Yeah no worries for the stream of consciousness, I do the same thing lol. I’m probably on the other extreme and complaining too much about things that don’t really matter. I tend to be a very yin / negative person though lol

Yeah, I like things starting at 0 so I remove my own up-vote. I used to do it on Reddit too until they removed the ability to do that, which unironically was one of the straws on the camel’s back for leaving there 😂

Thanks for the detailed reply :). Yeah I agree with you on most of it. A dumb phone actually sounds kind of appealing… Especially since it doubles as a fidget toy. Opening and closing it used to be like my favourite stim. I’ll seriously consider that.

On the Linux thing, I meant more that ITunes doesn’t work on my Linux PC, so it’s extremely hard to do anything between my phone and PC since I don’t use Windows at all anymore. And I really don’t want to dual boot it just for that and have it fuck up my grub file and ext4 drives. I tried having multiple file types on one drive once… Never again…

The camera is really high quality but really annoying. Like I can’t edit exposure or focus or anything properly. Either it takes a great photo, or it takes a garbage photo, and I kind of just have to accept whatever the phone app decides lol. There’s alternative apps but they work really weirdly due to API restrictions.

I’m starting to think my ideal setup is multiple separate devices that does one thing well. Like: dumb phone, dslr camera, kindle (for reading books), desktop for games, laptop for life admin, etc. Decentralise my digital life lol

Steam did basically invent the digital games marketplace, but that’s not a bad thing in my eyes. It brought games to many many more people, and helped make the industry what it is today. Without Steam, PC gaming might still just be an obscure hobby, and there might not be many games there at all. People forget what it was like before Steam, console gaming was extremely more popular than PC gaming. Like the numbers aren’t even close.

PC Games up to 2003 (Steam release date) were like: SimCity, Age of Mythology, Neverwinter Nights, Civ 3, Zoo Tycoon, Baldur’s Gate, Unreal Tournament.

Notice what these games genres and playstyle is like. You had to use a mouse and keyboard because game controllers didn’t even plug into your PC, even Microsoft Xbox used proprietary connectors not USB. My computer didn’t even have an USB port back then. The games had to be basically completely remade for PC, and game dev tooling was bad, so most didn’t bother porting at all. “Console-type games” were rare or extremely delayed PC releases.

This all changed after Steam made PC gaming popular, especially with the Orange Box. I remember thinking Steam was stupid back in the day. Like why do I have to make a dumb account just to use the CD I bought? And the interface was hot garbage. But of course it got better over time.

It was in person so it was even worse lol. Couch co-op chaos did not go well with BG3.

It was good in Divinity: Original Sin 1 because in that game you can kind of just ignore the entire story and play it like an action CRPG, which we enjoyed a lot. I got my MC and Jafar (not his actual name but it was a funny running joke because we couldn’t remember his name), my partner got their MC and the two handed sword lady I also forget her name. It was a running joke like, FFS Jafaaaaar C’mon! Because he would constantly fall over and get crippled by every CC that got near him. Like his toe would touch one molecule of frozen floor and he’d just comically fall over for 3 turns… then fall over again as soon as he got up and tried to walk out of it. Classic Larian.

But yeah it didn’t work for BG3 because the story actually matters

Sometimes my grown ass cat would made this really pathetic kitten squeak and I would pick him up like a baby and kiss him. He did it when he wanted attention and cuddles. I think cats are like kids, where you end up with these extremely specific “games” that everyone knows the rules to, but nobody would be able to write them down lol

Damn, that’s still some serious dedication though. Respect

Never heard of this one, it looks right up my alley though. Loved Hotline Miami and Brotato

It’s hard to explain, it’s more an emotional thing than a logical thing. Death by a thousand cuts kind of thing.

• I don’t like Apple choking out in-app purchases like they tried to make it even on Safari if you use Amazon website they wanted 30% cut…
• I don’t barely use any of the lock-in ecosystem like iCloud, I don’t trust “automatic backups”, I don’t understand or see the mechanism of.
• I wish I could actually access the file system when plugging into my PC.
• It doesn’t support Linux at all.
• I can’t download my movies I purchased onto my devices for backup.
• As an intermediate photographer, the camera really pisses me off.
• They updated the default keyboard years ago so swipe to type is awful now and I had to install GBoard.
• I don’t really trust Google either.
• I wish I could install Firefox and add-ons but Firefox is just Safari with a trenchcoat.
• I can’t sync things to my iPhone properly.
• Apps don’t really work properly in the background, they keep going to sleep. Even just switching between 2 apps to copy paste by the time I come back it’s killed the first app to save memory or something. I have plenty of memory.
• Web apps suuuuuck and keep logging me out and losing state.
• I hate notifications and being “always online” and social media. It makes my head hurt and it’s so hard to curate your notifications. Like I want discord to tell me about messages but not about Nitro promotions at 9pm.

I’m probably forgetting things too, but really it’s just a combination of factors. I feel like I’m paying a lot for things I don’t want or use. Honestly give me a phone with no apps apart from phone and messages, and just great Firefox web app support, and I’d probably be happy. My phone is an iPhone 13 so it’s getting a bit old, but I’m not sure yet what I actually want… Just thinking about it for now. Thinking about maybe something wildly different.

It’s not quite that, because if that were the case I’d just start a new save file or go do all the side quests. Instead I just stop playing forever

It’s not really the difficulty for me, it’s more a feeling of pointlessness and apathy and tedium. Like I just stop caring about the game once I see the final boss. I’ll grind out every secret optional ultra hard boss in the game, but I’ll refuse to fight the final boss lol

NMS is the perfect game for a specific kind of person. Unfortunately that person isn’t me either. I’m glad some people like it though, and it seems well made

Yes exactly, I had that same feeling in that game. I talked to every NPC 3 times just to make sure I didn’t miss any dialogue, and just sat there on the bridge, and then stopped playing lol

The game stops feeling immersive, and starts feeling like a game again for some reason. All the creative choices are interaction have been exhausted, and you’re just funneled into the final boss. Generally the boss only has one way to finish it and the same cutscene at the ending. It doesn’t feel like “play” anymore to me.

Yeah it’s interesting, I think it might be just differences in psychology. Like the reasons we play games in the first place and what we enjoy about them are different.

Most people I know in real life share your opinion, and look at me askance when I tell them I never actually finish any game. One friend said I’m the mf that would leave the ring at Mordor because I was just there for the hike. Which is accurate since I played some LOTR games in the past this way lol

Cassette Beasts was a game I played to 100%

Did you do the theoretical 10,000 hour speedrun and unlock all fusions and bootlegs?

The thing is, you can’t predetermine if they’ll have cancer or some other rare conditions before existing. There’s very good screening tests nowadays to help prevent that as well. To me, it seems like a strange morality for that to be your reason to avoid having children. It’s anticipatory grief, like not making friends because they might die. By the same logic, what if your child is the one that discovers the cure to cancer? In that case, it’s cruel not to have them, but you can’t know, so it’s a moot point. Unless you do know, in which case send me a DM, I’m in need of a mystic.

Hereditary conditions are a whole different conversation.

I had the same experience with BG3. It feels more like a single player game in a way, in multiplayer it felt a bit awkward with the story moments. My partner kept skipping cutscenes, and making weird story choices that often led to genocide. Which I suppose is peak chaotic neutral murder hobo DnD behaviour, but the game really isn’t balanced around murder hobo 😂. I kind of was just held hostage and had to sit there while they talked to people and I had no idea what was going on. I’m planning to try again in single player eventually.

Yes I agree, you said it better. There’s a huge conflict of interest and “trust me bro” involved when companies save money by switching ingredients. Most of these studies on the health effects of those ingredients are directly funded by those companies as well. If anything it’s kind of insane to trust those studies at that point, it’s like trusting big oil’s studies on global warming.

Sorry, you’ll have to rectify that

I find the “force fem” and egg image comments on BlueSky kind of disturbing… Is this an “in joke” or are people being gross?