I wonder if things have flipped back with the modern crop of teens and young adults, or perhaps my experience is an outlier.

My partner’s kids and their friends mostly seem to LOVE cologne and perfume. They use it heavily and daily. I’m somewhat more sensitive to it than most and strong fragrances like that will literally take my breath away as well as make it harder for me to breathe, so it’s a thing I notice. Similar experience when going places where the crowd is predominantly in the 16 - 24 age range, it can be a challenge for me.

The folks I know who are older than that range mostly seem to barely or rarely use cologne and perfume. I don’t typically even smell fragrances much anymore when I’m out and about (like shopping). At most, it’s usually scents that I associate with being from fabric softener on clothes, body washes, hair products, and deodorants.

I do think there’s a good chance that your correlation with reduced tobacco smoking might be a thing, but then I smell weed almost as frequently as I used to smell cigarettes when I’m out and about, and I don’t even live in a state where it’s legal. So, I’d almost expect to smell more cologne and perfume while out and about as folks are trying to cover up the smell of weed.

You see the real secret to a happy life are the blue bins we pass along the way.

I would love a super casual sonic-esque game that you could just mindless meander through without having to worry about falling into environmental hazards or bumping into enemies. Basically just complete and utter freedom to blast through a level without having to think too much about it and not having to fuss with a lot of different controls/buttons. Wonder if anything like that exists.

Several fossils from the congress of the USA were probably around to witness the development of these revolutionary tools.

Build them as connectable hexagons. Learn from the insects, they’ve had a half billion years to figure out what shit works and what shit don’t.

I think it’s possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody’s trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.

During the few months of the year I consider to be my “gaming season”, I mostly stick to 1 game at a time as my primary focus, but I’ll often have a game or few on the back burner that I’ll work into the schedule now and then.

This year I’m focusing on the Doom remake (Doom 2016) as my main game. To be honest, the game is stressful for me, so even though it’s been an absolute blast for me to play, it’s nice to have some alternative games to switch over to after I’m done with Doom.

I agree, it’s very hard to keep up with the stories when juggling multiple games at the same time. Almost as hard for me, if not harder, is keeping up with the controls. Every game is different. Games in the same genre can and will have vastly different control set-ups. Even games in the same franchise / series can have different controls from game to game. Yuck.

So, the control aspect and the story aspect are part of my inspiration for my secondary games. Right now I’m playing Halls of Torment. I guess there’s a story? But it doesn’t seem super relevant or necessary to keep up with. This game is in the same genre as another secondary game I play (and the main one from last year) called Vampire Survivors. Controls for both of these games is super basic. As I mentioned, if there’s even a story line to them, it’s irrelevant to my enjoyment of them.

I also have the Castlevania Dominus Collection which is includes all the metroidvania-style Castlevania games from the Nintendo DS. I played all of them back in the day on original hardware, so there’s a great deal of “recall” in terms of controls and story. And this is probably one of my favorite genres of game.

I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.

Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.

Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.

I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.

I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.

Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.

Yes, but not many games used it or supported it. I think mine came with the game Discworld or perhaps I bought it separately for that game, I don’t recall.

I know I can emulate, but there are times when I wish I still had my old Playstation. I left mine behind when I had to make a sudden break from an ex of mine about 20ish years ago. Somehow I ended up with a controller and the mouse, but I have no idea how they got separated from the system itself and ended up in my possession.

Never heard of it, but I enjoyed the videos of the game play that I just watched. I did not expect that much similarity to the Castlevania series, this looks like it’s close enough that I’m actually a bit surprised it wasn’t sued out of existence unless it was released before Castlevania.

Suppose I should give it a try some day.

Fun! I always like to imagine what ancient technology would be like with more modern applications. I dunno why, but the idea of browsing the web on a game boy or watching full motion video on an atari 7800 is fascinating.

I’ll give that a try. I don’t game much, so that launcher was not necessarily on my radar. Is that something you always have to switch over to desktop mode in order to use it?

Gracias. I will give that a try. Still sounds a bit complicated, but for sure that sounds better than opening up a terminal and copy/pasting commands, some of which I’m not super knowledgeable about.

That’s too bad. No doubt I appreciate it Steam for what it is, even knowing that I don’t actually own any of the software I buy from them. That being said, I try to support GOG where/when I can.

Is there any “easy” way to get GOG games running on a Steam Deck? It’s been awhile since I last tried to look into it, but back then it seemed like a lot of steps and a lot of places to potentially mess up the process. I believe I kind of got something working at one point, but I’d honestly have to go back and double check.

Over the past year? Probably Vampire Survivors.

As of late? Doom (the 2016 reboot).

Of all time? I’m actually not sure, especially if you include my pre-internet / pre-always-being-spied-on-and-tracked history. But probably it would be one of the Street Fighter 2 iterations.

I don’t think I’ve even played 450 hours total of games in the past 25+ years, though. So, I’m probably a bit of an outlier around here.

If I were going to use a dye on my skin for something like this, I would first test it out on a small patch of skin some place where nobody’s ever going to see it, like on my penis.

I use VS Code and GitHub Co-pilot and develop in a variety of different languages and frameworks. I’ve got lots of experience with some, but I’m less knowledgeable on others.

So, having the AI assist with languages I am very familiar with is basically a way to save time and preserve my mental energy. For languages and frameworks I’m less experienced with, it speeds things up because I’m not having to constantly search how-tos and forums for guidance. And for languages/frameworks I have limited or no experience with, it can be a helpful learning tool that speeds up how long it takes to get ramped up.

With this set-up, if I start writing a line of code and then pause for a moment, co-pilot kicks in and tries to autocomplete that line, sometimes even suggests the entire block of code. It’s really good at recognizing simple patterns and common boilerplate stuff. It’s less good at figuring out more complex stuff, though.

However, I find that if I start out by writing a comment that explains what I’m trying to accomplish, and to some degree how to accomplish it before I start writing one of those more complex blocks/lines, the AI has a much higher success rate in returning helpful, functioning code. So, basically yes, I write the comment to describe code I haven’t written, and I’ll let the AI take over from there.

This works for code, raw database queries, configuration files, and even for writing tests. I’m not an expert at building out Docker configurations for local development or configuring auto-deployment on whatever random system is being used for a project, but I can often get those things up and running just by describing in comments what I need and what I’m trying to accomplish.

The VS Code co-pilot extension also has some context menu items that let you ask questions and/or ask for suggestions, which comes in handy for some things, but for me, typing out my intentions in comments and then letting the auto-complete kick in as I’m starting a line of code is faster, more efficient, and seems to work better.

Granted, co-pilot also likes to try to auto-complete comments, so that’s sometimes funny just to read what it “thinks” I’m trying to do. And most of the time, I do remove my comments that were specifically to guide co-pilot on what I wanted it to do if they’re super redundant. And, at the end of the day, not everything co-pilot suggests is production-worthy, functional, nor does what I actually described. In fact, a lot of it is not, so you should expect to go back and fine tune things at a minimum. It’s just that overall, it’s good enough that even with all the supervision and revisions I have to make, it’s still a net positive, for now.

As a kid, by the time I started hearing about the system via video game magazines, which were kind of like miniature websites but printed on paper and then distributed via mail and stores, I was convinced it would be the next big thing. By the time it was launched, I knew it was going to be the new top dog in the industry. When I finally got my hands on one, it was (pardon the pun) game changing for me.

The system definitely had its flaws, but it was an evolutionary step up and order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before.

And go figure, it was the last system I owned before I stepped away from the gaming hobby for nearly 2 decades. Life, uh, got in the way.

What you don’t know is that he died when he was pulled into a jet engine.