u/Pristine-Ad-2556

I've been running computers since the early '90s. Started on an IBM PS/2, a 286, back when you had to actually understand the machine to make it do a damn thing. Thirty years later I run Windows every day and Linux when it suits me, and both of them work. Neither one takes a genius either. You just have to be willing to read up. That's the whole price of admission. A little patience, a little reading. Most people are too impatient and too lazy to pay it, and that laziness is exactly what Apple has spent three decades cashing in on.

Here's the thing I can't get past. Happened a couple months ago.

I was setting up a Ring doorbell for my folks. My stepmom's on an iPhone. To get the app working I needed into her Apple ID, and she didn't know her password. Half the time she doesn't know which password goes to what, that's just her, and that's fine, millions of people live in that exact spot every day. So I go to reset it. The thing anybody should be able to do, standing in the room, with the phone physically in my hand.

And Apple's answer, basically, was that they'd need to assess whether or not they could even give me a password reset. Sit with that one for a second. A multi day waiting period while Apple decides whether the owner is allowed back into their own account. And the kicker, the part that should make your skin crawl, is they offered to speed it up if I handed over a credit card number to confirm identity. Pay a toll to get into your own account faster. Read that again.

Now somebody reading this is already typing "that's just how Apple does it, it's a security feature." Stop for a second and hear what you're actually saying. You're telling me they built it on purpose so the owner can't freely get into their own account. You think that's a defense. It's a confession. "It's by design" means the disrespect was intentional. You're not arguing with me, you're agreeing with me and calling it a feature.

Here's the part that isn't up for debate. I bought the product. My folks own the hardware. The owner decides when and how he gets into his own property, not the company that already took the money and kept a key it won't hand over. You don't buy a house and then wait three days for the builder's permission to change your own locks. You don't buy a car and file a request with the factory to start it. You own it, so you reach it, when you see fit and how you see fit. The second a company keeps a key to the thing you paid full price for and makes you ask permission to use it, you didn't buy a thing. You rented access to it and they kept the deed.

That's the whole game right there. "You will own nothing" isn't some future they're warning you about. It already shipped. It's in my stepmom's pocket, and it made me sit and wait for permission to get into something we paid for, then offered to sell me back the speed.

And it isn't just the account. It runs all the way down to the dumbest little thing. The trackpad on their MacBooks doesn't even physically click anymore. It's a fixed sheet of glass that fakes a click by buzzing against your fingertip, and Apple's own engineering flat out describes it as fooling you into thinking the pad moved. Then they pile hidden pressure levels on top of the fake click, so a light press does one thing and a harder press does another, which means a click isn't a click anymore, it's the machine guessing how hard you meant it. Even Apple's own reviewers admit the thing takes, their words, concerted retraining of muscle memory. Retraining. To click. Something that's worked the same way since the mouse was invented.

And before the "well it's configurable" crowd shows up, yeah, I know, you can dig three menus deep and tune it back toward something sane. But the default is the product. Ninety nine percent of people never touch the settings, so whatever ships turned on is what the thing actually is. Apple chose to ship the fake click and the whole grandiose mess switched on out of the box, and then bury "make it act like a normal button" somewhere most people will never look. A thing built right ships simple and lets the power user add the complexity. Apple ships the showroom and makes you excavate the simplicity. That's backwards, and it's backwards on purpose.

I'm not asking for my computer to be dumbed down. I'm not asking for less power. I learned on a command line, I'll read a manual, I run Linux for fun. I'm asking for less theater. Make the simple thing the default. Let a click be a click. Let the owner hold the keys to the thing the owner bought. That used to be the floor you started from. Apple spent thirty years convincing a whole generation that the floor is a luxury, and that handing the keys to the manufacturer is what "it just works" means.

It doesn't just work. It works for them, and the people raving about how easy it is never noticed they stopped holding the wheel.

I'll keep my Windows box and my Linux partition. They make me read up, and in return they hand me the keys. I'll take that trade every single time over a pretty machine that keeps the deed to itself.

**The Tribute**

*On reverence, craft, and the oldest transaction*

by Disillusioned Non Partisan

*I am going to stand inside your cathedral, love the art with my whole chest, and tell you the truth about the bill. That is not an insult. It is the most respect I know how to pay.*

Before anyone reaches for the usual exit — angry atheist, hates beauty, never felt a thing — let me close it. I have stood in the nave with my head tipped back and felt the breath go out of me. I have heard the Mass in B Minor and understood, in my body, that something true was happening in the room. I am not here to call your cathedral a waste or your music a delusion or your grief a mistake. I am here to do something harder and colder and, I think, more honest: to ask where the awe should go, and to follow that question all the way down even when it stops being comfortable. If you want to dismiss me, you will have to do it on the argument, because I am not going to give you the sneer to hide behind.

Here is the whole claim in three sentences, so no one can say I buried it. Reverence is the highest tribute a mind can pay, and it is finite. Craft earns it by showing the work first and collecting the awe after; the unprovable inverts that order, collecting the awe first and deferring the proof to a horizon that never arrives. The difference between a thing earned and a thing extracted is the difference between a tribute and a con — and I am going to argue that even the most beautiful con is still running the structure of one, however sincere the hands inside it.

**One. The awe is scarce, so where it goes is a moral act.**

Most arguments against faith stop at the empirical objection: there is no proof, so belief is unwarranted. That is true, and it is boring, and it has never moved a single believer, because the believer was never argued in by proof and so cannot be argued out by its absence. The real question lives one floor up.

Reverence is not infinite. You have only so much of it, and what you spend on one thing you cannot spend on another. That makes the direction of your awe a moral choice, not a private taste — because to revere a thing is to grant it your highest tribute, and to grant that tribute to something that did nothing to earn it is to withhold it from something that did. The lap time that was actually run. The arch that actually holds the load. The cure that actually works on the actual patient. These earned the tribute by being real, and every unit of awe spent on the unverifiable is a unit taken from them. So the question is not whether the unprovable exists. The question is what has earned the right to the scarcest thing you produce — and that question answers itself the moment you ask it honestly, because it sorts everything by one test: did it demonstrate, or did it merely demand.

**Two. The tell is which way the proof runs.**

Craft and the unprovable can be told apart with a single diagnostic, and it is the order of operations. Craft shows the work first and collects the reverence after. The cathedral stands before you revere the mason. The bridge holds before you trust the engineer. The argument survives attack before you grant it. The tribute comes after the demonstration, because the thing paid its debt and only then presented the bill.

The unprovable runs it backward. It asks for the tribute first and withholds the proof permanently. Believe now; the demonstration comes later — after death, in the next life, in a kingdom that arrives precisely never, on a timeline built so that it can never be checked. And that inversion is not a quirk; it is the load-bearing wall. A claim that paid out only after demonstration could be tested and could fail. A claim that collects first and defers the proof forever cannot fail, because there is never a moment where the bill comes due in this world. Pull that wall out — ask for the proof now, on terms a stranger could verify — and the structure comes down every time. That it has never once been removed, in any of its thousand forms, across every culture that ever ran it, is not an accident of history. It is the design. I am not saying the people inside are liars. I am saying the architecture is the architecture whether or not anyone in it knows the blueprint.

**Three. Why a structure this visible never falls.**

If the inversion is that plain, why does exposing it never end it? Because it is anchored to the one thing that does not go away: the fear of the unknown. This is the universal. Everyone dies. Everyone has stood at the edge of an outcome they could not control and felt the specific terror of being capable and powerless at once — the lever held by chance, or by death, or by something with no face to argue with. That fear is not a defect in some people. It is the standing condition of a conscious animal that knows it will end.

The unprovable is the structure that learned to answer that fear. It cannot remove the unknown — no one can — so it does the next thing: it gives the unknown a face. The void becomes a plan. The randomness becomes a judgment. The silence becomes a voice that knows your name. And for that fabricated relief — the unbearable made bearable by being personified — it asks a price, and the price is reverence and obedience, which are simply control by another name. Say it flat and it is nearly mechanical: the fear is universal and renews itself every morning; the fear demands relief; the structure supplies a certainty it cannot back; the price of the certainty is your awe and your will. It is the most durable arrangement ever built, because the raw material is manufactured fresh, at no cost to the seller, by the buyer’s own nervous system, every single day, forever.

**Four. But it built the cathedral — and that is true.**

Here is the strongest case against everything I have said, and I am not going to flinch from it, because an argument that only meets the cases that flatter it is not an argument, it is a grievance. The case is this: the unprovable has produced demonstrable craft of the very highest order. Chartres. The B Minor Mass. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The first hospitals, the first organized mercy at scale, the requiem that has carried real people through real grief that I have no right to wave away. If the thing were only a con preying on the frightened, it could not have commissioned the most reverence-worthy objects human hands have ever made. A pure parasite does not write the St Matthew Passion. Something real is in there. Grant it completely, or the rest of this is worthless.

So grant it — and watch the claim survive the granting, because the resolution was inside it the whole time. The craft in the cathedral is real and revere it without reservation. The doctrine that commissioned the cathedral is still a structure that demanded before it showed, and never showed. These are two different objects, and the entire discipline is refusing to let them fuse into one. The vaulting of Chartres is granite: it holds, it was solved, it demonstrates — give it everything. The claim the vaulting was raised to flatter is sandstone: it asked first and never paid. You can stand in the most reverence-worthy room ever built and aim every particle of your awe at the people who built it and the stone that obeys the load, and aim none of it at the unverifiable proposition the room exists to honor. The Bach is granite. The God it was written for is not. The reverence goes to the composer.

And this is the exact place where this argument parts company with cheap atheism, because cheap atheism gets this wrong in the opposite direction. The cheap version has to call the cathedral a waste and the Bach a byproduct of delusion and the whole inheritance an embarrassment — and in doing so it commits the original sin a second time, misallocating reverence again, this time by withholding it from craft that plainly earned it, out of spite for the doctrine bolted onto it. That is the same crime, inverted. The disciplined version reveres the mason harder, not less — because it can finally see him clearly, his hands no longer hidden behind the doctrine that took the credit for them. I am not asking you to love the cathedral less. I am asking you to love the builders enough to stop handing their genius to something that did not lift a stone.

**Five. And I will not call you weak.**

There is one more objection, and it is aimed not at the claim but at the contempt that usually rides shotgun with it — and the contempt is both ugly and wrong, so I am cutting it loose on purpose. The fear of the unknown is not a character flaw. It is the universal human condition, and the people who feel it are not weak; they are human and unarmored. The crime in this whole account was never being afraid. The fear is the most reasonable response a mortal mind can have to its own death. The crime is the mechanism that farms the fear — that has an interest in keeping the unknown dark, because the dark is what it sells light against. Aim the indictment there, at the franchise and not the frightened, and notice that it stops being a sneer and becomes something you cannot so easily throw out.

And here is the confession I owe, the one that makes this honest instead of superior, because without it I am just another man looking down from a height he did not earn. I have not escaped the fear. I have felt all of it — the not-knowing how much time is left, the outcome held by a lever I will never reach, the void with no face on it and no name to call. I was not braver than the believer. I simply refused the anesthetic and chose a colder armor. That is the whole difference between us, and it is not the difference between strong and weak. It is the difference between being numbed by a comfort and being armored by the demonstrable. You took the relief that was offered, and I will not pretend I do not understand why — it was offered to me too. I took the harder thing on purpose: the proven, the checkable, the work that shows itself, reverence pointed at what is real precisely because the unknown is unbearable and the real is the only thing that has never once lied to me about it. I am not standing above you. I walked through the same dark you did and came out the other side carrying it bare, with my awe pointed at the things that earned it instead of the thing that would have let me stop being afraid.

So come back to the tribute, because that is what this was always about. Reverence is the scarcest thing a mind makes, and what you point it at is the truest map of what you actually value — truer than anything you say you believe, truer than anything you were raised to repeat. Point it at the demonstrable and you have paid your highest tribute where it was earned: to the craft that showed the work, the structure that holds the load, the mind that solved the problem and let you check the solution. Point it at the unprovable and you have been charged your highest tribute for a relief you were sold, against a fear the seller has every reason to keep alive, with the proof deferred to a horizon that exists so that it can never arrive.

None of this requires you to deny that the unprovable produced beauty. It produced staggering beauty, and I will stand in that nave beside you and mean every second of the awe. It only requires the discipline to revere the beauty as craft — to give the awe to the hands and the stone and the held note — and to withhold it from the claim those things were raised to serve. The mason gets the tribute. The doctrine gets the door.

***That is the atheism worth having: not a belief in nothing, but a refusal to misallocate the one tribute that cannot be faked. Revere what proved it. Withhold from what only demanded it. And do not, under any pressure of fear or beauty or inheritance, agree to be billed for the unknown by the only party in the room who profits from keeping it dark.***

I've been turning this one over for a long time and I think it's finally worth putting in front of people who'll poke holes in it.

It's a first-person extraction shooter on a colony world. You drop in with a faction, work your objective, and race a clock to an exit, except the clock doesn't end in a forfeited loadout, it ends in orbital sterilization. Anything still on the map at zero gets erased. No menu to rebuild your kit, no four-minute do-over. The loss is actually real, and that's the whole reason the rest of it works.

The piece I'd most like you to try to break is what happens when you die. You don't get bounced to a spectate screen, about a minute later you molt into a xenomorph and keep playing, except now you're on the hunting side, still remembering how your old squad thinks. So the longer a match runs, the more the hive fills up with the people who've already died in it. I've built in guardrails so it can't be turned into a griefing tool: the converted player is fragile, muted, and respawns at a random node instead of on whoever killed them.

The thing pulling the whole match toward its ending is a hard countdown that does not negotiate, no extensions, no grace second for the guy who was almost to the door. When it runs down, the orbital strike comes for everything still on the map, so the endgame turns into this convergence where every faction and the hive itself are all fleeing the same fire toward the same closing exits.

Most of the moment to moment is reading by ear. The motion tracker only gives you range and bearing, it won't tell you whether that contact is in the duct above you or the hallway ahead, and your ears have to do that part. Noise is the real currency: every shot, every sprint, every word on voice is something you're giving away to the hive and to the other players, and there's no minimap to lean on. The exits play into the same tension, because there are several of them and they open and close on their own timers, so getting out is a live decision about which door is actually still going to be there when you arrive rather than a single camped chokepoint.

There's also a live specimen you can haul out as an objective, and it's the high-risk prize, it's got its own decay clock, and if you take fire near it the containment breaches and now there's an active monster loose at your exact position at the worst possible moment. And the factions are all asymmetric, marines, corporate security, rival-bloc commandos, free contractors, lone operators, chasing objectives that don't line up, so they collide. AI fills any empty seats so the map's never dead, and the whole thing is solo-viable.

Short version: it's the extraction loop where the dead don't leave and the loss finally counts for something.

What I actually want criticism on is whether the conversion mechanic feels like a real second life or just a fancy way of being benched, whether a countdown with zero extensions reads as thrilling or as punishing, and whether the audio-first read holds up with no minimap or I'm asking too much of people's ears. Tear into it, I'd rather find the cracks here than after I've fallen in love with it.

And if any of this grabs you and you want to go deeper, I've got the whole thing written up as a full design thesis — the systems, the factions, the economy, the production case, all of it. Happy to share the long version with anyone who wants it, just say so.

Proof is in the pudding. You just have to have patience, and careful tuning along with proper care and use.

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