutions and traditions, the loss of these "local institutions" (shopping ) probably hits home more than it should. Still, their loss takes away that needed familiarity and sense of stability. My wife and I got home and said "Maybe it's finally time to leave here?" It's starting to feel like it's time to go.

I think the same way...such places are familiar and "tradition" to those who know/frequent them....moreso than any chain establishment, who only seem to care about the money and not the faces behind it....and when more of such is lost one tends to feel lesser than usual.

Today, I got a kernel panic from the graphics driver running a gog installer under wine. Repeatedly, albeit inconsistently, so I guess I can't update/install Windows games for now. My system gets broken in some way on every other kernel revision, mesa update, and/or X driver update, so you'd think I'd be used to it by know. Something broke inside of me this time, though. Maybe part of it is because I have at least 5 other critical breakages going on already. Maybe it's my ongoing anger at not having hardware documentation for any of my hardware (which has mostly been true since pre-AGA Amiga, which had the schematics in the users' manual and a complete hardware reference manual separately). Mostly, though, I'm tired of not having anyone to turn to when things go wrong. I'm tired of spending most of my time maintaining my system, rather than using it. I don't know why I'm saying this here, but it's not like there's anywhere else I can complain and expect a helpful response, either. Maybe the various mailing lists, but I can't tolerate firehoses, especially given that with the death of network news, people have lost the art of writing informative subject lines and reply editing. My bug reports just get ignored or replied with "did you try our latest, which has no changes that directly address your issue?" and require way too much effort, since I usually offer some sort of patch while I'm at it, meaning I've already fixed it for myself, anyway. I have wasted my last 35 years dedicating myself to these infernal machines with nothing to show for it.

I think I'm going to just go and take a long nap. Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow, at least until the next thing breaks. It's not like I have anything else I can do any more that isn't on my computer.

Edit: instead of taking a nap, I downgraded just my kernel (5.2.0->5.1.17) and the panic disappeared. I wouldn't have guessed based on my reading of the changes in the driver, but I guess some denominator is now being initialized to zero (it was an fpu fault). I probably won't investigate further or report it, because I'm tired of it.

It sounds like you might prefer a more stable distribution that doesn't get updates that break thing. Personally, I like debian (note that buster was just released as stsble, so if you run it now the software won't be that old, though it will of course age before bullseye gets released), but other options include Ubuntu LTS and CentOS.

Using a stable distribution means that you shouldn't be getting any updates to the kernel, mesa, Xorg/Wayland (if Wayland is even used), or other important packages, that would break things or change the way things work, but you would still have a system that is well supported via security updates. This is clearly the quote of someone who should be using a stable system that just works (as opposed to, say, something like Gentoo).

Hilarious. Need I mention that when I switched from Debian to Gentoo, Gentoo was a more stable system that worked better? Or that "just working" is impossible (even for Windows, which the modern machines were made for)? I've used Slackware, Debian, RHEL (aka CentOS), Ubuntu, and Gentoo for extended periods (>2yr) at home or at work, and others for shorter periods. They are all crap. I have been using Gentoo for too long now (over a decade) to switch to some other distro without a very big incentive (I had used Debian for 6 years prior, but I had good incentive to switch, and part of that incentive is still there, so not likely to switch back).

I had a longer response typed up, but I don't really feel like saying so much.

More interface differences between similar games:

In the SaGa 3 remake, you can get text to appear instantly with the control pad. This does not work in the SaGa 2 remake, where you need to press A, which is also used to advance to the next page of dialog.

There's also some situations where the screens are flipped relative to the other game. (These are Nintendo DS games, so there's 2 screens rather than just 1.)

Also, I can already see that the SaGa 2 fan translation is not as good as SaGa 3's; there are parts where text is cut off a bit, and you can't see the multiplier of healing effects, as that is cut off. (In the untranslated game, you could see this bit of information in the translation patch, it appears as "SPRT RECOVERY X" (with the text cut off right there).) That's even ignoring translations I disagree with, like calling the magic stat SPRT.