When I moved to the PNW a decade ago my dad was extremely worried about me. He would tell me every time we talked “You know, I saw on the news that all of the big companies are moving away to states that have lower taxes, and your city will be destitute any day now.”

Even now, a decade later, he keeps saying it. Any day now. Personally, I think he should stop watching Fox.

Talking to a relative about people in his retirement community, he told me “A lot of the people here can’t afford health insurance on their fixed incomes. If something happens to them, they just die.” And, as I was thinking how horrible that was, he switched gears to “Did you hear about how those democrats want to try and mess with healthcare again? I swear they won’t be happy until I’m broke!”

I missed a comma and read “fleeing cops say” and thought “yeah, that tracks”

Song-based radios for new music discovery on a service where they don’t silently drop huge swaths of music from my curated “liked” list. Tidal, Qobuz, and Bandcamp failed to meet this requirement in different ways.

Spotify isn’t even good, but I don’t have another real option yet.

I used Tidal for a few months, then found out it had silently removed ~10% of my music from my “liked” list. Completely unacceptable. They should at least keep a list of titles so I can go back and fix it. People say all services do this, but I’ve been keeping an eye on it and Spotify hasn’t done it since I hopped back.

Qobuz was painful to use and new music discovery was hopeless. No idea if they were removing tracks too.

Bandcamp seems cool, but I prefer to listen to music via song-based-radios, so that’s a no go.

Not sure what I’ll do if I have to drop Spotify again over ads.

If someone I knew told me they asked an LLM to generate their password, I would no longer talk to that person.

Temporal Anti-Aliasing. It’s a cheap and effective way to get rid of the jagged edges of a rendered image, but temporal effects like TAA and all of the other tools derived from it, like a lot of other AA options and most frame generation techniques, introduce blurring and shadow smearing.

I tried posting a three second clip from TP2 showing it clearly, but Voyager didn’t seem to like it. This post is an extreme example, but you can see it in most modern AAA games. Cyberpunk had it bad (another game I adore).

Thanks!

My biggest complaint with TP2 is that, between the two games, they added forced TAA like so many other games. TAA introduces blurring that drives me into a rage. The original came out before all that and was great, so I’m not super excited to try the modified version, though I might grab it just to support them a little more.

Talos Principle 2. It’s a solid chamber puzzle game like Portal, but the philosophy audio logs were so good that they shifted my real world views into a less nihilistic place.

Animal Well had some code breaking I enjoyed.

One of the quick time events in Wolf Among Us is my favorite gaming moment.

One of the great things about lemmy is that when I block someone toxic it has a significant impact on the quality of my feed.

I went to Wendy’s the other day, and they have this automatic pre-recorded English-fluent woman cheerfully ask for your order. While an actual person didn’t indicate that they were ready, I know they won’t do a second intro message either way, so I started to order. A heavy spanish accent comes over the speaker “Fucking wait, god.” My only thought was “Fair enough” and I waited.

Whoever implements these systems is crazy. We don’t pay people enough to be policed that heavily.

As a customer, I would feel much more comfortable talking to someone who doesn’t sound like they have a gun to their head.

Too much parking, in Topeka.

Reminds me of Nuclear Gandhi.

I wanted so badly to like Tidal (and Qobuz), but after using it for several months I discovered it had removed 5-10% of my music from my “liked” list. Presumably because the artists re-uploaded a higher quality version, but they didn’t give me any notification at all and there was no way to see what was removed.

People say Spotify does this too, but when I went back, my number of liked songs hadn’t changed in that same time frame.

Edit: Re-read your question, you are talking about games in general. A Switch might be a good buy, straightforward and you can usually find people willing to play in person or online for the more popular games. The games are rarely on sale though. Highly recommend a pro controller if you go this route.

For PC, there’s basically never kernel level anti-cheat, only a few frankly not great games go that route.

As far as expensive goes, there’s a ton of great PC games you can get for less than $5 during steam sale. The initial buy-in is more for a maybe $1500 PC, but you will make that up after a few dozen games. If you know a PC gaming enthusiast, imply you would play with them if you had a PC and they might sell you an old rig for dirt cheap. I’ve sold a few that way for like $100.

Set-up is easy as steam is the only program you need and controllers are plug-and-play. If you are willing to risk a little work, I found Linux Mint as an OS really easy to install and use, and then it will be future-proof (unlike windows) as well as free. You may have to troubleshoot something weird, but their forums are super helpful.

Got pulled off all of my R&D projects and told by the CEO in a meeting with all of the team leaders (who enthusiastically agreed) to focus entirely on this one project as it was critically important and mandatory whether we liked it or not before we could go to market with our product. Said OK, got it ready in record time, none of the managers wanted to approve testing. Got told a generic “We need more info.”

Fleshed out everything I could. Did all sorts of bench top testing with full reports, did thorough budget analysis for the entire thing, a complete gantt chart with every contingency accounted for.

Two years later I’m in the latest of god only knows how many approval meetings with management. I’ve dialed back how much I expect out of them and I’m just trying to get an official project initiation form signed so at least I have a record of them acknowledging the project’s existence. One of them asks, for the nth time, “Why do we need to do this again?”

Boss looks at me expectantly, like “Yes, why do we need to do this?” as if I was the one who put myself on the project. I said “I can forward you the email where you told me to drop everything and work on it. If you changed your mind I’m more than OK to drop it and work on something else, but I refuse to hold even one more meeting to get agreement that I should even be working on this.”

He says “I think we just need more information.” I ask “Such as?” knowing full well there wasn’t a single more thing I could add. “We just need more information.” All of the team leaders just stared at me. So I quit on the spot and walked out.

Talked to a friend who still worked there and they still haven’t moved forward with that project years later, and the governing body still refuses to allow sale of the product until they do. It’s a 2 year timeline for testing so I have no idea what they are thinking. It’s only $100,000 too, they paid me more to try and get approval for two years than it would have cost to do it in the first place.

I used to work with a guy who worked at Valve prototyping stuff like the steam controller. He was a boomer so he complained about how people were always playing games in the break room and what not. Said he hated that job, his reasons might as well have been a wishlist for my future career. If he wasn’t so damn helpful I would probably hate him to this day.