I don’t consider single player changes cheating. For something to be cheating, you need to break the rules agreed to by the players. If you’re the only player, you presumably can’t break the agreement you make with yourself.

Hypothesis: people who cheat in video games are scum bags in other aspects of life. I wonder if anyone’s done a study on that. I feel like the kind of person who has to cheat in video games is a broken sad sack.

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

I forgot they were even making this game. BL3 was kind of bad, the pre sequel was painful. The tiny Tina one was okay but weirdly had no ng+ and shitty dlc. Meh.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

Kirk doesn’t deserve a minute of silence. He was a scum bag. His ideas were trash. He got what he was due.

You’re probably more correct than not. I’d be curious to see like those people’s budgets. How many are carrying credit card debt or neglecting other parts of their life to spend on digital gambling?

There was an interesting video I saw online that was saying the final boss’s theme is interesting because it’s a piano piece for two players. The boss’s theme in it is very static, and the other, presumably yours, is more dynamic. Fits with the hollowing static world

Who has money to spend on a subscription?

Also even when I had money, I don’t want to keep buying the game every month. It’s stressful, and sometimes I like playing other things.

My ‘needs’ include what makes me want to continue living, regardless of what it looks like from your perspective

My parents would fight about this sometimes. They would blur “need” and “want” together, and that caused difficulties. It’s imprecise and, in my opinion, immature, to conflate the two categories. If you’re looking at a budget and you smush everything into “needs”, how are you going to know what to cut? The electric bill by any reasonable metric is more important than another lego death star, assuming you plan to continue living in society.

Furthermore, “I can’t quit my job at [evil megacorp], because then I might not be able to do luxury dining experiences as often” is laughable. Like, sure, there’s no way to live pure in our capitalist hellscape. We all have bills to pay. But highlighting “I like broadway” as the justification for “I help build AI used by ICE to deport people”? Come on. I’d respect it more if they just said out right that they don’t give a shit about other people. At least that’d be honest.

I don’t think most people could live on 65% of their current income. Many people are poor and can’t handle a surprise $500 expense.

I could live happily on the median income of my area (NYC) - $113,400. Even if I got a more expensive apartment, I could make that work.

I do wonder about people’s budgets sometimes. One of my friends has crushing medical, student, and credit card debt so they’re always struggling. But another friend was like “I can’t leave my job at [evil megacorp]! I need the money!” But when pressed slightly, their “needs” included broadway plays, fine dining, and every hot new game on steam (that they don’t even play). Most people are probably between those two extremes.

Inspiring

Have you tried explaining something to someone lately? A lot of people don’t care and don’t understand. About anything

How many of the bosses can you walk in and just wipe the floor with on the first try

A pretty good amount, though that’s confounded by playing lots of similar games over the years. But, like, I see the boss lift his weapon way up and I go “I bet he’s going to swing. I should get out of the way.” Sure, there is an element to “I’ve seen this before - I know if I run behind him after the big butt stomp I can hit him easily”, but that’s hardly unique to fromsoft.

What sort of games don’t have enemies that you learn their moves? Like, you play Baldur’s Gate 3 and you learn “ok, that wizard has Sleep prepared, I should keep my HP up.” Or you play Hades and learn “ok, these guys like to charge but then take a second to recover”. This complaint is not unique to souls-likes but I don’t know if I’ve heard it brought against any other game.

“Souls-like” games - memorise attack patterns, the game. Not hard, just tedious.

Are people memorizing attack patterns? This one comes up a lot and I don’t really get it. The boss does a thing and I react, which is how most real time combat games are, I think?

I guess something like Skyrim you mostly just stand there and trade blows.

I know I’m biting bait but I rarely got jumped by the “guy around the corner” traps because I looked before walking in. Counter intuitively, running in will also often avoid the worst of it.

I remember people complaining about the floor traps in the first game and I was like “you mean the raised tiles that are a different color? Yeah I was careful around those”. Player messages also help.

It’s okay the game isn’t for you - but “literally can’t win on the first try” is hyperbole.

I also don’t recommend bringing all that technology. The best of road trips I’ve done were from interacting with the other people. You can play elden ring at home. It shouldn’t be a priority.

I had a game boy on several road trips I did with my parents, and I barely remember the trips. I had nothing but a flip phone with one I did with friends, and had a lot more fun with them. Maybe because I was older and they were my friends, though.

Bring some low tech entertainment. Cards. Small board games. Dice. There are light weight pen and paper rpgs and word games you could do on the go (eg: Fate).

I’m pretty sure Wikipedia isn’t a government entity and thus not subject to whatever their fever dream is. Republicans are the worst, and many of them are quite stupid as well

Moderately irritated by having to explain “it’s literally j j j all js like the word all J’s but not this part” all the time

Maybe, but the bug report was it was showing them in the “wrong order” in the UI. I could look at the API response but then I need to map that to what’s displayed somehow. I think I used the dev tools to run js on the page to get the actual dates in one go (since that was in the dom), but that kind of sucks. A customer certainly isn’t going to do that. They see a bunch of stuff that all says “yesterday” or “two weeks ago” and they need to do extra work to get information that we went out of our way to hide.