I sort of like that on my ThinkPad though. It reminds me of the defiance shown in liberating the laptop from its grim past life.

I respect this.

People like you are why I finally got round to playing the original Hollow Knight (Thank you; I’ve been having a lot of fun)

I really like the world exploration. The world is pretty big, and it’s common to come across an obstacle that you can’t get past. I like the feeling of spending a few minutes trying to assess whether there’s a way past, and then going off adventuring elsewhere, eventually finding something that makes you go “ooooh, that’s how I’m meant to get past that earlier place”. I like that it really rewards exploration. There’s a lot of hidden stuff, but it’s not overly opaque — there are usually lots of clues that help you to find secrets.

The open world also makes bosses easier. I’m not great at bosses, so quite often I will get bored of trying against a difficult boss and go elsewhere. There’s nearly always more places to explore, and possibly find things that will make things easier.

I also love how well tutorialized the game is. When you get a new ability, the level design in the section after that helps you to learn first hand how that ability works, so even though the literal tutorial bit is little more than "Press [button] to [use ability], you come away with a good understanding of what that new ability will allow you to do.

I’m also typically not keen on platformers, but this game scratches a different itch for me

I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).

The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.

The OP concerns Hollow Knight — the screenshot is of a post that’s 10 years old

I agree. It can be easy to feel disheartened by a shitty comment (or many), and sometimes the bad outnumbers the good. However, it is useful to try to mentally filter out the mass of negativity because many of those are quick, lazy comments that say more about the commenter than the topic at hand.

Even though the sample of comments that you include in your comment are all short comments, I’d be inclined to view those with more weight, because it’s just a part of reality that it’s far easier to be negative and harmful than to be sincere and enthusiastic. There’s more effort and care into those short comments than someone just being negative

That sounds like it must’ve been rough. I’m sorry for your loss.

Very cool.

Got any plans for this coming Halloween?

“Some people say 100% cotton thread breaks easier than blend or polyester. So far I haven’t had any bad experience with cotton threats though.”

Cotton thread is just objectively weaker than polyester thread, but I’ve never had that be an issue while sewing.

And in terms of the thread tearing when it’s sewn into a seam, sometimes that’s a feature, not a bug: sometimes it’s better to have the seam blow out and need to be resewn than for expensive or delicate fabric to tear. The right thread for the situation is always relative

Seconding someone’s advice that kits are a bit rubbish. The only things you need are needle and thread. Start with a multi pack of needles, and observe how they’re different. Different needles may differ by: the thickness of the needle; whether the tip is sharp or blunt; how large the eye of the needle is; how long the needle is. Different needles will have different roles, but it’s so easy to get bogged down in complexity, so just get an assortment and discover as you go. Part of learning is building tacit knowledge around what the right tool for the job is, so just give it a try and feel free to try other needles to see how they feel. Personal preference matters…

My main advice on hand sewing needles is to invest in high quality ones, because they’re much nicer to use and last longer. For perspective on what counts as “high quality”, my current ones that are my favourite cost me £4.20 for a pack of 6. That’s expensive compared to a supermarket multi pack, but not excessively so. These ones were particularly fancy, by my standards (Clover Black Gold), but they’re a useful benchmark as being about as fancy as you can really get. John James is another good brand. If these aren’t readily available where you are, don’t sweat it — just use this as a benchmark to see what the rough equivalent is where you are.

A pin cushion is useful for storing needles temporarily, but you don’t need to buy this. You can make one as an early project with some small swatches of fabric and some scrap paper stuffing.

I strongly recommend a thimble for anyone who is going to do significant amounts of hand sewing, because it makes it much easier to build a rhythm and sew neat and fast. It feels clunky at first, but once you practice, it makes things far quicker and easier. Unfortunately, most people’s experience of thimbles is of ill-fitting ones that probably came in some kit. You need one that fits comfortably on your middle finger without falling off or squeezing too right. A simple metal thimble will do, and they’re cheap, but it can be a faff to find the right size. The sizing is sort of standardized, and usually printed/engraved/debossed on the thimble, so you can use that to ballpark if you have some ill-fitting thimbles around. Otherwise, it’s best to go to a craft store and try poking your finger in some thimbles to find one that fits.

I don’t have good recommendations about thread. I got started using generic machine sewing thread, which you’re not meant to do, because it’s worse and harder to use. I find it hard to tell though, because by the time that I got specific hand sewing thread, I had enough skill that I had my own snobbish preferences and specific projects requirements. You don’t need a multipack of thread though, because that’ll be more likely to be crappy. Pick a colour that matches most of the stuff you wear/will be repairing (for me, it’s black). Also get some thread in a contrasting colour, because sometimes that’s useful (such as for temporary lines of stitching). You probably want some cotton thread, and also some polyester thread. In general, repair like with like: so polyester thread for synthetics, and cotton thread for cotton or other naturals. Beeswax can be nice for reducing the friction of the thread, but that’s not super necessary.

I worry that my advice may overcomplicate things, when that’s the opposite of what I want to convey. If there’s any recommendation I could give you, it’s to just get something and start. Hell, if you feel overwhelmed by how granular this is and are at risk of not diving in, then go for a kit if it helps — just don’t spend too much and know that the lesser quality will give you a worse experience. However, the most important thing is to just get started. You can upgrade your stuff or buy specifics as and when you need them, or you feel you’ve outgrown your existing tools.

You will botch repairs and need to redo them. Sometimes you will make it worse than what you started with, but that’s part of learning. However, the sooner that you start to tackle the simpler repairs, the sooner you’ll have the proficiency to be making all sorts of repairs and alterations. I give you this advice as someone who accidentally became proficient in sewing: I dove in and spent a long time being mediocre, and I still feel mediocre at it, but people regard me as being quite skilled. There’s no cheat code, but to take at crack at it.

I keep trying to convert my friends to using Firefox mobile for this reason. I generally try not to evangelise too much, but I have so many friends who keep complaining about ads when browsing the internet on mobile, and this would literally solve their problem. One friend complained about ads so frequently that they ended up getting irked at me telling them the problem was solvable. Our unhappy compromise was that I would stop telling them to use Firefox and uBO if they stopped complaining about this so much in front of me.

I respect their choices, but by God, I’m baffled by them. I get that inertia makes it hard to make switches like this, but when you’re spending so much time complaining about how much effort it takes to use the internet on your mobile, why would you not just solve the problem?

I had that error a couple of times, and it inexplicably resolved itself. Try having the person join again (which may require a new invite). I think only 1 out of 4 members of my family were able to join without that initial error message. This was back when Steam had just switched how they handled family sharing, so I assumed it was just an implementation bug of some sort. One of my friends took three attempts before they could join, but it worked ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Though I will note that steam family sharing no longer works if the person is located in another country for the purposes of Steam billing region (so my Norwegian friend could not join my UK family)

I didn’t finish this article because I’m procrastinating before a minor deadline, but I read enough to realise that my prior bias against no-code software was excessively strong and largely based in gatekeepy ideals; I am a weirdo who loves to tinker, and I earnestly believe that many of the people who don’t consider themselves techy could find joy in this path if not for platform capitalism, bullshit laws around software, and IT education that creates a class of obedient users.

However, it’s unrealistic to hope that it’s possible to “convert” everyone to this path, or even the majority of people. It’s useful to remind myself that my goal of facilitating more tinkerers and builders in the world is that I think that’s a route towards greater empowerment and freedom in interfacing with our tech-heavy world, and that the template that feels most natural to me is not the only route to tech empowerment

Recently I joked to less techy friends that in the patch of the internet I most often lurk, there are two “genders”: anarchist, trans, cat girls, and libertarian techbros. This seems similar to the joke that was made about Arch.

I run arch btw. I am neither trans, nor a catgirl, but there is no question about where I belong — I have the programming socks, after all. Besides, anarchist trans catgirls throw the best parties

I got it laughably wrong

Ooh, I like the typeface used for headings on this site

Side note, but I really like when nerds call other people nerds as a term of endearment. It has the same energy as reclaiming a slur, albeit to a much smaller degree because “nerd” isn’t a slur

I think they use the same thing that web crawlers use. If Google’s crawler couldn’t access the content of the page (or could only access a limited amount of content), it would likely rank far lower in search results