I can’t vote because of my VPN… but I’ll wait for a sale before purchasing Grand Theft Auto VI. I don’t agree with spending $70+ for a game that I might enjoy for a handful of hours. No game is worth that price to me. I firmly believe in voting with my money, so I won’t support the industry that keeps inflating game prices.

Plus, I never buy games at release anyway. No game seems to be perfectly polished at release now (unless it’s been in early access for over 5 years) and I’d rather wait and let others find all the game-breaking bugs and get them patched first.

I remember a time when games were strictly offline. A new game released and whatever flaws it had were just part of the experience forever. Game studios were especially careful to ensure their games were as close to perfect as they could get.

Now with everything connected to the Internet, game studios just release a messy pile of code and drop day-one patches to make it semi-playable, with the expectation that gamers will find and complain about other problems that the studio can patch out later. There’s no more pride in making a quality game anymore, it’s just pushing garbage as fast as possible and fixing it in post.

I’ll wait maybe a year or so until Grand Theft Auto VI drops to $20-30 during a Steam sale and then buy it. I have plenty of other games to play in the meantime; I’m in no rush to experience it.

Alt + 0151 (on the num pad)

Or just press Ctrl + Alt + -

Ah, I haven’t even met any bosses yet. That’s probably why it’s so slow. I don’t even have engines yet.

I’ve been playing this game. It’s enjoyable, but it took way too long to get started. I was already several hours in before I was able to build my first base/ship and get moving to new islands. I wasn’t really sure what to do, so I spent a lot of time just wandering and exploring. I still feel that way, several hours into the gameplay.

And even then, it just feels very slow paced. Like it takes forever to do anything in the game. On that note, flying between islands is also very slow. I don’t know if it’ll pick up with later advancements to ship engines or something, but it’s kind of mind-numbingly slow where I’m currently at. It could use some fast-travel options so I’m not just leaving to make a sandwich while my ship flies to the next island over.

I tried to get my friends into it so we could all base-build together, but none of them had the patience to get a character started. So I’ve been playing it solo and hoping it’ll get better in the later game.

the devs are continuing to put significant work into the game, and it’s in a good state now

It’s actually been a while since I played it. I should probably pick it up again and see if the game has improved.

I have an app from the F-Droid store called URLCheck. I set it as my default “web browser” and then it intercepts every URL I click with a pop-up menu.

The menu lets me see the URL and breaks it down into various parts, which I can selectively remove if I desire. I primarily use it to remove all tracking tags from links people share. But at the bottom of the menu, there’s a drop-down list with all the detected web browsers on your device. You can select a specific web browser before opening the link.

Sure, you may have to manually select the browser every time, but you can guarantee that every Tumblr link opens in Waterfox instead of a default browser. And it gives you a chance to review your URLs before opening them.

Most people have no idea what kind of parameters are attached to links nowadays. I basically just remove the entire “parameters” section of the URL so it takes me straight to the webpage. No tracking, no data collection on where I clicked from, no custom attributes to load on the page. Just take me straight to the link with no extra BS.

Oh, I just noticed it’s on the Google Play store now. That’s good; with Google threatening to lock down Android to only install from their store later this year, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to update URLCheck anymore.

Their CEO originally claimed they were only porting exclusives to PC in order to get more people interested in buying PlayStation consoles. Steam sales didn’t increase PS console purchases, so they’ve decided to stop porting games to PC.

Nevermind that opening your games to more sources will rake in more money than keeping them locked down behind your singular platform.

I can’t speak for individual instances, but when I first moved to Lemmy, I used the Sync for Lemmy app. Every time I came across a deleted comment, it gave me the option to read the comment anyway. If the user hadn’t edited it before deleting it, I could still read their whole comment, even though it was marked as deleted.

I’ve since moved to the Voyager app and it doesn’t give me this option, but I know that my deleted comments are likely still readable out there.

Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!

And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.

If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.

I LOVE Saints Row IV! It’s my favorite of the entire franchise. Yes, it’s extra campy and over-the-top, but that just makes it more enjoyable.

Probably my favorite mission of Saints Row III was where you took an experimental drug and it gave you super-speed for a little while, so you could sprint across the city faster than if you were driving a car.

Saints Row IV just gives that to you as a permanent upgrade at some point. You don’t need cars later in the game, you can just run ridiculously fast and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.

I can’t remember if you can fly too, but I wanna say you can. It’s been quite a long time since I played that game.

I had so much fun in Saints Row IV, most of my playtime is just running all over the map and dicking around with NPCs once I was too OP for them to do anything to me. It’s hard for me to go back to the other games after that.

I block ads too, but a bunch of YouTube channels I follow slip in their own custom-made ads in their vids, and like 70% of them were NordVPN. I couldn’t escape it for a while.

This is why I’ll never use NordVPN. Their ads are everywhere, which makes me not trust their product.

Besides, the most popular products are the most targeted by malware, hacking, adware/spyware, etc. Lesser known security tools are generally better, as long as the product itself is quality.

Fences

I live in the countryside, so for decades, my area just showed up as a few main roads and a lot of empty map space. I’ve had delivery and mail vehicles fly by my house because they didn’t know where exactly to turn in. Inviting friends over was always a challenge because I need to describe distances and landmarks. Everyone misses the mailbox.

With OpenStreetMap, I’ve not only been able to put in driveways and outlines of houses on the map, but I put in the fences between my property, the 40 acres of conservation wilderness next to me, then the neighborhood on the other side. Now you can actually see the local neighborhoods out here! And every house has an address associated with it, instead of just a number next to the empty road that doesn’t quite match up with driveways.

And since updating it myself, I’ve noticed those details populating on Google and Bing maps too, so deliveries have been more accurate lately. I’m no longer getting mail for my neighbors, or having neighbors drop off my mail that was left at their house.

I volunteer for my town’s parks committee. Lately, I’ve been marking and labeling our parks and trails on OpenStreetMap because locals are always asking where they are. And my town’s homemade maps are ancient and awfully drawn. I spent my whole childhood living here and I’m only now learning about some of these parks and trails in my 40s!

I’ve spent a lifetime irritated with how little information is available on maps for my region, and now I get to update it myself! It’s been wonderful. I’ve even edited details in my local town as construction changed the street layout and no one updated public maps. It’s so convenient!

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!

And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.

Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.

I requested an ADHD diagnosis while serving in the US military. Specifically, my last year of service after submitting my request for retirement. I figured, “What are they gonna do, force me to retire?”

At first, the military was resistant. You can’t join the US military if you have an ADHD diagnosis, so their response was that I don’t have it, since I had already served successfully for 19+ years. (For the record, if you’re already serving and get a diagnosis, they’ll let you continue to serve)

But I refused to take no for an answer, so they finally agreed to get me diagnosed. But of course, they don’t have anyone at the military hospital who can diagnose me, because they don’t deal with ADHD people. So I was referred to a civilian specialist in the area. A lady who got her doctorate in ADHD studies and had been in the field for 11 years.

She told me I was the worst case of ADHD she’d ever seen.

She immediately wanted to get me on a regimen of pills. She claimed that ADHD wasn’t an exact science and everyone responded completely differently to medication, so it would likely take months of trial and error to find the exact type and dosage of meds to help me.

The military immediately shut it down. They said I was only authorized for the diagnosis and they weren’t going to cover any medication at this point. The specialist did give me some meds as part of her initial consultation and recommended I try them to help identify a baseline for meds in the future.

Since then, I’ve retired and tried a few different medications. Thanks to a 100% disability rating with the VA, I’m covered for literally all medical and dental for life, so I asked them about being prescribed ADHD medications and they were more than willing to help.

After testing several different types though, I’ve realized that I’m just not myself on any meds. Despite having a bad case of ADHD, I’ve inadvertently built my life around it and have learned how to use it to my benefit.

Knowing I have ADHD makes it easier to identify when I’m getting lost in the details and helps me to pull myself back to reality. But in the long run, my specific type of ADHD means I can hyperfocus on mind-numbing projects for hours and never be bored. So I’m actually extremely productive.

Medications just made my brain all fuzzy and killed my hyperfocus. I could silence all the noise in my brain, but it wouldn’t necessarily focus me. It would just give me the space to pick a direction to focus, but then I’d start missing details and making mistakes because I didn’t have the nagging voices telling me I need to double- and triple-check my work.

In the end, I much prefer to be unmedicated. But like I said, everyone responds differently. My wife also has ADHD, but she’s unable to do anything unless she takes her meds. She’s way too distracted and basically shuts down without her meds.

So if you’re happy with who you are, you can just refuse to get medicated. A diagnosis doesn’t mean you need to take meds. The diagnosis just helps you to understand more about how you operate, and you can do whatever you want with that information.

The soundtrack itself doesn’t have any credits listed. On their soundtrack store page on Steam, it says “Kraken Express” (the development company) is the artist, composer, and label, with an “other credits” featuring Seán Dagher.

I’ve been playing this game all week. It’s amazing! Exactly the kind of pirate game I want to play.

It’s basically Enshrouded, but pirates in the 1700s instead of a magic/fantasy world. It’s base-building with quests and adventures. And your can sail ships, battle other ships, build your own ships, etc. which is like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but way better.

I bought the soundtrack for the game on Steam and the entire second disc is just sea shanties! The first disc is the first four sea shanties spiced up with instrumentals for the trailers. Even when I’m not playing this game, I’m rocking this soundtrack while I’m working on my computer.

I’m really enjoying this game. I’m considering reviewing it for my “random screenshots of my games” series. It’s about time I wrote another one of those.

I mean, his game is called “American McGee’s Alice.” Saying “American McGee’s Alice creator, American McGee” is a bit wordy and repetitive.

Sync for Lemmy has a paid version that gets rid of ads. Its developer was one of the most vocal when Reddit started charging developers for access to their API. Sync for Reddit was one of the most popular third-party Reddit apps before then.

Its developer is also absent all the time. They poke their head in every few months, fix a bunch of problems, then disappear into the nether for an indeterminate amount of time.

I actually switched to Voyager because I was annoyed at how difficult it was to get anything fixed on Sync. And of course, Voyager is free.