Damnit, I just finished watching Alien Romulus and that’s a dad joke worthy for the android in it.

I’m mostly agnostic to it almost all of it. For all I know, the ancient Egyptians were spot on.

I think some states are offering workarounds for that dilemma now, but I really do wish the US federal would just legalize it already. We have 24 states that have already legalized it, as well as 3 territories and D.C… Around 33 states have for medical purposes.

When 2/3 of a country has legalized something in some form, it should become the de facto law of the land at the federal level. Those other states can continue keeping it illegal if their citizens so choose, but the Federal government should be forced to at least decriminalize it if it’s something that isn’t directly harming people against their will.

Now hold on, maybe they’re onto something. The highest levels of drug dealers most likely aren’t accepting cash, they’re laundering their money through legitimate fronts. Small time dealers setting up some simple LLC or something for a relatively small fee and funneling money through that could actually shield you better from local law enforcement. I’m pretty sure Cashapp and their ilk offer business accounts nowadays, haven’t checked myself.

We used to do tape backups up until about 6 years ago, but our higher headquarters decided they wanted to go all in on Rubrik instead. I will say that it is a lot easier to maintain and conduct restores from, and we have all of our various sites’ Rubriks backing up to each other for redundancy. But you’re definitely right that tape is far cheaper per GiB of storage than anything else.

Sometimes this one place gives me $20 of food before closing when I only intended to spend $5 so the upsell kinda hurts

But that upsell is strictly self-inflicted. If it’s before closing, I can almost guarantee the staff are just hooking you up because a large amount of that food is just going to go to waste since most restaurants require things to get thrown away (e.g. if it’s a deli, some of the meats may have hit their shelf life limit).

I’d just tip what you can comfortably afford and what you feel isn’t insulting (e.g. tipping someone like $0.50 on a $20+ order). I always follow the 15-20% rule, and possibly higher in some circumstances. But I don’t know, I haven’t worked food in 20 years, so maybe the manners/expectations have changed nowadays. Also depends where you live.

HDR in movies/TV shows that support it look phenomenal on a good monitor/TV, especially if you have OLED. Games, on the other hand, I have yet to see any that actually look improved with it.

I was tired last night, toddler hasn’t let me sleep much.

I think I poorly conveyed that I do prefer Steam, and do think Epic’s launcher is lacking. My point is, getting into the gaming retail business has a crazy upfront cost, so if GOG closes shop (which isn’t so crazy to speculate: https://cdaction-pl.translate.goog/publicystyka/wielkie-zwolnienia-w-gog-u-pracownicy-naswietlaja-wewnetrzne-problemy-firmy-tylko-u-nas?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true the original article was in Polish, thus the google translate link), that leaves only Epic competing with Steam. If epic eventually concludes they can’t pull enough marketshare to continue justifying the crazy money they’ve spent trying to attract users from Steam with all their sales, that’ll leave zero competition to Steam. I for one don’t condone monopolies.

Alternatively, studios could just start releasing physical media again, but we all know that’ll never happen…

Steam’s voice chat/partying functionality is garbage. Discord is widely used for a reason. Remote Play is hit or miss, but I’ve largely resorted to using Moonlight instead on my Steam Deck because it’s more reliable and stable. The guides on Steam vary wildly from game to game, just depends on the community support for it. It is nice when there’s good stuff available, as it is somewhat convenient (though I wished it saved my spot on the page, I constantly have to scroll to where I left off on guides whenever I do use them). Lutris and NonSteamLauncher makes running Epic on Linux a non-issue.

I get it, Epic is a lackluster launcher. No one’s arguing otherwise. But it’s hardly a huge barrier to playing games.

Not really. Games would’ve gone digital either way, it was the obvious path to go. Steam might’ve sped up that process by a few years, but pretending that without steam, digitalization of the games industry would’ve never happened is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

And yet consoles still have physical game copies available all these years later. Why is PC so much different?

And I’m not saying to be happy that Epic is competition, I’m saying that if GOG dies, you’ll only really have Steam and Epic. That sucks ass, but it’s still better than only having ONE option. And like I said, once Gabe is gone, I 100% believe Valve will go full on enshitification mode. I wouldn’t have to worry as much if I could still buy physical fucking copies of modern PC games.

As for Epic competing by creating better platform, I completely agree. Their launcher has made improvements, but it is still very bare bones and not great. I try to remember that tons of common sense software features we take for granted get patented. Hell, that’s why so many streaming services felt so much shittier than Netflix for so long. It’s not as straightforward as just emulating what Steam does but slightly better. That’s still no excuse though, and they still fall very short of offering the mostly comfortable user experience we’ve grown accustomed to. Steam didn’t start off where they’re at now, they’ve had 20 years with an entire company dedicated to developing it.

My main point is, we all love Steam and Valve because they’ve been a mostly ethical corporation so far as well as mostly improving the experience of PC gaming, especially with Linux (minus expediting and enabling 100% digitization so they could attain better profit margins on Half-Life 2 sales). But nothing lasts forever, and pure monopolies are bad. Fuck Epic for buying exclusive rights for third party games, but in this specific context, it is their game, so it is what it is.

Games not developed or published by Epic only become exclusive when the publishers and/or devs take their money. Why is no one mad at them? And of course Valve doesn’t have to do much of anything, they have had like a 10+ year headstart on cornering the PC marketplace. GOG has been completely awesome and more ethical than Valve and yet they’re barely scraping by. Gamers/consumers just love to fanboy the hell out of corporations these days. When Gabe is gone and Valve inevitably goes public and enshitifies, you’ll be glad there’s still some competition left. But it’ll suck because 90% of PC gamers have probably damn near 100% of their library locked into one platform. Remember, Steam is a huge reason why PC games went fully digital almost two decades ago.

Exclusivity has been a thing since the advent of videogames, this isn’t anything new. Epic is just a shitty company, so they’re an easy target to criticize. They funded the development and published the game, it’s their right to do with it as they please. They’re losing money by not bringing it to Steam, so their loss, really. But it’s not even close to the equivalent of console exclusives, as the barrier here is spending 5 minutes to just download their shitty launcher. It sucks, but this really isn’t that big of a deal, in my opinion.

How does it hurt you? Look, I get that people dislike using multiple launchers, but it’s not like you have to buy a console to play the god damn game. The melodrama is crazy, all you have to do to play it besides buying the game is download epic’s launcher. If you’re in Linux, it’s a bit more of a pain, but hardly.

I dislike Epic as much as the next guy, but he’s not the only one waging it, lol. Try to find any of Valve’s games on the Epic marketplace.

Oh, 100%. That’s what I mean, our Congress has become completely useless due to the “all or nothing” stance the GOP and to some extent the DNC have taken over the last couple of decades.

What a fucking shit show. It is astounding how impotent our legislature has been for so long. This whole thing could easily be avoided with actual fucking laws, but instead they’ve continued to hand more and more power over go the executive/presidency for years and years.

He’s morphed into what exactly? Being anti-vaxxers? I fortunately don’t know any anti-vaxxers personally, but I know plenty of MAGA idiots. Even those idiots tend to support vaccines, though. I just truly don’t understand anti-vaxxers, they’re the dumbest of the dumb.

Yes, I fully relate with this as if you spoke from my heart. Agreed on all points, haha.

I do cook, kind of have to when you have kids. But I definitely do not enjoy doing it. Especially because I’ll slave over a new dinner idea and my kids will just refuse to eat it.

I know people who like that he’s on board with shrooms and other recreational drugs as alternative treatments. Which I can honestly understand, given all the research that says stuff like shrooms does offer some promise in some mental health therapies. It’s ridiculous an agency like the DEA can dictate what drug options are available to people.

But other than that, RFK Jr is a fucking idiot and should absolutely not be allowed to head our health agencies.

Dude it’s insane. I don’t understand how the hell these places stay in business anymore when the quality still sucks ass and it’s all so expensive now. Like even taco bell, who used to be the king of cheap, costs a fuckton these days.