The usage you desire is perfectly served by getting a suite, or by getting two adjacent hotel rooms and opening the door between them. I have attended so many room parties at furry conventions that were held in two adjacent rooms or in a suite.

You can also do things like go out to a park and chill together.

I have been running a Mastodon instance since late 2017.

There are several design choices that Gargron (Mastodon's main developer) has made that are pretty explicitly because he wants it to be Twitter, But I Made It. Feature requests to change these choices keep appearing and keep getting denied - if you want to up the character limit past 500, or have markdown/other rich text, you will have to fork them and add it yourself, or perhaps switch to the "Glitch" fork, which is maintained by one of the leading contributors to the main project who is not Garg.

Personally I would be delighted if the Fediverse ate not just Twitter's market share, but Facebook's, and Instagram's, and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and every other site that has strip-mined public conversation for profit.

Catalina didn't offer anything that felt worth the hassle of losing a couple 32-bit things that will never be updated, and of discovering if the new separate Music app is as much of a pain in the ass about hassling me to subscribe to their streaming service as iOS Music is.

At this point I think it is pretty clear that the only thing that's gonna get me onto a new version of MacOS is buying a new computer, and that's not gonna be until like 2022 or 2023. Which feels kinda weird given that I've been on the current OS once a .1 release came out since like Tiger.

I'm still using an iPhone 6s I bought around 2016 or so. I bought an Apple case when I got it and that absorbed a few drops, when the last iPhone came out I decided to sink a whole forty bucks or so into a new case because the old one was starting to fall apart. I can't remember how much I paid for it when I got it, it was shortly after the 8 came out so it was last year's model. Plus AppleCare. Which is expired now.

No battery swelling, still works with my old wired headphones/earbuds. Still does what I need it to. I'm hoping to get at least five years out of it, maybe more; all I really do with it is maps, check email, and the usual web bullshit.

Yay for Asterix! Leave that one where the kids can get to it.

My day job is a web comic. All of my story notes live largely in Evernote. I mostly try to avoid doing lengthy sagas that need to really worry about continuity.

I believe Marvel and DC employ archivists; part of their job is to be a resource on continuity. Part of the job of a comic's editor is also to catch continuity glitches.

Millions of people bought Guitar Hero and Rock Band to enjoy a fantasy of being a rock star. I don't think anyone bought these games expecting to actually learn how to play music.

Have you learnt to become a space marine from playing Quake? Have you learnt to rule a nation by playing Civilization? Have you learnt to draw graffiti by playing Jet Set Radio? Have you learnt to be a hand-to-hand combat master playing Street Fighter?

Unless a game is explicitly designed as a teaching device, you are not likely to learn anything more than a vague caricature of the skills involved in the activity it simulates. Nobody expects to learn any activity based on a video game. But somehow, people constantly criticize Guitar Hero and Rock Band for this.

Why do you think anyone expects these games to teach them to play a real instrument?

I make comics, and I am curious where one can find the thin CMS you have made that you say beats WP for comics. I'm pretty happy with WP+CP for serving my comics after tossing in a security plugin; I also use it for my blog, and my image gallery.

I pay money to Metafilter - a mandatory $5 account creation fee, and now a buck or two every month since they added an option to do this. This goes in part to their fabulous team of moderators.

I also donate my time to helping to moderate a webcomics forum, because I want to have a nice place to talk about making those.

It's not so much that trolls are paywalled out, it's that there is a definite culture in place in these places that is anti-troll, with enough people wandering around the site with 'keep things civil' in the back of their mind. Sometimes a mod has to step in and delete a few posts that are turning into personal attacks, and politely remind everyone to please chill out and remember that there's humans on the other side of the screen. It works. I have had civil discussions with people who passionately believe the opposite of my views, and we have kept it polite, because both sides know they're in a forum that expects certain behavior, and that stepping outside of those bounds gets posts or accounts deleted.

(Neither of these places has a real names only policy, by the way; MeFi even has a modest cultural expectation of elaborate usernames that are unique to the site.)

You're only just now noticing this? I've been feeling like I've been living in a Bruce Sterling novel for the past seven years or so.

I think iTunes has all of those things you want nowadays, actually. At least for me on my Mac. It seems to kinda suck on other platforms because it has to drag a whole lot of the Quicktime infrastructure it relies on for playing music along with it, and becomes kind of big and unwieldy.

I get system notifications of playing tracks if I want 'em.

It's got plugins. I don't know how extensive they are, mostly I just have a handful of visualizers, and I think I've got a couple music format plugins somewhere in there too. (I've spent like $100 on various visualizers over the years, right now I'm really liking Aeon.)

I'm not sure what "excellent media library" or "the ability to play straight from the library" entails. I can double-click on a track in the iTunes window and it plays it, it manages all my folders and tags for me and makes it easy to dig out the actual files when I want to, I can sort in all kinds of ways.

Does Winamp do "smart playlists"? Because that's iTunes' killer feature, IMHO. It spends the vast majority of its time in a playlist of "stuff I haven't played in the last 5 weeks, or skipped in the last 10". Keeps my vast collection constantly rotating.

No, a virus would be hard-line fundamentalists, who the US elevated to power in the Middle East because they would originally be more amenable to doing our bidding in terms of who got the oil. The same virus can work in Christianity, and is pretty widespread. Or maybe the virus aggressively amoral capitalism, which has a really depressingly powerful synergy with fundamentalists. But perhaps I'm stretching the metaphor to far.

Islam, in this metaphor, might be described as another OS entirely that was implemented on top of Judaism; there's quite a few stories in the Bible that also show up in the Qur'an. Much of the Bible happens in the Middle East.

It's frontpage-worthy because it's by Charlie Stross, who used to be a programmer, and writes science fiction that a lot of nerds enjoy. Multiple Hugo awards and all that.

And the point of this lengthy metaphor is given in the second paragraph: "Over the beer, the conversation turned—for no sane reason—to computer operating systems. There being some non-technical folks at the table, I then had to cough up a metaphor to contextualize the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX..." It gives them something of the flavor of how all these Unices are related, yet at odds with each other over various points of dogma that're incomprehensible to the layman.

I just gave my 70-something mother my old iPad2 and fifty bucks on the app store. She's loving it.

I'm hanging out at her place for a week or so as a Christmasish kind of thing, so I've been available to answer her questions and tell her how to do basic stuff. We'll probably go get her a cover with a keyboard in it before I go - she's a touch-typist so she kinda hates the screen keyboard.

Admittedly she's fairly tech-savvy for an old lady - her vcr has never blinked 12:00, she's got an aging Windows laptop that she does stuff on - but if your father's still mostly got it together, you should be able to teach him a lot about how to use it and have an excuse to hang out with him. Don't show him how to do stuff, tell him how to do stuff while you're sitting next to him, and be patient. Then grin happily once he gets it and spends a whole day doing nothing but playing Fairway Solitaire or something.

Hell, I had a good time sitting next to my mom this morning playing a hidden object/adventure game based on A Christmas Carol with her. The iPad mostly stayed in her lap, with me poking at it now and then for some of the kinds of puzzles I'm a lot better at than she is.

Trouble:

hauling your computer into the same room as the tv, then back out when you want to get work done
setting up a selection of games mostly designed for play with keyboard/mouse to work with a controller
having a big computer with a noisy fan sitting there in the living room

The Steambox is, admittedly, designed to attack all these points, so maybe soon it will be the year of PC Gaming In The Living Room.