Aaand… this is my cue to go to bed. It’s 6:30 AM here and I haven’t slept a wink yet. I’ve been up all night being super productive, as is my M.O. as a retired night owl.

Far Cry 6 was a huge letdown, I hated it.

I felt the same way. It was even more disappointing because Epic Games got their claws into it, so it released as an exclusive title. I had to wait a year before I could play it on Steam, and it didn’t even live up to the hype!

I recently re-installed Far Cry 6 and a friend and I have been replaying it in co-op mode. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember. I don’t know if it received a bunch of patches/updates since I last tried it, or if I was just super-critical after Far Cry 5. But it’s not a horrible game. At least not yet; we’re only a couple hours into it so far.

Video games and collecting Sonic the Hedgehog comics are my two expensive hobbies; I don’t spend money on much else besides essentials (food, shelter), so I can afford to splurge a bit on these hobbies. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the US military took really good care of me for 20 years and continues to provide for me in retirement, so I’m able to live a pretty relaxed life now.

If you somehow dont have Metro 2033 yet, you can still add it to your library for free today.

I saw that it was free for 48 hours! I already have the whole Metro franchise, but I’ve informed my gaming friends about the deal this morning. Thanks for spreading the news!

One caveat to my Steam library is that I always try to wait for deals before I buy; I rarely buy anything at full price. I don’t want to think about how much money I might’ve spent if I bought everything at full price! 😱

I really like video games. And I’m retired young(ish), so I have all the time in the world to game now.

Plus, I have a (relatively new) blog dedicated to introducing games to people, which encourages me to play through a variety of games in my library. It’s basically just archiving my “Random Screenshots of my Games” posts in !games@lemmy.world.

And according to the SteamDB, I’ve played 26% of my games. The last time I checked, it was at 38%, but that was maybe 2,000 games ago. I need to keep working through my library!

Oh damn. I’ve spent $30,359.76 on Steam in the 17 years I’ve had an account. And I just passed 4,000 games in my Steam library within the last month. That checks out.

I could’ve used this community a month ago. For years, I swore I had a fever dream in my childhood about playing a side-scrolling shoot-em-up game with dinosaurs as anthropomorphic protagonists.

A friend of mine reminded me that Dinosaurs for Hire was a thing, released on the SEGA Genesis in 1993.

Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week.

🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?

TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.

The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.

That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.

I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.

I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?

I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.

I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.

The Vesper is James Bond’s personal invention, from the very first novel, Casino Royale. It’s basically his own custom twist on the vodka martini.

He explains he only has one drink before dinner, but he prefers it’s a large one, ice cold, and made very well. He drinks plenty of other types of alcohol throughout the books, but he’s pretty particular about this one evening aperitif.

The movies kind of latched onto it and just made him drink vodka martinis in general. Although the 2006 film Casino Royale had him order his custom invention from a bar, almost word-for-word from the original novel. It’s named after Vesper Lynd, the first girl Bond truly fell for in the novels.

James Bond was an alcoholic, with good reason. He didn’t drink vodka martinis for the taste, he drank them to dull the pain and horrors of his job. As much as he drank, he probably didn’t really taste the booze anymore.

The original James Bond from the novels was a dark and brooding high-functioning alcoholic, who operated at his best with a drink or two in him at all times. He was pretty useless without the drink. A vodka martini would quickly get him in the right headspace to accomplish his latest mission.

The movie Bond was reinvented to be this dashing, handsome womanizer who drank and smoked socially and was charming as hell. Basically, a 1950s ideal male fantasy. This Bond probably could’ve used a classier drink than straight vodka, but that’s one aspect of the books they kept pretty loyal.

Thanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!

So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.

By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.

One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.

I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.

They put a ton of effort into remaking Xen so that it blends better into the gameplay and story. I think I read somewhere that Half-Life took about an hour to slog through Xen, but Black Mesa, despite having around 4 hours of Xen gameplay, was actually really enjoyable.

I learned “perkele” from Scandinavia and the World. Although from various context on that site, I always thought it was the equivalent of saying “fuck.”

Movies have actually been a huge influence on America’s view on sexuality, if not the largest influence.

There’s one organization, CARA (the Classification and Rating Administration) who provides ratings for movies and TV shows in the US, and they’ve heavily censored nudity in film for decades, giving films shockingly high ratings if even a breast is flashed on screen for a moment.

This has caused studios to limit nude scenes, or to be extremely creative about sex scenes, to avoid higher ratings. Because the higher the rating, the smaller the audience will be, and they want to appeal to a larger audience.

If you watch American films from the 70s and earlier, seeing casual nudity in a film was a pretty normal thing, whereas you have to buy a porno just to see any nudity today.

This had a nasty backfire effect, where our culture now associates nudity with sex. We don’t appreciate the natural human body unless it’s under the context of sexual desire or procreation.

The crazy thing is, nobody really knows who the members of CARA are. Their identity is kept secret. The heads of their organization are known; you can check them out on their official website (https://www.filmratings.com/About), but the organization as a whole keeps their members’ names secret. So we have no idea who these people are who are censoring nudity in American films.

This depends on a lot of factors. If you’re part of a targeted demographic due to race, gender, religion, etc., then it might be safer to flee before you draw attention to yourself.

If you’re not a targeted demographic, then it might be best to stick around and stand up for your fellow citizens. But this could also lump you in with the targeted demographic and might eventually lead to your own persecution, so it’s a risky choice.

Either way, I still advocate for standing up to any oppression or persecution going on in your home country. No one should ever lose their home to dictators and/or fascists.

This is actually how a lot of states get divided politically. People see a place as a “red state” or a “blue state” and decide to either avoid them or move away if their political ideology doesn’t line up. But that just further entrenches the area into a political leaning. By sticking around and advocating for human rights and better community and respect, you can help prevent the splitting of communities and stop divisive concepts like fascism from forming.

It bothers me that “desu” (the last two characters) aren’t pointing at the period at the end of the sentence.

I lived in Japan for 3 years and took an elementary Japanese college course from an old Japanese lady while I was there. She always described “desu” as an audible period mark. Formally declaring the end of a sentence. Simply adding it to the end of a word can turn it into a full and complete sentence.

As other comments mentioned, removing it makes the sentence less formal, which is fine with friends and family. There are several ways to speak Japanese depending on who you’re talking to. Whether it’s a friend, a lover, your boss, a stranger… there are several variations of politeness/formality to the language, which makes it very difficult to learn how to speak properly.

“Desu” is pronounced “dess” (don’t say the “U”) in traditional dialects. Or if you’re from Southern Japan, their “southern drawl” includes pronouncing every single character, so you’d pronounce it “de-soo.”

Personally, I hooked up a micro PC to my TV to use it as a giant monitor. I use a small wireless keyboard and mouse to control it from the couch.

Then I use Firefox with uBlock Origin (and Proton VPN) to block ads while I access YouTube from a browser on my TV.

I’m very anti-advertisement, so I don’t even watch TV anymore. My TV is a glorified streaming PC; I stream all my shows and movies online and block ads that way. No commercial breaks!

I also built my own Plex media server and ripped all my DVD and Blu-ray discs to it (and even some old VHS tapes!), so I can stream my own media from anywhere; through my phone, tablet, laptop, etc. I primarily use it to watch my movies and TV shows on my living room TV.

I also ripped all my old music CDs to mp3 and added them to Plex, so I now have my own ad-free music I can listen to on the go. I stream it through the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car’s Bluetooth. It’s like ad-free radio, except I can play whatever I want to listen to in the moment.

I got my first DM from “her” today as well! I was feeling left out.

I must’ve been tired last night… I stared at this meme for so long, not able to make any sense of it. What does the Cold War have to do with refrigerators?! I finally put down my tablet and went to sleep.

This morning I picked up my tablet, saw this meme again, and immediately thought, “Oh, the COLD war.” Duh.

He fixed it. They’re swapped now.

Basically charisma (the rizz part)

Think of it like “cha-rizz-ma.” It’s just a slang abbreviation, using only the middle sound of “charisma.”

Fellow old guy here, in my early 40s. I had to figure out where “rizz” came from before it really clicked for me.