How important is owning your own games to you?

Let me put it this way: I have nearly 5,000 games on Steam. It’s the one source of media I have no problem investing money into, because I agree with how Valve is providing the service.

It’s convenient, user-friendly, and easily exportable. I can go anywhere in the world, download my games and save files, and pick up where I left off. Which has been made even more convenient with the advent of the Steam Deck.

If I paid for a game, it’s in my library forever. Even if it gets removed from the Steam Store. And the regular sales/discounts ensure I can afford to have such a massive library. I would be severely in debt if I paid full price for my entire library.

If/when Valve loses Gabe Newell and the new CEO prioritizes profits over customer satisfaction, I will gladly switch to pirating and hoarding my own games.

I’m very much against subscription services and I firmly believe in owning everything I drop money on. I don’t play console games anymore because they’ve all been pushing subscription services, and with Sony in particular trying to push for people to not own games anymore? Fuck PlayStation.

This is also why I won’t use Epic Games. Their predatory business practices and poor customer service shows what a terrible company they are and I refuse to support a business that degrades and exploits the customer experience for profit. I will gladly pirate any exclusive they keep off the market, or wait until they show up on Steam in a year or so.

If everyone voted with their wallet, Epic Games would be forced to confront the fact they need to make changes to compete with the online gaming market, or go bankrupt.

I used to just have a standard complex sentence memorized as my security question reply. No matter what question is asked, I type the properly formatted sentence, with capitalizations and punctuations in all the right places.

The question itself is useless for anyone who is trying to data mine me for access. If they don’t know the sentence I use, and exactly how it’s formatted, then they’ll never get in. I would usually just pick random questions because it doesn’t really matter.

Bonus: Most people don’t use proper punctuation, spelling, and/or capitalization online anymore. So even if they learn the sentence, figuring out how to format it correctly will pose a challenge. Unless they’re an English teacher (or a bibliophile).

Google works if you put a minus ( - ) in front of the word you want omitted, without a space.

For example: correctword -wrongword

It will show searches with “correctword” but omit any search results that also have “wrongword” in it.

EDIT: But yes, don’t use Google if you can.

I’m in the same boat for hard drives. I bought 20 TB hard drives for $360 each three years ago. Today, they’re more than double that price, selling for $880!

The worst part is, I have one drive that’s failing and 5 more in a NAS that are about due to be swapped for newer ones. It’s the worst timing for this price hike!

Huh. I can’t add screenshots to this thread for some reason. Well, you can check their current price on Amazon. I buy the Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives.

How have things gotten so bad?

Because AI companies pre-ordered all the resources needed to build their data centers for the next decade, which means there are practically no computer resources for the average consumer for years to come. Everything being produced is going toward data center development now.

So everything still on the market has gone way up in value, being a rare commodity. Basic supply and demand, except a handful of rich losers have tipped the scale of the market, effectively screwing over every regular person who wants computer parts.

I thought maybe it was an old sweater mom stole from an ex of hers back in the day that her child just discovered. But then I couldn’t understand why she was crying over it. Yeah, the message of this comic is too ambiguous. I have no idea what’s actually going on.

EDIT: The sweater text said “BOY” with the male symbol for the “O.” Which I thought indicated an old boyfriend. But I’m assuming it’s implying that Mom is trans and used to be a boy? I still don’t understand the crying though.

Shortly after COVID started (but before I retired from the US Air Force in 2022), I was working in an office with a bunch of programmers. I myself was a server admin.

We were exploring ways for our squadron to stay connected, even though half the squadron was at home at any given time. We were doing split half-shifts during COVID. Half the squadron would come in for the first half of the day, then they would sanitize everything and go home. An hour later, the other half would come in and work the rest of the day.

Zero physical contact between shifts. So if anyone developed COVID symptoms, their entire shift would stay home for 2 weeks while the other half of the squadron came in full-time to keep operations running.

One of the proposed ideas was to have everyone join Gather. It’s basically a top-down 8-bit style world like old JRPG games, except you could design your own virtual office workspace, then others could create avatars and be invited to the office you created.

They had proximity chat, so if you were close enough to an avatar, you could just talk through your mic and be heard by them. They also did zoom-style video meetings and Slack-style chat boards.

Plus it was basically a game, so you could get creative in how you designed your office space. You could have karaoke rooms, mini-games, etc. You could design the place to look like a dungeon, or a cyberpunk building. I knew one guy who built a whole labyrinth of offices so he had a private place to hide out and work when he needed a break from his office mates (without being caught logging off). Another guy built a massive outdoor garden to explore, for when he just needed to “get outside” during his shift.

We played around with it for a while, but the company eventually wanted to charge us to keep using it, and we couldn’t justify the expense to higher leadership. In the military, every expense paid to a business needed a government contract written up and no one was willing to make and approve one for some random virtual workspace development company that no one has ever heard of before.

For the record, we mainly used Zoom and Slack during COVID, but we talked about moving off those programs when they started demanding government agencies pay for continued use. I know we already had contracts with Microsoft and we were already shifting a lot of resources over to Teams as our virtual workspace. I retired around that time, so I have no idea what happened with all that.

I’m enjoying retired life now, but I still think about Gather every now and then and how cool of an idea it was for a digital landscape.

That poor unfortunate soul…

Clavicular is in jail, and he was kind of leading the charge with all this looksmaxxing stuff.

My dog licks his metal food bowl clean after every meal, regardless of wet or dry food. When I had another dog, he’d lick her bowl clean too, when she was done eating. I give the bowl a good rinse before filling it at every meal, then wash it with soap and water maybe once every couple weeks.

Same with the metal water bowl. Every meal, I dump out whatever water is still left in it, give it a good rinse, then refill with fresh water. Then I do a soap and water clean every two weeks or so.

I live out in the countryside, so we have well water with lots of minerals in it. My dad used to just top off the dogs’ water bowl every day and it started forming a calcium mineral ring along the top edge. Now that I rinse it a couple times daily, it stays pristine. No more water rings.

My dog is also an indoor dog, so the cleaner I keep his food/water bowls, the less germs and bacteria he spreads around the house. I don’t have to fend him off if he wants to lick hands or faces now.

Meh, I’ll start with the '30s. I feel we need a little more buffer from the late 1900s.

I still keep forgetting it’s a quarter of the way into the 21st century already. I keep thinking it’s still like 2002 or something. I think we need to get away from all the 2’s in the dates before I’ll start to recognize the new century as independent from the 20th century.

I didn’t even know she still had a YouTube presence. I’ve been following her on Nebula for ages.

My favorite is, “Are you subscribed to my OnlyFans?” Not only stops the conversation, but they’ll avoid you for the rest of the night.

I have a friend who used to do exactly this. He used to be a bit of a conspiracy nut and didn’t believe in the stability (or validity, for that matter) of the US dollar. He wanted to do all his monetary exchanges in gold and silver, which were very stable and reliable at the time (about 2 decades ago).

I don’t know how exactly, but he converted any cash he earned into gold and then worked out a deal with his local grocery store to buy his groceries with tiny bits of gold.

He was a good kid, if not a little dumb. I think the grocery store humored him. Besides, gold is valuable, so they may have been just ripping him off.

It’s so popular from Shrek […]

[…] it started in Mystery Men.

I was 15 years old in 1999 when Smash Mouth dropped their second album, “Astro Lounge.” All Star was the hit song released on that album and it was all over the radio for the next couple years.

It was an extremely popular single at the time. Everyone in my school would drop everything to sing along if it came on the radio. Most of my friends (myself included) owned the album on CD. And to think the song was written as an afterthought, when they were finished with the album but needed more songs to fill it out a bit.

And yes, Mystery Men (1999) was the first film to prominently feature the song. But that film was technically a flop at the time of release, so most people didn’t even see it. Which is why no one knows that All Star was in that movie.

Right as the song’s popularity was finally starting to die down, Shrek (2001) released and brought All Star back to life. And it’s become the anthem for Shrek movies ever since.

It was an incredibly popular song on its own back in the day. Shrek just ensured it lasted for several generations instead of dying out in the early 2000s.

Moist

That is the benefit to making ridiculous money. You can really take your time and produce a quality game instead of rushing and cutting corners to meet an arbitrary deadline.

They make way more money managing a game store. Why would they ever need to make another game? /s

But in all seriousness, Steam makes them a ridiculous amount of money. If I was Gabe, I’d slow down game production as well.

I was stationed in Japan with the US military between 2002-2005 and every evening at 5 PM, the Japanese and American national anthems would play on speakers across our base, signaling the end of the work day.

We were required to stop what we were doing and listen quietly and respectfully for both anthems. If we were outside, we’d have to stand at parade rest and face the nearest country flags we could see, or face toward the music if there were no flags visible nearby. When the American national anthem played, we had to snap to attention and salute for the entire song.

The Japanese national anthem is probably not my favorite ever national anthem, but I heard it every day for over 3 years and the hauntingly beautiful anthem has forever planted itself in my brain. It’s so calm and smooth compared to the almost militaristic march of the American anthem.

I discovered bidets when I was living in Japan for a few years. I eventually bought my own for my home. Now I feel gross pooping anywhere but my home. Leaving my house for more than a day is absolute torture.

Why do Americans just use toilet paper? If you spill chocolate pudding on the floor, are you just gonna use a dry Kleenex to clean it up? Do you trust it to actually be clean without water at a minimum to scrub with? What if that floor happens to be carpeted? You’ll never get it out with just a dry tissue paper.

Bidets are definitely my “true level” experience. I’ve upgraded every toilet in my house. I can never go back to just toilet paper.

In certain communities, some people are known for posting specific types of content regularly.

For example, I started a series of essay-style video game reviews in a games community and they were pretty popular for a while. But I’m not updating them nearly as much as I used to, so I’ve just become another anonymous member on Lemmy now. Which is fine, I’m doing it for me, not for any Internet accolades.

Which reminds me, I should probably make a new one of those. It’s been a while.