If it snowed out, I’m either getting exercise by shoveling the walkway outside my house, or the street’s already been plowed and I can bike.

Yup, the article focuses only on OLED, but only because that’s the “news”. They had previously reported the LCD model being out, which I hadn’t heard about yet.

I mean, true, but I don’t think the Machine and VR headset are competing with the Deck.

Man, I know it’s typical and passé to pass on things with complex names, but it may have been a poor move. Imagine if people stayed away from “dihydrogen monoxide” bottles because they sound like chemically treated poison.

Somehow height didn’t work for me. It might be attractiveness; part of me also suspects something about the sum image makes me seem a little bit intimidating to people.

It did come in handy one time when a racist drunk guy was harassing a poor Korean commuter on the subway. It’s hard to quantify the ways being scary/intimidating is good for you, as opposed to the inverse.

Most of my Discord usage is text-based or sharing images, and I tend to have casual presence in many of them at once, due to varying interest groups. As far back as I’ve known, those servers haven’t focused much on that.

I installed this yesterday and couldn’t find one room related to video games that had any chat messages in the past few years. I put a message in anyway, but not optimistic.

It seems like they were the main replacement recommendation in many cases, and their servers may have overloaded thanks to the Discord enshittification news.

The Last of Us Pt 2 Episode 1 (and an announcement for its Remaster in one year)

I might consider the facial verification thing if someone fulfills a security audit that both verifies the photo is never sent, encrypted or not, and it does not stay on the device’s drive.

But yeah, part of me hopes some number of privacy focused companies will just abandon business in these locations and claim “It’s only a matter of time before they reverse course for security failures, we will just wait until then.”

Even with all the hacky annoyance CachyOS gives me, it is so refreshing not to get OneDrive or Copilot shoved on me in every window.

Cue montage of anime/visual novels that have the pretty protagonists relaxing on a hill with 5 wind turbines in the background behind them.

I wonder how many people would have said the same about reality TV host Donald Trump.

Though Highgiard probably deserves to be a failure, I have noticed these snap judgments too, and don’t often enjoy them.

I even see them the other way. A crowd knows a game for its notoriety, and they worship the amazing payoff at 30 hours. But, in the face of that positivity, no one is making good observations about how 15 of those hours were useless padding and the game’s main mechanics are severely flawed.

That’s not an observation that should retroactively pull down the score of a game that left impacts on people though. Analyzing flaws can help us work out how to improve sequels, or even patch games to help people dive further into them.

Alright, here’s a hot take:

I’m 7 hours into Clair Obscur. It’s intrigued me a little, and I know it has good reviews for excellent story, but nothing I’ve seen has wowed me. Should I give it a negative review?

If you want nostalgia for a remake of a game that came out close to the year 2000, I would instead recommend Trails in the Sky First Chapter. Unlike the dumb time travel ghost shenanigans, it’s actually a remake of an old JRPG. It tunes up battle mechanics, but also respects what worked in the first game.

Some games that came to mind for this thread were:

• Another Crab’s Treasure, a soulslike with some fun imagery, but also a great storyline about the poisons of late-stage capitalism
• Mouthwashing, the famous horror game where the monster is machismo and warped senses of responsibility
• J J Macfeld and the Island of Memories, also a pretty brutal game about a certain kind of social acceptance (I got this one wrong even late-game, which made its message all the better)
• Papers Please, giving you a highlight of the xenophobia developed at the border of nations in conflict
• Celeste, promoting self-acceptance through difficult platforming challenges

I have a novel planned about this. Basically, zombie apocalypse starts. People get infected, the lights go out in major cities and they lose radio contact, and the troupe of heroes, lead by a gritty survivalist, set down harsh rules for their camp to survive as long as they can.

Several months later after some harsh decisions and a few deaths, the radio hums to life again. Turns out, the city’s main antenna was damaged, and there was risk in fixing it. But, with some danger, life has proceeded as normal there; and they’re making steady breakthroughs on a cure for the infection. The government is active, finding who to help, and little of the “Brutal, tough decisions” of the survivor crowd were necessary.

Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.

This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.

Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.

I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.