Personally, I’m ok with it remaining niche. Reddit got worse as it got bigger. Both in terms of it attracted back the CEO that had left it, now that it looked like he could make money from it (which ultimately led me to leaving the site entirely and just lurking instead of participating if I do go there), and how it attracted every other person looking to either make money from spam or manpulate opinions via disinformation (or selective information). Plus the corruption when the greedy CEO and those looking to just make money worked together. Oh also a higher prevalence of people just looking to troll or fuck with people.

The fediverse mainly just addresses the stuff having to do with the admins. If the admins for one instance get greedy or allow corruption, users can move to a different instance to avoid that admin’s power.

But I don’t think it has anything to solve the other problems, those just require more moderation, which comes with problems of its own, like power tripping mods, users reporting things that don’t need moderation because overworked mods might just remove it anyways or automatically because they can’t handle the volume otherwise (and generally aren’t paid to do that work).

But coming to here from Reddit those years ago was nice because its size meant we not only got away from corrupt admins but also most of the other shit that made reddit crappy outside of how it was run.

I played a lot of games this year, but there were main ones that “stuck” more than others. I’m a patient gamer, so most of these aren’t new releases.

I was playing a lot of Satisfactory earlier in the year. Not much more recently but I know I’m not done with that game. I started a second save to organize things better, though not sure how well I’m accomplishing that. Though this second one uses more trains while the first one had more of a road setup, including a raised highway to access the oil area in the south east. Still nothing like some of the megaatructures I see in other builds online. I try to plan for expansion, so don’t tend to “finish” buildings, but rather build up a frame that can be added to in any direction. I’d give the game a 9/10 overall.

Another game I got into for a bit was TCG Card Shop Simulator. It was fun for a bit but then dropped off hard as the novelty wore off. I think that’s how “pretend to work a job” games generally go for me. Fun and satisfying at first, but then repetitive and unrewarding later on. I’m going through something similar with Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 right now, though I’ll get to that. I’d rate it about a 6.5/10, though it feels like an 8/10 at first before dropping off to more like a 4/10 once it gets old.

I’ll give Healed to Death an honourable mention, even though I moved on from it pretty quickly. It’s a great concept IMO, since sometimes I want to do a “healing the raid” type activity but don’t want to invest the time into a MMO to get there again. But this one isn’t just playing the healer, you also need to manage a constantly revolving party’s gear and switch them to follow mode (where they do no attacking even if they are ranged) to move them out of the fire during fights. So it’s basically healer simulator but your party is always the worst. If they (actually it’s one guy I believe, so impressive job even if it is lacking overall) added better AIs that didn’t need to be micromanaged, it would be much better. I’d give it a 4/10 in its current state but it could be a 9/10 with better execution.

TMNT: Splintered Fate is very similar to Hades (in fact, I’d call it a clone). I liked it but didn’t stick with it for long. 8/10.

Schedule I is another one of those “work that is fun at first but gets old”. Though they’ve added a bunch of stuff since I last played, so I will probably check it out again at some point. Game loop is basically find a spot, produce drugs, maybe modify them by adding shit to them, then selling them either directly or via a dealer. Then use the cash to produce more drugs or get new places (both areas to produce drugs and businesses to launder the proceeds, though I don’t know if laundering even makes a difference at this point), hire workers or buy vehicles and weapons. I believe they added competing cartels in an update since I last played, so it could be more interesting now. 7/10.

Then had a short period where I was interested in speed running, though mostly just against myself, since I’m nowhere close to the top charts on anything. Did a bit with Subnautica (best time to leave in rocket was under 10 hours now iirc) and Grim Dawn (I think I got my best Act 1 time to beat the record full game time lol). No rating for speed running in general (though it does not go well with ADHD unless you hyperfocus on one game), but Subnautica 10/10 and Grim Dawn 8/10 (it’s similar to Diablo).

Widget Inc was another, it’s pretty much an automation game without logistics, where each new production building rises in cost exponentially and prestiging to increase overall production. Apparently they just released a major update yesterday (looks like it adds enemies). Not sure I’ll look into it. 6/10.

Did House Flipper for a bit, which followed the job game pattern of being fun and engaging for a bit and then repetitive. At first, I intended to get the second game, but my interest in the whole thing waned before that. It was cool that they had Kame house in the game, with hidden dragon balls to find. 7/10.

Also was playing some Dark Souls this year off and on. I realized that there was a lot more to the world than just a hard path through tough enemies. Like there’s shops, blacksmiths, and a ton of hidden things. I also tried builds other than highly mobile swords builds and found 2H is actually easier because your hits often stagger the enemies (and do way more damage), so instead of dodging and timing carefully, you can rush in and overwhelm opponents, eliminating members of groups before the others can even react. Got stuck on the gargoyles, though there were some close attempts and I’ll probably get farther the next time I pick it up. 8.5/10.

I 100% Particle Fleet: Emergence. This game is great if you like systematically picking apart an opponent’s position. Took 15.8 hours to get 100% of achievements, though there’s also a bunch of other maps without achievements that I haven’t done yet and will return to when I feel the itch that those games scratch. 7/10.

I didn’t play it for very long but tried Breathedge, going for a subnautica kind of experience. It does feel like it, but I don’t think the game is tuned very well. I’m not sure if it changes later on in the game, but the part I was playing had me constantly returning to the start. I could go farther out as I upgraded, but progress felt stagnant and I gave up on it. The game did set goals at points of interest, but they were pretty far between and I felt like either I didn’t know what to do to extend my range that far or that it would be tedious as hell doing it the way I could see was possible. I’ll give it a 7/10 on the assumption that part of my issue was needing to git gud, but if I was right about it being the tedious route, I’d drop it to a 5/10.

Played a bunch of Dota 2 for a few months. They give you free dota plus access when you start, which gives access to some useful meta information, but then when it expires, the amount they want for a subscription is kinda high. I’ll give credit for coming up with a f2p system that can generate revenue without any p2w (between the dota plus and cosmetics), but the price turned me off and I didn’t feel like playing as much without that info. Maybe I’ll return to it eventually, as I did enjoy the game itself and like that the full hero list is free (unlike LoL with a rotating set of free ones, though I also don’t mind that monetization system, but I’m on Linux so LoL doesn’t really exist anymore). 7/10.

Stuck in Time is an interesting idle-ish game. You play a regressor, so a character for whom the world resets and plays out exactly the same (depending on your actions) each loop, and as you loop, you get better at doing everything. You give a series of actions to perform each loop and can tweak that list as you go for the next loop. 7/10.

Icarus is a survival game on an alien planet that was teraformed and seeded with a bunch of earth life. You start out with stone age tech (though with a modern understanding, like you can build stone age tools for water purification). I like that, even though there’s oxygen on the planet, they still have you in a atmospheric isolation suit because the air contains microbes we can’t breathe safely (though no idea how it would be safe to consume food and water in those conditions, but hey, it’s still more accurate than most “visit alien planet with oxygen” fictions are which usually just do analysis that says it’s safe to breathe the air). The open world mode is very well done, a nice combination of freedom to do what you want plus missions to do something more specific for a reward or direction. I’ve more or less mastered the forest biome and have started branching out into the arctic biome. The wildlife can be tough to deal with before you figure out how to fight certain animals (like bears and polar bears), especially when you’re stuck with stone or iron age weapons. I almost rage quit the game a few times due to a scenario that spawns a bear, which then tends to stick by your corpse and gear. But there are multiple strategies to handle them, so I suggest sticking with it and even looking up how others do it if you’re really stuck (I did for bears, though they get easier to handle with shotguns). 9.5/10.

Nova Drift is a recent game I’ve been playing, a bullet hell roguelike, so far 2.8 hours in, it’s a lot of fun. 8.5/10.

And Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 is the latest in the job games I’ve been playing. It’s following the trend, as I’ve finished tearing down the biggest ship in the vanilla game and am now on the fence about whether to a) finish up the smaller ships I skipped along the way to the biggest, b) buy some DLC with more ships, or c) just move on from this game. I will say that it is more satisfying than other job games I’ve played, but at only 23 hours in, it’s hard to say if it will have more staying power than the others. 8/10.

And on my playstation, I’ve been playing through FFX remastered. FF7 was always the “main” FF in my mind, but I think I like the FFX gang better now. I’m not as into JRPGs and the turn-based combat as I used to be, but don’t mind it so much in this game. 9.5/10.

It’s a stupid argument to begin with. Trademarks should die with the original entitiy that used them. Neither of these companies have anything to do with the original brand but both want to cash in on its recognizability. Both should build their own fucking reputations. I hope they both go broke fighting over this.

I disagree with that. The instance you pick is important. They are a set of mini dictatorships (though not all are run like that in practice, but admins can be dictators on their instance). Some even have built in automated censorship.

And somehow Palpatine returned.

I think it’s because people know that those who really need that kind of help aren’t going to benefit from some corporate approved form “we care!” message.

So the people who use it are either the “wants to be helpful but is very bad at determining who needs help and how to help” type or the trolling type.

What in the ragety-anne-fuck is going on there?

Your second paragraph tells me you haven’t even tried because the first part is just checking a checkbox in the steam settings to automatically use proton for games without linux support, and occasionally going in to the game settings (again in steam) to force it to use proton instead of a broken linux version.

And there’s no performance limitations running them on Linux. If anything, performance is even better on Linux because it isn’t running every single possible service MS wants to minimize support time and gobble up data.

Only exceptions to this are if you play games that want to do things in your kernel, or maybe if you’re using an nvidia gpu, depending on your distro it might take effort to get that set up properly.

If you have an AMD GPU, it’s actually quicker to go from start installing the OS to playing a game on linux than it is in windows between a) it not trying to steal focus to upsell you on other ms products, b) gpu drivers being included in the distro, and c) the defaults just being better on linux, thus less time spent making it less annoying to use.

It’s just no longer true that windows is the right tool for gaming, except for a list of specific games that want to invade the kernel and thus I’m kinda happy that I won’t accidentally run one. They don’t even stop cheating (which should be done on the server side anyways).

Not to mention they often cheap out on both the software and hardware, so you end up having to slowly navigate through poorly designed UIs that it struggles to display.

It’s because epic store launched with “exclusive access” being a “perk” to attract users. I fucking hate that shit in the TV/Movie space so I decided to not support it.

Also, using that as an opening move suggested that they’d enshitify as soon as they have the market power to do so.

Plus their anti-linux stance. Not just not supporting the shift to linux but specifically against it by removing support that was previously there. And they killed off the UT franchise to be sure it wouldn’t compete with Fortnite.

Even the reduced commission rate just seems like a play to build market share to be abused.

Meanwhile, the biggest negative I’ve seen from valve is cosmetic lootboxes that you can ignore by not playing their games or not buying lootboxes if you do.

It supporting Gaben into billionairehood isn’t great but he’s one of the few that makes things better by still being around (because who knows if the next one(s) in control will sell out or not). Plus, with him already being a billionaire, MS can’t change his course by throwing money at him.

Check your resolution and scaling settings if it’s literally blurry. If you’re not using an integer multiple of your monitor’s native resolution, fonts can become hard to read because they don’t scale evenly into the pixels available. Sometimes games launch for the first time with weird defaults for resolution, so worth having a look if you haven’t already.

And I blame shit like sherlock for making idiots online think they can deduce shit based on random shit like this. Even if Sherlock is smartly written, he’s still written to be right and bases deductions on random tiny details. Not to mention, there’s tropes to writing that makes outcomes more easily predictable, and someone picking up on foreshadowing might think they can do what Sherlock can do and apply it to stupid shit on the internet, like if a story is real or if someone is telling an accurate version of the story for AITA type judgements.

If you had stuck around because the sex stuff didn’t bug you, it devolves into capitalist propaganda. The evil bad guys follow communism, except the focus is on making sure everyone suffers similarly and talent is kept down (because everyone must be equal, thus anyone with talent are trying to be better than others). Of course Richard changes the hearts of those he comes in contact with by carving a statue so amazing it changes their worldview. Oh and he protects everyone from the evil bad guy boss dream walker by having them swear allegiance and if they truly mean it in their heart, it’ll protect them.

Near the end, Richard monologues for pages and pages about the greatness of capitalism and became the second book I was reading for fun where I skipped over parts because even young me found the preaching to just be too much and his portrayal of communism so cartoonishly evil that it must be bullshit.

I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t an example of that. The three sisters provided benefits to each other while growing simultaneously.

RAM is a resource that works best when you have more than you need. I always want there to be some unused RAM because then my system can do anything it needs to without spending time swapping out the least recently used pages before it has any free ones to use.

Shitty programs that take GBs of memory to do things that should only need MBs or KBs of it isn’t “getting my money’s worth out of my computer”.

If someone claims to not have any pronouns, always refer to them by their name.

No, “Hi Jeff, how was your day? Did you pick up your package?”

It’s, “Hi Jeff, how was Jeff’s day? Did Jeff pick up Jeff’s package?”

If you don’t know their name, make up a descriptive one, be creative!

The connectors on the back of the TV can be oriented horizontally (like parallel to the screen, not perpendicular), which at least changes the pull force to a torque force, which isn’t ideal but easier to hold on to.

Iirc you can create custom syntax highlighting formats for notepad++. So if it’s not there by default, someone else might have made a file for it, or you can start making one yourself, as the format was easy to understand. It’s been like a decade since I’ve used it, but it should be somewhere in the menus.

To be fair, it’s about other things, too. Like Jenny’s character’s arc had nothing to do with that part.

Lol

Cause: No one knows.

Treatment: Tell the patient to stop worrying about it.