Can you get the unique seasonal cars? They aren’t in the autoshow, you can’t buy them aside from the AH.

See also: Chex Quest

I had this on my “to play” list for years and finally did a full play through as the first game on my new OLED monitor. It holds up incredibly well so many years later. The AI, sound design, and lighting really carry the game, and when I went back to watch Alien I realized how true to the source material it was. 9/10 game for me, had my heart racing numerous times but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I could only do an hour or two a day but wow, very glad I pushed myself to finish it. Probably the most fun I’ve had with a game’s AI since STALKER’s A-Life or FEAR’s AI.

Still Wakes the Deep. Shit goes wrong on a Scottish oil rig in the 70s, it’s sorta like dead space mixed with alien isolation and a walking simulator. Stealth gameplay with some puzzles and a decent emotional narrative. I had a good time playing it and it’s on gamepass. Short and sweet.

You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout

Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way. Walking from A to B and getting distracted for 2 hours at random POIs you find is a hallmark of these games.

This aspect was completely absent in Starfield, idk how they fucked up exploration so much.

it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space

Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.

This one?

I felt differently, so many of those stars and collectibles are uninspired filler. Trying to 100% it led to me significantly disliking it. They could have cut so much and it’d be a much tighter experience.

It’s broader than just a Disney+ trial account, it’s part of the whole Disney account, such as when you buy tickets as he did in 2023. Between that and the Florida judge I’m not sure it will get thrown out.

Best case scenario is forced arbitration is just ended. It should be an option, not a requirement.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

Disney adds that Mr Piccolo accepted these terms again when using his Disney account to buy tickets for the theme park in 2023.

By no means do I agree with forced arbitration, but so many articles are reporting this partially.

They also agreed to the same clause when buying the tickets in 2023. It’s not just the streaming service ToS in play. Sure gets a lot of clicks saying it like it was though.

Again I think this is all horseshit and forced arbitration can get fucked, but it’s not being reported properly. The Disney+ trial could have not happened at all and the argument from Disney wouldn’t change.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

Disney adds that Mr Piccolo accepted these terms again when using his Disney account to buy tickets for the theme park in 2023.

Boarding a plane by scanning a QR code off my watch stills feels pretty cool even though you’ve been able to do it for years now.

It’s not about the degree of genetic hybridization but rather what’s playable. 100% dragon MMO means there’s only dragons, no other playable creatures. Pretty straightforward, no?

Regarding the testing - Short of waiting 100 years, how else would you accelerate the degradation of the discs to simulate aging?

Not totally surprised about Reddit falling for some misunderstood labeling. Just curious about that, mainly.

However, even if they are perfect they still wouldn’t meet my needs. I couldn’t use them to share data with anyone I know, as nobody has a data Blu-ray drive. I can’t access the data on them at a whim, and they’re slower than a RAID array. I can’t easily perform automated routine data scrubbing to ensure corruption hasn’t occurred. Speaking of; how often do you verify the data on your discs, and how do you do it?

I can see its usefulness in some scenarios (cold storage), but I’m quite happy with my NAS.

Are those the m-disc? I’ve heard they’re no longer using the inorganic layer you’re referring to, but still being sold with the same branding.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_verbatim_no_longer_sells_real_m_discs_now/

For me, it’s just too much risk. I don’t want to have to worry about counterfeit discs or a silent downgrade from the manufacturer. Those inorganic discs are slated to last a long time, but who really knows? A set of HDDs in RAID with a 3-2-1 backup strategy is the gold standard. HDDs do fail, and I’ve already planned for that.

You do point out some good points I didn’t consider before for BD-R, but for me, it’s NAS and sneakernet with flash drives for the homies. Hardly anyone I know has an optical drive anymore, much less a Blu-ray drive in their PC.

Building a NAS is a large upfront cost but it’s worth it IMO. Giant HDDs are fairly cheap now and you can use cool filesystems like Btrfs to combat bit flips from cosmic rays and the like. I’m not sure I’d trust a dye based optical media, but there are apparently some archive quality 100 year BD-R. Most have a drastically shorter lifespan, though.

According to the Canadian Conservation Institute, which publishes a paper on media longevity, BD-R discs are expected to last between 5 and 20 years, depending on the material they are made out of. BD-RE, which is erasable Blu-ray, is estimated for 20 to 50 years while DVD-R and CD-R, which hold a lot less data, can last 50 to 100 years.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pioneer-new-blu-ray-recorder-and-bdr-promise-100-years-lifespan

That’s not the point I’m making. You should disable your cars modem if it has one, but you still should have no expectation of privacy. Thinking you can have anonymity with a license plate displayed to everyone is foolish. It’s like asking how to be anonymous while wearing a name tag and the same clothes every day.

I reconstructed my comment. I believe people thought I meant disabling the modem is pointless due to ALPRs, but that wasn’t what I was trying to communicate.

Let me try this comment again.

There is no driving with privacy or anonymity unless you’re on private land.

Anyone got tips for how to anonymize their car?

Remove the license plate. You will rarely have privacy driving a car on a public road. You should disable the modem, of course, but you’re still not going to be driving anonymously or privately. Automated license plate readers means your travels are going into databases that very well could be breached at some point in time.

Law enforcement use of ALPRs is rapidly expanding, with tens of thousands of readers in use throughout the United States; one survey indicates that in 2016 and 2017 alone, 173 law enforcement agencies collectively scanned 2.5 billion license plates.

According to the latest available numbers from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 93 percent of police departments in cities with populations of 1 million or more use their own ALPR systems, some of which can scan nearly 2,000 license plates per minute. In cities with populations of 100,000 or more, 75 percent of police departments use ALPR systems.

Despite this expansive data collection effort, many departments have not developed a policy to govern the use of ALPR technology, or provided privacy protections.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/automatic-license-plate-readers-legal-status-and-policy-recommendations

The point I was trying to make is driving a car is inherently not private due to license plates. Of course license plate readers can’t get information directly from the ECU, but thinking you’re going to be driving privately because you don’t have a modem in your car is naive, IMO. Car privacy is shit even if you disable the modem, which I wasn’t recommending against. Of course you should disable it. It’s still a very public activity you’re doing that’s likely being tracked by license plate readers.

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The studios they kept around are making games that are a shadow of their former selves too - Halo Infinite and Forza Motorsport come to mind, as well as Starfield. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the only really good one still as far as I can tell.