The proliferation of this stuff has started to make me far less receptive to being asked to tip. I’ve basically started to make a mental rule to hit “no tip” on every square terminal I encounter to guard myself from the guilt and pressure when it’s a really absurd tipping situation like a self checkout, or picking something up or whatever. I really don’t want to be an asshole, and I do try my best to tip in the appropriate situations… But I actually hate it so much that I avoid patronizing services where tips are expected. I just find navigating this to be more mental effort than I can spare most of the time and I hate second guessing myself about how much to tip or if to tip at all, and I just always feel taken advantage of or like I didn’t do enough… I usually just suck it up and tip when in doubt, but I really don’t like how it makes me feel. I just want everybody to be able to make a good living and to not have to think about any of this and have the price just be the price (with taxes included too, by god).

I don’t think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn’t it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games… It’s so confusing that I think I’m just not going to buy their games anymore.

I guess you’re just talking about one person, but I think Cities Skylines was received quite well in general? I just remember a bunch of praise for Cities Skylines (in contrast to Sim City 2013 which a bunch of people had a meltdown about).

Thanks :). I’ve actually been looking for the RSVP stuff and I wasn’t sure which RFC to look through (wasn’t sure if it was in the CalDAV one or the iCalendar one… and they’re weirdly huge). I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!

Also was curious how they were implementing reactions in e-mail. I actually think it’s a good feature, and it’s one that’s slowly been making it into XMPP and stuff. Emoji reactions and stuff sound kind of dumb and like a “whatever, who cares?” feature, but I find that on platforms like slack they’re actually a really good way to deal with quickly confirming something / finalizing decisions / quickly gauging the opinion of a group. I think a huge problem with e-mail and instant messaging is that they can be quite noisy, so having a “quiet” way to respond without having a thread explode is actually pretty welcome in my opinion.

Which RFCs are you referring to?

I’d agree that “it gets better later” isn’t a good way to promote a game, but I dunno that a game has to be good (or at least at its best) from the start. Totally understandable if people don’t want to, or can’t invest the time into something that doesn’t grip them right away, but at least for me a slow start can be really nice, especially when a game ends up unfolding in unexpected ways later on. I can enjoy that kind of pacing, and sometimes it’s rewarding to have something start off kind of painful for one reason or another and become something much greater. At least personally I think a “weak start” can end up making the full experience better overall, as it’s kind of a part of the journey.

But of course, if you’re not enjoying it and you don’t want to continue and you want to refund it… That’s totally reasonable! A game that’s a slow burn is probably a much harder sell and not going to appeal to as broad of an audience, and I think that’s okay.

I was a sad Dvorak typist :(. You don’t want to make Dvorak users sad, it’s punching down.

For some reason I find it really unlikely that Google would support a product for 10 years. They don’t exactly have a great track record…

I really want to like playing games on my phone, but I absolutely hate it for similar reasons. I guess some people might pair Bluetooth controllers or something which might make it better for these kinds of games, but still… either way I have yet to find a touchscreen based game that I actually want to play. The closest I’ve gotten is chess and go.

It’s insane to me that they’ve dropped every other API… They should really support Vulkan.

Yeah monitors are my primary problem too. Can’t get them to work properly at all through the thunderbolt dock.

Hell, I’d settle for thunderbolt peripherals working reliably. Maybe it’s just a Linux problem (or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing), but I’ve never had a thunderbolt dock “just work” as advertised.

You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.

On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.

This is my experience as well. It’s a little disappointing. Still, if anybody has suggestions for xmpp communities I’d be happy to hear it!

I dunno, I don’t think the point of all art is to be “fun”. There’s plenty of examples of games that aren’t necessarily fun but do something interesting in some sense or inspire other emotions. Exploring a bunch of dead and boring planets may not be fun and maybe it’s not compelling or worth doing in Starfield, but I think it can be interesting to have something more “boring” most of the time to have other moments stand out… and sometimes something being boring or painful is part of the experience and it wouldn’t be as worthwhile without, like for example particularly difficult games can be pretty painful to play through, but sometimes having gone through the painful thing is a huge part of why you care about the experience.

Of course not everything is for everybody, and more “boring” experiences in general are probably not what the average person playing video games is into… but there’s plenty of us who like a good boring or tedious or painful slog every once in a while :). Maybe it’s rewarding, maybe it sets the atmosphere, maybe it’s meaningful in some other way… I get it, but I think it’s a little sad to reduce games to “just supposed to be fun!” It’s an awesome art form and I love seeing other creative things done with it.

I loved the first one, but couldn’t get into the second. Didn’t really like the other characters too.

Oh boy, Myst… Overall I think I enjoyed Myst, but mostly I enjoyed the books in the library and the world(s). I completed Myst without a guide and I think in terms of early point and click adventure games it’s on the straightforward side… but it can be a real pain to notice some areas and some things are needlessly obtuse, and frankly I didn’t like most of the puzzles. Honestly, I can completely understand why people wouldn’t like Myst, it’s far from perfect…

Riven, on the other hand… is kind of amazing. There’s a few things that are needlessly difficult to spot in Riven, but it’s a little easier to navigate because there’s more frames. Riven is gorgeous, though, and the puzzles are a bit more interesting. I don’t think everybody will love Riven, but it holds up a lot better than Myst does.

I’m surprised how many fellow xmpp people I see on here, because I feel like matrix has a lot more of the public consciousness. It’s nice! I’m pretty happy with xmpp, though I wish I could find some larger communities.

The variety is really great. If your partner isn’t as into games it makes for a good jumping off point for finding out what kinds of things they do like.

Monal is okay. It chews up battery and recently did some heinous crimes with group chat notifications so I’ve switched to Siskin. Either way… Neither app is perfect. Xmpp is decent on iOS now, but still a little lacking.