Several fossils from the congress of the USA were probably around to witness the development of these revolutionary tools.

Build them as connectable hexagons. Learn from the insects, they’ve had a half billion years to figure out what shit works and what shit don’t.

I think it’s possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody’s trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.

During the few months of the year I consider to be my “gaming season”, I mostly stick to 1 game at a time as my primary focus, but I’ll often have a game or few on the back burner that I’ll work into the schedule now and then.

This year I’m focusing on the Doom remake (Doom 2016) as my main game. To be honest, the game is stressful for me, so even though it’s been an absolute blast for me to play, it’s nice to have some alternative games to switch over to after I’m done with Doom.

I agree, it’s very hard to keep up with the stories when juggling multiple games at the same time. Almost as hard for me, if not harder, is keeping up with the controls. Every game is different. Games in the same genre can and will have vastly different control set-ups. Even games in the same franchise / series can have different controls from game to game. Yuck.

So, the control aspect and the story aspect are part of my inspiration for my secondary games. Right now I’m playing Halls of Torment. I guess there’s a story? But it doesn’t seem super relevant or necessary to keep up with. This game is in the same genre as another secondary game I play (and the main one from last year) called Vampire Survivors. Controls for both of these games is super basic. As I mentioned, if there’s even a story line to them, it’s irrelevant to my enjoyment of them.

I also have the Castlevania Dominus Collection which is includes all the metroidvania-style Castlevania games from the Nintendo DS. I played all of them back in the day on original hardware, so there’s a great deal of “recall” in terms of controls and story. And this is probably one of my favorite genres of game.

I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.

Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.

Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.

I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.

I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.

Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.

Fun! I always like to imagine what ancient technology would be like with more modern applications. I dunno why, but the idea of browsing the web on a game boy or watching full motion video on an atari 7800 is fascinating.

I’ll give that a try. I don’t game much, so that launcher was not necessarily on my radar. Is that something you always have to switch over to desktop mode in order to use it?

Gracias. I will give that a try. Still sounds a bit complicated, but for sure that sounds better than opening up a terminal and copy/pasting commands, some of which I’m not super knowledgeable about.

To hear it from the conservative side of my family … “Is there no limit on how many people he can commute?” and “There’s no way he’s able to sign all those letters, he can barely keep his eyes open.”

I don’t know how accurate it is, but they were saying he has already freed 1,500 people. I asked how many of those people were convicted of non-violent drug related charges, and they did not know nor did they seem to care. I thought that was interesting given some of my relatives’, shall we call it, histories.

That’s too bad. No doubt I appreciate it Steam for what it is, even knowing that I don’t actually own any of the software I buy from them. That being said, I try to support GOG where/when I can.

Is there any “easy” way to get GOG games running on a Steam Deck? It’s been awhile since I last tried to look into it, but back then it seemed like a lot of steps and a lot of places to potentially mess up the process. I believe I kind of got something working at one point, but I’d honestly have to go back and double check.

Over the past year? Probably Vampire Survivors.

As of late? Doom (the 2016 reboot).

Of all time? I’m actually not sure, especially if you include my pre-internet / pre-always-being-spied-on-and-tracked history. But probably it would be one of the Street Fighter 2 iterations.

I don’t think I’ve even played 450 hours total of games in the past 25+ years, though. So, I’m probably a bit of an outlier around here.

Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe?

No. When did I do that?