Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release

I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss

I know Element sucks compared to Discord but with more users and potential funding interest from that user base growth, it can get a lot better and snowball to fast improvements. Blender was the butt of jokes until version 2.8. Like 15 years of being easily dismissed as major commercial production worthy. Element can get better. It’s the story of pretty much all the well regarded general consumer targeted open source software we use today

There are levels of paranoia that gets to the point of excessive time spent managing your footprint that could be better used elsewhere as I would imagine especially if you’re not a high value target. I am not a high value target

In my group of friends I describe what I feel related to this as, obsession with youth/fear of aging, and consumerism/tourism rebranded as spirituality/wellness/experiences

I really enjoyed the first game but couldn’t get through the second. Too much of the same without the interesting enough for me mystery. Enough reveals in the second game and my interest in the story tanked

Regardless of that, I ignored this news until I started reading that this is actually guerilla games studios work straight up rather than licensed out development with them more as narrative/art consultants. The game doesn’t look small. What’s the developmental state of a third game when this is a main studio game rather than a licensed out game

The main thing is if you like or can stomach the combat. The games stories are connected but work fine standalone. I like XC 3 the most. They’re long games. The second games story takes a good while to really get going and the it’s entertaining the rest of the way. The environments are big, annoyingly big in my opinion, but I play the games for the real sincere passionate teenager saving the universe type story in a convoluted mess of a universe. It’s cheesy teenage scifi fantasy fun

My guess on Veilguard is that after the original creator left, now it was up to remaining writers to maintain passion in lore that they didn’t formulate. So Veilguard, it all gets watered down and anticlimactically rolled out and the focus ended up being relationship drama which still sucked.

A Dragon Age game that wants to be Lifetime channel medieval teenage fantasy romance but the characters are all seasoned combat veteran adults so it’s very weird for them to behaving so childish and unprofessional or even blase about the world ending/faith shattering reveals in the story. They are weirdly archetypal high school students placed in the wrong story

I played DA1-3 a bunch of times. Veilguard just sucks. ME1-3 I never liked like KOTOR 1and 2 but good enough. Andromeda, it’s not interesting. Dropped maybe halfway through. Good gunplay and movement but overly big uninteresting worlds. I don’t remember what any character wanted. At least Inquisition, the different areas were visually memorable

Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, Mass Effect Andromeda, Dragon Age Veilguard - each one of these games were touted for their improved combat, at least improved movement. That’s not to say any are great, just that they’re not as clunky as previous games. They are not standout in that regard. So for Bioware and Obsidian, it is still the case that their draw is writing in a higher budget RPG than the startup indie scene. Pretty much where Owlcat is now getting to with Warhammer and the Expanse licensed games, that’s where Bioware and Obsidian were 20-25 years ago. Narrative games

Bioware and Obsidian games aren’t so fun to play to appeal with mediocre writing. I think like an 80+% reduction of irony, snark, sarcasm, eye rolls, modern slang, knods to modern culture would do wonders for their games writing. Don’t have to get rid of all of it. Just have them be more fun finds in a dialog tree that make them memorable and each high quality while the rest of the narrative takes itself seriously. I’ll 5 great jokes over 100, “ehh I get it. I guess that’s funny.”

At least GPD Win now considers Linux important enough to now try to make up claims to some sort of partnership. Lenovo ships SteamOS devices. Zotac ships Manjaro devices. Good trajectory for Linux on handhelds

They can’t really be trying as well as they can afford. The Steam Deck is almost 4 years old and they still have no answer for Steam Big Picture. No built into the EGS client remote play to an Android/iOS phone. They’re just a Fortnite company with a vestigial game engine and traditional games storefront. Their real video game storefront is now in fortnite

It wasn’t done well but each Fable game were hyped up about how your actions would change how NPCs and the towns/cities/kingdom would evolve. It never amounted to a lot but Fable wasn’t a complete left turn from Lionheads god games. Super watered down to the point of barely being memorable but that was the hype of Fable. Changing evolving world based on your actions

My concern on it is whether the game leans too heavily into parodying folktales/fables/fantasies and missing out on the simulation aspect of fable. Way stronger tech than a 360 or the OG Xbox. I had hoped Fable would keep building up the world simulation aspect of it. Like a watered down Black and White but in the form of a third person storybook RPG

Without the Lionhead god game elements, I’d think it’d struggle to stand out. Pretty much banking on nostalgia for the first 2 Fables

ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE

Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qidql1/it_appears_that_i_have_rage_baited_tim_with_my/

I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they’re the best option.

Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.

The current free game are the two Styx games. I grabbed them on Steam when I saw they went 90% off so I’d have an easier time running them on my legion go and my Android phone. I learned of the games because of them being the EGS free game and the game looked up my alley

https://store.steampowered.com/app/242640/Styx_Master_of_Shadows/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/355790/Styx_Shards_of_Darkness/

Their gamer phones are overshadowed by RedMagic now. They have their marketable cooling methods and under display camera. Asus would need to match at least. Also every high end Android device maker deciding to no do microSD express. Got to do something better than RedMagic

Here’s a video about kdenlive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dIqJDy78TI

Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck

I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings