Ahh, yeah, I stand corrected. Sleeves were gone from the Thinkpads earlier than I thought.

This is a good suggestion. That generation of ThinkPad keyboards wasn’t the No-travel scissor switch nonsense that most laptop keyboards now anyway. It was IBM buckling sleeve technology, and a low profile tactile switch with similarly low-pro keys would probably be about the closest thing to its feel.

it would make a good excuse to skip the trip and stay home like I wanted to do in the first place.

This, LOL. My credulity is inversely proportional to how badly I want to go on this trip.

maybe a bead from a dessicant packet? They’re usually more clear, but can sometimes drift towards brown.

One of my friends had one and they always did the same. I don’t think any computer has ever seen its power intentionally turned off as often as the Commodore 128.

First one I used was an Apple II at school. First I used outside of school was my buddy’s Laser Apple II clone. First one I owned was an Atari XEGS, with the caveat that we didn’t get the disk drive, so all programs had to be typed in when I wasn’t playing Bug Zapper or Missile Command or failing to learn how to play Flight Simulator 2. Still learned a lot of Atari BASIC.

Eventually we got a Tandy RSX with DOS 5.0 and “Tandy Deskmate”

I handwire keyboards. It’s just like tying fishing flies except I burn my fingers sometimes.

If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.

Yup. You could probably go back to the late 1300s and get a grasp within weeks instead of months, at least in the southern half of England, and it would get easier with each passing decade, but you’d probably have to drop in a couple of generations after Shakespeare to be sure of being mostly functional on Day One.

No, that’s beta.

‘Butter’ is hitting something a lot.

this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.

Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,

What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”

Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷

Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).

I honestly forget who at this point, but I think a few people still believe that I met my wife during a brief educational stay in her home state, when in fact it was online and years later.

Doesn’t really matter, as long as you add the sugar while the liquid is hot enough to go into supersaturated solution.

Then chill and add ice.

Goddammit all y’all GPU people are right. 😂

The 580 is definitely the current bottleneck on Starfield, and likely on any other remotely intensive games. I am going to return the old-stock 2600 as soon as it arrives and instead use an eBay 3600 I got for slightly cheaper, and I’m going to stalk 6600 class GPUs until I find a good deal. I’ve had the mobo and 2400G for 5 and half years, and the HTPC case it’s in for something like 18. The poor thing has had a couple of extra fans bolted on and almost 40 holes drilled into it to increase airflow. It has a FIREWIRE port (disconnected), a floppy bay (with 3D printed insert to mount USB3 ports) and two optical bays (one of them still filled). And I still think it looks better than the RGB monstrosities that seem to be in vogue, LOL.

Okay, so I actually bumped up the Amazon 2600 to an eBay 3600, and yeah, I think the GPU camp was right. Starfield is pegging my GPU but not stressing the CPU, and Minecraft bedrock pushes harder on the CPU but doesn’t quite max it. I think a used RX 6600 will finish out my budget and be about what I want from this platform, which I’ve had for 5+ years.

I literally have no idea.

Eh, you may be right, but I’m starting with the stuff that will also involve a clean install and maybe seeing how everything comes together. With the 30 or 40 bucks residual value of the 8GB 580, a used RX6600 should still be in the budget, which TBH is a bit artificial, but also based on the priority I place on my “gaming rig.”

The 2600 is not much better on single threads, but has more cache and more cores, and is on the W11 list; I guess I could return it, but I’m probably topping out at the 5500. RAM for this build is cheaper than cheap right now and I do want to play with VMs a little. Storage should help with some things but is also for my own sanity.

I’ll use them till they don’t serve my needs and then move on.

This. Certain regional and hobby communities need a critical mass that doesn’t exist on Lemmy, and frankly it’s mostly the popular subreddits that are really bad over there anyway. I have reduced my engagement to posting about Mechanical Keyboards and otherwise lurking, I use an app that survived the APIpocalypse because the blind community (of which I am not a member) uses it, and I keep my adblocker and RES on. They’re probably still extracting some value from me, but so are several other companies that are probably even worse.

Lemmy is the community I choose to engage with most directly, and I will shed no tears over the end of Reddit when it comes, but for now I’ve found the middle ground that works for me.

Boxer shorts, specifically stretchy cotton knit ones that fully enclose the elastic waistband. I do have a couple of pairs of synthetic boxer briefs for the increasing rare occasions where I am running around enough that I might get chafed, but I think of them as sporting equipment or almost a medical garment.

Decided to get 16GB more RAM, a Ryzen 5 2600, and a Gen 3 Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD. About $145 all-in. If there are still issues, then a GPU in the ~$150 used range is really the last upgrade for me on this platform, I think.