I almost need a "thumb sideways" button but I can't give this game a thumbs up.

Why should you listen to me?

For background, I beta tested Homeworld for Relic back in '98-99. I've played every single PC Homeworld game. I've sunk hundreds of hours into playing vanilla Homeworld, Complex, and Every. Single. Star Trek mod that anyone has ever made for Homeworld and Homeworld: Remastered.

That's to say: I adore love Homeworld/Homeworld 2. Over 25 years of PC gaming, they may be my all-time favorite games period!

Of course, I bought the "Fleet Command" edition. In truth, I did it to encourage the developers to keep pumping out more Homeworld.

Alas, the only thing I want right now is a complete and amazing mod toolkit so that this game can quickly become the substitute and successor for the original.

A little history: Homeworld (and Remastered) thrived with its mod community. The original game was not designed for modding. Yet so many intrepid individuals out there struggled their way through cracking the binary format(s?) of the game. And, at least, as I understand it, some of the game behavior is scripted in Lua, a less common but publicly available programming language. Just go look at the Workshop for Homeworld: Remastered. The number of different total conversion mods out there is staggering. The love put into so many of those mods is utterly mind-blowing!

In a nutshell, HW:3 plays a lot like Homeworld (the original) but, if anything, dumbed-down
significantly from the original but with 2024 visuals--except for the cut-scenes that oddly look rendered using vintage 2000 technology. The game mechanics lack the depth of any of the HW sequels. The campaign is linear and, at times, glitchy (I'm looking at you, asteroid mission and you, the one cut-scene where some of the lines repeat causing me to wonder if I'm suffering auditory hallucinations or if their QA missed something like that).

The gameplay is not particularly innovative or deep. The default pace of combat itself tends to be faster than previous Homeworlds. Though, in single player, you can change the game speed. However, the default speed can be overwhelming compared to previous Homeworld games, which can make multiplayer frustrating.

For fans, while it should not be surprising It's not Homeworld: Complex (or EVO), I expected to see more of the depth, introduced by HW:C and HW:2, For instance, there are no subsystems on ships; you can't target engines or weapons. Ships either blow up or they don't. There's no defense field frigates and no cloak generators.

My hope is that the mods (Star Trek or The Expanse, anyone?) will make this game shine. But right now? Unless you're a true super-hardcore Homeworld fan, who needs their Homeworld story fix, you should hold off.

On the plus side: it doesn't crash as often as a NASCAR driver like Helldivers 2 or the original Homeworld, for that matter.

Ultimately, I'm disappointed that Homeworld 3 plays like a dumbed-down version of Homeworld 1. I suppose this shouldn't be surprising, what with game studios increasingly desperate to get that larger market share which means appealing to a broader audience. But that means that if you long for the depth of Homeworld 2 or Complex, you're waiting for mods.

The modding tools aren't out yet.

And, so, thumbs down.

I watched the 2003 miniseries which I thought was decent enough. It certainly piqued my interest, so I went into the show itself with an open mind and kind of excited that I had a nice, long sci-fi series to get into.. but.. I'm now solidly underway with season 1, a lot of it falls totally flat. I just finished episode 5 and while it's not the worst show I've ever watched, it certainly isn't great either and I have to say I don't understand why this show is praised. It feels really dated.

There are some truly awful scenes where it feels like I'm being preached to, like "remember to go in for your breast cancer screening!" and "prisoners aren't slaves!" and the scene from this episode where the president appears on the Galactica just to tell the commander "ackshually 45000 people are more important than just 1!" as though it's some deep philosophy, and then he changes his mind off of that, but like, his character really isn't dumb enough to not have already considered the morality of the situation. He should have perfectly well realized that they'd expended half of their fuel reserve searching for the downed pilot, and that's more than they can afford. He is not stupid, but the writing certainly can be.

There are also a ton of cliches and cheap story beats like fake-outs, cliff-hangers, characters that could solve all their problems if they simply communicated, dundundun dunnn moments with fabricated tension, not to mention the amount of halfway meaningless filler. It's a shame because the lore and overarching plot is interesting, but when every episode has so much pointless conflict in them that always gets resolved 10 minutes later, it starts to really drag. The episodes are self-contained and I get that, but I mean most of it is to the point that it's borderline a soap opera.

And it's not even filmed or directed well or anything else to make up for it. The desaturated colours are depressing as fuck, there is no cinematography to speak of, the special effects are (understandably) very cheap, everything is truly ugly which while I understand that's the point, it just detracts even more. The lighting is also inconsistent between some scenes, and the fight choreography is honestly laughable. You also have shoddy camera work and obnoxious, never ending close-ups of every actor's face - I have seen all of their pores by now, thank you very much. And omg why are they so obsessed with wide shots of the ships and then snap zooming not once, but twice, every time!!

Also, variations of the word "frak" is just so grating but I'm nitpicking at this point lol

I apologize to any fans of the show because this turned into a bit of a rant, but goddamn.. I'm kind of grasping at straws to find things I actually like about BSG. Maybe it's because it's a network production? Perhaps I'm too young to watch and truly appreciate it/its era of American network TV? Like the only of these kinds of shows we had in my country that I watched when they were current was things like Friends, Monk, Desperate Housewives etc., so I missed out on all of these supposedly great shows back then (I was only 11 years old when BSG started airing). I really love some of the other things from the 00's that I've watched much later on though, but those were cable shows like The Wire, so it's not just because it's from the 00's.

Anyway, all of the above reasons (and more) are why I usually stay far away from network shows with 20-episode seasons, but I thought BSG was going to be different because it's my impression that it has a really good reputation? Like I said in the beginning, the miniseries was decent so I'm not sure what changed between it and season 1? I think I'm gonna demote it to a background show unless the next few episodes pick up a bit. Should I keep going? Does it get better after season 1?

A different thread reminded me of this unique for me and frustrating but enlightening experience.

This war of mine is a survival game where you have to manage food, building equipment, scavenging, security, stealth, possibly weapons and the morale of your companions for an unknown period of time until the siege is lifted. The art is beautiful but simple. The pace is slow. The emotions are profound. At the end of the game there are different stories for how your companions lives progress depending on how well or poorly you handled the circumstances of the game. It is very easy to die.

It is the only war game I have seen where you are a civilian.

It's hard to find hopeful sci-fi these days. The zeitgeist is that things are bad and they will keep getting worse. That's a problem, because before you can build a better future, you must first imagine one. This is the first book I've found in a long time that does a credible job of that.

This post is about a pair of novels by Daniel Suarez. The first one is Delta-V, the physics term for a change in velocity; the second one is called Critical Mass. Together they're a heavily-researched look at asteroid mining, offworld economics, and space-based solar power.

The series takes place in the mid 2030s. By this point, the symptoms of climate change are becoming serious, creating what people call "the Long Emergency": famines, storms, and waves of climate refugees. There is real concern that the global economy will collapse under the strain. To avert financial apocalypse, an expedition is launched to mine the asteroid Ryugu; the first book covers the miners' training, their long journey through space, and the hazards of mining an asteroid in deep space. In the second book, they use those mined materials to build a space station in lunar orbit, to set up a railgun for launching materials from the moon's surface into its orbit, and to begin building the first space-based solar power satellites.

I was surprised to learn that space-based solar power is a real thing that the US, China, and several other countries and companies are actively pursuing. Basically, you have a bunch of solar panels in orbit, which beam power down to receiving antennas ("rectennas") on Earth. You lose a lot of efficiency converting the electricity to microwaves and back, but solar panels on orbit have access to ~7-10x more energy than those on the ground, since there's no atmosphere in the way and it's always solar noon. In exchange for a large initial investment, space-based solar power offers always-on, 100% renewable energy that can be switched from New York to California at a moment's notice.

That initial investment is a doozy, though. SpaceX is working on lowering launch costs, but launching material from Earth's surface into orbit is going to be very expensive for a very long time. So these books look at what might be possible if we could avoid those costs. What if we could create mining and manufacturing operations in space? What if we could use those to generate clean power in heretofore undreamt-of amounts?

I’m going to excerpt a conversation from the second book:

[At dinner,] chemist Sofia Boutros described the unfolding water crisis in the Nile watershed back on Earth—and the resulting regional conflict. This elicited from around the table a litany of other climate-change-related calamities back home, from wildfires, to floods, to famines, to extinctions.

The Russian observer, Colonel Voloshin, usually content to just listen, chimed in by saying, "Nations which have contributed least to carbon emissions suffering worst effects." He looked first to Lawler and then Colonel Fei. "Perhaps the biggest polluters should pay reparations."

Dr. Ohana looked down the table toward him. "It's my understanding that Russia has actually benefitted from warmer climate."

Yak replied instead. "Not overall. Soil in Siberia is poor. Wildfires and loss of permafrost also disruptive."

Lawler added. "You guys sell plenty of fossil fuels, too, Colonel."

The electrical engineer, Hoshiko Sato, said, "Complete decarbonization is the only way to solve climate change."

Most of the group groaned in response.

She looked around the table. "That might sound unrealistic, but there's no other choice if we want to save civilization."

Chindarkar said, "We've been saying the same thing for fifty years, Hoshiko. It's barely moved the needle."

"We’ve brought carbon emissions down considerably since 2020."

Boutros said, "You mean we slowed their growth."

Ohana said, "We should be planting more trees."

Monica Balter countered, "Trees require water and arable land. Climate change is causing deserts to spread, pitting food versus trees. Plus, whatever carbon a tree captures gets released when it dies—which could happen all at once in a wildfire."

Chindarkar looked down the table at her. "Nathan Joyce claimed we could use solar satellites to power direct carbon capture. Could that really be done at the scale necessary to reduce global CO2 levels?"

Colonel Voloshin let out a laugh. "That's not even in the realm of possibility. It wouldn't even make a dent."

Monica Balter said, "I respectfully disagree, Colonel." She looked to Boutros. "And Sofia, I understand we must do everything possible down on Earth to reduce carbon emissions: solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal—all of it. But that won't remove what's already in the atmosphere."

Voloshin shook his head. "We must adapt."

Lawler couldn't resist. "Easy for Russia to say."

Balter spoke to Voloshin. "Back in 1850, atmospheric carbon was at two hundred eighty parts per million. Now it's at four hundred fifty-seven parts per million. We put over a trillion tons of CO2 into Earth's atmosphere over that time. Humans caused the problem, and humans can solve it."

The colonel was unfazed. "Yes. All of humanity worked hard to cause this, and it still required almost two centuries to accomplish. It is naïve to think a few machines will correct it."

"Half of that excess carbon was emitted in the last forty years, and direct air carbon capture powered by solar satellites can actually work at a global scale. I can show you the numbers, if you like."

He scoffed. "Even billionaire Jack Macy says that solar power satellites are idiotic—that very little energy beamed from space reaches the terrestrial power grid due to transmission and conversion losses."

Balter nodded. "The number is 9 percent."

The crew around the table murmured.

He spread his hands. "I rest my case."

"But 9 percent of what? Jack Macy neglects to mention that a solar panel up in orbit is seven times more productive than one on the Earth's surface. The fact that he runs a rooftop solar company might have something to do with that.

Boutros asked, "A sevenfold difference just from being in space?"

Balter turned to her. "The best you can hope for on the Earth's equator at high noon is 1,000 watts of energy per square meter—and that's without factoring in nighttime, cloudy days, seasons, latitude. But a power sat in geosynchronous orbit would almost always be in 1,368 watts of sunlight per square meter. So you get a whole lot more energy from a solar panel in space even after transmission inefficiencies are factored in. Plus, a power sat won't be affected by unfolding chaos planetside."

Voloshin shrugged. "What if it is cloudy above your rectenna? You would not be able to beam down energy."

"Not true. We use microwaves in the 2.45-gigahertz range. The atmosphere is largely invisible at that frequency. We can beam the energy down regardless of weather—and directly to where it's needed. No need for long distance power lines."

"But to what purpose? It could not be done on a scale sufficient to impact Earth."

"Again, I could show you the numbers."

Chindarkar said, "I'd like to see them, Monica. Please."

Balter put down her fork and after searching through virtual UIs for a moment, put up a shared augmented-reality screen that appeared to float over the end of the table on the station's common layer. It displayed an array of numbers and labels. "Sorry for the spreadsheet."

Colonel Fei said, "We are quite interested in seeing it, Ms. Balter."

She looked to the faces around the table. "There are four reasons I got involved in space-based solar power... " She pealed them off on her fingers. "...electrification, desalination, food generation, and decarbonization. First: electricity. We all know the environmental, economic, and political havoc back on Earth from climate change. Blackouts make that chaos worse, but a 2-gigawatt solar power satellite in geosynchronous orbit could instantly transmit large amounts of energy anywhere it's needed in the hemisphere below it. Even several locations at once. All that's needed is a rectenna on the ground, and those are cheap and easy to construct."

Chindarkar nodded. "We saw one on Ascension Island."

Jin added, "J.T. and I are building sections of the lunar rectenna. It is fairly simple."

"Right. For example, space-based energy could be beamed to coastal desalination plants in regions suffering long-term drought-providing fresh water. It can also be used to remove CO2 directly from seawater, through what's known as single step carbon sequestration and storage, converting the CO2 into solid limestone and magnesite—essentially seashells. This would enable the oceans themselves to absorb more atmospheric CO2. Or we could power direct air capture plants that pull CO2 straight out of the atmosphere."

Voloshin interjected. "Again, a few satellites will not impact Earth's atmospheric concentrations, and where would you sequester all this CO2?"

"Just a few satellites wouldn't impact climate, no—but there's definitely a use for the CO2—in creating food. Droughts in equatorial zones are causing famine, but hydrogenotrophic bacteria can be used to make protein from electricity, hydrogen, and CO2. The hydrogen can be electrolyzed from seawater and CO2 from the air. All that's needed is clean energy." She glanced to Chindarkar. "NASA first experimented with this in the 1960s as a means for making food here in deep space."

"Really? Even back then."

"The bioreactor for it is like a small-batch brewery. You feed in what natural plants get from soil: phosphorus, sulfur, calcium, iron, potassium—all of which, incidentally, can be extracted from lunar regolith. But I digress..."

Colonel Fei's eyebrows raised. "That is indeed interesting."

"The bioreactor runs for a while, then the liquid is drained and the solids dried to a powder that contains 65 percent protein, 20 to 25 percent carbohydrates, and 5 percent fatty acids. This can be made into a natural food similar to soy or algae. So with energy, CO2, and seawater, we could provide life-saving nutrition just about anywhere on the planet via solar power satellites."

Voloshin was unimpressed. "Yet it would still not resolve climate change."

"At scale it could. Do the math ... " Balter brought up her spreadsheet. "We're emitting 40 billion tons of CO2 per year, 9 billion tons of which can't be sequestered by the natural carbon cycle and which results in an annual increase of roughly two parts per million atmospheric CO2—even after decades of conservation efforts."

She tapped a few screens and a virtual image of an industrial structure covered in fan housings appeared. "A direct air capture facility like this one could pull a million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year at a cost of one hundred dollars a ton. All of the components are off-the-shelf and have existed for decades. Nothing fancy. But it needs 1.5 megawatts of constant clean energy to power it—and that's where solar power satellites come in."

Voloshin said, "But who would pay? Governments? Do not count on this."

Chindarkar asked, "Monica, seriously: How many carbon capture plants would it take to make a difference in the atmosphere of the entire Earth?"

Jin added, "And how many solar power satellites to power them?"

Balter brought her spreadsheet back up. "Merely to cancel out Earth's excess annual emissions—9 billion tons of CO2—we'd need nine thousand 1-megaton DAC plants worldwide, each requiring 150 to 300 acres."

The group groaned.

Tighe said, "That's a lot of hardware and a lot of real estate, Monica."

"It doesn't have to be on land. Just 2.7 million acres total—smaller than Connecticut. And that would be spread across the entire globe. More importantly, doing that stops the advance of climate change. If we reduce emissions, then it would actually help reverse climate change."

Chindarkar studied the numbers. "Powered by how many solar satellites?"

Balter highlighted the number. "It would take 1.6 terawatts of electricity—or 818 2-gigawatt SPS-Alphas. Each about 7,400 tons. But again: that halts the advance of climate change."

The group groaned again.

"Eight hundred eighteen satellites?" Jin shook his head. "That would take decades to build."

"Not with automation and sufficient materials here on orbit. You've seen the SPS-Alpha I'm building—it's made of simple, modular components."

"Yours is one-fortieth the size of these 7,400-ton monsters."

"But it's the same design. We just need the resources up here in space, and we could scale it rapidly with automation."

Voloshin picked up his fork. "As I said: it is a technological fantasy."

Chindarkar ignored him. "Monica, what would it require to not just halt climate change—but reverse it?"

Balter clicked through to another screen. "To return Earth to a safe level—say, three hundred fifty parts per million CO2-you'd need to pull three-quarters of a trillion tons out of the atmosphere." She made a few changes to her model. "So with forty thousand DAC plants, powered by thirty-six hundred 2-gigawatt satellites in geosynchronous orbit, you could accomplish that in eighteen years."

Fei asked, "At what cost?"

"Roughly seventy-two trillion dollars."

Again groans and an impressed whistle.

Voloshin shook his head. "I told you."

Balter added, "That's four trillion a year, over eighteen years. Spread across the entire population of Earth."

This was met with a different reaction.

Jin said, "That is actually less than I thought."

"And bear in mind the fossil fuel industry has been supported by half a trillion dollars in direct government subsidies worldwide every year for ages. Whereas this four trillion is for just a limited time and would permanently solve climate change, and we'd see significant climate benefits within a decade as CO2 levels came down. And once it was accomplished, all that clean energy could be put toward other productive uses, either on Earth or in space."

She studied the faces around her. "But to accomplish it, we'd need tens of millions of tons of mass in orbit. Launching all that mass up from Earth would never work because all those rockets would damage the atmosphere, too. However, with your lunar mass-driver—and the ones that follow it—we could make this work. This is why I'm here."

Those around the table pondered this. For the moment, even Voloshin was silent.

Boutros asked, "Is it not risky to tinker with the Earth's atmosphere?"

"That's what we're doing now, Sofia. This would just reverse what we've done and return Earth to the conditions we evolved in."

Chindarkar pointed to the virtual spreadsheet. "Does that seventy-two trillion dollars include the cost of the solar power satellites?"

"Yes. And doing nothing will cost us far more. Best estimates are that by the year 2100, continued climate change will reduce global GDP by 20 percent—which is about two thousand trillion dollars. Not to mention the cost of possibly losing civilization.

"But if, as your CEO Mr. Rochat says, we intend to prove the SPS concept at scale here in lunar orbit, well... then you will make this commercially feasible. In other words, you can make this future happen. Everyone else has talked it to death. The bean counters and decision makers back on Earth clearly won't do it, no matter how critical it is. And this needs to be started as soon as possible—before the situation on Earth gets truly untenable."

This book is not afraid to think big. That's what sci-fi is for, right? And it's extensively researched; there's a bibliography at the end of each book that I've used to start my own research journeys.

I like these books because they're ambitious. They never downplay the scale of the problems we face, but they maintain that these problems are solvable, and they expose me to new ideas I'd never heard of. I found them in my local library. Thanks for reading this wall of text!

I didn't have as much time for reading this year. My daughters kept me quite busy (and happy). However, I managed to squeeze in one or the other title. I don't want to discuss all of the forty-something books I read, but here's an incomplete list of what I can recommend (and what not).

I really enjoyed the following books:

• number9dream by David Mitchell
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
• Red Rising (all six books) by Pierce Brown
• The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis
• Dark Rome by Michael Sommer
• A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman
• The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
• At Night all Blood is Black by David Diop
• The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World by Tim Marshall
• First Person Singular by by Haruki Murakami
• Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus
• This is your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin
• The History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill

I think my favorites were Black Swan Green and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Both are very powerful stories with complex protagonists.

I didn't really enjoy these books:

• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (seriously, I like Murakami, but I hated this book – the plot was annoying, stylistic choices were questionable and the protagonist bland)
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang (the book was interesting, but also a bit "too much" for me)

I think those books taught me something, although they weren't necessarily fun to read:

• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics

Especially Chris Voss and James Clear can't stop boasting and/or advertising. I learned something from their books, but I found them annoying to read. The mental models book and the Phoenix project were fun, though.

I'm a software developer and read quite some books about this topic this year. I can recommend the following of them:

• Efficient Linux at the Command Line
• 100 Go Mistakes
• The Staff Engineer's Path
• TypeScript Cookbook
• Principles of Package Design

But I didn't really like those (although they're good from a technical perspective):

• Cloud Native Go
• Security and Microservice Architecture on AWS

So, what did you guys read? What can you recommend? Which books disappointed you?

I guess this is just a thing I like to do lol. I got an OLED Steam Deck and have been playing around with it for about a week, so I wanted to share what all I got.

TL;DR: OLED is the definitive version of this product. If you're at all interested, whether or not budget is a concern this model is worth looking at, especially if you can actually get your hands on one to try for a bit. Words aren't quite what they need to be to get across how it looks and feels.

The long of it:

Valve wasn't kidding about stuff like a little performance improvement and better battery life. It feels like someone took the LCD deck and made a checklist of every single thing that could be improved, and then did it. The result is just about the best refresh of a product I've ever seen.

The screen is the most obvious upgrade and it really is great to look at. It is a big jump to go from an LCD at 60hz, to OLED at 90hz with HDR available. As great as VibrantDeck is, no amount of color fuckery can really reproduce what is happening when you have these features. For games that support HDR, it can feel like you've actually made an upgrade, because of how differently it can handle things like bright flashes of light and particle effects on top of the color differences. The refresh rate is tied to the frame limiter by default, so when you drop the frame limit the refresh rate tends to stay double whatever that is. 40fps/80hz feels better than 40/40 to me, like stuttering just isn't as bothersome.

Be aware it's on developers to implement HDR, which means sometimes you run into a game with a shitty implementation. FFVII R comes to mind. Just know that if you run across a game where this feature seems to make the game look terrible, it's not the device doing it.

The improvements to the battery do mean something like a ~40% increase. Games like Armored Core VI and Elden Ring tended to last about 1.5-2 hours on the LCD model, on OLED it's more like 2.5-3, and this is the sweet spot imo. Rare that I'm gonna sit down and play for that long in the first place, so having this much power available means being able to play here and there with much less concern. Games that already played well in a low power state just get that much more time. One thing to know if you're coming from an LCD - it doesn't save your power profiles. Input profiles yes (if you saved them), but power settings need to be redone game-to-game.

The device itself is a little lighter, and it feels like it sits in my hands a little better. The difference is minute, but noticeable, and nice. All of the buttons feel good, the sticks have slightly more resistance to them, and the trackpads are much nicer to use. In particular, the way you click the trackpads is more forgiving by default, so while it is a little easier to mis-click it feels more like using a "real" trackpad. The deck in general is the only device I find doesn't really aggravate my carpal tunnel, and the OLED model keeps that up.

On the software side there isn't really a difference - SteamOS is more or less exactly the same with a few OLED-specific settings. Most of your info gets saved and loaded up when you log in. Cloud saves are one piece of course, but too, any controller profiles you saved will come back, and the SD card can just be freely transferred/there isn't really any setup to it. From boot to play I mostly just waited on the game to download - setting up the device was as simple as waiting for it to do an update, then log in, and that's it. It doesn't pester you to register for anything/no ads.

Things like sleep/wake and transitioning to desktop mode are faster and more consistent. Pretty regularly, my LCD model would fail to sleep/wake correctly - I'd put it to sleep and upon waking it, it would reboot. Inconsistent but often enough to get annoyed with. With the OLED model, i notice this doesn't happen as often. It still does, but much less frequently. The improvements to the trackpads means I use desktop mode more often, it feels much nicer to navigate. All of the stuff I had before was simple to install and restore - emudeck, decky, cryoutilities all installed without any issues and worked fine after I moved over all my stuff from the first deck. Haven't hit any issues with decky plugins either.

Even the carrying case got a pass. It's been redesigned a little, with an extra velcro fastener bit and tighter mold inside, black instead of white.

Transferring my information was about as easy as you could do. There are several options - I mostly used KDE connect, but there's also Warpinator, and a deck plugin called DeckMTP that can let you do a direct USB connection. Literally just copy/paste, once I installed all the stuff I had before I could just drop in the old device's things and be good to go. One thing to be aware of, is that for games which don't support Steam Cloud, you need to copy their save data over. That's gonna mostly be in a folder in /steamapps called CompatData. Takes a little doing but it's not hard to figure out. The hardest thing to set up was STALKER Anomaly, and all that was was about a five step process of clicking things in Wine. By the way, if you make a custom controller profile for a non-steam game, when you add that game to the library make sure it has the same name as before and your controller profile will be saved!

Overall I'm impressed to the point I intend to hold off buying any more PC hardware until a Deck 2 appears. If that product gets the same kind of attention this one did there's no doubt in my mind it will be fantastic. Considering too, the ability to dock and use peripherals, I think I'd feel safe recommending an OLED steam deck as a replacement for a gaming machine + non-work computer to just about anybody. $399 as a base price for PC Gaming is fucking awesome, and $549 for this improved model, at least I feel is very much worth it. $150 for an OLED screen, more storage, bigger battery is not bad. The deck is a hugely popular product, which means you get the added benefit of folks constantly tinkering and messing with stuff to make it work, on top of the odd developer specifically targeting it (such as in Cyberpunk, or how Bannerlord reworked its control scheme). Those kinds of communities exist around other devices, but not nearly to the same extent, and they'll die fast as those products come and go.

So that's what I got. I hope this was informative and helpful. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer as best I can. I'm super happy with the deck as a product, it feels a lot like getting to see what it looks like when someone goes the distance and throws their full weight behind this kind of product.

Edit: I don't know how well this will come through looking on different screens, but here are a few screenshots from AC VI and Morrowind that made use of HDR. Even if it doesn't come through - if you've never owned a deck and were considering one, yeah stuff can look this good on it! It's amazing.

After giving This is How You Lose the Time War a five star review, I started scrolling through other reviews and I found thoughtful, well reasoned arguments for the other side. This is a thoroughly crafted well written book that is not going to be to everyone's taste.

The premise is two opposing secret agents, saboteurs, time and history manipulators who work for conflicting civilizations become aware of each other and start to exchange letters. It becomes a love story.

The nature of the work each main character does to manipulate history across many centuries and many parallel universes makes the narrative confusing. I can't imagine it done effectively any other way, but I also like other confusing time shifting stories where the story starts to make sense later.

The characters only meet through their letters with a couple of exceptions, so some say the love story is unbelievable. For me, it reflects the extreme isolation and loneliness of their work and how even minimal tenuous companionship of a peer would satisfy a gaping need.

The writing includes extravagant romantic feelings and poetic literary allusions to go with the science fiction and time travel aspect. I appreciated it, but people who like romance and poetry don't always like science fiction and time travel and vice versa.

The authors lean into the epistolary format. It's not exclusively letters but a significant percentage of the writing is the letters these two characters exchange.

The creative forms the letters take were fun for me and seemed like a valid extrapolation of actual historical spycraft if you assumed much greater ability to manipulate matter. However some people find them over the top.

It is an exuberant, enthusiastic book that is fun if you like it and possibly cringy if you don't

I just finished this show, having waited for it all to come out before getting into it -- other Disney+ Star Wars series taught me the lesson that they are much better binged than watched week to week and I was not wrong.

Spoilers below

The endless references to a children's animated show that I have less than zero interest in viewing really drags it down, which is why my main take away as per the title is that it doesn't really work. Most of the premise of the show is finding Thrawn and Ezra -- two characters you have no way of knowing about unless you watched that cartoon. Yet these two characters are constantly referenced and for some reason important, but you're never really sure why.

It kind of works with Thrawn because there's a mysterious villain type of thing going on. But Ezra? Why do we miss him? Who is he? What did he do? Almost none of my questions are ever answered, even after we find him! Aside from simply being told by other characters that he is important, I am never told how or why. Nothing they say or do makes me care about him. They don't show me anything that makes me want to get emotionally invested in him. And no, I am not watching hundreds of hours of cartoons to understand the context. That is simply too much.

This show is in a very strange place between obviously trying to cater to a large audience (it is a Disney property after all, so $$$), but it simultaneously can only be fully understood by extremely hardcore Star Wars fans. I consider myself a fan. I have watched all live action movies and shows, even the laughably bad stuff like the Boba Fett and Kenobi shows. That they intentionally mix together animated and live action storylines though -- especially with any context lacking -- is a major misstep.

I like the Star Wars universe a lot. And while a lot of it is entertaining, it feels very bad to feel left out. It would be different if it was a small cameo or name drop once in a while. But the main storyline gets impacted by this, and it just kind of leaves a sour taste after finishing it.

I was decently entertained and it had some very good moments, particularly the Baylan and Shin duo was intriguing -- which is ironic as I understand that they are among the only original characters in this show. Regurgitating old canon is not the way.

7/10. Entertaining but unsatisfying.

I'm a little over halfway through and I really have to force myself to keep playing it. Some of it is really cool and a lot of it drives me crazy. Sorry to rant a bit but a lot of the discourse online is extremely positive and I just wanted to let this out.

• So many cutscenes. They're pretty good cutscenes. The acting is largely very good, most characters are really enjoyable (although maybe one day FF will realize that antagonists can be multifaceted and not just generic evil badman). But so, so many hours of cutscene -- run over there -- cutscene -- go to the one map location that's unlocked -- cutscene.
• So much time wasting slow running around. Sometimes the maps are designed like a (linear) maze for apparent reason except to make it take longer to get somewhere. I see a quest marker and I just immediately "ugh" at how long it's going to take me to plod over there.
• And as a corollary to the above, exploration sucks. I learned very early on that there's no reason not to beeline to the next goal, so it makes the slow running that much worse. Dungeons are basically right out of FF XIV, which means one straight line and a very clear pattern of trash mob, trash mob, boss, rinse, repeat.
• The gear and stats are a non-entity. You go through the story, it more or less hands you periodic levels and gear. It feels like they thought including these things was obligatory, but for what they put in the game, they could have just not bothered.
• Combat is pretty fun! A little repetitive. A little samey. I wish there were more options for using all the skills you get. I have all these things I could unlock, but the very limited set of slots you get make they basically a non-option once you've picked the ones you like. The system just feels kind of half baked.
• And in that same vein, the big quick-time-event boss battles are neat too. I don't love them, because it feels a lot like I'm not playing a game anymore, but they do look pretty fantastic. Some of the latter ones go on for way too long. Just like, I was done with punching this fantastic looking beast 10 minutes ago.
• Maybe I haven't heard enough of it or listened long enough, but the music is disappointing. Which is sad because I love the tracks in XIV from the same composer. So much here is just ambient or otherwise underwhelming. A bunch of critical moments are just remixes on the classic theme, which is nice, but not really selling me on the new score overall.

I'm probably going to stick through to the end (slowly, with many breaks for Dave the Diver), at the very least because it was so expensive. I just wish it were better.

Roguelikes have a special place in my heart. When you know that your character is mortal, the stakes feel so much more real, and your progress feel so much more earned. You can’t second-guess the level design, because random, and sometimes things are simply not unfair, like when you get transformed into a cute mushroom, while your otherwise generic foe get transformed into a god. I consider unfairness, uncertaincy and chaos to be core gameplay components.

Here’s some roguelikes I liked, in no particular order:

Inscryption
Sort of like Slay the Spire with retro aestetics combined with the gritty feel of the SAW franchise. The most atmospheric and foreboding deckbuilder I've ever played. It is sort of a meta-game where you play a retro computer game in which you play a tabletop roleplaying game with a deranged dungeonmaster.

Noita
Looks like a rather generic pixelart side-view dungeoncrawl, but beneath the humble surface lurks Finnish folklore, a revolutionary physics engine and an insanely versatile magic system, likely the best in any game. The game is vast, both in sense of game world but also the numbers of monsters, spells, perks and secrets. I consider this the best roguelike, full stop.

Don't Starve
Craft to survive in an unforgiving wilderness, battling wildlife, hunger cold and insanity. Having to constantly collect resources makes this game a bit on the grindy side, but the hand-drawn artwork and a rich world to explore and unlock makes this stay fresh.

Jupiter Hell
This, the successor to DRL (Doom Roguelike), is the only classic roguelike I could ever get into. The top-notch visuals makes me literally forget that I'm playing a grid-based turn-based rogue-clone. Still, the game is rather lacking in variation, and there's no lore or story choices. While I think this is by design, the DOOM roots and whatnot, I'm missing the sense of exploration and wonder found in other roguelikes. But even with that, the game is cool and ever so dark, and there's quite a lot of depth despite the simple controls.

FTL
Simplistic and neat pixelart space exploration game. The meat of the game is space combat in real time with pause, between which you plan your route on a node-based overworld and make various choices. The game, while cozy, is quite intense. You're trying to escape a vastly superior fleet while fighting off incoming attacks and trying to not run out of fuel while hopefully improving your ship to survive as the stakes rises. Every choice you make feels like a life or death decision. The fights offers a lot of different tactics. There's various ships to unlock by completing various missions. The one downside is that you have seen all the different encounters way before you have everything unlocked, but the mod FTL Multiverse adds a lot of new content.

Into the Breach
Simple tactical turnbased on 8x8 fields, by the folks behind FTL. The main gimmick is that you can see how the enemies are going to attack in their turn, and try to counter it. This works surprisingly well and offers a lot of depth.

Depth of Extinction
Underwater turnbased tactical. The game feels like watching a cheap action movie from the eighties. Sometimes the missions can feel a bit samey, and the underwater setting could be more in forefront but this doesn't stop the game from being quite a lot of fun. I'm hardly an expert here, but I've heard people who prides themselves of their expertice at turn-based tactical gaming giving this one a lot of praise.

Retromancer
Arena-shooter with a very stylish retro aestetics which doesn't confuse you in the fast-paced chaos. This, combined with a RPG fantasy theme really make this stand out from the other twin-stick offerings. This is a game I consider a spiritual successor to the original twin stick shooter, Robotron 2084. Of course, you need to play the Hunter, the other characters doesn't have the Robotron-trademark mashine gun fire. There's a dash function which is quite handy when you're about to be cornered. There is not really any character building, although by scoring enough points you can unlock various pickups. I guess it is designed for local multiplayer (there's four characters to choose from) but I haven't tried this. Plays excellent with controller.

The Wrath's Den
This is basically Dungeonkeeper, but simplified into a turnbased pixelart game with keyboard controls. You use space to switch between minions, arrow keys to move them, X to do various actions. Besides the random room choices, everything follow simple strict mechanics, which sometimes requires a bit of observation to grasp. The one major downside is that you cannot save your game. Much suck! But other than that, this humble little game is quite easy to fall in love with.

I've been playing through Remnant 2 and having a great time with it. I think they've hit on a great mix of combat and challenge. Plus I was pleasantly surprised to find that the writing, especially for the lore, was quite engaging (the intro doesn't set a high bar tbh). Still in progress for the game, so no spoilers please, but what do you think?

I originally decided to review this book for Tildes because I know that there are music lovers here. I made this choice before I finished the book. This is a music focused novel. People who love music will likely get a lot out of it. But the music content provides a context for a great novel.

The first half of the story focuses on two music obsessed young men who become friends. One has a strong interest in sound technology. (I'm sure that there is a more precise way to describe it but I'm not a musician. Bear with me here.) The other is a collector, focused on old Blues recordings.

Without giving away too much the plot, a new character is introduced part way in, an older Blues collector and there is a journey into the deep South to find Blues recordings and buy them from individuals who have family connections to the Blues musicians.

About two thirds of the way through reading the book, I started to wonder about recommending it without caveats. It is extremely well written and tells a compelling story. I'm glad I read it. However, there are aspects that will probably make it difficult for some people to enjoy it. Other people will, I suspect love it, for the exact same content.

Here are some aspects of the book that might need trigger/content warnings.

Violence: There is a particularly brutal police encounter among other episodes.

Revenge: Race and racism is one of several themes of the book and African American rage over mistreatment and abuse is bluntly expressed and enacted at a few points.

Narrator (and reader) lacking real time contemporaneous understanding of what is happening:
Part of the book contains content representing what might be a fever dream or a psychotic episode or a drug induced experience. Late in the book a possible supernatural/uncanny explaination is offered, but the question of why the episode is surreal is not definitively resolved.

Strong contrast and vivid descriptions of wealth vs middle class vs poverty:

Death:

As I said, I think the book is exceptionally well written and the author quite skilled. I found it compelling, interesting, entertaining, but certain parts more fascinating than enjoyable. If someone reads it, I would love to know what you think.

Here's a list of cookery books that are frequently recommended in various forums when people ask for good cookery books.

These are not in any kind of order. Please add any books that I've missed! I'm sure there are lots of great books that I haven't heard of. I wanted to link to a bookshop, but I got stuck with that so I used Wordery, unless they didn't have it in which case I link to Amazon. Some of these books have hardback and soft-cover versions, or newer editions, so go careful with the links because I just link to any version of the book. I have done no research at all into the authors or illustrators here, so if I've included people who are toxic arseholes please do let me know and I'll fix it. (This post is episode 2 of "DanBC goes down a rabbit hole and dumps the results onto Tildes").

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking - Samin Nosrat and Wendy MacNaughton.

A review from Kitchn: 8 cooks on why "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is such a special, unlikely, hit

A lot of people love this book. Beginners say it gave them a bit more confidence, and good home cooks say it helped elevate their cooking by giving them usable information.

How to Cook Everything - Mark Bittman.

A review from Kitchn

How to Cook Everything - the basics - Mark Bittman. A review from ShelfAwareness.

A lot of people don't know how to cook, and have never cooked anything. Mark Bittman's books are often recommended to this group of people. And the books are excellent sources of information, and so they're useful to lots of people. They're very clear and easy to use.

Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan.

A VERY SHORT, almost bullet point, review from FiveBooks And a longer review from LitHub

She wrote two books in the 1970s, and these were combined and updated in the 1990s for this book. These books are widely credited as introducing people outside Italy to "authentic" Italian cooking. LitHub review has already said everything that I'd want to say about this, but better than I could.

On Food and Cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen - Harold McGee.

A Kitchn review

This is a heavy duty book about the science of food. It's often described as the best single reference book for the science of food and cooking.

Food Lab: Better home cooking through science - J. Kenji López-Alt.

A review from Chemistry World

Surely everyone knows J. Kenji. He's really approachable. He give you science, but it's actionable and achievable.

In Bibi's Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean - Hawa Hassan, Julia Turshen.

A mini-review from Kitchn. So, I'm cheating here because I haven't seen this recommended by anyone but I wanted more books that are not Euro-US focussed. This book focuses on food from Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, and Comoros

Each chapter starts with a short geo-political intro. You'll be familiar if you've ever read the CIA World Factbook. It then has a short interview with a grandmother, and then it gives some recipes.

Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making - Wordery link - James Peterson.

A review from MostlyFood

"Don’t be put off by the size of this book. It’s true that it’s as big as a small piece of furniture but it’s as big as that for a good reason. There isn’t any padding in Sauces. It’s cover-to-cover solid information that will be welcomed by anyone wanting to perfect sauce-making. Nothing seems to be omitted or overlooked. Every imaginable sauce is described, including Asian Sauces which have been added since the publication of the first edition."

Lots of people like that "no padding" feature.

How to Eat: The pleasures and principles of good food - Nigella Lawson.

A review by Food 52

"Thinking back on the lifespan of this formative book, I can’t help but feel that it’s to the recipes in it, and of course to Lawson herself, that I owe much of my confidence in the kitchen today."

Lots of people just want to cook tasty food and they're not bothered by The Science. Lawson's books are excellent if you want great home cooking.

The Professional Chef - The Culinary Institute of America

There are lots of versions of this book. The current version will be expensive. The older version are usually very similar and will be much cheaper.

Home cooks often get into weird habits and that's fine - it's your kitchen, do what works for you. But if you want to get better in the kitchen by improving your techniques and skills this is the book for you.

I just finished it today and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what parts I enjoyed.

The rest of the book felt very preachy and a lot of it felt unnecessary. I don't think I liked a single character in the book. They all felt like caricatures and not how people would genuinely act or respond to the events happening in the book. Almost every single action taken by every single character felt forced to fit a narrative.

I cannot fathom why this won a Hugo award other than the fact that it was the first piece of science fiction originally written by a Chinese author in the Chinese language to win. [edit: In terms of novelty. The fact that it was originally written in Chinese has absolutely no bearing on my opinion other than possibly due to the translation the characters seemed to have no depth.]

I listened to the audio book, as I was told the names can be confusing and the audio book helped with it. I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, and when it was over I thought to myself, "that's it?"

Maybe someone can give a different perspective on it, because right now I'm just frustrated I spent money on it.