I’ve never been a big fan of Tinder. It’s too hard to figure out who is a real person with the minimal profile info provided. I think you’re generally better off with an app that requires(or at least allows) more effort to create a profile, and/or something a bit more focused than just hookups.

OKCupid and Feeld are the apps that work best for me. Feeld is more for kinky and/or poly people, so it narrows down the playing field a lot. I think that makes things way easier. Of my current partners, one was on OKC and the other was on Feeld.

The deal includes the teams working on the mentioned properties, but doesn’t go into what IPs are changing hands. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if all Tom Clancy series are lumped together

Here is the source article. It’s light on methodology. Are they going off of price of the game at launch? I maybe pay full price for a game once or twice per year. 50-70% of my unplayed games are probably from Humble Bundle/Humble Choice.

I loved Death Stranding, but anyone else feel like that guy putting on the bandana might have been Kojima making a little dig at David Hayter?

The character design looks very reminiscent of the MGS Delta materials we’ve seen, and Hayter has been more open lately about how miffed he was when Kojima dumped him for Kiefer in MGS V. That coupled with how much promo work Hayter has been doing for Delta makes me think it wouldn’t be too surprising if Kojima was annoyed with him.

I have never seen a McDonalds that looks like the top pic. I remember plenty with play spaces, but they weren’t visible from outside.

Very much same. I wish the Burning Shores expansion was a bit longer. It’s kinda hard to call it a must-play DLC, but it’s got some big stuff in terms of Aloy’s character development.

And now it’s gone, along with the expertise it housed from developing cult hits stretching as far back as MS-DOS games in 1997, through the iconic Shadow of Mordor, F.E.A.R., Condemned, No One Lives Forever, and The Matrix Online.

Fuuuck. That really sunk it home for me. Other than the Matrix, I played and loved all of those games. RIP Monolith.

The whole point of the Sword of Damocles was that the threat was always looming and Damocles didn’t know when it might fall. We know exactly when Microsoft says they are going to drop support. There’s a decent chance that they’ll push that date back due to slow adoption at least once.

This is more about rats not fleeing the sinking ship until the sea has reached the bow.

Though really it sucks that your insurance would increase the copay so much on you.

Oh, we are way beyond that point. My insurance stopped paying for this drug years ago. Told me I had reached the “lifetime benefit limit”. This is all out of pocket and the price yo-yos constantly. It’s not the first time it’s been this high.

According to a thread I found on the bad place, individual pharmacists can make the decision to reject coupons for prescription drugs. This was per an account that claimed to be a GoodRx rep

The drug I’ve paid $25/15 pills for the past couple months suddenly jumped up to $140 this week. I tried giving CVS a GoodRX coupon to knock it down to $75 and they told me they no longer accept them.

It’s an important drug to me, but luckily not vital to my survival. Still, fuck this healthcare system.

It’s a far cry from this guy’s situation, but I think I had five or six bitcoin back when I was mining in the early days. I cashed out when they were maybe $40-50 each towards a new GPU.

Sure, I could go nuts thinking about what I would do with the money now, but if I hadn’t sold at that rate, I probably would have sold at $100, or $200, or…

There’s no way in hell I would have had the discipline to “hodl” to this point, so I just get on with my life.

Which population numbers are you using for this graph? Census data for 2020 has LA county at 10.01 million and NC and Georgia at 10.45 and 10.73 million respectively. (for the second link, click on the Table 1 PDF. I didn’t want to link to a PDF directly). 2023 numbers seem to have LA county trending down while those states are trending up.

It’s still a staggering visual to compare population densities. I just thought the claim was a bit suspect regarding my state.

Good point. I remember needing a pretty beefy PC to run Civ V at launch. Even coming back to it after a hardware upgrade, the game could get pretty chuggy towards the end of a playthrough.

When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that’s really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That’s a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.

When I “buy a game” on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn’t going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn’t around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I’ll just regret not buying the game on GOG.

State of Decay is one of my guilty pleasure series. I know it’s got its faults, but I keep going back to it once every couple years or so.

The standard difficulty just nails that dopamine cycle of grinding and reward, until you’ve got a thriving community that can hold off all threats until the resources in the map are totally depleted and it’s time to move on.

I could probably get a bit better at the game and tackle the harder modes, but that would up the stress factor and make me more likely to put it back down faster.

I’m glad Microsoft is dropping their internal releases on competing platforms now, because otherwise I’d probably never play the upcoming third one as a Linux and PS5 player.

Electronics have lifespans. With refurbished parts, it’s hard to tell if you’re buying something that someone else whoopsie-bought and sent right back, or waited until a day before the end of the return period before sending back. And that return period might be long if they had an extended warranty through the manufacturer.

I’m generally pretty comfortable diagnosing hardware failures and isolating components, but so many electronics are a massive headache to break down and service, you often have to toss them as soon as one crucial component fails. For those, I’d rather spend a bit more and improve my chances of getting the most lifespan out of the whole.

For the Steam Deck, if I didn’t already have a good desktop PC and wanted to get into PC gaming, I would be happy to spend the full price on a new OLED. Just having it for travel and light usage around the house, I don’t mind holding out for a better price breakdown.

And this is of course also assuming that the refurbishing process is on the up-and-up. That’s not always the case

Ooh. Normally I stay away from refurbished hardware, but the Steam Deck has really good repairability reviews. The base OLED price is just a bit higher than what I would want to spend, so I’ll really have to consider this.

Now I’m picturing a video game version of the Disney Vault. “Play now through the end of the year for just $129.99* before GTA 9 goes back in the Vault for another decade! *Not including Microtransactions, Online Pass, BattlePass, Totally-Not-A-Lootboxes, or Megalodon Cards”

I started playing around 2022, so I don’t have a point of reference for some of your points. They did overhaul space stations visually, but they are mostly the same functionally system to system. I can’t remember if they made multi biome planets because frankly, I rarely land on the same planet twice. Again, they did revamp the appearances of land and water biomes to make them more interesting as well.

To me, No Man’s Sky is more about breadth and discovery rather than depth and simulation. I have come back to the game a number of times because of interesting expeditions or the addition of new mechanics like piracy or organic ships.

It’s not a game for everyone, and it doesn’t do any one thing better than any other game, but it’s a great experience if you want a solo space sandbox experience.