What will probably happen is a one or two term slump. What’s different between then and now is the internet and social media, which fills most people’s brains with a deluge of noise. In addition to the effects of misinformation daily telling people that the moon is the sun, most algorithms prioritize novelty, and nothing’s more novel than the most stupidly wrong-headed take. We constantly hear the opinions of people who should be laughed out of the room! We sit and chuckle, but there’s tens of millions of people who have poor media skills who it can actually influence.

There are so many weird things about GIMP, and it feels like they add more over time. I’ve moved a layer and then tried to draw on it and had nothing happen. Why? Because the layer was created as an array of pixels the size of the image, and when I move it there’s now a dead zone where there’s no pixels in the visible image. It turns out there’s a special command to expand moved layers to fill the image: https://docs.gimp.org/3.0/en/gimp-layer-resize-to-image.html

There are times using it that it feels like a maze to navigate to just get my changes reflected in the document.

Back in the day there was Hardware Wars.

I handle this, as do most poor people, by not asking ourselves this question, not even fantasizing about it, for why torture yourself with something you never can do?

The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it’s actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don’t need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.

The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there’s no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

Along these lines, I have several important memory locations memorized. POKE 53280 and 1 to change the border and background colors. 828 is the cassette buffer, and 49152 the free memory above BASIC ROM. SYS 64738 resets the machine.

I also can recite the powers of 2 up to 65536.

Way back in Sunday School at the church we went to when I was growing up, they taught them to us in a song. I still remember the whole thing.

Recently, McDonalds announced an initiative to remove all instances of Ronald McDonald from their stores.

So, Ronald McDonald removed all instances of McDonalds from around him.