Snapblade 18mm razor, sharpie, blistex (superior to balm/stick in every way), bandages and alcohol prep wipes and triple antibiotic, Sawyer mini filter and a vacuum insulated bottle, and a towel - you never know when you’ll need a towel.

Oh also an extra mask, couple napkins, some new folded up tissues, and earplugs.

Make a SWOT analysis for each option. Quantify EVERYTHING you can into personally objective and subjective values. Then A/B all of those values against each other. Then sleep on it, ask other people, and then return to the SWOT tables and try to add and simplify.

If you still have troubles after that, try to figure out what about either choice you don’t know, and work to find it out with footwork and socializing, asking pointed questions, and paying attention to the things you want in life about people.

If that still doesn’t tip the scale, it’s probably because you don’t know enough about something else, probably yourself.

100%, music. Get on a music service (not a video service like YouTube) and go listen to genres of music that feel good.

Music that you liked when you were 13
When you were 21, music that reminds you of the good times
Or music that fits how you feel…

Seriously, don’t underestimate the power of music. It’s literally like magic and has the power to heal, inspire, distract, inform, validate, remind, transport, stimulate, numb, etc… I became a musician because I wanted to help people through hard times and to be better people, because I realized how powerful and important it is.

Go try old stuff, too, like bob dylan. Or go listen to Linkin Park again like it’s 2003. Or go listen through the entire nutcracker suite by Tchaikovsky (i suggest looking for the decca phase 4 London festival orchestra worth robert sharples that was recorded in the 60s https://youtu.be/S7VrwRJ4t-Y?si=cmLUTdUAmg2jw7kr i think it’s the one, I’m not sure on my phone where it is on spotify). Or if you want to listen to the same song over and over and that feels good to you, then that’s what you should be doing.

Just keep searching and following the good feelings and don’t give up, like trying new sexual stuff and not trying for a specific outcome but allowing yourself to be in the moment and feel then sensations.

And feel your feelings. Just find someplace safe, get a good sound source, and let it all rip… if you feel like crying, cry. If you feel like being mad, be mad. You have to actually process your feelings.

A wise man once said to me, “there’s no bad music, only bad timing”. If it feels off or wrong, just switch it. It takes courage to try something different sometimes, though, so try not sweat it too much either way, and just remember to breathe.

Thank you for this craving.

Valve is an independent company.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I’ve found to be actually good.

I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:

• Foreign (Non-American)
• Indie
• Small studio

Basically all of the good games that I’ve liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I’m sure if you think about it, the great games you’ve played have also been this way.

Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won’t have fun, and it’ll be expensive.

Go play EDF5 with some friends. It’s jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.

Raft is great, too.

Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.

And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.

Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it’s been solid.

But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.

It’s like the loss of a union, except it’s industry wide.

There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don’t have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.

Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn’t that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you’re voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.

It’s ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn’t be supportable.

Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn’t be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.

Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they’d: “be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all.”

But remember:

• Foreign
• Indie
• Small Studio

These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.

STOP MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Enshittification.

I think in this dynamic, Microsoft+XBox has done by far the most damage to gaming, and so has the least amount of karma and trust. Whereas Sony had free, great online multiplayer services on even the PS2, Microsoft quickly ripped off everybody else’s consoles, relied on Halo to sell, has the worst everything, and has pushed the majority of anti-consumer practices in both gaming and the wider technology markets.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF THERE IS A DEFINED SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS THAT’S SUCKING MONEY FROM THE ECONOMY

Less infighting, more eating of the rich. Pay the devs, not the landlords. The capitalism system is broken and breaking further. The cost of goods is defined by how much workers need to be paid to make it, and then multiplicatively inflated by how much greed that BILLIONAIRE CLASS wants.

Government is for the people, by the people, that’s the ONLY reason it exists. People in, and that want to be the billionaire class have declared war on the rest of us, and it’s the government’s sole purpose to protect the well-being and will of the people.

The government MUST serve the people.

If it can’t, the highest priority is it MUST be fixed immediately.

The longer we flail and wait, the more that obviously hostile class of people grow in power and make fixing this a more and more serious issue.

Like any good leader, if you are failing in your duties, you must self-correct, elect an adequate replacement, or you must be removed, by your own will or by force.

Because life-time is too precious to waste waiting for the conflict to come to a head and burst.

That hostile class is doing everything possible to prevent any of this. Calm down, diffuse, obfuscate, confuse, project, gaslight, lie, cheat, steal, destroy, and gain power to RULE above the-will-of-the-people: the government.

I’m a little out of the loop. How so? Have they always been said way? Edit: I’m an aspiring dev and want to know as much as I can, and if they’re shitty, I wanna know.

Apparently he was CEO in mid-2004 when EA bought Renderware and basically killed it.

COINCIDENCE???

It’s global warming. All the natural disasters, insurance and repairs are extreme and accelerating, and those funds need/want more money and are collecting in every way they can.

I can’t believe it either - our inability to prepare for global warming has caused Unity to charge per install.

Shoes? Maybe Reeboks?

Edit: I am appalled by how many people know the term aglet.

Oh my…

You really have to be careful. Sometimes browser add-ons can really fuck with your search results. A YouTube enhancer extension was a culprit at one point. If you’re on Android, it’s possible for apps to do this too. Stuff is constantly being patched and blacklisted, but it might not be purely the search engine’s fault. I don’t main Google anymore, but I still occasionally do use it when other engines let me down, and Google has been different enough.

I’m not saying it’s worse or not worse, but that, if it’s REALLY bad, it’s also possible it’s something else.

Edit (a week later): no, Google has actually gotten weirdly worse recently. Confirmed on multiple PCs. Not sure if it’s just Google, the entire spread of the internet, or just search engines getting SEOd.

That… Is so incredibly disruptive mentally and emotionally. It’s like being slapped in the face with a fish the size of a truck.

I can’t believe that actually helped at all. Holy shit.

It has been an absolute gift to be part of and watching that/this growth. Seeing posts on a new platform go from something like 10/day to the, now, probably, hundreds, if not thousands per day.

I remember in late May/early June this year (2023, when this place really came alive, for archival sake), seeing the posts on Reddit about the ACTUAL api changes, then that evolving into a bit of vocal protest, which surprisingly evolved into an ACTUAL protest with a lot more information why. It was the last straw for me. Everything the world has shit on me and my generation and lifetime, all of it from selfishness and ignorance and greed. Then musk bought Twitter and immediately drove it face first into the ground at high speed and got support by most of the worst demographics on the face of the planet - and I didn’t even care about Twitter. But, a long-standing media giant, brought down by a billionaire simply because he had the money? It was if all of our intuitive fears about the world being awful just came true in real time, over, and over, and over, and over. The past fifteen years have been so bad, it’s actually insane, and it’s nuts to think that it can still be way way worse.

And then along came this dried out, greedy ass, shameless, two faced, wannabe psychopath who IDOLIZED Musk, Hoffman/spez, and just shits in the faces of everybody on Reddit that ever cared about anything. The very people trying to make the world a better place at least for a little while, pleading with him not to be THAT greedy and shitty. And he just spread open his wonderbread buttcheeks, stared us all in the eyes, looked away, smiled into a mirror, and blasted out what was left of his rotten, liquefied spine. RIP Aaron.

Everybody saw it coming, yet we were still all shocked at how blatantly greedy and manipulative every single event was. Now, he’s just trying to wait it out and let it quiet down.

I’m still convinced this or an evolution of this will be Web3.0. The evolution past megacorps as a result of direct abuse of power, anti-competitive and other dark behaviors, anti privacy, ultra-rich maximizations of profits, and late stage capitalism. Decentralization and a reinvigoration and re-emphasis on integrity and quality, put truly into the hands of the users by stripping abilities of people like musk to literally capitalize on and destroy is hugely paramount in the next step. We all want it, the world needs it, and maybe the Fediverse is it. Maybe, maybe not. It feels like the right direction and I’ve had enough bullshit to know it.

This made me actually just snort in bed, laughing, and woke up my partner.

There’s something very satisfying about it being actually pixel-perfect.

However, there’s also something to be said for a/b comparing for each sperate game and deciding what you think looks best for it. Having options is always best.

It’s a hot take, but I agree with you.

Actually, I try to find a noise overlay that emotionally simulates the nostalgia effect, minimizes the looks-like-shit effect, but then also makes sure to impart the minimum amount of dither needed to technically have it look it’s best.

Less is more, and even back in the day, a lot of these games on crappy CRTs looked like absolute trash. A lot of them were bright, colorful, and actually good, but a lot of them just looked like smeary poopoo.

If I can just squint my eyes and it looks better than your filter, you’re doing it wrong. I think it takes a high nit display, vsync, with the right array of colors to hit the crt emulation just right.

Just go get an old tv at this point, damn. You’ll get the buttons, the sound of it turning on, the high pitched whistle of it just being on, the smell of the burning dust, the ozone or whatever smell too, the brightness, the curve, the colors, the emotional risk of hitting the wrong channel and blasting yourself with full volume white noise and having to panic look for the volume buttons or the remote… You can even use the in-tv speakers to output sound! Tv speakers were actually decent before flat screens.

Am I selling us all on this idea, yet? ;P