Lets say your worst fears are correct and this “female”, is trying to keep you as an orbiter. Get over yourself, you had no claim to her time.

She was willing to spend time with you before, probably because she thought you were genuinely interested in her platonically and wanted you as a close friend. You caught feelings and are blaming her for her actions and assigning motives to easily explainable actions. you crossed the line, and she pulled away. Shes a social person and wanted many friends. Even if she was interested in you at some point, you said/did something that superseded that. Maybe she felt like you werent reaching out to her enough. but my guess is using the word female unironically to describe a person.

Seems to me that she “Intended” to hop online, play some games and talk to strangers. You should probably back off and re-evaluate how you view people especially women.

Open Book by: Cake https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YUkLbsc6434

Heres a song, very relevant to your situation.

Yeah! great read if you have the time. It can be used to explain alot of things since its a very open take on going from a state of ignorance or naivety to “seeing the light”. I think its an important read, since people still in the “cave” are hard if not impossible to “convince” with such a limited perspective on reality.

I further interpret this to mean If we want to pull our fellow man out of the cave, we have to help change their perspective and meet them where they are in their journey out.

“The allegory of the cave” Is another great example!

This Is the best response Ive read so far. The only thing id add is that this falls under Epistemology. that word alone IMO is dangerous to any regime.

The news is a propaganda machine designed to output a dual-pronged attack ironically outlined by your post. For skeptics like yourself the constant stream of misinfo will have you fact checking senseless data that you instinctively know to be true or false based on observation, wasting your time. however when presented in the news or by aquaintences It challenges you to correct them, this is a job for a team of the same magnitude as the news stations themselves.

For the indoctrinated Its just a constant echochamber of new info that helps fortify new or previously fabricated info, and gives them talking points to repeat to anyone even minorly skeptical of the regime.

Your experience with your friend IS part of the manipulation. the only way out is to attempt to focus on what is local to you and within your control (dont ignore the macro issues obviously just try not to focus on them). Getting involved with local politics, speak with real people and rather than attacking their facts. Attack their logic, similarly to how you are trying to get your friend understand her bias and where that stems from.

being a victim of propaganda, being religeous, being part of a subculture, having unresloved trauma, having children, never being properly taught logic or Epistemology (edit:this word is so important cant believe i forgot it.), all of these and more contribute to bias.

To answer your question, there are organizations that do fact checking but im also skeptical of those because who watches the watchers? How do they afford to exist? Do the fact checkers have bias themselves? Its a never ending cycle of bullshit.

No doom and gloom though (they want you to feel defeated) because there is still tons to appreciate, so many people are waking up. Lots of individuals attacking “the system” from every possible angle all across the world. All it takes is some mildly uncomfortable conversations with the people you care about, and patience, LOTS of patience.

Braindead responses and honestly probably just bait anyone passing through, ignore this fool. Ubuntu base install(gnome), in my experience uses less than 2gb of ram at idle. (Even less when using xfce or lxqt) Dummy added bloat to his system and then came on here to bitch about nothing. either that or hes a bot, troll or both.

I cannot find it, but my gf showed me this tiktok where a person made an extremely compentent remix within the fortnite music mode. It was a completely original work made of songs within fortnite it was very impressive. All that is to say Im not a fan of low effort work when just a small amount more could turn it into something new and interesting. Monitizing it is just an extra fu imo.

I do get what youre saying about struggling for money, but even so ive seen street artists with some insane talent and or ingenuity. Im of the belief that everyone can practice at something and make a living off of it even if its something wed consider mundane like… sweeping a floor. Im going to look up a professional sweeper right now on youtube and find someone with insane skill. And im sure the same is true with any task or art.

True. But at the same time If little to no effort is being put in, it does ride the line of being fair use. So if they are monitizing it which i dont think they were doing 15 years ago I find that kind of scummy. but other than that i look at it as the same thing as those AMVs back in the day. Just something someone made for the love of the source material.

Thats sad if they actually consider what they are doing art. Ive been out of the loop for a while but when I saw people making this stuff 15 years ago, it seemed like a thing a niche community was doing. I dont think anyone took it seriously. I still find songs that sound better sped up like this one is very funny try this one at 1.5 or 1.75 speed. Game changer kinda hits like rapgod from eminem

https://youtu.be/4c82n0dex0k

I know i just enjoy thinking in these odd out of pocket ways to get people out of their heads. Its actually really cool looking at a snake skeleton you can see where the limbs would have been had it not evolved to lose them and where the tail begins very clearly!

Always and slightly less over time. But also randomly.

Its a genere of… music. If you want to call it that. They basically just speed up and pitch up the song to make it sound like its being sung by a mouse version of themselves and then boom nightcore remix.

I dont usually post links because of tracking and what not but i dont know how else to show you its loud btw. This was one that i found as a teen that i didnt hate as much.

Nightcore https://youtu.be/-I0Pp-SMWdM Original https://youtu.be/Bjadoqjdz2c

Only entropically and even when i dont think about entropy im thinking about entropy because of entrophy

I hate this, and I will now say this in public settings to make people uncomfortable with me. Thank you

Other phrases on this list include classics such as.

“Trees are just logs with branches on both sides.”

“Snakes are just heads with tails.”

“Cupcakes should have icing on the sides too for them to be cakes.”

“Step aside mortals”

“Good Luck and bad luck are the same thing, just a matter of perspective.” (love when they ask for me to elaborate on this one)

“Ants fought and died for this land!”

“Ever think about entropy?”

“Do you think wed survive at this speed?” In a car, plane etc or if theyve heard the phrase from me before say it again when moving at a snails pace.

“I wonder if theres a horton that can hear us whos.”

“The devs really fucked this one up.” in response to real world bad news implying we exist in a simulation

respond “NO” agressively with a straight face to very innocuous and polite requests, quickly smile and say “problem at all, ill do that right away” then do what they asked

I have more but they are contextual and dont spring to mind.

“Thanks for coming to my ted talk”

Did you even read the whole comment?

just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc.

If time is a factor and you just need a distro that “works” stick with what you have, and find FOSS alternatives for zorin. Best of luck

I respected their time and was simply making a suggestion because zorin seems scummy locking default features behind a paywall.

Most distros come with a built in software downloader. If you consider it “work” to type kdenlive and click download ive got nothing else to say to you.

Yeah fully agree, i just wasnt willing to outright call them scummy. If anything the 50$ price tag should drop to ~20$ since the software they are packaging is not even their own work.

Zorin itself is foss but paying for features like themeing and software Is imo against the spirit of linux, they should, (again imo) release zorin pro as the default and simply accept donations. Like most distro maintainers. Even more frustrating, is the advertised features are just normal features and software readily available for free on other distros being paywalled. Its very likely that a user could get all of the listed features on the free version without paying. I also misread the website, ms office and adobe premier are not even what is included. In fact they do not list the specific names of the alternatives that they use in the pro version. I would bet that the pro version Has all foss software that is being hidden behind the price tag. I will do more quick research and edit this comment if that is the case.

Edit: Yeah i nailed it, its all foss software available through most package managers or flatpak heres a list.

Additional Software Included in Zorin Pro: Office & Productivity:

LibreOffice: A comprehensive office suite compatible with Microsoft Office/365 documents: https://www.libreoffic…​

Scribus: A desktop publishing application: https://sourceforge.ne…​

Graphics & Multimedia: Krita: A powerful, open-source image editing and painting software: https://krita.org/

Inkscape: A vector graphics editor: https://inkscape.en.so…​

Blender: A free and open-source 3D creation suite: https://www.blender.org/​

GIMP: A free and open-source image manipulation program: https://www.gimp.org/d...​

Evince: A Gnome document viewer: https://apps.gnome.org…​

Foliate: A simple and lightweight e-book reader: https://flathub.org/ap...​

Kdenlive: A non-linear video editor: https://kdenlive.org/e...​

FreeCAD: A free and open-source 3D design application: https://www.freecad.or…​

LibreCAD: A free and open-source 2D CAD software: https://wiki.librecad…​

Darktable: An open-source digital photo management and editing tool: https://www.darktable…​

ALL of the listed features from zorin pro have free alternatives, unless you really want microsoft office, screen sharing, adobe premier, etc… just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc. How did you land on zorin to begin with? Most new users are recommended to use fedora, ubuntu-gnome, and linux mint. To me, just looking at zorins website they do not share the most basic principles of the linux space (being free and open source). I highly recomend switching, if you could run

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

This will output the name of your display manager like gnome, kde, etc. The version of zorin you are running is more than certainly using a popular one. Just find a distro that uses the same one. And your user experience will be almost exactly the same. Zorin might have some QOL features but definitely not anything you couldnt implement yourself.

Feel free to reach out here for more help if you run into any brick walls. You already dual booted your pc so i have faith that you have a pretty good grasp on what you are doing. If time is a factor and you just need a distro that “works” stick with what you have, and find FOSS alternatives for zorin. Best of luck

Personally, I configure my entire os before signing in to websites or any software (or putting any privacy critical info on my system) then I backup my os to my NAS using rescuezilla, using linux its usually max 30Gb. I also have a private github repo that i backup my dotfiles to just in case my NAS kicks the bucket. Going back to a “clean” install after doing something stupid kinda sucks but at least all your hard work making it look and feel the way you want will persist. I also highly reccomend doing some sort of offline & off network backup for privacy sensative information. Best of luck, I feel your pain I nuked my system once after days of work and i said, never again.

You will be assimilated, resistance is futile. Your technology will be added to our own. Embrace the inevitable.