•_•

Me and my friends were talking about how Zuko and Mai are just the worst canon relationship in AtLA, and decided that Zuko would find his true passion with Sokka.

*Not being able to conceptualize the idea of what a fight against your pfp would even look like, e.g. if your pfp is just a solid blue circle with no inherent meaning behind it

Do not use Discord to host your files. Do not rely on Discord to preserve your text. DO NOT RELY ON DISCORD FOR ANY KIND OF PRESERVATION OR HOSTING!!

It CAN be lost, it WILL be lost! You must consider Discord as a part of the Core Internet, controlled by one company that hosts the servers.

I thought it was impressive at first that it replaced IRC, but now I am horrified. If the company behind Discord went under today, how many friends would you lose?

How many relationships? How much writing?

You may think this won't happen, but I remember when AIM went down and along with it, entire novels worth of interaction with my oldest friend.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. NO COMPANY IS INFALLIBLE.

I am used to Word autosaving relentlessly; for the last few years it didn't really even have a "File>Save" command that I could see--it just autosaved like every five seconds or something. It took me a long time to get used not clicking File>Save at the end of every writing session, and I never really trusted it--with good reason, it turns out.

Apparently, when you turn off Word's new ai features, AutoSave is disabled and cannot be turned back on. There is toggle button in the upper left for it, but when I try to toggle it on, it says "Autosave is not available because of your privacy settings." I worked in my document yesterday, put my computer to sleep with the doc still open on the taskbar (my usual habit), and when I opened it today, the new work I did yesterday was gone.

This time I only lost about 300 words, which I had typed into my document from my longhand-writing in a notebook (so I guess I kind of autosaved them that way!), but if I'd really been on a roll, this could have been a disaster.

Many here will suggest LibreOffice as an alternative: and it is a damn good one. But it is not nearly as polished as word and to some people it might be a bit jarring to get back to the Menu Bar era, especially people who haven't used anything pre-Word 2007.

So, here's my not very comprehensive list of alternatives and how to make them feel more like home:

1. *LibreOffice*: The gold standard. People love it and for a good reason. Still the open source champ but feels old.

> When you first start LibreOffice, it'll prompt you to select an interface, check them out. The most familiar to Office refugees would be Tabbed Ribbon.

or

> If you've already installed it, follow this guide: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-properly-set-up-tabbed-view/58871/3

2. Collabora Office: If you need to, well, collaborate with people this is the way to go. Used at enterprise scale. Already looks like Office.

3. OnlyOffice (Web or Desktop editors): I _highly_ recommend these. They are incredibly well built, look and work almost entirely like Office, and did I mention they are Open Source?

4. WPS Office: I don't really recommend this as much because of its closed source nature, but it does work incredibly well on mobile where the others still struggle a bit. Worth checking out esp if you are on Android.

5. Ellipsus: Must mention. If you need to just _write_ and don't need formatting tools, don't even bother with anything else. Local storage, sync, auto-save, cloud backups, sharing and editing and revising tools - this thing is actually amazing. Really worth a shot!