I would absolutely choose this mode without any shame. I already spend plenty of time in “Story Mode” difficulty; I don’t care to spend hours of frustration trying to hit just the right dodge pattern for a boss because I no longer have the finger dexterity that I did when I was 20.

Here’s an archive.today link for that article, it has the whole thing on one page.

Bill Withers: The Soul Man Who Walked Away

I’ve been listening to a lot of instrumental metal lately (all the awesome sound, none of the incoherent screaming or terrible rapping) and found the 2018 album Controlled Chaos by Nita Strauss. Her playing is fantastic - I especially love the second track from that album Alegria.

“Mallyhacked” - meaning something that is broken or destroyed. I heard this phrase a lot from older folks during my childhood, but never by anyone who wasn’t from my area. My SO didn’t believe it was a real word so I did some digging and I think that it is likely a very regionally accented version of “malahack”.

Urban Dictionary says that malahack comes from the Lumbee-English slang of southern North Carolina. I don’t think that’s quite accurate because I’m not from anywhere close to North Carolina. My preferred reference is from The Vocabulary of East-Anglia: An Attempt to Record the Vulgar Tongue of the Twin Sister Counties Norfolk and Suffolk, as it Existed in the Last Twenty Years of the Eighteenth Century, and Still Exists: with Proof of Its Antiquity from Etymology and Authority; in Two Volumes · Volume 2 by Robert Forby, 1830:

Malahack, v. A word ludicrously fabricated, which means to cut or carve in an awkward and slovenly manner.

Several things are regularly in my “ponder and wonder” list, the most recent being:

• Chaos theory
• Higher dimensions (>4)
• The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
• The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)

I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.

I beat my head against Hollow Knight when it was released and set it aside after a while. I recently went back and somehow was able to get through it (I’m convinced they made it easier vs me getting better).

Make sure to explore and find all the story and world building tidbits. It’s definitely worth digging into, and I love some of the little side stories and character interactions as you go deeper into Hollownest.

I finished a playthrough of the legendary edition of the trilogy earlier this year. Still great and after all the time that’s passed since the original ME3 release I can almost accept the ending(s).

Grinding through nightmare dungeons in Diablo 4, and because I fell down a YouTube tutorial hole I’m retrying Frostpunk. Hopefully I can stave off the guilt from slapping makeshift prosthetics on orphans long enough to finish it this time.

I’m really excited for the first season, especially that they’ll start us with the altars and map cleared. That’s always annoying to do on a new playthrough. Now I just need to get my current character to tier 3 and finish hunting down the rest of the altars.

Modal or bamboo underwear - soft, stretchy, silky, the solution to everything I hated about cotton underwear. They are usually more expensive than Walmart (or other box store) brands and take more care when washing, but to me are definitely worth it. You can find them for fairly good prices on Amazon if you don’t want to splurge on name brands, but you have to do the research and check the reviews. You can get them in boxers, briefs, and thongs for men and even more styles for women.

This is good advice if your phone is actively being hacked in real time when you turn it off. Otherwise all you’re doing is delaying or temporarily interrupting any data collection that’s going on in the background. Any apps that are sophisticated enough to run undetected by a normal user are also going to restart themselves as soon as the phone boots up again.

Also, if you are being targeted by a hacker that is knowledgeable enough to actively get into your device (especially an iPhone) without physical access then you’re better off destroying it and buying a new one, along with doing a full reset of all of your passwords, 2FA setup, and anything else you think you’re relying on for “security”.