I always think it’s fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It’s always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.

I had to search “Bethesda space game” just now to even remember its generic name …

It won’t even be obvious to you it happened or what may have caused it. Some AI algorithm determines you are an un-citizen and checks a box. Rejections keep coming back as you slowly fall down the social ladder, or not so slowly at all, until you become the invisible poor and disappear altogether.

The protection of FDE is the carrot they give to get you to enable TPM 2.0. The stick is the remote attestation which can be used for nefarious purposes like DRM and other types of denial/system lockdown at Microsoft’s discretion.

It’s true it’s hard to motivate people into taking a better security posture for themselves but forcing them like this doesn’t come from a good and sincere place.

Valid, but that’s also why I enjoy typing up these posts, too. Sometimes people just kind of intuit that they dislike something and giving them the words to more properly form their thoughts is the first step at breaking out of those patterns. I think for a not insignificant number of people, not being able to properly articulate their thoughts can lead them to believe that maybe they’re not valid.

Cyber security effectively doesn’t exist without consequence in capitalism. If there aren’t regulatory fines or monetary damage from breaches, what incentive is there to spend on enforcing anything? When they can’t innovate or compete anymore, they’ll begin cutting at the structural systems to save more money until it’s just a shell of an appearance of security, and maybe not even that. Who will care?

I mean, yes. That’s what we’re all kind of conjecturing on at the moment.

I want to warn against conspiratorial thinking because I’m always trying to avoid falling into it myself. We won’t ever really probably have direct proof of a lot of this unless there are credibly authenticated insider leaks from Microsoft.

But we can analyze evidence. Things like seeing that the Terms of Service have been updated for so many apps and online platforms to automatically opt-in your work for AI training purposes. The fact that Microsoft is forcing online accounts. The fact that Microsoft is defaulting save locations to OneDrive (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-word-forcing-you-to-save-new-files-to-the-cloud-heres-how-to-stop-it/) and that they are training AI on pictures you’ve saved there and you can only opt out 3 times a year??? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/onedrives-ai-face-scanning-feature-suggests-it-can-only-be-disabled-3-times-a-year-but-that-doesnt-seem-right)

Telemetry is already pretty opaque; it’s hard to tell what data they are wrapping up in it and if I understand what you’re saying correctly, yes. It’s very easy to keep that bottled until the next time the computer comes online so that even your “offline” activities are monitored. Look at Recall or even before that, Activity History was already giving me the heebie-jeebies (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/what-is-the-recent-activity-page-23cf5556-4dbe-70da-82c8-bb3a8d8f8016)

They already consumed the entire internet, probably some time ago it’s been theorized. In order to keep chasing those diminishing returns they are incentivized to chase every new data source because that scales into profit (no it doesn’t, that’s the bubble, but that’s a whole other conversation).

It’s pretty bleak. Use Linux, etc.

This was always my assumption as well. When they quit the project, didn’t they leave some message recommending Microsoft BitLocker as an alternative? Everyone at the time interpreted this as the clearest “they’re already in the room with me” warning sign, given that that kind of project would NEVER reasonably make such a closed source, corporate centered recommendation …

I think most people tend to forget that part of the cat girl fantasy IS having an ancient demon trapped inside. Uphold the traditions!

Absolutely boggles my mind that they would even consider this? I can’t imagine the amount raised would come anywhere close to justifying the damage done?

Agreed. I was actually afraid to modify my KDE desktop for months because of the trauma sustained from just trying to customize Gnome a bit. My configuration is still pretty vanilla, but it’s got enough personal flair to it that it feels uniquely mine and I’m the happiest I’ve been.

Aww, I will always love XFCE and save a place for it in my heart … but I moved to Plasma 2 years ago and haven’t really looked back either >_>

It annoys me how much crap people still give Arch because it did honestly deter me from trying it myself when all this time it was exactly the distro for me. A lot of it is the nature of the rolling releases and pacman just feeling more clean and simple then apt and the inevitable Franken-Debian installs I end up with.

The archinstall script makes installation much easier. After that, choosing all my own apps and having to read the wiki and perform minor configurations on them could be seen as tedious when something like Mint is just more out-of-the-box, but it both helped teach me more about Linux so I have a better understanding of how my own system works when things do rarely go astray and it helps me feel like my system is very personalized and my own. Sometimes I still go, “Wait, why don’t I have this very basic thing or why isn’t it working?” And I find out it’s because I didn’t install a necessary package, but then I learn and build

As far as rolling releases, I update daily because I’m a geeky maniac and I have had better stability doing that the past 2 1/2 years than I ever did in Windows. Truly, no lie. Part of that is Microsoft setting a low bar, but also my system is a simpler build. That’s not to say there have been no issues whatsoever, but I wonder at the people making these claims how much they’ve really used Arch.

My point generally being: don’t let the opinion of some Linux snobs deter you. Try Arch, it may very well be your thing, too.

I recently sat down with Baroque, the cult classic dungeon crawler for the Sega Saturn. Very good, top 20 games for me now!

First off, play the Saturn version. You can liberally rebind the controls in an emulator to make them feel a lot more like a modern FPS (d-pad up & down to left analog up/down for forward and backward movement with L & R to left analog left/right for strafing while putting d-pad left & right on right analog left/right for turning. Also rebind attack to R1 or R2 and map to whichever you didn’t bind attack to). Use scanline shaders, something like crt-royale or just hyllian-fast. Under the hood this game is a fairly standard mystery dungeon style roguelike but it’s ALL about the vibes.

The story is opaque but advances simply by doing runs through the dungeon. Make sure to talk to all the NPCs and do what they tell you to/fulfill their requests and you’ll figure it out. The gameplay is simple but the player movement is fast and smooth enough as well as hits having decent enough feedback when connecting with an enemy that it avoids feeling too much like a clunky old game. The weird monsters, gnawing on bones, and using torture devices really sell the atmosphere. A+ soundtrack, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXUEH0ijdk&list=PLfhw8A1mg64H1MVWcSPocp6qaaQoiOAJo

TIP: Throw stuff at stuff. Experiment by throwing all the things at all the things. Throwing is a big mechanic in this game, don’t sleep on it. Throw things at sense spheres to teleport them out of the dungeon so you can guarantee them for your next run. Here’s an adorable Neocities fanpage for if you really get stuck, https://nervetower.neocities.org/guide

I’d skip the PS2/Remake, the vibes are all wrong and again, this is just a good game to spend some time with and soak in the bleak world they created. The PS1 version is pretty similar to Saturn but I think honestly the Saturn just nails the atmosphere a bit better.

Just from personal experience, I was in a relationship like this once and found it absolutely intolerable for me.

I have many friends and I value them quite a bit. I also manage my time and emotions by spreading them out. I can’t always talk about everything with everyone, nor can I always do the things with friends they want to do or spend all the time with them that they want. It’s a delicate and complex web. It doesn’t take a lot to manage, it’s just simply, “This for you, here and now, while I can” and “This for you, here and then”.

She on the other hand was co-dependent. Cut everyone else out of her life to wrap herself tightly around me and lean her entire emotional weight on me all the time. Any thought she had was run through me and any time she needed attention she’d come to me because she had nowhere else to turn. It literally broke me.

Maybe some people like this or can manage it better than I could, but be aware the toll this may take on your partner as well.

This was my very first thought, too. There’s already something out there he’s aware of and making a call to flood the internet with AI generated videos is going to lose it in the wash. Brilliant move honestly, if you’re a dirty skeezebag without a shred of humanity.

Inevitably there’ll be a gacha game with US presidents and I’m gonna be exposed to some busty, tarted up anime ladies called “Grover Cleveland”.

For me a lot of it is just weird motivations. I have a laundry list of games that sound interesting to me - really good in fact! And that I absolutely want to play, but sometimes that particular game just isn’t clicking for me, so I put it back on the list and I’ll try it later. Don’t be afraid to shuffle things around and try out different things until something sticks.

Lately I’ve been trying a lot of different genres that I never thought would appeal to me. I hate the actual sport and concept of playing golf but I will totally obsess over Hotshots. Same with racing. Was never a huge racing fan but something about the simplicity and focus of Trackmania really clicks for me. And bullet hells. Thought I’d find them waaay too difficult for my tastes, but it turns out memorizing patterns and getting into a flow state while some of the best 00’s electro you’ve ever heard fills your ears is pretty therapeutic.

Try changing the way you approach gaming.

Another thing I’ve really been enjoying is setting up EmulationStation Desktop (ES-DE) with RetroArch backend and building out a full retro collection. When I don’t want to play games directly, I can still sift through them. Download a completed Sega Genesis/Mega Drive collection, scrape the boxart and manual data, fix titles, patch fan translations. And if I see something interesting while I’m doing this that I’ve never seen before, I’ll pop into the game and poke at it a bit to see if it clicks and maybe THAT will be my thing for a bit. Look up some articles for best hidden gems on the PS1 and see if there’s something new, or get into a system that you’ve never touched before like the TurboGrafx-16. Discovery can be part of the fun, too.

I know we’re all burnt out and frazzled, sometimes forcing yourself to play that one game that you’ve been meaning to play and want to enjoy is just the wrong ticket and only puts too much pressure on yourself, further disincentivizing you.

People saying “it was the same with 4K” are really missing the point. It’s blatant consumerism pure and simple.

Viewing distance and diminishing returns play a factor .While some people cite upscaling, that can be of various and questionable quality depending on how it’s being done. 8K content is also exponentially more expensive to create, store, and stream and while I won’t say it’ll never happen, I don’t know if it’ll happen before the full collapse of society at the rate we’re going.

This could be a motivating factor for AI-generated content to reduce the cost of production, but I already think AI-generated content is slop and in 8K resolution any oddness or imperfection is just gonna be magnified.

In the end, though, you just can’t argue with some people when bigger number = better.

EDIT: I do admit there is some bias in taste here. I’m a 120hz nut and while I admit I can’t really see the difference between 60 and 120, I can feel it, especially in 3D action games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Psychonauts 2 where you pan the camera around to look at the environment and it’s buttery smooth. It makes playing Bloodborne wanna hurl my guts out from nausea (I’m sorry BB, I love you but you know you’re nasty).

I feel like this is possibly one of those things where Dune was responsible for a lot of the things you’re seeing in it that you might call derivative. Dune was written in 1965 and while I don’t mean to imply that Frank Herbert’s work was wholly original and that he didn’t take great influence from a number of things himself, it was also highly influential at the time and provided a lot of themes and tropes that would be taken up by sci-fi in the coming decades as well.

Hasn’t it been said that Star Wars was admittedly pretty influenced by Dune? Lemme see if I can source that …

EDIT: Yes, apparently Herbert himself even noticed and directly complained about it, https://nerdist.com/article/everything-star-wars-borrowed-from-dune/

To be clear, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I don’t think Lucas was wrong to wear his influence on his sleeve and I don’t think Herbert was wrong to take some offense at it. This is just art, this is how things work. Was it too much? I think it’s debatable. Whatever. I’m too old to be arguing about Star Wars on internet forums at this point.

For me a lot of it depends on the perspective.

• For an FPS, I think non-inverted feels more comfortable. I generally just want the view window to move in the indicated direction, but I understand people that like it inverted.
• If it’s third person, I actually prefer completely inverted (including horizontal). Especially with something like Dark Souls where one stick controls the player and the other stick controls the camera. It’s more clear that the camera is an external entity and I’m controlling the angle, not the view window. It feels unpleasant and unnatural to me to push left and then also have the camera bend to the left.
• If it’s a rail shooter like Panzer Dragoon or something, we’re back to non-inverted. I’m controlling the absolute position of a targeting reticle and I just want it to move to where I want it to move.