I haven't written anything in a while so I wanted to say hi, here's an update!

The construction is over, I have a kitchen again. That happened like the end of the first week of November. Ever since then I have been fighting a mega nasty cold. It laid dormant with sort of a minor cough for a few weeks and then came back with a vengeance over thanksgiving weekend and I'm only getting over it now.

2026 is coming up and I have a few things to think about, one is I need to finish Yakuza 0 finally. I have 15 videos to commentate. The other is that the construction was expensive, a little more than I budgeted for to be honest and while I'm able to make ends meet with all the payments it's real tight. I may have to do a stream to raise some money next year to maybe try and take a chunk out of some of this debt. If I can pay off one of my higher interest rate credit cards (probably the one that has all the "you just got fired from CVS and have to move back in with your parents" debt on it) I'll be able to breathe a little easier each month. I spent the time without a downstairs of my house in my bedroom playing Balatro on a laptop and I think that would make for a good stream warmup game at least.

I dunno! We'll see how it goes. 

Once the construction ended I decided to wipe the old version of linux mint on my laptop and try out Bazzite, as it came highly recommended by The Gamers and you know what? Fuck Bazzite, I think it sucks. 

The immutable OS thing is extremely frustrating to work with if you're an old-school linux user. Usually the first thing I do is I create a /tools directory where I can throw stuff like conda and docker volume mounts, but you can't do that in Bazzite, no matter how hard you try and whatever clever workarounds you find it is simply not possible. This also means I can't make a /data mount point for my NFS shares. 

Then there's the whole Distroshelf thing which is a huge hassle. Why do I have to emulate Ubuntu to install a program to play music files? At least when you're running docker containers it's because you're usually trying to manage like sixteen different nginx instances. Programs also started getting killed by the kernel with Out of Memory errors which was not happening on mint.

So I decided, fuck this, and installed KDE Neon, and so far I've been pretty happy, except the Out of Memory thing was still happening, and it turns out that KDE Neon defaults to a 512MB swap file. That's an insanely low number, I think Linux Mint's been giving a 2 gig swap partition for like 5+ years at this point. I cranked up the size and reinitialized the swap file and now it's perfectly happy to page things out of memory like a normal ass computer. A few years ago I had tried KDE Neon on either this computer or it's predecessor and after an update it started crashing to a black screen with a mouse cursor so I really hope that doesn't start happening again, but I'm optimisitic at this point.

The Linux Mint install on my desktop has some problems that I've not been able to figure out, mostly around how slow it is. When I boot up and open a terminal, it often takes a solid 3 minutes for the bash prompt to appear. I have no idea why. It's a terminal window, it's the most basic of linux components? Without the shell there is nothing. So if KDE Neon proves to be a champ I might fix this by using KDE Neon on the desktop instead.

This post is already sort of disjointed and a mess so here are a few things I've been watching lately:

• The Chair Company
• Pluribus
• QI
• Crowd Control
• The Last Leg
• Rapsittie Street Kids (turns out that's just Debra Wilson making that noise with her mouth)
• Very Important People
• Started digging into Stargate SG-1 and might write about it once I finish the first season.