I’ll admit that I’m staggered by how a lot of writers absorb hundreds of little details of how trained soldiers/detectives will use little tricks to survive, observe a room, or follow patterns of criminals. Once long back, those little things like leaving a bit of pencil graphite in a door hinge to denote intruders (or, in Better Call Saul’s case, placing a carbon sheet under the doormat) were extremely rare to hear about.

I don’t even know who you’d ask without ending up on a list.

That’s what I saw out of it. Being attacked by non-zombies trying to rush you makes for an extremely disconcerting look. I can’t help but think the dev pictured themselves in that situation.

When I went to Disney World in Japan, there was a train stop that leads right to it. That’s the way to handle it (not drive to a pointless monorail)

I’m pretty sure Unity and Unreal all have a Linux export option - but that doesn’t come with a 100% guarantee that everything the dev linked in, from plugins to outside libraries, launchers, and hundreds of other things, all work perfectly. I’ve played several indie games that decided to helpfully include a Linux build, but I had a better time running their Windows build through Proton.

I’ve wanted to work out Pipewire for the specific case of threading music directly into a “Microphone” device to play into game voice comms for memetic moments. But, the extensive commandline setup and duplicative terminology has made it feel like a barrier.

I only do system upgrades every so often, normally based off hearing some new feature in a program I want. When I do, that usually includes a kernel update and it asks me to restart.

I’m acutely aware of how anti-consumer it is, but I always found it strange they ever started putting singleplayer games on PC.

Yes, it’s some revenue for the game itself, filtered through Valve’s 30% cut. But from what I gather, most of the reason the console offering works is because people who’ve finished God of War will learn about some new forever F2P game, and decide to play it on that same PlayStation, thus getting all the microtransaction revenue. None of that environmental connection really happens on PC.

That especially hurts because the cost and risk for singleplayer games hasn’t always been great. Sure, we look positively at Hollow Knight: Silksong, but that often ignores the 95 other indie failures for every Silksong. At the least, a publisher like Sony that’s put out enough big hits can pull that failure rate down, but they’ll still put out stinkers; and the whole “environmental buy-in” helps to pay for that failure rate.

But, if people can get their well-produced games anywhere, the insular cycle encouraging people to get PlayStations kind of falls apart. Not many people will buy them specifically to play FortNite (though they will, in the end). It was good for PC consumers for a time, but I feel like PC releases were very much motivated by short-term profit. You can also see how, since singleplayer games fit in a longer-term industry plan, it may explain why we don’t see many of them anymore.

I feel like so many Linux advocates would get more interest if they were at least a little honest about the upfront friction, and recognized how obtrusive so many acronyms and half-names (or “hames!”) become.

Main thing I want to work out is a reliable path for reinstalling Windows, so people know they have a safety net. Licensing is often complicated since it came with people’s computers.

There’s a dumb anime game in Steam next fest called Fate Trigger. It’s not innovative at all, but it runs fine under dwproton, which lets me experience the thrill of battle royale that I’d never been willing to stomach Fortnite to try out.

It took a bit of time, but using a protontricks launcher, I’ve been able to do this for a trainer or two on a game on Steam.

I do think, if gambling is to be allowed anywhere, it should only be in places that can verify age; just like alcohol delivery services. But, given the trend of using age verification as an inroad for data collection and Palentir spying, I mostly think of that requirement as a jury-rigged guillotine for the casino, or for the loot boxes. Either get rid of gambling, or set up a monolithic roadblock to users. I’d be appalled if Valve were somehow required to collect drivers’ licenses of people playing Dark Souls.

Trading cards are arguably a problem too, but one that becomes much less prevalent due to their comparative inconvenience. The internet can gamify immediacy around them, and the cards of that store will never run out of stock.

My libraries still lend out a lot of DVDs. I ended up getting Fallout S1 in that format, and while it was a resolution drop, it was perfectly bearable.

I can guess for the audience using discs, a lot still have archaic hardware to play them on.

Man I want to finish the campaign and enjoy this game, but as long as they have this split-lock issue on Linux causing severely low framerate every few minutes, I basically can’t. ProtonDB for more info…

Oh, I absolutely know it’s not new. Long ago, I thought that Uncle Ruckus in the Boondocks was an absurd fictionalized character. But people like that absolutely exist.

This was the twist of a great movie about corrupt cops

What kind of organism do you think the government is made of? That’s right - People. Where do you think today’s Republicans and cops grew up?

Every person that’s managed to exit cults of toxicity has admitted they inherited a poisoned worldview because it surrounded them - they never would have felt “Black people are subhuman” if they didn’t have messaging all around them saying it so.

If you have resigned yourself to the idea none of these people will ever change, and they’re fated to be that way from birth, stay in your own bubble and stop commenting anywhere about it because by your own admission conversation doesn’t do anything.

Even if they had it, a lot of smaller developers don’t even want to be serving as chaperones for their playerbase. Some have even said they don’t want their game page to create a Steam subforum.

Trails in the Sky became bearable because of this. It was so well enjoyed that the full remake of the game kept the feature around.

Nothing will ever get better

Stop suggesting policies and theories. Don’t vote. Don’t even suggest taxing the rich.

/s