It's so interesting to see how other people's experiences of white conservative Christian America can be so different from mine.
I agree. It's interesting and enriching to hear about the different starting points in life that led us to similar places.
my upbringing in a little country church.
It looks like you had one of those pockets of "true" ~~scotsman~~ christians! ~/s~
My family was catholic. I was surrounded by miserable conservatives before it was cool! :D
Ok bear with me here but we're on Lemmy so I think I get in trouble if I don't ask this...
Have ya tried Linux on the old machines? If not, you can make a bootable USB of Linux Mint and play around with it without changing anything on your system. The UI is laid out like Windows.
Nothing makes an old machine sing like installing Linux!
I appreciate the comment. Thanks!
It's funny how often I see a headline like this, then think to myself "now, now, let's be reasonable and give them the benefit of the doubt because crazy situations happen every day..."
aside: You see, growing up in white conservative christian america, my brain has this old deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or who have different priorities in life than me and think of how stupid/worthless that makes them. I have those neural pathways pretty safely contained, but it's important to do maintenance.
Anyways, I often think to myself oh hey they aren't just mind numbingly stupid and surely there's something else going on. Then I read the details and it's like every sentence pushes my face closer to my silly optimistic assumptions bellowing "search your feelings, you know it to be true" like some really heavy-handed metaphor about feeling the call of the dark side.
Nah, I guess I do know how stupid they are. But their stupidity isn't gonna frustrate me into being like them again.
When I switched over my home desktop to Mint, it was a very short time before I looked at Windows and said "I'm too old for this shit." I mean, the reason I am a Mint fan in the first place is that I am a FOSS loving nerd but with a family and pets and hobbies and a career and a middle aged energy level. The decades I've spent fixing Windows based PCs is enough for a lifetime, thx.
I say consolidate old files you want to keep. Shuffle them between drives as necessary to be able to format everything. Go all ext4 on the drives you already have. (once you're ready)
This is the way.
I think these days the PC value argument is a lot more about longevity and versatility than price.
Like in my case, I want to have an old fashioned LAN gaming setup in my house. I've already managed to find four PCs stored away, and they are all going to work great. Three are already set up and have linux installed and everything. So they cost a decent amount in their day, but now they're kind of just free extras.
It's like foveated rendering for the whole damn universe.
"Just vote" is kind of an election day strategy.
The whole part where the actual work happens to put a decent person on the ballot instead of corporate drone n+1 is right now!
Well now I absolutely expect to read a future story about somebody working their way into ICE to do some good. But then before they knew it they were hauled out into the desert and told by masked men to execute a Mexican detainee like some kind of fucked up gang initiation ritual, to prove their true loyalty.
After doing a bunch of carpentry this year, now I have metric and imperial sets of nice long hex bits for my high torque impact driver.
Something is gonna move, one way or another!
*Upgrayedd
I love this post. You are on the other side of the world yet you've envisioned an optimistic and plausible path for this country to start not just rebuilding but to find some redemption and even inspire people again. Eventually.
I'm not in NY, but am in the US within a several hour drive of there.