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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Wanna know which game I last broke my “no pre-orders” rule for?

    No Man’s Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It’s become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven’t bought a game since then.

    It’s kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you’ll develop and when (if ever) you’ll release it











  • Left two jobs in the last 3 years because they offered remote and then tried to claw it back. If I ever set foot in an office again it’ll be too soon.

    I also tend to check in with myself on Sunday nights as I’m lying in bed. If I feel like I’m walking into a good situation the next morning, with good problems to solve and a decent chance of actually solving them, then I stick around. If I’m filled with dread awaiting the next off-hours disaster, I brush up my resume and flip the flag on LinkedIn.



  • The problem arises from the fact that the internet in particular incentivizes attracting attention above all other things and there’s no incentive for being correct, nuanced or well-researched. Combine that with the fact that people like to be right about things and doubly so when everyone else is wrong about it and you create a world where conspiracy, woo and other bullshit is actually an industry. I feel like that’s part that always gets lost in these discussions: people are making money from this.


  • My bad, I got you confused with OP and their “under no circumstances will I back my stuff up to either the cloud or local storage” attitude. I can’t count how many people I’ve seen who feel that way right up until the moment where they’re saying “What do you mean you can’t recover them?” I sometimes get a bit preachy about it because I’ve seen people lose their wedding pics or pics of dead relatives, and I personally lost a bunch of the stuff I worked on as an undergrad that’s just gone forever now.






  • any game that gives you control over sheathing/holstering your weapon instead of waiting for your character to do it for you

    I recently bought red dead 2 and that feature took some getting used to. Especially because the controls are context sensitive and the button that starts a conversation when your gun is holstered is the same button that points that gun at a stranger if it’s out. I’m used to it now and compulsively holster my gun as soon as the shooting seems to be done, but for a while there was a lot of “Howdy partner. Fine weather we’re having ain’t…no wait wait sorry I didn’t mean…ah shit” and suddenly I’m in a shootout with the law and out $50 for my bounty when I just wanted to buy a bottle of whiskey.


  • I used to like to get gently stoned, fire up GTA 5, put on FlyLo FM in the car and just drive around. My brother and I would sit for hours, and it was basically like we were in a real car. I didn’t drive super fast, took most reasonable precautions against wrecking and killing people. It was just…nice. A sort of cut-rate flow state where the thing I’m doing is something that I have to pay attention to, but not something I’m occupied by to the point of not being able to bs with somebody.