T w e n t y S i d e d

More on that in a minute. I decided to try using Opera on Linux instead of Firefox. My motivation is the influence Google has been exerting on Firefox coupled with suspiciously-rapid “updates” over the last couple of months or so. Of course, I want to be clear: choosing Opera over Firefox because of problems with Google’s influence is a bit like saying “I don’t like how General Motors controls Opel so I’ll buy a Chevy instead.” Firefox is still based on the Gecko engine; Opera is built on Chromium. As in, Chrome. I have, however; accomplished some of the things I needed to do in order to move on to maybe a more secure and less-Google influenced browser, like maybe LibreWolf. Most importantly I broke my dependence on Firefox’s sync settings, and the Linux version of Opera (in my experience so far) WILL NOT import ANYTHING from any external browser. Or rather, at least; the EASY way. It won’t detect that I have Firefox installed. I had to manually export bookmarks to a file then import it. And since I’ve been meaning to move all my Firefox-stored passwords to Bitwarden for a while, I finally went through that process. After some setup Opera works…fine. I have noticed that it slows down after a while doing playlist management in YouTube, but some things work better on Opera than on Firefox, like video redirects on some sites. Certain ones don’t work on Firefox; they do on Opera. Bit of a surprise honestly, because I thought they were just broken. I will likely try LibreWolf sooner rather than later. Firefox works *well* for me, I just want to get further away from Google.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Grew Up With Two Songs Called “Forever Young””

Paige Francis He/him

Sable has been on my Steam Wishlist for quite a while. Long enough that I had actually *removed* it for several months to a year, because it was never on sale for enough of a discount to make it a “must get” option. Well, this weekend I was notified that Sable was 65% off, which put it under $10. I figured that was worth it. Sable is arguably my favorite type of game: platforming/exploration/puzzle-solving with minimum (or no) combat. There are games that include combat that I still really enjoy, like Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy and the first remake of Prince of Persia. Or the first and second generation of Tomb Raider games. Likewise, the exploration component can be more expansive or even effectively non-existent. In Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider for example, the exploration content extended to places you could go to that you didn’t actually have to explore and “secret” items. This feature is occasionally called “open-world,” although this is a nebulous concept that only really works with a proper level of interaction, and depending on the primary gameplay. In Sable, for instance; exploration and secret-finding seems to be the entirety of the open world. I’ve read there are several optional side-quests, but in the introduction/tutorial the gameplay was *mostly* linear. Today I’ll go through that first area.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “New Game: Sable”

Paige Francis He/him