Got home from lunch with some friends right as 3 (three!) CID officers pulled up looking for me, over "malicious communications" I "may" have made. 5 hours later I was back home, having charmed them into asking for only a 2 sentence "I'm sorry for bullying you" letter as punishment. Not even a caution. Skip to the last section if you just want the analysis without story.

Let's be clear, I was extremely uncivil in my email (cw gross insults, mention of suicide)

Among my ranting - i.e these are the bits the cops actually brought up - I accused him of getting off on blowing up Palestinian kids to be so rabid in his support for Israel, compared him to Hitler and the Royal Family, and signed it with "Fuck you and kill yourself". I did not include any threats, actionable or not, veiled or not, or anything that could be interpreted as a threat to him - the closest I came was the phrase "kill yourself". The cops specifically stated that there was nothing threatening in the message.

I'm not trying to pretend what I said wasn't offensive, it was meant to be. Fuck him, he doesn't even have local support, nearly the entire Constituency Labour Party quit when the PLP forced his nomination on them, and since then he's unflinchingly supported Starmer's evil. Multiple people I know have sent very polite emails stating their objections to his support of Israel, and all received the same proforma zionist reply talking about Israel's "right to exist", so seeing as their politeness got ignored I aimed to make him just straight feel bad about the things he votes for, but that's all I did. I used some mean words, but it stayed well within the realm of just words.

Potentially I could have "no comment"-ed everything to make a big deal about it - I would 100% lose in court and get up to 2 years in prison and a fine, but it would drag things out in a way that attracted negative publicity for my MP and the police at an already quite volatile time - but instead, mainly for reasons that will stay between my solicitor and I, I was completely cooperative, making even more of a farce of the whole situation.
The cops arrived on edge and ready for something - a chase, a fight, an emotional breakdown - and instead got polite compliance from a charming and well spoken young man ("man"). They aren't used to people being friendly, helpful, and "open" while being arrested - they had to confer about putting cuffs on me before deciding there was no point. They certainly aren't used to receiving a cheerful admission of "guilt" and well thought out explanation of just what someone did to receive such abuse - once we finally got to the interview they were nodding along while I talked about evidence of the Israeli genocide being all over the news and the OSA doing nothing to protect women even before the technical implementation is considered.
With my solicitors help I didn't even actually have to say that I'd done anything wrong (not sure if it's the autism or what but I find it really difficult to use moral language to describe legality, even within the context of lying to authority figures), just that I could have used different phrasing (not a lie), I was sorry (definitely a lie) and wouldn't do it again (probably not a lie, but we'll see). She had to kick me under the table a few times to make sure I didn't get too close to certain subjects, but I was able to make it obvious that there was no crime here, just emotional language wrapping intelligent and legitimate complaints from someone who equally obviously wasn't a troublemaker, really a credit to their community, and the detectives ate it up. It was clear to them this was a complete nonissue of a case that just needs a light slap on the wrist to fulfil the requirements of the law, all tidied up just in time to clock out. They didn't even need to actually check my phone - I mean, I already admitted to sending the email, and I would hardly have given it over so willingly if there was something incriminating on there, would I?

The takeaway from the experience is that politicians are becoming scared of their constituents and are using the police to intimidate them, and it is obvious to everyone. I told my boss and he thought I was fucking with him. I told some libs at work and they started going on about 2004 honda accord jojo well. I told my dealer and he started laughing because I've been buying drugs from him for years. Even the coworker who's literally dating a cop was appalled. The unanimous reaction has been that while my email was maybe a little excessive, arresting me goes far beyond any reasonable response. Even the cops found it excessive - I wasn't joking about the two sentence apology and slap on the wrist, on releasing me the arresting officer literally said they were required to punish me because I'd admitted to breaching the 19whatever malicious communications act, but they were giving me the smallest possible punishment they had the power to give out.

I don't really know where else to go with this so TLDR:

I only moved to it because it's free (as in beer, not as in speech, but it is also free as in speech), but it turns out a lot of distros are just better than Windows and Mac OS now. When I switched from Windows 7 to Windows 10 it wasn't quite there yet, but it's fully transformed from the OS for nerds to the OS for anyone:

• Quicker and easier to install even without the "try before you buy" mode Ubuntu-based distros provide
• Loads faster
• Basically the same UI - you won't need the command line unless you're trying to make advanced changes
• Customisation of every element is nearly unlimited - you could easily change the start button to shrek's face, for example
• Programs of all types are easier to find, install, and uninstall
• Programs generally load faster and run more smoothly
• Windows games generally run more smoothly and occasionally even at slightly higher framerates
• No ads or bloatware or background data collection getting in your way and sucking up your resources
• Can't run modern Call of Duty games (unfortunately many older ones do work)

Anyone who can follow half a page of simple step by step instructions is qualified to install it (the most complex part is flashing an .iso to a usb (a program does it for you)), and everyone who has used a computer is qualified to use it. At its simplest, with distros like Mint and Pop!, for the casual user it's the same experience as the mainstream OS's - or rather the experience they expect before the system throws the inbuilt bloat at them. When you get more specialised, especially on gaming distributions like SteamOS or Bazzite, it's a much better experience even for advanced users, as various utilities are preinstalled and preconfigured, minimising your time setting up. You can go up or downstream to find a distro with as much or as little as you need and then add as much or as little as you want to get your ideal computing experience.
There's also Arch, which we will only be acknowledging.

I thought that switching to Linux would be as big a jump as when I moved from Mac to Windows, but moving to Mint, trying Ubuntu and Kubuntu, then settling on Bazzite has just been a series of small, shuffling steps. Recreating a similar setup to what I had in Windows has been as trivial as it was time consuming to do originally, while still providing the option for much finer tuning - On Bazzite I had to install a grand total of 4 programs to recreate my software setup because the included utilities covered so many things I'd had to find programs to do in Windows.

As far as I can tell there's only one real downside, and it's one that only really matters to advanced users: if you tell Linux to do something stupid or that would break the OS, where Windows will do its best to stop you and Mac will ask where you learnt those words, Linux will simply ask for the password and then gleefully snap it's own neck. It doesn't matter if you meant to or not, you will have to reinstall and reconfigure it.
But like I said at the start, that's real easy, so it's not much of a downside.
The less real downside is that some specific games and applications won't work even with the translation layers, but you can always dual boot for that one thing.

You can switch because you hate corporations, or closed source software, or spending money, or for opsec, or because you're a big fucking nerd (Arch btw), or any of the traditional reasons for using Linux, but the main reason to switch over is because it's simply the superior product. The power of Windows and the simplicity of Mac OS, without sacrificing any of Linux's extensive customisation. I don't know how long ago it truly overtook the competition, but it definitely has done.
Just download Mint and give it a try - if you need something more specific you'll know and can explore further, but for most people it has everything you'll want ready to go.
Also if you don't switch you're a fucking liberal.

How do I convince them the robots are in league with the feds

They are nearly 70 so if you can find an analogy to the miner's strike it would help

Make no mistake, it's a fully modern game, but a lot of it feels like an homage to the JRPGs the developers grew up with. Lost Odyssey is obviously a big influence on the combat while having much more modern cinematography, enemies and npcs have traces of Shadow Hearts to them while being gorgeously rendered, the overworld has lovingly oversized characters and npcs accentuated by a tilt-shift effect - it all beautifully emphasise the slightly retro-magical setting.

I'm only 5 or 6 hours in and I'm absolutely confident this is my GOTY.

It's all just so unrelentingly French. If I have to watch that man wiggle his head Frenchly one more time I'm not letting him dodge or parry for the rest of the game.

What a dickhead

Woke: That doesn't even make sense, stop being weird

Bespoke: Space Marines can't be feeeeeemale because they're all gay for each other. It's just a giant polycule. they ain't talking about war when they call each other "battle brother".

On boxing day we thought it was simple gastroenteritis, but she quickly deteriorated despite veterinary intervention. Scans showed nodules in her liver and a large number of lesions in her bowels, almost certainly cancer, but its effects had left her too weak to deal with the trauma of any operation that could have helped. We chose to put her down rather than make her live her remaining few weeks in pain and misery.
All dogs are the best dog, but she was far and away better than any other dog I've owned, patient, loving, and obedient to a fault. She loved a good life, full of runs, sticks, cuddles, and naps.
You will be sorely missed, Nell.

What in the fuck is this shit

and it's my best friend playing and his decision making process in games is infuriating

What games should I legally acquire for it? I had the various DS/3DS Zelda's, most of the pokemans up to Black, Bravely Default, The World Ends With You (which i never completed because I was bad at fighting on two screens at once), and Contact (which I never completed because it was made by Suda51). I'm leaning towards ~~steali~~ getting some of the later pokemans because I 100%'d Cassette Beasts and I crave more creature collecting, but is there any other good stuff?

He's too old for it to be a reference but like... That's his actual name. Jan Six. I don't know how to process this.

Dr. Rachael Louise “Raygun” Gunn is a lecturer at Macquarie University, Australia, who has extensively studied and participated in the Sydney breaking (more commonly known as break dancing) scene. Her work has primarily focused on studying social dynamics in the breaking scene from feminist and queer perspectives: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=LLebtn8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra. Gunn has also demonstrated outstanding ability in the breaking scene, having won numerous competitions across Oceania and garnering wide respect from other Australian breakers.
Gunn has also been widely reported as having a background in Jazz, Tap dancing, and Ballroom dancing.

I put it to you that Rachael Gunn is intimately familiar with breaking, to a much higher degree than most breakers, having both personal and academic experience with the scene. Her academic work breaking down elements of the scene indicate a detailed understanding of the moves, speech, social and cultural contexts, modes of dress, relationship with gender, and numerous other individual aspects. She also has a detailed understanding of her relationship to the scene, having written a paper titled The ethics of living a double life: rethinking ownership, authenticity, and identity in hip hop culture, and spoken in interviews of being white and middle class in a scene that grew from socially impressed minorities.

So how could someone with the demonstrated knowledge and ability of Raygun not score a single point at all, having reached the Olympics as the highest scoring competitive b-girl in Oceania? Indeed, Martin Gillian, head breaking judge at the Olympics, praised her performance, and she's received extensive support from the breaking community in defence of her routine, so a score of zero seems impossibly unlikely.

The inclusion of breaking at the Olympic games was a controversial topic ahead of its debut, primarily due to concerns over the corporatization and dilution of breaking culture inclusion would bring, and was widely criticised by the breaking community. One person who studied the divide in opinions was Dr Rachael L Gunn, who in 2023 published The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification, which criticised the IOC and WDSF’s implementation and homogenisation of the scene. From the conclusion of the paper:

[...] the concerns are centred on the impact upon culture, and a potential loss of agency and self-determination. Isolated from neighbouring countries, and consisting of distinct, localized scenes guided by individual agents, top-down decision-making led by the WDSF already impacts the social organization, identities and hierarchies of respect within the Australian breaking scene.

While sport and the Olympics are framed as ‘great equalizers’, the exclusivity of Australia’s sporting institutions along gendered, class and racialized lines means that breaking’s sportification may in fact impact the accessibility of breaking. While the ABA aims to ensure that Australian breakers retain self-determination and agency through this Olympic process, there are many obstacles that come with the introduction of concepts like governance, transparency and accountability. Making global what is essentially a localized practice invariably requires standardization, homogeneity, professionalism and risks further moving breaking away from its African American and Latin cultural traditions and histories.

I put it to you that Raygun's olympic performance was in fact carefully calculated to show off breaking without meeting a single olympic criteria, as a protest against the inclusion of the sport, choosing to show breaking off as an artistic medium rather than athletic one. Using movements that were specifically contextual to Australia's presence in an international space, her performance was a criticism of the IOCs attempt to represent breaking as a gymnastic sport rather than artistic expression, and directly intended to sabotage the inclusion of breaking - and expected resulting gentrification of the scene - in the Olympics.
Currently it has been confirmed that the 2028 Olympic Games will not feature breaking, and there are currently no plans to include it in the 2032 Games.
Raygun wins.