deathinactthree's recent activity
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Comment on Investment club? in ~finance
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Comment on Investment club? in ~finance
deathinactthree Link ParentAll that makes sense, and fair enough. But I'd be remiss to not ask since this is something you're looking at spearheading: what's your background in this? I'm not looking for a specific answer,...All that makes sense, and fair enough. But I'd be remiss to not ask since this is something you're looking at spearheading: what's your background in this? I'm not looking for a specific answer, just curious.
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Comment on Investment club? in ~finance
deathinactthree Link ParentI like the idea of a knowledge exchange that was mentioned. I can pitch in a small amount but my advice will be really boring--S&P500 and Vanguard Retirement Funds --but could be valuable for...I like the idea of a knowledge exchange that was mentioned. I can pitch in a small amount but my advice will be really boring--S&P500 and Vanguard Retirement Funds --but could be valuable for people starting out on the how and why.
For the investment club I have a small separate account I keep for moonshots but is the goal here technical or fundamental analysis? Both? Neither? Vibes? 😜
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Comment on Investment club? in ~finance
deathinactthree Link ParentI feel the same way. Almost all my money is in no-load indexes averaging 15% YOY but, like, I'd at least look. I have a separate much smaller account where I can take some chances.I feel the same way. Almost all my money is in no-load indexes averaging 15% YOY but, like, I'd at least look. I have a separate much smaller account where I can take some chances.
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Comment on I've noticed an odd and possibly disturbing trend on Reddit lately in ~tech
deathinactthree Link ParentI have occasionally myself debated creating such a bot that allows me to bait a Reddit Idiot(tm) into arguing endlessly with an LLM. But I truly feel that there are enough bots (or even just...I have occasionally myself debated creating such a bot that allows me to bait a Reddit Idiot(tm) into arguing endlessly with an LLM. But I truly feel that there are enough bots (or even just idiots) on Reddit that I would just be contributing to Dead Internet Theory. It wouldn't add anything but more noise.
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Comment on Favorite mobile games for short play sessions? in ~games
deathinactthree Link ParentThis seems pretty good actually--I just ran through the tutorial and a couple of levels and it strikes me as a simplified (not simple) version of Alina of the Arena which is a game I love and I...This seems pretty good actually--I just ran through the tutorial and a couple of levels and it strikes me as a simplified (not simple) version of Alina of the Arena which is a game I love and I always wished I could play on mobile. This is close enough! Thanks!
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Comment on Explain Linux controversies to me in ~tech
deathinactthree Link ParentThat's how I recall it as well. It's not that the project was asking for financial support, it's that it was a little presumptuous to default to a $20 (IIRC?) donation on the download page for an...More “lol I’m donating to Debian not this unfinished desktop environment that’s an old fork of an Ubunutu LTE” and less “how dare a FOSS project ask for donations!”
That's how I recall it as well. It's not that the project was asking for financial support, it's that it was a little presumptuous to default to a $20 (IIRC?) donation on the download page for an aging Ubuntu fork with a custom desktop environment that wasn't even close to usable as a daily driver. Pantheon was somewhat promising when it launched in 2011 but still barely an MVP at that stage, and they were using dark patterns to make you pay retail software price for software that doesn't work.
I'm phrasing it this way because they did. It wasn't "please donate to help our developers get to the goal of a finished and fantastic software experience", it was "click here to buy ElementaryOS". It gave you to understand you were buying a retail product.
That rubbed a lot of people, including me, the wrong way. And here we are, nearly 15 years later, and I would argue eOS is still not what I'd consider ready for prime time, and they're still asking for money--but at least now it's a bit less dark-patterny.
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Comment on What is a quote that you really like that is from a problematic person? in ~talk
deathinactthree Link ParentTrue... in hindsight I feel like maybe giving him a little more credit than I used to just because so many people have tried and failed to be him since. I didn't care for Jobs much as a human...True... in hindsight I feel like maybe giving him a little more credit than I used to just because so many people have tried and failed to be him since. I didn't care for Jobs much as a human being, but I would never claim he was a stupid guy. Unlike, say, Holmes putting on a turtleneck to sell her scam, or Musk buying his way into a decade of credibility for a bunch of companies he had no hand in the success of.
I didn't really believe in Jobs' vision (though full disclosure, I had my reasons at the time and have come around a little bit on since) but at least he had one--my antipathy was more around his leadership style and the fact that he was never an engineer despite letting himself be widely seen as one.
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Comment on What is a quote that you really like that is from a problematic person? in ~talk
deathinactthree (edited )LinkI have no love whatsoever for Steve Jobs, whom I regard as little more than a successful salesman taking credit for other people's work and who was always kind of a scummy dude both personally and...I have no love whatsoever for Steve Jobs, whom I regard as little more than a successful salesman taking credit for other people's work and who was always kind of a scummy dude both personally and professionally, but he has two quotes that have always stuck with me:
"It's not the customer's job to know what they want."
"Real artists ship."
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 5(ish) Discussion in ~games
deathinactthree (edited )LinkSliding in under the wire since the final recap isn't posted yet, and since I only managed to add two games that aren't going to take a lot of words: deathinactthree's bingo card Mode: Standard...Sliding in under the wire since the final recap isn't posted yet, and since I only managed to add two games that aren't going to take a lot of words:
deathinactthree's bingo card
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 10/25 Your friend loves it
✅ Berzerk BoyHas survival mechanics Has an isometric perspective
✅ Albion OnlineA romhack or total conversion mod Has both combat and puzzles Has a silent protagonist Randomness determines your fate Owned for more than 4 years Has a moral choice system
✅ The Witcher Tales: ThronebreakerHas cards
✅ InscryptionA modded game Has a skill tree ★ Wildcard Has a review score below 57 Has driving
✅ Bang Bang RacingFocuses on relationships
✅ Stray GodsHas a score system From a series you have never played Uses procedural generation An updated version (remake, re-release) of an older game
✅ Shadow Warrior 2013Has a satirical vibe
✅ Shing!Is open-source Uses a unique control scheme
✅ Arcade ParadiseFocuses on exploration
✅ Dear EstherIs one of the oldest games you own Dear Esther
This has sat on my hard drive in one form or another since its release in 2007. Starting life as a Half Life 2 mod and eventually getting ported over to the Unity engine, it's a game that invented the need for the term "walking simulator"--you spend the entire game walking from one end of an island off the New England coast to the other. There's no controls beyond walking. No sprinting or jumping or interaction of any kind. Someone, which is not entirely clear as to whether it's you, someone you're trying to find, or someone who was also trying to find whatever you're trying to find, narrates pieces of a story periodically during your walk. The story doesn't make any sense at all at first. It sometimes seems to allude to the things you see during your walk. Often it's clearly talking about things that happened in the past that seem completely unrelated. Until, depending on your read, it's all very clearly related.
The game only takes an hour at most start to finish unless you spend some time looking at the various vistas offered by the game, which I did. In a sense, the original HL2 mod was an attempt to push the visual experience as far as it could go, which is partially why it didn't offer much in the way of interactions or moving objects, because it was a bit of a beast to run in 2007 and controlling for jumping aliens or fast gunfire would've caused your GeForce 8800 GT to dribble out the bottom of your PC case, having melted into liquid form and forming an Elephant's Foot underneath your desk.
Ported to Unity in 2013, the graphics hold up surprisingly well and I did occasionally just hang out and appreciate the care put into the surroundings. The more the story unfolded and took shape, the more I became invested, but I can't say anything more than that. As an experience, Dear Esther only works at all if you go in absolutely blind, and I mean blind--the less you know anything past that it's a walking simulator, and the less you expect, the more impact it will likely have. Fortunately, despite having this in my library for 18 years, I did go in blind, and while I initially expected my attention to wander off in the first 10 minutes and uninstall it, I can say that I genuinely enjoyed it and found the ending...well, literally any word I could use here risks giving something away. I will say that if you haven't played this because you kind of roll your eyes at an expected "twist" ending of "but I'm/you're/we're deeeeeaaaaAAAAAaadddd!!1!"--I will fully confess that having that expectation is why I never spared the hour for nearly two decades--it is not that. It's also not not that, but it's nothing nearly so lazy. Death is almost beside the point. It is also the only point.
This game is a kind of literature and I'm not surprised it launched the walking simulator genre. If this game was any longer than an hour it would become incredibly tedious and you would declaim something about trading your kingdom for a sprint button. If it was any shorter than an hour it wouldn't have any time to soak into you enough for you to buy the premise. I truly thought I wasn't going to care at all about this game but it turned out to be something I'll be thinking about for a long time.
Inscryption
Upfront, I'll say I wish I had more to say about this game but I'm kind of sliding it under the door since it's the end of the month. I expect it'll be a game I could write 2000 words on at some point but I didn't have a chance to get very far and I've only got a few hours before @kfwyre closes the gates, so I'm leaving this flyer on the ground largely to remind me to write up something about it later on in one of the usual weekly gaming topics.
I was really looking forward to this one, and I was right to. Oddly, the biggest reason it went on the backlog was that I felt uninspired by the card art. Simple line drawings of animals while I was playing other card-based games with art that looking at was half the appeal. Imagine going from the richly painted and animated cards of Gwent, say, to a pencil drawing of a frog. It's just a frog. Its power is that it can hop. (In the way of flying enemies which is insanely useful, but still.) Where's the fireballs? The magic shields? The area of effect damage? Particle effects?
I didn't really dismiss the game because of that, but there were other deckbuilders in my queue that were literally just more appealing to look at, so while I was genuinely excited about getting to this one, I kept putting it off. If you're familiar with the game, you already know the actual card game is only part of it. Yep, it's just simple line drawings of animals that you put onto the board to fight each other viz. their numerical attack and health numbers. Then the cards start talking to you. Then you start noticing the weird stuff around the cabin you're stuck in. Then the mysterious opponent starts putting on masks, the only time you see its face, and the masks are simultaneously comical and kind of horrifying. Then you die the first time.
I would like to have more to say about this game but I didn't get to spend as much time with it as I'd hoped before May 31st came faster than I'd anticipated. But it's as good as the reviews say.
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Comment on What in your opinion is the greatest guitar solo? in ~music
deathinactthree LinkFor me, the riff and solo opening to Dinosaur Jr's "Out There" and no one else is even in the parking lot. It--like most of J. Mascis' guitar work, really--is kind of unconventional for a hard...For me, the riff and solo opening to Dinosaur Jr's "Out There" and no one else is even in the parking lot.
It--like most of J. Mascis' guitar work, really--is kind of unconventional for a hard rock solo. It's kind of all over the place, all over the fretboard, and with so many bends it constantly feels like it's on the verge of going off the rails, but it completely swings. It's got a driving rhythm that gets me hype every time and makes me want to run through a wall.
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Comment on What is a non-problematic word that you avoid using? in ~talk
deathinactthree Link ParentYes, totally--which reminds me I also hate the word "craveable", which unfortunately my phone spellcheck recognizes as a word despite it being purely a marketing neologism.Yes, totally--which reminds me I also hate the word "craveable", which unfortunately my phone spellcheck recognizes as a word despite it being purely a marketing neologism.
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Comment on What is a non-problematic word that you avoid using? in ~talk
deathinactthree LinkI absolutely loathe the words "luscious" and "decadent". Not just because I hate the weirdo marketing tendency to sexualize food--every time I see someone in a commercial take the tiniest nibble...I absolutely loathe the words "luscious" and "decadent". Not just because I hate the weirdo marketing tendency to sexualize food--every time I see someone in a commercial take the tiniest nibble of a Lindor chocolate and pretend to have a full-body orgasm, I cringe so hard my spine snaps in two places--but I hate the way they sound in my ear.
Partly, I think, because the terms have lost most meaningful relevance outside of the food thing, so they sound kind of like weasel words to me if they're used in any other context, and gross within that context. Partly because the literal phonemes just sound slimy to hear. I can't explain it any better than that.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
deathinactthree Link ParentOh! I actually didn't know that, and that's good to hear that it sounds like you can just force yourself to go "cozy mode". Here I was, planning to look up if there was a mod or a console command...It took me way too long to realize that there isn’t really a failstate though. If you don’t play optimally, that’s fine — you’ll just take slightly longer to unlock things, but you’ll probably have a much better time. You don’t have to maintain a minimum income each day or anything. You can literally do nothing each day, every day and still continue in the game.
Oh! I actually didn't know that, and that's good to hear that it sounds like you can just force yourself to go "cozy mode". Here I was, planning to look up if there was a mod or a console command to change the timescale in game but it sounds like I can just do whatever without penalty. (Goals taking longer doesn't read as a penalty, since it's necessarily assumed by taking your time with the game.)
I'm still comparatively early in the game and was debating whether I wanted to face the slog I figured this game would turn into, but if there's no real way to lose then I'm definitely going to finish this one, as I really dug a lot about it. Even if it's just something I pick up for a while during downtime between other games, or when I just want to chill out with something that isn't GrimGoreWar Extreme 5000: The Bloodening. Which might take a year at the pace I want to go, heh.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
deathinactthree (edited )Linkdeathinactthree's bingo card Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 8/25 ✅ Berzerk Boy Has survival mechanics ✅ Albion Online A romhack or total conversion mod Has both combat and puzzles Has a silent...- Exemplary
deathinactthree's bingo card
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 8/25 Your friend loves it
✅ Berzerk BoyHas survival mechanics Has an isometric perspective
✅ Albion OnlineA romhack or total conversion mod Has both combat and puzzles Has a silent protagonist Randomness determines your fate Owned for more than 4 years Has a moral choice system
✅ The Witcher Tales: ThronebreakerHas cards A modded game Has a skill tree ★ Wildcard Has a review score below 57 Has driving
✅ Bang Bang RacingFocuses on relationships
✅ Stray GodsHas a score system From a series you have never played Uses procedural generation An updated version (remake, re-release) of an older game
✅ Shadow Warrior 2013Has a satirical vibe
✅ Shing!Is open-source Uses a unique control scheme
✅ Arcade ParadiseFocuses on exploration Is one of the oldest games you own Shing!
This had been on my radar for quite some time, as I like beat-em-ups, having largely grown up on them (Double Dragon, Final Fight, TMNT, River City Ransom, etc. were among my favorite childhood games). It's very comic-booky, and it attempts to satirize a lot tropes from both anime and beat-em-ups. The characters are sarcastic quip machines, and the story is full of knowing cliches from typical magical anime set in a techno-feudal Japanese setting.
The humor is mostly pretty lame if I'm being honest. The characters wisecracking at each other never results in clever dialog and the magitek world setting nods at itself throughout but isn't actually any different from the thing it's nodding at. It's basically a somewhat generic "feudal future" Japanese setting where demons are coming to steal the magic goo that has mystical powers and powers everything. Except the characters sometimes say swears and call each other assholes. Which gets old by the third level and leaves the protagonists forever one-dimensional.
However! Fortunately as a beat-em-up it's exceptional, one of the best I've played in a while. You have a ton of movement and combat options out of the gate and its freestyle approach lets you get as technical as you want, mixing up combo styles to match your flow, or just kinda button-mash. Although I would recommend playing on the lowest difficulty if you're a button-masher--the game starts out very easy after the tutorial but the difficulty gets pretty spicy, pretty quickly on anything above Casual. Combos are controlled by the right analog stick, a control scheme that takes a minute to get used to especially with the wide range of attack possibilities available, but makes the game feel fresh for the genre once you start free-flowing combos as you slice through hordes of yokai.
Like most games in the genre, you have the option of choosing between four characters. Unlike other games, who you choose at first doesn't really matter because you have the ability to instantaneously switch between all four characters at will during the game. Each character has their own unique weapon and moveset--they don't vary too much mechanically but it's worth your time to swap through all the characters in the first level or two and learn the differences, because unless you're good enough to never die with your preferred character, you're going to eventually have to play with them all. If your character dies it's not game over yet, as you can simply drop in one of the other characters, so the game isn't over until all four get waxed.
I recommend this game highly to beat-em-up veterans. The mechanics are pretty innovative for this kind of game and keep it from wearing out its welcome as you can frequently change up your play style experimenting with different combos between the characters. Not much about the presentation will grab you--the art design is solid and appropriately cartoony, but otherwise kind of generic, and the humor falls flat every time. For that reason, I don't think I'd recommend this one to newcomers to the genre, as the weakness of the humor and the narrative won't carry you through the potential frustration of the quickly ramping difficulty....especially once you meet the Tengu.
Arcade Paradise
This is a hands-on, first-person management sim, where you are the lackadaisical 19-year old son of a semi-wealthy "small business tyrant" living sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. He has put you in charge of King Laundry, the first business he owned as part of what eventually became a vaguely described local business empire. He does not believe in you, or your half of a business marketing degree you worked on before dropping out of college.
As you start your first day washing and drying laundry, picking up trash, and unclogging the one toilet, you will eventually stumble upon a back room that has three arcade cabinets in it. You can play them, or get back to work, or split your time between the two. At the end of your first day, you're instructed to empty the change machine for laundry as well as emptying quarters out of the arcade machines, and you will hopefully immediately notice that the arcade machines yield significantly more money. So you contact your sister via chat using the PC in the office, and she informs you that she put the cabinets there because she already knows what you figured out: People spend more quarters on games than on spin cycles. You also approach your dad with this revenue-generating idea, and he predictably shoots you down as a boomer who thinks vidya is all brain-rotting beeps n' boops. And thus, you start hatching a plan, with no money and not much spare space, to somehow turn King Laundry into a thriving arcade.
The game goes in timed day cycles, which you can track with the LCD watch on your wrist. You have a PDA that's a clear nod to the Apple Newton that tracks goals, achievements, and game settings. You make money by actually doing laundry and keeping the store clean, but you make the games make more money by playing each of them to make them more popular--each cabinet has a popularity rating which you can raise by actually playing the games and earning achievements within them. The games are 80s-style simplistic game modes of types you're very familiar with: match-3, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, racing games, etc. Getting demonstrably good at them draws more players and more quarters. But in the short-term, you make more cash directly by your day job, so you have to time laundry cycles with how much spare time it gives you to work on becoming an S-tier gaming god. Eventually you earn enough day job money to start buying more and better arcade cabinets, and your devious plan starts coming to fruition.
As someone who very much grew up obsessed with arcades and has the deathly pallor to prove it, I love the concept of this game, I love the incredibly stylish presentation, and I almost love the gameplay itself. As the game goes on and you get more cabinets but need more money and popularity ratings, you end up in what becomes an increasingly frantic loop of sprinting between tasks--very typical of any management sim, where you're juggling resources and time--but eventually you get so busy that you have zero time to actually enjoy any of the games you're buying and gaining achievements in them as part of your goals becomes a tense exercise that starts wearing out its welcome after you've played a Pac-Man clone for the 1000th time and your watch alarm is screaming that it's time to unclog the shitter again.
I really wish this game had a more casual mode--I think this game would be a favorite for me if it had a way to play that wasn't so time-crunched to create its artificial sense of urgency required of management sims. I would love a "Cozy Mode" where I could just kind of bum around between trying to get a new high score in Not-Burger-Time and picking used chewing gum off the walls (an actual task in this game).
Shadow Warrior 2013
An updated classic boomer shooter wrapped in much prettier (and slightly less problematic) skin. So pretty in fact that I was surprised to find this 12-year-old game absolutely chugging on my medium-high-range PC without dropping some settings.
The original Shadow Warrior was a game I was familiar with but never played. I thought it incredibly corny in a tedious way and just a lazy reskin of Duke Nukem 3D the time or two I watched a friend play it, so I just ignored the series. What brought the remake to my attention was picking up Evil West as a free game via my PS Plus subscription, and finding I enjoyed it way more than I expected. A good friend mentioned that he wasn't surprised it was fun because it was made by Flying Wild Hog studios, who did the Shadow Warrior remake that he said was a blast if you just wanted to turn your brain off and engage in a bit of the ol' ultra-violence. Coincidentally, within the next week or so SW2013 came on sale at GOG.com for $2 so I bought it and shelved it, as I am wont to do.
It is, in fact, quite fun, and I was hooked from the opening scene with Lo Wang speeding his Porsche through rural Japan cranking up and singing along to "You Got the Touch" (the main single from 1986's The Transformers Movie). He's a professional hitman sent to buy (or otherwise obtain) a famous Japanese katana, the Noributsu Kage, from a very wealthy collector at his compound until things go to hell, literally. Lo Wang's inherent corniness is more digestible here, as it plays more as the character's defensive mechanism against the absurd realities of his job and life--Wang is objectively and believably not a good guy or a hero, until of course he is. It would be remiss of me to not briefly mention that although FWH Studios is a smaller game studio out of Poland, I do wish they had been a little more intentional in their casting. There is literally not a single Asian person in the entire voice cast of a game set entirely in Asia, and it frankly shows.
Honestly the game kind of knocked me out with the visuals on reaching the compound, with beautiful swaying cherry trees, rippling koi ponds, and traditional Japanese architecture. It knocked out my frickin' GPU as well, and it took me time to find how much I had to drop the settings without losing too much fidelity or dropping below 40FPS. I settled for what was a pretty shitty framerate for a shooter in favor of nicer graphics since I figured (correctly) that I was going to largely rely on melee anyway, which requires way less precision than an MP5.
Beyond that, not really a ton to say about it. You shoot or slice up demons, you gain various ki powers and upgrade weapons, the humor is still corny but less cringey, you progress a pretty straightforward plot for this kind of game. This is not at all a must-play, there's nothing here you haven't seen before, but my friend was right that if you just want to pump bullets into some demons and blow stuff up in a good-looking environment, you could do worse than spending a few afternoons with this.
Stray Gods
I almost don't want to review this one. I don't think I'm qualified to. I'm not a fan of visual novels, or musicals. But I wanted to break out of my comfort zone with Stray Gods, a game that a lot of people raved about and I picked up on sale for a couple of bucks from GOG.com where it was rated 4.5 stars (few titles on GOG get that high). I was going to try something different, and let myself be surprised and delighted by something far outside of my usual lane.
I wasn't. At all. I can't say I enjoyed a single minute of the 3-ish hours I played of a 6-hour story before I gave up. The art style and character designs are very solid, to its credit. The main character is a goth-adjacent woman who in the game's first scene vaguely gestures at either a dark backstory or garden-variety depression, I never learned which, but who of course very quickly is revealed to be the Magical Chosen One Who Will Save Us All. At the beginning of the game you have the option to give her one of three personalities, Charming, Punk, or Clever, but they don't have any discernible effect except changing a few dialog options as you progress. The idea of "what if the Greek Gods lived among us in modern times" is one of the most played-out concepts of the last 30 years, although again, their character designs are cool.
But we gotta talk about the music, since that's the whole reason we're here. As someone who just said they're not a huge fan of musicals, I have seen a lot of them, and I can definitely be grabbed by an individually great song even if I don't love the whole production. I found the music in this game to be mostly talk-singing normal dialog in a limited vocal range, with nothing remotely approaching a hook or even a theme half the time, just a continuation of the initial conversation/argument with the odd rhyme thrown in. None of the cast of singers were specifically awful, but none impressed either.
I don't want to spend more time than I have to talking negatively about a game that a lot of people clearly loved, but I will say that it was.........................not for me.
Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker
Set in the world of The Witcher, this is a combination of RPG and tactical card battler in the style of the King's Bounty or Disciples series, in that you have an overworld map you move your "army" (represented by your hero character) around to collect resources and pick fights in order to capture or progress through pieces of the map. Instead of tactical hex-grid battles with units like in the aforementioned series, in Thronebreaker you play a simplified version of Gwent. Simplified in this case means there are only two rows instead of three, units aren't locked to specific rows (as far as I saw anyway), there's often only one round instead of three, and there are often special conditions to the fight beyond or instead of just getting the higher team score.
This was easily my favorite game so far for this round of Backlog Bingo, despite that this is one of my shorter writeups this month. The production values feel like a triple-A game, from the art style of the maps and characters and animated Gwent cards, to the voice acting and script, to the challenge level and goal variety. The protagonist, Meve, a queen returning from abroad to find her kingdom (queendom) in ruins with the invading armies of Nilfgaard knocking on the front door, is well-written and well acted and is a compelling and morally grey lead in a gritty, low(ish)-magic epic fantasy setting. You are often asked in short vignettes to make moral and strategic decisions as a leader both for your armies and the various subjects you run across, and every decision plays into the final result of one of 20 or so available story endings.
I was pulled into this game more than games of any type I've played in a long time. It fires on every available cylinder in terms of quality and presentation. The battles and the puzzles can occasionally be tough, but I was okay keeping a guide open on another screen just in case, and so far only found I needed to refer to it once (technically twice, but only because I'd misread what a certain puzzle card did, and figured it out after that hint).
And here's the funny thing: I've never played through any of the Witcher games. I'm familiar with the series but although I have all 3 games and all DLCs in my backlog I've never played through more than an hour or so of any of them. So I went in as a fan of RPGs and card games, not as a fan of Witcher, and was very pleasantly surprised. Very highly recommended if you like this style of game, whether or not you're familiar with or good at playing Gwent from the Witcher games or the standalone Hearthstone clone.
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Comment on Have a hard time letting go of old tech? in ~tech
deathinactthree LinkStarting around 2007, I have what I've come to call the "Tech Karma Closet". Over time I was starting to accrue a bunch of old tech that I didn't personally need via various means, from my early...Starting around 2007, I have what I've come to call the "Tech Karma Closet". Over time I was starting to accrue a bunch of old tech that I didn't personally need via various means, from my early professional career working with consumer electronics brands, to regular personal tech upgrade cycles, to my nerdy personal hobby of buying outdated gadgets to play with that I was too poor to have back when they were new. It all started taking up a bunch of space in my living room closet: PC parts, laptops, monitors, older phones and media players, about a jillion pairs of headphones of all price ranges and form factors, NASes, routers, etc. All of it worked perfectly, I just didn't have an existing use for it.
So in 2007 I started a process of selling some of it locally via online classifieds to make room, and whatever I found I couldn't sell quickly enough, I would give away to people who needed it. It wasn't unusual at the time that I'd hear about a friend or a friend of a friend or a coworker or a friend of a coworker mention that some tech thing they had broke, or that they needed an upgrade to something ancient they were using but couldn't afford it yet, and I'd offer them something out of my closet that would fit the bill even if it was just to cover the spread until they could get the replacement thing they needed.
After a while, it'd happened enough that I kind of got a reputation for it, to the point that people who had old stuff laying around just offered it to me to hang onto until I could find someone who needed it. At that point, I more or less stopped selling anything online and only donated equipment to other people in need (and even a couple of local small businesses and nonprofits here and there) as a form of material aid. Someone dropped their phone and can't afford another one yet. Someone's kid needs a laptop for school. That kind of thing. I started calling it my Tech Karma closet because it did come around--more than once over the years I myself found I needed something for whatever reason and someone would just give it to me.
I'm still doing it, and the large double closet in my home office now houses all of the gear, to the point that I bought and built a new shelving system for it about 18 months ago. I do have a hard time letting go of stuff I haven't been able to give away--I definitely hang onto the idea of "either someone will eventually need this, or I will"--but I try to keep things cycling through.
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Comment on How do you decide what to cook on a normal day? in ~food
deathinactthree LinkI am 100% vibes-based. But I prepare for my upcoming vibes. I don't do any meal prep, partially because I love to cook and consider it a recreational break, partially because my wife will not...I am 100% vibes-based. But I prepare for my upcoming vibes.
I don't do any meal prep, partially because I love to cook and consider it a recreational break, partially because my wife will not touch leftovers of any kind. Instead, I keep my pantry and fridge stocked with canned, jarred, and frozen staples which include base starches like pasta and ramen and rice and canned potatoes, frozen veggies like peas and sweet corn and broccoli florets, and plant-based protein sources like tofu and seitan and Alpha chick'n strips and Beyond Meat steak tips. In addition, I keep a wide variety of sauces and spices on hand. Pretty much the only thing I buy fresh are onions, mushrooms if I plan to use them within the next 48 hours for a specific dish, and baby bok choy if I'm having a ramen kick.
Dinner is basically opening the fridge and the cabinet doors and deciding which starch to combine with which veggies and protein and add a relevant sauce and seasoning. I have enough stuff on hand to be able to make Italian, Indan, Asian, Mexican, soups and stews, and dishes like stroganoff and an ersatz bourguignonne. Or pizza, as I usually have some frozen crusts on hand.
Nothing I make is hyper-fancy nor labor-intensive. The goal is to make things with comparatively little prep, and virtually zero food waste because all of it is shelf stable or at least keeps for a long time before use. I've been doing it this way long enough that I keep a par of each staple and grocery shopping on the weekend is just marking and replacing which things I used during the week.
Yes, this formula and this goal necessarily set some limits on what I can make in a normal evening, but some of that's deliberate, because the tertiary goal is that it should be somewhat healthy. At least most of the time--I have some dishes like the stroganoff that I'd never call "health food", though it's also not particularly bad for you either. But it'll never be, say, burgers or casseroles or any kind of fried food. Which I enjoy all of but better for me if I save them for special occasions.
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Comment on Not sure where to start or how to approach massage tools in relationship in ~life
deathinactthree LinkMight seem like an unusual take, but since the major tools and callouts have largely already been addressed, I'll mention how I learned to get quite good at giving massages: I got massages. This...Might seem like an unusual take, but since the major tools and callouts have largely already been addressed, I'll mention how I learned to get quite good at giving massages: I got massages.
This both sounds counterintuitive and also it won't be an option for everyone depending on availability, but at my local mall there's a place that does 12-minute tui na chair massages for $12. (For the record, these kinds of massage shops or kiosks exist in a ton of US cities, mostly in malls and shopping centers.) I carry a lot of tension in my upper back for reasons not needing a dry retelling here, so I started going every weekend, because hey, it's only $12. Less than $50 a month, meaning less than half the cost of one massage at most places.
After enough times I started paying attention to what they were doing--what I preferred and didn't prefer but also how they were doing it, including techniques of relying on their body weight and forearms and heels of palms to deliver pressure instead of only pushing with thumbs and fingers (which as the masseur gets exhausting and crampy after a couple minutes). I noticed how they started, with a simple rolling technique to gently "crack" the back a little and loosen it up, as well as where on my muscles they were putting pressure. And, importantly, not to just go as hard at the knots as possible out of the gate but rather work the whole area firmly but gently over time and "let the knot figure out to let go".
Beyond just being a quality-of-life thing for myself, I also realized over time that I could probably do a passable job of the same kind of massage for my wife, who likes the idea of getting chair massages but only went once or twice before stating that she felt awkward and exposed. (There are no private rooms in the massage space, the chairs are all out next to each other like a barber shop. The whole experience is completely no-nonsense--no candles or soft music or dimmed sconce lighting, just a 60-year-old Asian man whose only goal is to fuck your shit up. I strongly prefer this, but I get where she's coming from.)
So a while back I offered to try to replicate it, with her laying down because the techniques work largely the same barring how to approach the trapezius which isn't hard to figure out. It took about two tries and just a little experimentation (oil or no oil, towel or no towel, etc) before I could reliably give what we both agreed was a pretty damn good massage.
May not be a possible option for you, but on the off chance it is, it's worth trying. By the time you spend enough to equal one of the more expensive massage tools you'll probably have enough to get started with, as long as you keep in mind the advice from other commenters here about going slow and asking questions (and NEVER applying pressure directly on the spine). And maybe this is terrible advice that worked for me alone, but worst case scenario you'll get some of your own knots out. :)
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
deathinactthree (edited )LinkI missed the Week 1 topic due to Real Life but did get to some games. I'll give that update then try to give another update in this thread in a couple of days. deathinactthree's bingo card Mode:...I missed the Week 1 topic due to Real Life but did get to some games. I'll give that update then try to give another update in this thread in a couple of days.
deathinactthree's bingo card
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 3/25 Your friend loves it
Berzerk BoyHas survival mechanics Has an isometric perspective
Albion OnlineA romhack or total conversion mod Has both combat and puzzles Has a silent protagonist Randomness determines your fate Owned for more than 4 years Has a moral choice system Has cards A modded game Has a skill tree ★ Wildcard Has a review score below 57 Has driving
Bang Bang RacingFocuses on relationships Has a score system From a series you have never played Uses procedural generation An updated version (remake, re-release) of an older game Has a satirical vibe Is open-source Uses a unique control scheme Focuses on exploration Is one of the oldest games you own Berzerk Boy
An unabashed love letter to Mega Man X, to the point that on the surface it looks like a simple reskin done as a fan project. Fortunately it's a little more than that--it's definitely a Mega Man-style game, no more and no less, but with a focus on speed and movement and chaining attacks. At least at first, you don't have any projectile weapons, you instead attack by jumping on or dashing into enemies.
Once you get the first Berzerk Orb that turns you into the titular character, you gain more power in your dashes and overhead smashes, plus an electric attack by punching the ground. Importantly, jumping and dashing lets you bounce off of enemies and you can chain that into attacking other enemies, which both gives the game an almost Sonic-like speed element and becomes necessary in short order to reach certain parts of levels.
Like Mega Man, you fight themed enemies and gain their powers when you beat them by absorbing their Berzerk Orbs. You have the ability via a radial menu to switch between those powers (Lightning, Fire, Earth, Air, and Ice) at any time once you attain them.
As a big fan of the old games--Mega Man 2 was one of my first NES games and I've put hundreds of hours into the core series--I can say simultaneously that "there's nothing here you haven't seen before" AND "this is a quality homage and very fun to play". If you're a Mega Man fan but haven't burnt yourself out on the series after 4 decades, this game is totally worth your time.
Albion Online
I'm not really a fan of MMOs at all. I don't like the grinding, I don't like the repetitive combat of using the same ability stack in the same order to fight 30 wolves to collect 10 wolf pelts or whatever, the stories and writing are usually paper-thin and unengaging, and I am generally not someone who enjoys multiplayer games.
However, I'd had my eye on Albion Online for two reasons: first, it was directly inspired by Ultima Online and primarily focused on the actions and economy driven by players, not by the game world. I'd been unable to play UO the first time around because it was back in a time when I didn't have sufficient Internet access, and so many people raved about it that I'd wondered if I missed out on something. Second, it's available on literally everything, every OS including desktop and mobile, and while I normally don't go in for hours of chopping wood and managing crafting stacks and killing the same trash mobs over and over, I actually liked the thought of having something kind of mindless available on my phone and tablet to pass time sitting in the lobby of a tire shop, say. Something that would also sync progress between anything I was playing it on.
It's exactly as advertised. It feels like a very polished version of an old-school MMO. The graphics are polygonesque and comparatively simple for 2025, but clean and with a very solid aesthetic. There's plenty to do, but most of it early on involves collecting resources and crafting. You do have early access to some dungeon quests, but even then you're going to want to wait until you craft or buy at least Tier III gear (it doesn't take all that long). Combat is the familiar ability bar and there's nothing new here, except for one mildly annoying thing--positioning matters in the sense that some enemies telegraph directional or AOE attacks that you can move out of the way of, but you can't, say, dodge arrows that just track you in the air wherever you are in the old-school tradition of "the game state means you are either attacking or being attacked". It's not confusing if you've ever played an MMO before, but I found myself longing for a dodge button or ability. I started spec'ing a Dagger fighter and also found myself desperately wishing for a dual wield ability, since you have to grind a completely different branch of the skill tree to hold any shield whatsoever.
Another thing that drew me to it is its classless system--you "are" whatever gear you're wearing. If you're holding a staff, you're a mage. If you holding a bow, you're a Ranger, a sword a Fighter, etc. Or do a bit of multiclassing by mixing outfits among the class archetypes. You do have proficiency skills in the skill tree that affect how effective the gear you put on is, though, so if you want to switch your skill focus you'll have to grind another skill up a bit, which I think is fine and fair.
Obviously this is not a game you can finish or even make too much progress in in a month but I put a number of hours in. I do believe I'll continue playing it casually (I'll probably avoid PvP and stay in "safe zones" for a long time) as a time-killer in airports and dentist's offices. It's nothing I'll become obsessed with but it's a well-made game that can give me a downtime alternative to Gems of War, the match-3 RPG I've been playing for over 4 years and love but have done pretty much everything there is to do.
Bang Bang Racing
An arcadey, top-down racing game in the style of older isometric racers like RC Pro Am and Micro Machines. It has everything you would expect in this kind of game, including unlockable cars and tracks, road hazards like oil spills and traffic cones, and "unfair" opponents whose speed and relative position are entirely based on you in order to make it feel properly competitive (a la F-Zero, if you need a reference). Unlike more modern arcade racers or Mario Kart games, there are no weapons in this one, just steering to avoid obstacles, the clever conservation and use of nitro, and occasionally ramming opponents into the wall during a sharp curve.
Honestly not a lot ot say about this one. It is genuinely fun if you like old-school top-down racers that do not even slightly care about even a facade of realism, which I do. But it's pretty forgettable and not a game you can play for more than an hour without wanting to move on to something else.
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Comment on Announcing the Tildes Backlog Burner event for May 2025: Shrink your unplayed games list this coming month! in ~games
deathinactthree (edited )LinkLittle late to this, but sure, I'm in. I'll create a card later today and edit this comment with it. EDIT: And away we go deathinactthree's card Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Your friend...Little late to this, but sure, I'm in. I'll create a card later today and edit this comment with it.
EDIT: And away we go
deathinactthree's card
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Your friend loves it Has survival mechanics Has an isometric perspective A romhack or total conversion mod Has both combat and puzzles Has a silent protagonist Randomness determines your fate Owned for more than 4 years Has a moral choice system Has cards A modded game Has a skill tree ★ Wildcard Has a review score below 57 Has driving Focuses on relationships Has a score system From a series you have never played Uses procedural generation An updated version (remake, re-release) of an older game Has a satirical vibe Is open-source Uses a unique control scheme Focuses on exploration Is one of the oldest games you own
Alright, I'm in.
I'm an extremely conservative investor but like I said, I have some "fun money" I can play with, and none of it is crypto or will be. It could be useful to give some basic advice for people starting out as well as collectively doing some fundamental analysis on prospects and see where it goes.