I’d say '92. I think he had a full coherent sentence in Home Alone 2.

It’s the same grift that every cloud provider does. The “You’ll save money because you’ll eliminate CapEx and only have OpEx instead of both!” And then they present you with numbers that look reasonable, hoping you don’t do the math.

CapEx - Capital expenditure = the cost of buying the things (ownership)

OpEx - Operating expenses = cost to run things

So, yeah, you don’t have to buy their overpriced $2000 GPU… you could just rent it! But renting it means you never own it, and the contract will state that the SLA will change. So they get you to sign up and then the prices change. And when your money is being dumped into the monthly bill, you are now constantly short what you’d need to buy the hardware and get yourself out of that hell. Ask anyone who’s accidentally left something running in AWS and got a MASSIVE bill. Or made an API but didn’t put rate limiting on it.

That’s not an incentive for people to shop there. Grocery store prices are already bad enough. No one wants to pay extra money for a more limited selection.

You don’t become a billionaire by hard work. You exploited a lot of people, you fucked over a lot of people. If they were a billionaire but literally everyone that worked for them was a multi-millionare I’d shut up. If I made $100,000 (of current USD) for 2,000 years… I wouldn’t have made a billion dollars.

Holy crap I see what you mean. That small red one… I just gave up. Fighting Simon blindfolded has to be easier.

Hoop jump… Did I miss something? Doesn’t sound familiar, and I got all 3 pieces.

I remember when that word meant something.

Yeah, I took it as it’s a barely functional company that’s being held together by hopes and dreams. The food vendors at my local state fair do millions in sales in just a few weekends. Per Wikipedia, Sweet Martha’s Cookies in 2023 made $4.6 million in 12 days.

• they like jagermeister above all else
• Their apartment is likely messy, (they’re hoarding bottles instead of taking them to the recycling, implying not a hoarder but lack of motivation)
• They play music
• Their last play session didn’t go very good, as the guitar is broken.

They’re in the photo…

It’s why they’re so damn happy 😉

if they just need a face scan… whats stopping a million "donald trump"s from appearing?

I have an old machine been using as a Unraid server for years. It’s an i7-3770 paired with 32GB of ram and like 4x2TB drives.

Finally upgrading it because it’s just not going to keep meeting needs and frankly it’s wicked old (might keep it as a gitlab runner server or something). Finally “upgrading” by taking some old hardware (and bought some new), to have a full compute + storage setup. Proxmox (Ryzen 9 5900XT + 128GB ram) with all the compute and TruNas (Ryzen 7 3700X + 64GB ram + 8x16TB drives [LSI LOGIC SAS9211-8I] [raidz2/82.62 TiB usable]) for storage with a private 10G direct link between the two (Intel X550T2BLK).

I’ll take the blood one.

I think it’d be fun just to freak out some people. I would have gone with the eye one but I’m always wearing sunglasses, so would be wasted on me.

“What a refreshing opportunity to boost engagement by confidently telling someone they’re wrong! Thank you for your bold and thought-provoking contribution — your feedback is not only valid, it’s downright essential for the thriving digital ecosystem we all pretend to enjoy. Let’s collaboratively acknowledge that OP is wrong, together.”

Actually, what you said unlocked a memory. Though I don’t know if it falls in line with the Gameranx video (I’ll have to go watch that) or your sentiment. But the ‘Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.’ immediately made me think of the first Shadow of Mordor game. It was a great game, undone by a QTE final boss.

But yeah, so many of these games just don’t go anywhere. To your point, the live service games. It’s not 100% with what I intended, but I feel it ends up in the same area… I’m spending all these hours… what am I accomplishing? What’s the point of all of this? It’s just endless padding with endless travel time, side quests, and anything that requires you to wait real time for the quest to progress. Dailies in WoW, were my WoW killer. Some people saw it as “easy gold”; I saw it as non-content meant to drive daily engagement but not actually accomplish anything in the game. It’s all just padding for extra “engagement” or to make a game seem bigger than it is (or should be).

I’ll break down some of the issues I had with the games I listed for better context. And I’ll front this with, I know you don’t have to do side missions. It’s more like, you realise instead of giving you a tight, compact story that’s well crafted, they spent too much time padding it out so it appears to be a bigger game. CP2077, the main story is absolutely dwarfed by all the side content. The main quest line is like… ~35 missions? There are like 70+ “gigs” and the same for “side missions”. The main story is the thing you do the least. With missing mechanics, I can’t help but think it would have been more interesting if it were done in a more linear fashion like Deus Ex Human Revolution. Instead of a giant city that’s mostly empty boxes (the buildings aren’t buildings) and padded out with side quests. Skyrim, the thing that killed it for me, was just how pathetically easy it was to become the leader of the various groups/factions. It felt so unearned. I can only take being handed “wins” left and right because I’m the fucking chosen one… before it’s just dull. It was Medieval Idiocracy. I could have just started learning spells and they’re ready to give me the college because I’m the smartest person they’ve ever seen. Brawndo, it’s what Dragonborns crave. And Hogwarts, walking around the castle, was the best part. It felt magical and alive. Some of the puzzles were fun. But the classes were boring tutorial sections, and the main thing you do in the game is LEAVE Hogwarts to go do unspeakable things in non-descript burrows and dungeons scattered all over the place. That game has 15 main quests, 21 side quests. 95 Merlin Trials…

The tl;dr: An easy way to look at it, CP2077, Hogwarts, and Expedition 33 have similar playtime for just the main quest (per howlongtobeat.com, ~26-28 hours). But how it feels to play the game is drastically different. One had a story to tell and a point to get to, and it does that. The others made a world with a whole bunch of other stuff to do.

Alright, I’ll limit it to just pet peeves.

Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said. One game that I really liked how they did it was BG3. There’s a tutorial, but you can also turn it off on future runs. Worst tutorial I think I’ve ever seen was Xenoblade 2.

Games (and really any consumable media) that just don’t know when to end. There are very few games I’ve completed, mostly because I get bored. The game overstayed it’s welcome and I’m done. The grind isn’t worth the final boss fight or whatever is at the end. Generally, it’s because games (especially RPGs) think grinding is a “fun” mechanic when it’s more of an imbalanced game. Take, for example, Expedition 33, not once in that game do you need to run around grinding levels. You can successfully go through the entire game, only going to each stage once. Fucking fantastic. But then you have games that just went too far with things. Some games, like Skyrim, CP2077, (especially) Hogwarts Legacy, I only know the ending to those games because other people beat them. Ex33 I got 52/55 achievements (just need to win the gestral games and find whatever record I missed). I beat that game entirely in 74 hours. My first run of BG3 (53/54 achievements, only missing the bard one, because I think it’s boring), first playthrough was maybe 120 hours (currently over 700 due to multiple playthroughs). Skyrim… 146 hours… 27/75 achievements. CP2077, 133 hours, 18/57 achievements. Hogwarts sits at 50 hours with 19/45 achievements (that game should be a 20-hour game at most).

Games that don’t really respect your time. This one, Nintendo does a lot. Actually perfect example is Breath of the Wild. It’s a giant fuck off world that’s mostly empty, peppered largely with the same enemies throughout the whole thing. You have a weapon mechanic that encourages you NOT to fight (just get some good weapons and head off to exactly where you need to go). The cooking is bullshit, no recipe book, no making a bunch of something, a stupid cutscene every time. And the entire poop joke… like getting 20 for a poop joke would already be too much, but collecting 900 with (IIRC) no fucking way to track them… Or the fact that the way Nintendo expects you to get arrows is to grind out rupees to buy them. And the exploits used to get arrows or rupees quickly, in a single player game, they actively tried to patch out. That’s just one game, Nintendo does this on SO MANY GAMES, which actually pushed me to “fuck Nintendo” and I didn’t buy and won’t buy a Switch 2.

Some games are combos of these. One game I really like, but I always hit a wall is Satisfactory. Once I get to trains/aluminum, it’s just not fun anymore for me. I work 40-80 hours a week (sometimes I work 5x12s and 8ish hours Sat/Sun)(only sometimes, usually closer to 50 hours a week)… so all the extra planning and time to making a factory… like I just don’t have the fucking time. Same thing with Dune Awakening. The first zone was the best. Getting your first Orni wasn’t too bad, but it was already starting to push it. Having to fucking pay taxes in a game… Oddly, it was about the time I was farming up aluminum, I quit that game too. Maybe I have a pet peeve with aluminum in video games…

And with the help of Valve, it’ll continue to get better. Hoping companies like EPIC also take note and really start adding things to Unreal to really push Vulcan and Linux. Like, I don’t want a monopoly or anything, but if big companies make big moves towards supporting Linux, others will follow. ( I know Unreal supports Linux, I’m talking like actively pushing tech, support, pushing for games to be compiled for linux, pushing for native code and not needing compatibility layers, etc.)

you can fail upwards, con people and still get out filthy rich.

Only if you con the poors. If you con someone who’s rich or “powerful”, then you get punished.

You didn’t really offer any insight as to why you moved on…

I believe this is their third VR headset.