I’m playing The Outer Worlds. Pretty cool so far!

Lots of dialog options for stuff, as I’d expect from Obsidian, interesting lore, hard choices. I wish the slow motion mode also highlighted enemies with V.A.T.S. That would make it much easier for me to play.

It’s weird how big of a deal he made about the noise and I barely heard it.

Oh, I get the business side of it. I don’t get people wanting this, but I guess I’m just not into showboating, like you said.

I know he also didn’t want a bigger one, you’re “supposed to” use the bypass method. Which works really well, in my experience.

The good cheap brewer, but expensive. I don’t get it. Help?

Well, it’s not quite that bad, but it takes a special kind of person to send their very obviously visually impaired coworker screenshots instead of plaintext. And I know a few of them.

Are you my coworkers?

Right, as an instance admin, I’m very confident I can avoid Facebook’s mistakes. I don’t have the same motivations.

No, registers and bit-wise manipulation. In a Minecraft server running in the browser.

With enough zooming, even I can tell it’s the same profile picture. Wow.

That’s good, but you’re still the perfect of that meme where the stick figure is looking at the computer while the weather changes outside the window. By your account, that is.

Since it sounds like that’s a source of stress or unease for you, I think you could experiment with a “month of drawing” of “month of evening bike rides” or something like that. I love problem-solving and development, so it’s easy to look for that thrill outside of work too, but you may find a different thrill that gives you more variety and you also find rewarding.

In my case, I often get away from computers by going out on photo walks. Then I get home and stare at my photos on the computer. Hehe. It’s good to have that outlet all the same.

I work from home, most days, so I was doing that while staring at the same monitor and typing on the same keyboard.

After catching myself on the way to burning out, I was advised to stop working on time and go work out or take a walk - something physical to mentally change modes.

I agree with all the advice here to get a different hobby or touch grass.

The roasters nearest to me were all out by the time I watched the announcement video, so I won’t be joining in. I think it’s a neat idea though, and I hope everybody has a great time.

I’ll play it with an Xbox controller on PC, but what I mean is the thematic impact of playing it while so much of the world is also isolated isn’t - hopefully won’t be - repeatable.

It’ll always feel like a relic of that time, won’t it? I wonder how we’ll talk about it in 20 years…

I played a chunk of it then on PS4, but found the text exhausting and put it down. One of these days I’ll have to play it on PC, but it just won’t feel the same.

Yeah, the vehicles and battlefield chaos are really well executed. It feels genuinely grandiose today, so it must have been mind blowing at the time. I can also tell the campaign is meant to teach you how to play multiplayer, which other games would go on to do in the years to come.

There’s a lot of Battlefield 3 in there. Or the other way around, more appropriately.

I played a bit of Infinite coop - that game is super faithful, by way - and that was a lot of fun. Playing this in 2001 with a friend must have been fantastic fun.

You know, having just played the Library level, I get the feeling that it was thematically necessary to drive home the scale of the cosmic horror you’re facing. It needs to be exhausting, overwhelming, unending…

I tried it on PC in 2004 and all I got was a slide show.

Incredible, I’m sure. Especially for people who weren’t playing on PC before - it generally stands up to Half-Life in a lot of ways, including the enemy movement and maybe even AI, but the cutscenes have that more traditional cinematic look. I love the constant immersion of Half-Life, but this feels like watching an awesome sci-fi action movie, like Aliens. There’s enough survival horror and cosmic horror vibes as well to keep you going.

[crosses legs and hums]

Halo: Combat Evolved. I get what all the hype was about. This is a good game!