absolutely astounding how so much of the feedback to this article i’ve seen across social media amounts to “artists don’t deserve a living wage” or “they don’t do real art”.

don’t use LLMs or GenAI. support your artist friends

Second week back at work after holidays and maybe my brain has started returning. I have an interesting H2 left.

Current obsession is being a coffee wanker (again), which has been fun and tasty and expensive

Just more Crusader Kings 3 and whatever the hell goes on there.

I also went back to Stellaris for a bit now that it’s stable since the big change uhhh a few months ago. It used to be to my favourite Paradox game but at the moment it’s just not hitting right.

Playing a bunch of Crusader Kings 3 and Civ V. Have half a mind to learn EU4 right as (relatively) EU5 is coming out for some reason. Also played some Lost Eidolons which is kinda fun, the between combat stuff isn’t very fun however.

This past weekend Steam had a Darkest Dungeon 2 free weekend and I finally realised that those games weren’t roguelite deckbuilders (ohhh i hate those so much). So I finally tried them and they are…fine. The “I’m so edgy and dark” aesthetic gets stale really quickly, as does the slightly-but-deliberately-obtuse UX that appears in games that are supposed to be “difficult and unforgiving”.

gross

i remember really liking Grey Goo and yeah no one i was friends with back then had ever heard of it

oh i lovvveeeed Lost Records (but I also adore the LiS games). I definitely recommend sticking through it’s clunkiness (I agree that the ‘stand in right place to give dialogue option X’ is a weird system tho)

been using newsblur since google reader died, works very well across everything and has OPML import/export support. some non-newsblur RSS apps allow reading from newsblur accounts

Apparently I’m in a 4X & RTS mood: Age of Wonders IV, Civ V & Civ VI, and some Age of Empires 2 & 4 matches. Also on holiday for the next couple of weeks so I’m debating whether or not to do BG3 or Pathfinder: WotR (my patience for CRPGs runs out at ~50-60 hours so perhaps neither)

wondering a bit what my life would have been like if i didn’t have a pathological need to please people. maybe i should book some therapy again

funnily enough i’ve only learned of this term from people saying it’s wrong and not real, so it’s more ‘friendslopslop’ to me

having a baaaad bpd week. oscillating between deleting all my social accounts or instead becoming ‘a posting/reply guy’.

I’ve been trying to not use Steam on linux for a while now unless necessary (I have too many games there). GoG + Heroic keeps me pretty sane. Otherwise it’s Lutris for starting them (which I’ll agree is VERY clunky but you can get things done). I think we’re actually getting over the hill of “Linux gaming means Steam” that we’ve been on since the SteamDeck launched.

While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?

This is a pretty valid-ish concern I would say. It’s one of the reasons I’m using GoG mainly now (which yes, still buying licences so similar concerns just maybe not as great or maybe I’m kidding myself)

This whole article is great but the last section resonates with me pretty hard at work rn:

But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless.

At work we’re being pushed to use Copilot because “you shouldn’t spend your time coding, you should spend it designing” (actual quote) and my guy, I enjoy coding and writing and doing things, not sending it off to the plagiarism-pollution machine

Still working through the Dishonoreds. Almost done with 2 and I’m enjoying it WAYY more than I did back when it came out (and I gave up after 90 minutes).

I would like to get back into Vic3 since I’m hearing lots of good things about 1.9 and the new DLC, but I tend to fizzle out of every Paradox game after 3 hours. Maybe that will change this time?

Since getting an Anbernic something and really liking it, I’ve been trying to use my SteamDeck more but it’s just so not nice to hold or use for more than 30-45 minutes. Alas, I’ve been playing WarGroove (badly) on it.

The Deus Ex games are all great (YMMV with Invisible War tho). I’m currently going through the Dishonored series and at least the first one should be fairly nice on the SteamDeck battery, but that might be one imm-sim too many 😆

As an aside: how do you find using the SteamDeck while flying? I also have to do such long flights to go to my home country but for me the SteamDeck is just really uncomfortable after about 45 minutes of use.

I tend to stick to quality mode unless it causes too many < 30fps drops OR it needs a higher FPS e.g. driving. I don’t play shooters or any PvP games on console though

I mean, the Switch 1 also abused the heck out of the USB-C specification (I can’t find the really good write up anymore unfortunately :( ) Not surprising they would do something similar here. This post suggests it’s not actually that dire

The EU AFAIK only requires that USB-C charging needs to be compliant.

ETA: This is in no way me going in to bat for the big N

I got one of those Anbernic emulation devices and I’ve been quite into Secret of Mana (a game I could never finish the 30-odd years of restarting it countless times).

Also replaying Dishonored. IDK why, just feel like going through the series (I did not like the second one and gave up after a few hours when it came out).