While this doesn’t directly affect me, I really hate that a payment processor I don’t even use can dictate what is and is not acceptable speech.

Why do I feel like no good can come of this?

Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.

It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.

I mean, the only reason I hardly ever use 10x zoom is that it looks like a shitty impressionist painting. If optical zoom made it look better, I would use it often.

That’s always my first thought when I see these.

PSA for those who don’t know, if a store finds refrigerated or frozen food outside where it’s supposed to be, they have to throw it out. They have no reliable way to tell whether it’s been out of the cooler for five minutes or five hours, so it’s a food safety concern. Stores are forced to throw out an absurd quantity of perfectly good food for this reason.

Even if you don’t care about food waste for its own sake, stores incorporate this type of loss into pricing and stocking decisions. It makes food more expensive and less available for everyone.

Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.

Tens of millions of us voted against it and did our best to convince those around us.

On the whole, we deserve what we’re getting. We asked for it. I just hope the rest of the world doesn’t forget that so many of us tried.

This has been (probably unreasonably) my biggest complaint with Starfield since I went into the club. There are gameplay and story issues that realistically should be bigger problems for me, but for some reason I’m actually offended by the Astral Lounge. I don’t expect nudity or even topless dancers, even though thematically it seems appropriate there, but what the fuck were they thinking? The game is rated M for some reason anyway, so why are we being so prudish? Baldur’s Gate 3 gets away with sexually aggressive lizard-person pussy in your face and that seems to be fine with most people, even as a modern mainstream AAA game. Why can we not have a simple space bikini/speedo when the setting calls for it instead of whatever that fucking monstrosity of an outfit is? If you’re not comfortable doing that, maybe don’t put a “club” with “exotic dancers” in your game at all, especially if the story describes that club (and entire city) as particularly libertine and lawless.

The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.

Evolutionary psychology. I think there’s real research in the field, but it’s drowned out by charlatans who invoke its name to lend credence to their made-up bullshit without the burden of scientific rigour.

If the neighbor is doing this intentionally, I’m pretty sure it violates some pretty serious wiretapping laws.

It’s truly a non-issue, unless we’re talking competitive multiplayer games. The only single player game I can think of that I’ve had Linux-related problems with since I switched my desktop over a couple years ago has been the new Indiana Jones game, and that was patched within a week of launch. Proton makes it brain-dead easy. I have a pretty big library and not many games have official support, but they just work with Proton. I don’t do any tinkering with custom proton builds or anything either. On a fresh Steam install, you have to go into settings once to enable Proton in games that haven’t been tested with it, but then you just forget about it and play like you would on Windows.

Adding to this for more context, in America, credit card fees on merchants are like 3-5% of the transaction. That’s why some places have started to pass them to consumers, especially in low-margin businesses like restaurants and movie theaters. If your margins are around 5% and Visa is taking 3.95%, that’s not super sustainable. Card network fees tend to be much lower in Europe. I’m not sure about elsewhere.

So I’m an insurance agent who has also been through a house fire personally. Any of the options people have suggested here would be fantastic and far better than what most people have, which is nothing.

What I suggest to my clients is to make a video once or twice a year walking through your house, inside and out. Video makes it less likely to miss a small detail that turns out to be important later than pictures, but pictures are also helpful. Insurance aside, it’s kinda fun to look back and see how things have changed through the years. I like to do it around Christmas.

Ideally that would be in addition to a spreadsheet or something with receipts and serial numbers and individual photos of specific items, but that’s a lot of work and hardly anyone keeps up with it on a consistent and long-term basis.

Whatever you end up doing, it’s useless if the only copy is stolen, burned, or sprayed with a hose. This is one thing I keep with a major cloud provider with a local backup. At the very least, make sure you have an off-site backup that’s reasonably up to date.

I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t appear to be a direct continuation of Jin’s storyline, but I’m still excited.

Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.

There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.

I honestly had no issue with Indiana Jones at launch on the Deck. My tolerance for performance issues is probably higher than average, granted, but I started playing it within a few days of launch on the Deck and beat the main story within a few weeks of that. It was officially unsupported and there were absolutely some framerate hiccups, but it was totally playable and enjoyable. It actually ran better on the Deck than my desktop (also Linux, to be fair) for a while because of nvidia driver issues. The faster pace of Doom will make it more of a problem, though.

I’m an insurance agent and I’m constantly frustrated by shit agents and shit companies giving all of us a bad name. Not that I always agree with the decisions from our claims people, but they generally try to be fair. I’m assuming this was long enough ago that it’s too late now, but for anybody else reading this who runs into a similar situation, you may have some recourse.

My first stop, if I have a local agent, would be their office. I would calmly and politely (agents don’t make coverage decisions so it isn’t their fault) explain the situation to them. They have a vested interest in keeping their customers happy and they may have access to claims supervisors who can make it right. They probably don’t want to lose you as a customer, especially over such a small claim.

If I’m still not happy, I would start pestering the adjuster to talk to their supervisor. Don’t be rude, but be persistent. Call every day. Leave messages and emails until you get the supervisor.

If they won’t give you a supervisor or the supervisor is no help, you can go above the claims department. It’ll be different for each company, but look for contact info for the “office of the president” or something like that. In my experience, those calls always get looked into by someone who has the power to really ruin your day as an agent or claims person. If you get a call from them, you had better either have a good explanation for why you did what you did or fix it in a hurry.

As a last resort, check with your state’s insurance department. You may be able to file a grievance.

I take claims practically every day and I can’t imagine this not being paid. I’m not sure why it would even be questioned, since it’s your first claim and it’s not huge. Could be that that particular adjuster is an idiot or on a power trip, but it’s also possible that the company is just shady.

Quite a bit of what I have on my Jellyfin server is ripped from DVDs and Blu-Rays that I already had.