Vi's Weekly Wonders #1
Welcome to Vi's Weekly Wonders #1
Your weekly dose of living the good, cultured, entertained and enthralled life!
This has been an exhausting holiday week. It was orthodox Christmas and I went from spending time with my partner to my family, all stuffed together in a house, constantly babysitting, eating too much but also starting some interesting projects.
Linux
First off I went deep on Linux since I truly despise Windows and I finally had enough time to dedicate to it. So outta 3 computers, I have two running Linux distros.
One is a living room PC that has been running Linux Lite for years. It’s a very old laptop that’s super low spec for today and it’s been running faster than ever with that OS. I made a bunch of research about changing it, so I tried Xubuntu and Lubuntu, but Linux Lite is still the best version for that one.
But the more interesting part is what I did to my gaming laptop. I finally shut windows fully out of my life, I have only slightly enjoyed using it since Windows 7 and the encroachment of Edge and Copilot as well as lagy performance are the last straws.
Since I’ve been hearing a lot of positives about Bazzite, I took the plunge, putting all my existing games on external drives and installing it. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it was worth it. My PC is enjoyable to use again, something it hasn’t been a year before I bought a Mac. I figured out lots of ways to run all my Windows games and the system is faster than ever. Especially alt tab switching applications, which can be a problem on Windows depending on the game.
Games
The games I’ve been enjoying are admittedly old, running Warhammer 40K Space Marine, a game I played when it came out fully and a few levels since then. It’s like I remember it, enjoyable but repetitive and lacking in creativity. Just how Empire prizes them.
I started playing Burnout 3 for the first time and it’s phenomenal. I can’t believe I’ve been sleeping on this magnificent arcade racer for so long. The driving is so fluid, the mechanics great, the game modes fun and varied, the locations interesting and the music phenomenal.
Otherwise I’ve been debating weather to finish Mafia Definitive Edition, which I played half of, found disappointing and lost my save file in the migration. So I’ll either figure out how to add a new save file, play the game again or just say it wasn’t meant to be and play the original.
Work
As for my career, I finished my portfolio page & this blog, which took about a month of work and years of experience. I solidified my online identity and committed to spending my time on my passions.
Reading
For my reading I’ve finished Soldier, Priest and God A Life of Alexander the Great which I loved. It shows how important religion, respect and understanding was to accumulating the largest empire in the world (at the time). At first at least, because it quickly devolves into an out of control egoist with a god complex who can’t stand to stop and see what he’s done, compelled to keep going while regularly falling into manic suspicions of his most capable men, slaughtering them and inventing the reason afterwards. Submit or die and maybe die if you submit as well.
This great exploration of Alexander that got me into a rabbit hole which will occupy me for the rest of the month. I then finished The Diadochi War, a short account which quotes lots of ancient historians for the events and shows how ripe the descendants made the entire region for Roman conquest.
Watch
I finished Brockmire and I loved every season. The last one started especially badly, but gosh did it manage to turn it around and show real heart and pointed critiques. I think it’s a wonderful exemplar of where our world is and feels like it’s going, while the characters obsess over the minutiae of their own life, the world around them has fallen apart.
Then I started watching The Comeback and since i had so much free time, I managed to finish 2 seasons, which are 10 years apart. Both of them are such great exemplars of their time, I absolutely loved them.
Links
Otherwise I doom read and glanced at the mouth of hell (the news) and I’ve been strangely taking the worst events with uncharacteristic optimism. I feel like I’m in high school again, where I can focus on the good possibilities of the worst news, instead of spiraling in a doom cycle. Some highlights I’m actively remembering on a Sunday night are:
I enjoyed the MacOS Tahoe UI icons critique, a software so horrible I’m sad I still have to prefer it to Windows. I’m having active fantasies of using very old versions of these operating systems, maybe I’ll figure out a weird hacked together solution some day soon, but for now I just have to endure.
Are almonds good for you (yup), a good reminder to not demonize a single food or scientific sounding compound source of it as the cause of all your problems, healthy diets require diverse food.