I have really fond memories of the first Grid game from 2008. That’s alongside NFS: Most Wanted from around that time, like most people it seems, haha! I also spent an inordinate amount of time playing Gran Turismo 3: A-spec. I loved the career mode so much.

My favorite cars are the Lotus Espirit and Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR, to this day, because of Gran Turismo 3 and Most Wanted, respectively.

There haven’t been many recently that have piqued my interest, other than the gang all wanting to get Forza Horizon. I don’t play it much on my own, though.

If there were another track game where you work up from the bottom with a shit car in different classes of races, earning money and unlocking new parts and stuff along the way, I’d be into it. It seems most newer racing games just have generic “Engine Upgrade 1”-type options, or full-blown sim where you’re picking extremely particular individual pieces and tuning everything to an overwhelming degree.

Ooohh! Interesting. You’ve got me curious about that now. I’ll have to look into it.

Epic has sold Bandcamp to music licensing company called Songtradr.

Ah, I see! Yeah, a bigger catalog would be nice. You can add more repositories to it, enable Flathub, which provide more options, but something about it does feel hamstrung.

The Firefox thing is something I know about! You can set a config option in the about:config page to tell Firefox to use your desktop’s standard dialogue. It has to do with XDG Desktop specifications, I think

Maybe they were putting their hair up? Or taking a sweatshirt off? Or they were headbanging really hard. Or they’re not bifocals and are nearsided?

You’re totally right. I’m just being difficult.

Was that a Blazing Saddles quote?

In Firefox, you can disable the clipboard events. I’ve done this for the rare case of me copy+pasting a password and forgetting to clear the clipboard after.

On Android, I’ve noticed that it’s possible for apps to read from the clipboard, to read OTP tokens for example. Since I noticed that a while back, I’ve always been wary of the clipboard on any device I’ve used.

I putz with Discover sometimes. Though I have no idea how it resolves package updates under the hood, as it often will produce a different manifest than running dnf itself.

What would you like to see improved?

SUSE’s Open Build Service absolutely rules, too. I use Fedora personally, but would switch to Tumbleweed any day. I’ve gone back and forth, eventually settling on Fedora only because of familiarity with Red Hat.

There are things I miss, big one being Zypper. It’s slow as balls but it’s usability and ability to dig through packages is unmatched, in my opinion.

I’m not a systemd guru, but I do find it relatively easy to work with.

I’ve noticed that a lot of it is actually made up of separate binaries and daemons. Is it wrong or misleading to think of systemd as a collection of utilities that share a common DSL as opposed to a strict monolith?

With you there. The workload on developers is reduced with these features, to a degree. But, instead of saved effort then getting directed to working on gameplay mechanics and such, to me it feels like many devs just see it as time/money saved, producing a game that looks and plays like one from 10 years ago, but runs like it’s cutting edge.

For instance, Abiotic Factor. That game on my RX 6800 XT runs at 40-50fps when at 100% resolution scaling at 1440p. Why? It’s got the fidelity of Half Life 1, why does it need temporal upscaling to run better? (I adore that game btw, Abiotic Factor is so much fun and worth getting even if playing alone!)

Not saying that’s how every dev is, I know there are plenty of games coming out nowadays that look and run great with creators that care. Just feels like there are too many games that rely on these machine learning based features too heavily, resulting in blurriness, smearing, shimmering, on top of poorer performance.

Just hoping the expectation that something like an RTX 4090 does not become the default cost-of-entry in order to play PC games because of this. It would be unfortunate for the ability of game developers to create and tune by-hand to become a lost art.

Lol nailed it

I think Keanu Reeves is playing Shadow.

Edit: yup - https://www.ign.com/articles/sonic-the-hedgehog-3-voice-casting

Being honest, and I know this isn’t a laptop or some productivity device, but I personally very much dislike using any screen under 100Hz now, even for just simple desktop use. I think I get your point, that it would have made more practical sense to use a more economical display.

I just know I personally wouldn’t spring for something like this if it only had a 60Hz display, though.

Yea, man. Nothing wrong with liking how the inside of a PC looks. All those traces, different colored PCBs, shiny heatsinks, components, etc. I could take or leave RGB myself but I wouldn’t deny someome their glam.

Jesus. I always assumed there was creepy, evil “rich people doing weird shit” kinda stuff going on behind the scenes there, but this is worse than the masked-bloodpact-orgy-dressup deal I imagined.

I actually don’t understand the hate Sweet Baby gets. The most I’ve been able to understand about it is that they use inclusive language or something.

Is that honestly it? Because that seems like a lot of wasted effort spent hating something pretty dang benign…

Props for being self-aware.

I surprised myself at how loud I laughed at the battery life lol

For the Dreamcast, specifically, there was a show on G4 (on cable, before merging w/ TechTV) that I remember casually watching a bajillion years ago that discussed what happened with the Dreamcast. Basically, the PS2 is what happened.

There’s this 5 second blip of the program that burned itself into my brain where someone from Sega was talking about how awesome and exciting things were one moment, and then PS2, then *cricket sounds*. They mention how they had to stop production because they literally had warehouses filled with Dreamcasts just sitting there.

It was kinda nuts for them 'cause the Dreamcast actually sold pretty ok until people learned about the PS2’s price and the fact you could watch DVDs on it, which alone was huge. Sony just fuckin instantly annihilated everyone so hard with the PS2. It wasn’t feasible, timewise or financially, for Sega to iterate on a new system fast enough and somehow dump all the systems they had lying around, and they knew if they wanted to contiue to exist, they had to switch gears to be mostly software/publishing, aside from arcade cabinets.

Though (to me, sadly) Sega shed the last of their arcade board-makin days in 2021, they are the reigning champ and legends of bigass video game machines. They made more than 500 arcade games and produced over 20 arcade system boards that ended up being able to run stuff like huge Unreal Engine 4 games on dual 50" screens. They sold the last of their arcades back in 2022, leaving a pretty dope legacy behind, even though they’re still kicking around otherwise. I guess COVID was to their arcades as the PS2 was to the Dreamcast.