I have this in my Steam library, but I haven’t played it yet. Guess I need to install it and see what its all about.

Aaand… this is my cue to go to bed. It’s 6:30 AM here and I haven’t slept a wink yet. I’ve been up all night being super productive, as is my M.O. as a retired night owl.

Far Cry 6 was a huge letdown, I hated it.

I felt the same way. It was even more disappointing because Epic Games got their claws into it, so it released as an exclusive title. I had to wait a year before I could play it on Steam, and it didn’t even live up to the hype!

I recently re-installed Far Cry 6 and a friend and I have been replaying it in co-op mode. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember. I don’t know if it received a bunch of patches/updates since I last tried it, or if I was just super-critical after Far Cry 5. But it’s not a horrible game. At least not yet; we’re only a couple hours into it so far.

Yes, but only because we had a spare TV and nowhere else to place it.

For years, my wife was adamantly against using the bedroom for anything except for sleep. She used to make a big deal about how a TV would just keep us in bed all day, watching shows and movies instead of getting up and being productive.

The thing is, we spent most of our free time just sitting on the couch, watching TV shows and movies. And when my wife went to bed, she’d pull out her phone and spend hours watching online videos or playing games before she would sleep. So it’s not like a bedroom TV would be much different.

When we ended up with an extra TV and no space to put it in any other rooms, I placed it on the dresser near the foot of our bed. When my wife balked, I reminded her how we already spend hours in bed staring at screens; we might as well make progress on our backlog of TV shows instead of wasting our evenings with idle games or random videos.

Besides, our bed is one of those adjustable beds where you can raise the head and/or foot of the bed to whatever height you want. So we can literally prop ourselves up in bed and relax from a comfortable viewing angle while watching shows.

Despite all this, we rarely use that TV. We much prefer the larger one in our living room. But every now and then, when my wife is having a bad day and refusing to get out of bed, I’ll grab a bunch of snacks and drinks, join her in bed, and turn on that TV.

Video games and collecting Sonic the Hedgehog comics are my two expensive hobbies; I don’t spend money on much else besides essentials (food, shelter), so I can afford to splurge a bit on these hobbies. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the US military took really good care of me for 20 years and continues to provide for me in retirement, so I’m able to live a pretty relaxed life now.

If you somehow dont have Metro 2033 yet, you can still add it to your library for free today.

I saw that it was free for 48 hours! I already have the whole Metro franchise, but I’ve informed my gaming friends about the deal this morning. Thanks for spreading the news!

One caveat to my Steam library is that I always try to wait for deals before I buy; I rarely buy anything at full price. I don’t want to think about how much money I might’ve spent if I bought everything at full price! 😱

I really like video games. And I’m retired young(ish), so I have all the time in the world to game now.

Plus, I have a (relatively new) blog dedicated to introducing games to people, which encourages me to play through a variety of games in my library. It’s basically just archiving my “Random Screenshots of my Games” posts in !games@lemmy.world.

And according to the SteamDB, I’ve played 26% of my games. The last time I checked, it was at 38%, but that was maybe 2,000 games ago. I need to keep working through my library!

Oh damn. I’ve spent $30,359.76 on Steam in the 17 years I’ve had an account. And I just passed 4,000 games in my Steam library within the last month. That checks out.

Note: the reason it looks especially phallic is because Norway is missing. Because Norway isn’t part of the European Union, and thus does not use Euros as their primary currency.

Oh dang! I remember seeing the initial trailer for this show and thinking it looked interesting. Then I forgot all about it, until I saw this article. A whole 4-season series has come and gone before I even got to watch a single episode.

You only get better through failure. Drawing and art is a skill that you develop over time like training a muscle.

I’ve been given this advice my whole life and I’ve always hated it because it’s never worked for me.

I used to love drawing as a kid. I was always sketching things. I got a lot of praise for my artwork and was told that I was highly skilled for my age.

The problem was, I mostly just copied other works of art. I wasn’t very good at drawing something unique. And even with decades of practice, my skill never improved. I never figured out how to draw unique styles, shading, or details. Despite my “skill,” I eventually gave up drawing altogether.

As an older man looking back, I realize now that I was focused on technical details I could actually see and I could never recreate them from a mental image. I never had an artist’s mind. I was just really good at copying exact details from other art. I could’ve even draw based on a photo, because I didn’t know what details to include and what to exclude; there was too much information in a photograph and my brain couldn’t parse it all.

To this day, I can mimic other works of art very well, but I can’t create unique works, and no amount of practice will fix that. I’m just not artistically inclined. I can’t visualize a scene well enough to create it from scratch.

I could’ve used this community a month ago. For years, I swore I had a fever dream in my childhood about playing a side-scrolling shoot-em-up game with dinosaurs as anthropomorphic protagonists.

A friend of mine reminded me that Dinosaurs for Hire was a thing, released on the SEGA Genesis in 1993.

For the next hour and a half, Musk sat in stony-faced silence and blasted techno music while dozens of users with names such as ELON_IS_A_PEEDOPHILE and ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC repeatedly spammed the chat […]

Oh my god, Musk is J.P. from Grandma’s Boy. I can’t un-see it now.

I was serving in the US military during Trump’s first term as president, and whereas it was illegal for me to criticize the president as an actively serving member of the military, I made sure to keep my fellow service members informed of the BS he was up to, without providing my own commentary.

I’m retired now, and I still talk with some of my former subordinates about what Trump is up to. I can speak a bit more liberally now, not being tied down by legal rules and regulations.

And I constantly remind them that we have a duty to ignore unlawful orders. If Trump demands something of the military that violate life and/or liberty toward the citizens we’ve sworn to protect, that qualifies and should be ignored.

Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week.

🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?

TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.

The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.

That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.

I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.

I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?

I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.

I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.

They couldn’t get Leslie Nielsen to reprise his role (since he passed away 15 years ago), so they called the next closest name in the Hollywood phone book: Liam Neeson.

The Vesper is James Bond’s personal invention, from the very first novel, Casino Royale. It’s basically his own custom twist on the vodka martini.

He explains he only has one drink before dinner, but he prefers it’s a large one, ice cold, and made very well. He drinks plenty of other types of alcohol throughout the books, but he’s pretty particular about this one evening aperitif.

The movies kind of latched onto it and just made him drink vodka martinis in general. Although the 2006 film Casino Royale had him order his custom invention from a bar, almost word-for-word from the original novel. It’s named after Vesper Lynd, the first girl Bond truly fell for in the novels.

James Bond was an alcoholic, with good reason. He didn’t drink vodka martinis for the taste, he drank them to dull the pain and horrors of his job. As much as he drank, he probably didn’t really taste the booze anymore.

The original James Bond from the novels was a dark and brooding high-functioning alcoholic, who operated at his best with a drink or two in him at all times. He was pretty useless without the drink. A vodka martini would quickly get him in the right headspace to accomplish his latest mission.

The movie Bond was reinvented to be this dashing, handsome womanizer who drank and smoked socially and was charming as hell. Basically, a 1950s ideal male fantasy. This Bond probably could’ve used a classier drink than straight vodka, but that’s one aspect of the books they kept pretty loyal.

It’s not that bad. They have three difficulty settings: Normal, Black Mesa, and Hard. I played on Normal and I haven’t really struggled anywhere. I think I’ve only died once in my whole gameplay, and it was when I was fighting off waves of Marines flooding a single large space that I couldn’t leave. I’m assuming “Black Mesa” is their suggested difficulty level.

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Thanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!

So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.

By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.

One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.

I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.