Early access doesn’t really work for me. I’ll pick it up, play at half-baked game until I run out of content, then never touch it again. I’m sure Valheim and 7 Days to Die are really good now, but my initial pass wasn’t good enough for me to ever say “Ah, let’s spend more time on another playthrough!”
Maybe other people get something out of it.
I always hear “very competitive”, which in my experience means “nearly minimum wage”.
The day Steam enshittifies will be a dark day for me.
If I had read that series a few years earlier I probably would have liked it. It felt like the author just hated women, and I was just old enough to go “What the hell?”
Edit: It’s been a while, can’t remember if this is the one I’m thinking of or if I read a similar series at the same time.
God I forgot about that. Windows makes me so mad.
I made an account just to know when PAX tickets went on sale, but I still feel dirty.
Tabletop games are good because you can trust your DM to guide the failures in an interesting way. Unless it’s a bad DM and you can’t.
I had a DM who believed strongly that failure was what made it interesting, he loved to say “The characters in Star Wars failed almost every time and that’s why it was good!” But actually watching the movies, failures bad enough to result in grievous bodily harm are relatively rare.
One time during our first session of a new game we were somewhere dark and a creature was there. He had me roll athletics with no explanation and I rolled high. Then he had me roll acrobatics, high again. Athletics again, high. Constitution check, high. Athletics 11. Then he cackled and eagerly described how a dragon cut off my arm.
My character was built entirely around two handed weapons, this made me borderline useless. Based off of his comments, he didn’t have any plans to provide a way for my character to recover his limb, he just thought it would be cool to mutilate me and decided to force me to roll until I failed.
Needless to say I didn’t go back.
Even BG3 failed at this. A few times I had to navigate a minefield using a guide for something I didn’t want to miss out on. It’s more fun to just blast through without loading, but sometimes the consequences are dire for messing up some little detail and I can’t bring myself to just not have good endings.
It used to be about half of users lied about restarting because “That couldn’t possibly solve this problem!” Now there’s also people who truly believe they did but didn’t because MS sucks and broke shutdown. IT could be fairly confident in saying “No you didn’t.” to almost every user.
I’ve experienced IT support aura, both from my friends and myself when I joined IT for a while.
I’ve also experienced the evil IT aura. Sometimes when everything is working just fine and an IT worker touches or observes it, it will break inexplicably.
An IT friend asked to use my computer to play a round of Starcraft at a LAN party and I agreed. Watched him slowly sit down, extend his arms above the keyboard like a pianist, slowly rest his hands on the keyboard, and immediately got my first BSOD. Wasn’t even running anything, just sitting on the desktop.
Hope things get more relaxing for you OP.
I recently installed Mint for my first Linux and honestly it took me a few days to get it set up fully. The initial install was really quick and super easy, 90% complete in an hour. But, for example, my speakers didn’t produce sound. Four hours of trying to force drivers and all sorts of bizarre fixes, finally post on the forum for help and find out there’s a hidden volume setting in alsamixer that was set to 0.
Still better than windows.
I don’t know this woman, but she’s close with people I care about and responding to her bragging about her son with “His actions are terrible and here’s why” would have stirred up drama. I’m not going to convince her that I’m right and her son is wrong in the five minutes we had together.
Not super related but a friend of the family I’m visiting stopped by yesterday and was bragging about her son, who recently prompted an LLM to write a fantasy series “in the style of the Witcher”, did some loose editing, and published the books on amazon. She wrapped up with “He did some research and it isn’t even plagiarism!”
I tried to look occupied with something else, but she explicitly called out to me “What do you think?” It took everything I had not to lunch into an anti-AI rant starting with “Actually, his pollution of the literary space syphoning money away from real authors is plagiarism, and here’s why!”
Personally, I hate partial releases so I haven’t played it yet, despite loving Undertale.
One of my friends pointed out to the teacher that they shouldn’t store the grades on a shared location the students could access and got expelled. I’ll stick to Oregon Trail.
One time I was one of the very first people to play an MMO so my friends and I all grabbed up some really good names that are always taken before we start. I made six characters, two female, one of which I named “Beyonce” and put effort into making it look as much like her as possible.
On five of the characters people pretty much ignored me entirely, as usual. But when I played Beyonce people wanted to talk to me all the time. They would constantly invite me to stuff, give me things, name drop me in chat. Just kind of gather around me in town. Even other men who were playing female characters just assumed I was a woman.
I don’t know what it was about that character specifically, but it was a valuable insight into the life of women.
When I was in grad school I lived in an international student dorm where I was basically the only American. One day we had a party, and after a few drinks the Europeans started into this game they’ve all seemingly done a hundred times before where they started saying the most vile shit I’ve ever heard to each other while laughing. Like “OK, sure everyone in my country is drunk all the time, but it’s better than you guys letting in all those thieving gypsys!”
So they did a full round of about 20 people throwing the worst racism/nationalism I’ve ever come across in real life at each other, including absolutely dunking on the only black guy as if he was a representative for all africans, then like a hive mind they all turned to me and someone went “At least none of us are as racist as these Americans!” followed by uproarious laughter. I ask myself internally all the time if my behavior is problematic, but it seemed like these people never learned that skill but instead were taught “USA=racist, everyone else is good” and never questioned it or themselves.
For years this led me to privately think “Man, Europeans are way worse.” But then, you know, we elected Trump twice and the Klan came back dressed in camo.
For me I just want a fast forward button. They have something they call fast forward, but it seeks instead.
Tbh now gaming just works on Linux. I primarily game and I see no reason to ever go back.