Always good to see a DS9 reference.

This is kind of where I land. I think there are some interesting conceptual elements, but having just one life and a PvP-only win condition stresses me out. I found the Plunder mode in the original Warzone to be pretty interesting, so I think there’s still room to innovate in the genre.

I mostly lurked on Reddit, but #3 was pretty big for me. If I needed to ask a highly specific question and get an answer from a real human, there wasn’t really any other option. Until now, hopefully.

We could have been updating our sizzle certificates all this time!

Seconded on PipeWire if not already installed. Also, I’m not sure what the built-in Gnome audio mixer is, but you might check installing/running pavucontrol from the command line and seeing if it allows you to select different output devices.

Yeah Defector spun off from the old Deadspin amidst clashes with their parent company over editorial independence (among other things). Drew Magary is one of my favorite writers, so I was mostly tracking it because of him.

There’s some stuff across the Metal Gear Solid series that’s pretty memorable.

I’ve used Logical Increments for a couple builds and liked it a lot. I didn’t copy their recipe verbatim, but you get some good starting points both on compatibility and cost.

Yeah I’m really excited to see more non-Jedi stories in Star Wars. I’m hopeful that Andor created a moment where there’s space for people to explore more of the universe beyond the Jedi.

You kind of hit on the major tradeoff while thinking through it. That tight product integration (phone, watch, tablet, laptop) is a selling point for a lot of people to buy into closed tech ecosystems. It’s easy and it just works. In exchange for those seamless integrations, you kind of lock yourself in to that family of tech products. There’s also the fact that the owner of said ecosystem will happily monitor and monetize all your activity on those integrated products. Open source solutions allow you to strip out that corporate telemetry to a greater or lesser extent. You can also achieve some similar levels of product integration, but it does demand a little more effort and technical savvy from the end-user. I wouldn’t claim that one or the other choice is explicitly wrong or evil, as people have different tech needs and different amounts of skill/time to devote to this stuff. That said, I personally have tried to be more thoughtful about what I do and do not control with respect to my digital life.

Hunger or thirst mechanics in anything that’s not explicitly a survival game.

Diablo 4 pretty much nonstop since release. Really enjoying it so far.

Yeah I think it was too much to hope there would actually be good-faith engagement at this point. It was just more corporate messaging.

Hah, thanks! Link to the Past is my GOAT Zelda game.

The initial breaking of this story is what drove me to explore some Reddit alternatives, but this is worse than I realized. It’s a bummer to see the enshittification principle on full display.