So they literally did it for the lulz.

Yet another reason to throw Windows out the... window. I have a Dell XPS 17" that runs fine under the current Linux Mint. It didn't a few years ago when it was new (sound card wasn't detected by older kernels), but it's quite nice now. It's even got two NVME slots, so I just added a second one for Linux.

The only issues I've had so far is when I reboot from Linux it wants to start Windows (probably a BIOS problem, fixed by having Windows boot manager put up a screen) and recently the 80% battery charge limit that I set in BIOS was ignored and it charged to 100% (still watching the situation).

I'm pretty sure that Gemstone III was on GEnie. I had been playing since the last month of GS2 beta... those GEIS computers were not very timeshare friendly, and the game would sometimes freeze up user commands while the monsters clicked away on their 10 second timers. As I recall, GS3 was set up on a Sun workstation to avoid such problems, and I guess it's possible that they could have added another gateway from Compuserve.

Thanks to how they did turn timing, I am to this day quite good at counting down seconds on my microwave while doing something else, usually to better than +/- 5 seconds per minute.

And you might be wondering what happened to Gemstone I. As I recall, it was the original demo which ran on an Amiga.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

The challenge is that you have to be sure you're booking with the actual hotel. The middle men are sneaky and make the web site look like they are the real thing. The actual hotel web site is never the first on the search list. Blame the shitty SEO merchants. SEO should be renamed "FIO" Fraudulent Impersonation Optimization.

His surname is one transposition away from "AI Mode".

Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.