I’ve always felt the Game Boy is the biggest icon of old Nintendo, before their more modern and less consumer friendly form. Its portability and low price also made it a more accessible system worldwide for many years, making it a good symbol of worldwide gaming for that era in general.

This probably at least plays a factor. It’s been researched, and people actually have different personalities in different languages. It’s a very individual thing, can be more mild or more pronounced, can vary over time, etc. It’s like a slightly split personality you access at will without realizing it (unless you pay attention).

Yeah, I understand very well. My disability is different, but money is still tight and when my Sound Blaster died it was really annoying trying to find a way to replace it within my budget and without rearranging my whole setup. I’m new to audiophile stuff too so it’s intimidating and a lot to learn.

For my use case, I look more into the USB audio interface side of things because I need to have an XLR input and a monitoring plug with zero latency. If you don’t need anything like that, then a DAC or a DAC/amp combo is what you want. I’m not really an audiophile and this is getting into that area so I’m not the best person to explain it. Definitely take anything I say with a grain of salt and make sure you check. But I think you only really need the amp if it’s required to drive your headphones. If you don’t have high impedance headphones, then you should be able to skip the amp and just get any DAC that fits your needs.

There’s a huge variety of brands, price points, and features. It’s dipping your toe into the audiophile world so the rabbit hole is bottomless, but you can also find very good quality gear on a budget. FiiO, Topping, and Hifiman are brands I recognize, but there are plenty of others I don’t which I’m sure would still be good. It’s the kind of gear somebody buys and expects to still be working in ten years.

The one thing I personally would look for is I would avoid anything with an internal battery. That’s why my Sound Blaster died. For whatever reason, they gave it an internal battery so you could unplug it and use it as a portable headphone amp. I never needed or wanted that, but the battery started expanding and died after over ten years, so that was the end. It’s not a feature I care about, so I’m better off getting something without a battery.

For what it’s worth, a quick search suggests any USB DAC should work fine in both Windows and Linux as long as it doesn’t require special software. So if you look for an affordable USB DAC with physical buttons/dials and all the inputs and features you want, that should help narrow things down to start. You can definitely find one with multiple inputs for both the speakers and a headset, and possibly different volume settings. But I’m not sure - different settings for different inputs might also be more in the realm of a USB audio interface, which may not be as good of a fit for your situation. But you could always look: Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and Motu M2 2x2 are very strong contenders for me.

Also, at least in the US, Sweetwater is a reputable site for audio gear. I’m sure there are others, of course, but it’s a start.

Good luck!

I haven’t made the switch away from Windows yet, but I hope to try in the near future. So I don’t know if my suggestion is of any help to you. But I’m one of the other weirdos not using onboard sound. Is there a reason you need a PCI card specifically?

Most good options these days are external. I had an external sound blaster for years that I bought before learning that it was basically just a sound blaster branded external DAC. When I can, I want to replace it with either another external DAC from a proper audio manufacturer or a USB audio interface.

If you look for those instead of sound cards, you’ll find a lot more options. I have no idea if that’s useful to you or if any of them work in Linux, though. Well… some idea. I know somebody who I think is running Linux with his DAC, now that I think about it.

So, I hope that’s helpful to you. Cheers :)

It’s a fun sport to watch for so many reasons, but the first that stuck out to me when I first saw it was how fast it is. Sure, there’s a lot of ceremony and lead up between matches, but the matches themselves are short and intense. If you watch a summary that cuts straight to the matches or just have it on while you do other stuff and look up when the match is about to start, you’re basically getting nothing but highlights. Every single match is worthy of a slow mo action shot.

The more you learn about it, the more interesting it gets.

I used to get Taco Bell like twice a month because it was tasty and cheap, even if it was garbage. But when fast food prices exploded the last few years, it really lost its appeal. The quality and variety dropped, too, and it just doesn’t make any goddamn sense to drop $15 to eat at fucking Taco Bell. There are countless better options for that price. I think I maybe ate there once in the last year and nothing about it made me feel like I missed it. A bit sad since I used to enjoy it, but in the end I’m better off.

And the better it is, the harder the fall. I’m five months into a very long RPG series, but starting to approach the end. The hangover from this one is going to be absolute hell.

How much wiggle room is enough will obviously vary a lot by player, but I do truly find the older Souls games to have much more of it than people realize if you play smart. Even a little too smart in some cases.

But I feel you on the carpal tunnel. There are a few rhythm games I enjoy, but I can no longer play them on a moderate difficulty for more than an hour before the pain starts - and it takes a couple days to settle down again. I basically have to play on the lower difficulties or not at all. It was a sad day when I learned that.

Compared to most action RPGs, they’re notoriously more methodical and slower paced. But, they’re still action RPGs. Elden Ring leans more heavily towards the action where memorization and reaction times have the most influence on success. You have to learn the patterns, but good stats and gear can make it more forgiving when you make a mistake. DS leans more towards RPG, which makes it more flexible. You can play it as a pure action game and rely on good reflexes and pattern memorization, but you can also largely brute force it with a powerful character the same as many RPGs.

If you wanted to just mod Elden Ring into something more casual, the closest thing is the seamless co-op mod. But that would rely on having at least one friend to join you. It does drastically alter the balance, but I don’t think it would help the parts of the game that make it feel inaccessible if it’s a reaction time sort of thing that’s spoiling the game for you.

I myself have played nothing but slower paced and turn based games for the last couple years, so I get it. But I have had the Souls craving creeping up on me again recently.

I find their older titles more accessible because they were a bit lower budget, more experimental, and not trying so hard to cater to players who want the hardcore experience. That means the balance is all over the place, which can make the game stupidly hard if you just dive in unprepared. But it can also make the game fairly easy if you know how to cheese the bosses, where to find the OP gear, and what spots are good to quickly level up and just overpower the game. There’s nothing wrong with reading some wiki pages or watching videos ahead of time so you can play more optimally instead of floundering around and brute forcing your way through with an underpowered character.

Demon’s Souls can have long runs back when you die, but is extremely exploitable. DS1 can still be overleveled and you can sequence break to get OP gear, but there aren’t as many blatant boss exploits.

If you get really into it, you can always do challenge runs with certain restrictions, weapons, or builds. You can always make it harder to get the magic back - if the difficulty is part of the magic for you. If it’s not, then using strategy to make it easier is just improving your enjoyment.

The mute system is a little confusing. Basically, Twitch auto scans the video for what it thinks might be copyrighted audio, then it mutes that section for you to prevent you from getting a copyright strike. This is all automatic and set to extremely paranoid because when a big wave of copyright enforcement went around a few years ago, that was equally paranoid and ridiculous. People got copyright strikes for 2 second snippets of something you could barely hear in the background. It was bad.

But the auto mute isn’t a strike or even a warning. It’s no authority at all. It’s just a random automated guess at what companies might be looking for when doing their scans. It’s there to protect you in its weird and uncomfortable way.

You can dispute, but that puts the responsibility for any claims on you. You’re waiving the protection. It might be fine, but if it isn’t you suffer the consequences. So generally it’s usually not worth the risk to bother. But a mute is no big deal. It doesn’t hurt you or count against you in any way.

tl;dr: nobody is actually claiming that audio is copyrighted, except some robot scan thought it might be and better safe than sorry.

If you like QfG, you might be interested in Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok on Steam. It was released for free and I imagine that hasn’t changed. But I still ended up donating because I enjoyed it so much.

Random thoughts in no particular order:

Circle of the Moon was actually not made by IGA. It was developed simultaneously by Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe while IGA worked on Harmony of Dissonance in Tokyo. However, to me Circle ironically feels closer to an IGAvania of the two while Harmony feels like IGA was trying to make something partway between Symphony and a classicvania.

Aria and Dawn are generally the best liked portable games, but OoE has a loyal following due to its much higher difficulty more reminiscent of the classic games.

Harmony of Despair is surprisingly enjoyable. Even if you missed the boat, it can still be enjoyed on a PS3 emulator with all the DLC and even online multiplayer. It’s honestly a blast.

There’s also a mobile game called Grimoire of Souls and, for the really obscure stuff, some Japan only Castlevania casino games.

Of the PS2 games, I remember quite enjoying Lament of Innocence and keep meaning to give it another play someday. The other one I forgot completely.

I’m looking forward to Bloodstained 2!

Edit to add one more: there’s a Sega Saturn version of Symphony of the Night where you can play as Maria. It’s Japan only, but a translation patch can be found online.

For me, it was studying more effectively. Whether it’s studying, cleaning, or even enjoying a hobby, I just cannot buckle down and grind through the hard part. My brain needs some minimum level of efficiency to be satisfied. If it feels like I’m working too hard without enough of a result, it’s an impossible battle.

So I figure out how to do things better. Someone already mentioned Anki flash cards, and those were great for pure memorization. But every subject - and person - is different. The key was always going off the beaten path to look for other ways and other resources rather than just trying to grind it out. If I were in school now, I’d probably ask ChatGPT a lot of questions to help me learn. But I want to stress that I’d do so very carefully.

Maybe it’s because I’m AuDHD, but I tend to have to figure out my own way of doing things anyway. I rarely expect that the way other people do it is going to work for me. So I research and experiment until I find my own unique path. That feels less awful and it’s much easier to stick with.

I’ve always had something wrong with me. The various diagnoses never fit and treatments didn’t do much. After making progress with my depression, I reaffirmed that it’s a result of my struggles, not the cause of them. So I stopped taking my meds, which never helped anyway.

At least, not how I expected. All my life, the mental fog and feeling scatterbrained was just normal. Even when starting Wellbutrin, it was mixed with other medications and ramped up so slowly that I never noticed the difference it made. But suddenly going without, I realized … oh, this has gotta be ADHD. So I got diagnosed and I’m seeing where that leads me.

It’s been a long road, and more difficult than most. But maybe soon it’ll finally get a little easier.

The same happened to one of mine. The doctor said it might stay gone after I removed it on my own (it was easy and painless) but it still came back again so we let it grow out a little until they could do their thing again. I don’t remember it being as bad the second time because there wasn’t much nail that survived the first round, so it was really just clean up. It never came back again after round two.

wtf, they took the whole nail off!? Not that I’d really mind, for the reasons you’ve stated. Ingrown toenails somehow run in my family, but when I get the permanent procedure done the doctor still just removes a slice off on the side. What made them do the entire nail?

I can’t help with your primary request, but on the chance that you aren’t able to find a better solution, it seems worth mentioning that four months is probably too long. I’m not an expert or anything, but I did look into it when I had to take a drug test. If someone has corrections to what I found, I would be interested to hear them because it may not be the last I have to deal with it either.

What I learned is that exact time varies, but two months is on the long end. One month is common. You can even test negative in as little as two weeks, but it requires specific effort and still might not be enough if the test is really strict or sensitive.

There are a lot of tricks for trying to quickly prepare for a drug test, but the most simple and reliable if you aren’t on a major time crunch is just fiber and water. Eat lots of greens and stay hydrated. That helps your body naturally get rid of the THC, making 3-4 weeks a more likely time frame.

If he’s already suffering through a detox, you can at least shorten that by quite a bit. Also, it will get easier over time. While weed is way less addictive and easier to get off of than a lot of other drugs, it still has side effects like the ones you’re describing when you try to quit.

I still hope you find a better doctor, but don’t lose hope even if you can’t. This is doable and it’s not as impossible as it seems. It is bullshit and unfair though. Best of luck to you both.

Hearsay af but I have heard of that amount being taken. The dude was never the same again, though. Whether for better or worse is harder to say. He didn’t regret it at least, and seemed to be doing well. But he definitely saw some shit.

I can’t remember the specific examples (surprising nobody), but I have had at least a couple occasions where I found traces of something I’d done that showed me I did actually react that exact same way some while previously and forgot about it entirely. In one case, a friend stopped mid conversation to say, “Wait. Haven’t we had this exact conversation before?,” and I while it wasn’t as concrete as finding my own evidence, I was pretty sure he was right.

It’s almost like a coping mechanism, even if I don’t do it intentionally. My life is a book, but at any given moment I might not know what happened on the last page or three. So I have to just figure it out and act how I would act even when I’m clueless.