Shit, that picture outside Edmonton is hardly even distant, there are a bunch of communities in northern Alberta and BC that don’t even have roads going to them because they’re too far away.

The fact that foreplay was a sword fight was much more of a turn on than anticipated.

Shit. I used to use most of these apps when my life was more degoogled, but even now I like the gallery a hell of a lot more than other options I’ve found. Guess it’s an opportunity to see what else is out there.

Sounds like the client will keep working until something breaks compatibility, which could happen whenever. Backend updates, chrome functionality, lots of things could happen. Or nothing. They’re not supporting it, they can’t guarantee anything.

32 bit game support is a bit more unclear; I’d probably recommend downloading games you like to play a lot, I’m not sure they’ll be distributing 32 bit macos versions long-term.

Keep in mind that the main comparison point for it was Skyrim, which was pretty much the previous RPG people got sucked into.

The story was pretty good and it had a good number of meaningful side quests. Gwent was also a lot of fun, and the Blood and Wine DLC was another step above to keep the hype alive for longer. The combat can get fairly involved without feeling overly complex. Rather than the blank slate of many games of the era, you play as Geralt, who actually has relationships in the world to draw you in.

Basically, rather than the unfocused sandbox of random stuff in Skyrim, it was a more involved story-rich experience that a lot of people appreciated.

That said, the hype was ridiculous. It’s a very good RPG, not the second coming of Christ. It didn’t really do anything new, it was just a solid experience.

I’ve cried a few times in my life at games. This is the only one that had me outright sobbing.

I find installing via Lutris works most of the time for most games. Definitely not as clean or easy as going through Steam, but it’s typically not hard enough to avoid entirely.

Cats. Mastodon has a lot of cats. It’s great.

I follow hashtags on Mastodon sort of like how I follow communities on Lemmy, but instead of “content” I get quick thoughts from people. It’s different but, as someone who also didn’t use Twitter, it’s nice to have a space where the barrier to engagement is a bit lower; you need a thought, not a link or discussion, and sometimes that’s enough to prompt engagement.

They sort of have watches categorized by sport/purpose if you know why you want a watch, but most of them do basically the same stuff and the main differences are battery life, appearance/build, and whether it has GPS.

I wanted something I could use to navigate and track multi-day backcountry hikes, so I got a Fenix. My wife wanted to go for a run without bringing her phone with her, so I got her a forerunner. There are lots of options, but even the cheapest watch is good enough if you just want to track steps and basic activities.

Federal, provincial, and territorial emergency management agencies have lots of non-social media ways of telling people to get out of Dodge, but for smaller updates on a situation that don’t need an alarm going off on everyone’s phone in a huge area social media and news are more reliable for reaching a large number of people. People don’t check government websites often enough, but they check twitter and Facebook a lot, and it’s repeatedly shown to be the method that gets the most attention from affected people.

A lot of these smaller updates are stuff like status of people’s homes, updates on the wildfire and suppression efforts, options for evacuees, reminding people to stay out of town, etc.

Actual emergency warnings that need urgent action result in every phone in the region blaring like they’re waking the dead. Those do not rely on the benevolence of foreign corporations.

On my keyboard it’s a function key plus:

• ijkl for arrows
• h for home
• n for end
• u and o for pgup/pgdown

So they’re all very accessible. I find I’m much slower at using those keys on a full-size keyboard or on laptops than on my 60% keyboard. But it is an adjustment, and it’s not everyone’s preference, for sure.

It’s fairly common for mechanical keyboards to come in different, smaller formats. Personally I prefer it for general usability—my 60% keyboard has no F keys or arrows or a numpad and everything can be accessed without moving my hands—but there is the odd use case that gets affected. People just have to decide how important they find it to have those keys available without holding down another key.

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven’t figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it’s all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it’s probably mostly just that I haven’t tried very hard.

In the past I’ve used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I’m forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you’re looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that’s easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

This is one of those games where every time I see it, I want it, it looks so crazy, but it also looks like it will require so many hundreds of hours to understand that it’s hard to commit to buying it.

Still, congrats to them on the 1.0 announcement, the game has so many weird interactions that I wasn’t sure they’d ever be comfortable pulling the trigger on that.

To add: I thought Below Zero felt more “designed” than the original. The biomes feel less natural, the progression is a bit more obvious, the story guides you along quite a bit more. Even just the vehicle progression makes it a little less satisfying to explore around—finding a route to get the cyclops through small cave systems was just amazing.

I ended up treating it more like a game and less like a survival sandbox, if that makes sense. I was given goals rather than finding them.

4-player SM3DW is one of my all-time favourite gaming experiences. The game is way more chaotic than it has any right to be and it’s entirely because of that stupid crown. People will spend every life attempting to sabotage someone to get that meaningless cosmetic and I live for that energy.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.

My only hesitation points when I first heard about the laptop was whether the company would survive long enough to make upgrades/accessories and whether the main board upgrades would actually work. The concept was, as you say, a dream.

Both of those concerns have faded away for me, my next laptop is pretty much 100% going to be a framework. Just need to stop spending money on dumb stuff so I can afford it…