Now I see one second a panda butt and the next second a snoring panda and then the butt again… help.

This is the way!

Yes. We should embrace it. _/notsorry

More seriously, we don’t know. Only time will tell. Take-Two will definitely be looking at redundancies, so it might not be good for all employees. For the IPs, hopefully it can’t get much worse than sitting at Embracer while the company sinks like the Titanic. But Take Two has also had layoffs and shelved projects. One can only hope for the best.

Tomato sauce and everything hot tomato, especially if you use canned tomatoes, needs a bit of sugar. It makes it 100% better. It does not make it sweet, but all the flavors of the tomato just pop while otherwise it is only sour and bland.

In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.

I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.

There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.

I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.

A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.

I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.

If you buy Backpack Battles you can get a copy of Slay the Spire for free … just sayin’. I mean I am totally not hoping for a lot of people to hop on Backpack Battles, so I will have a lot of people to play against forever. 😏 It has a demo, so no blind buying necessary. It is Early Access but worth every Cent in my eyes.

I am too old to sail the seas. Either I get it legally and convenient or I just stop watching and read a book instead. Not saying others shouldn’t, I had my fair share of years out there, but it’s not for me anymore.

Me: “I would like to uninstall Edge and use Firefox for everything!”
Netflix: “With Firefox I won’t give you best quality even if you pay for it! Use Edge!”
So Edge stays my video streaming browser for now, but only that.

Increasing water efficiency is likely to result in reduced demand for water, with less water therefore flowing through drains and sewers. Some parties have suggested that this could lead to blockages, drainage problems and homes flooding due to backed up sewerage systems.

In Germany our toilets usually have two buttons, one for the yellow which flushes but with a lower amount of water and the bigger button for the big brown business and maximum water flow.

Depending where you live and depending on drought being a thing in your place of the world, using less water can have unwanted side effects:

• backed sewerage systems
• not enough water can lead to environmental problems if the sewage isn’t watered down enough for your sewage treatment plant to deal with it or if it goes straight to a river it is worse than with more water (that one is always really bad but definitely extremely worse with less water)

In the past I had to upgrade my PC every 4 years (my first PC run on Windows 3.1), but my last one just works and even the GPU only fell out of minimum requirements of the newest and graphical shiny games end of last year (it even managed to run Starfield although it looked bad and lagged in cities terribly), but my backlog is huge, so I don’t care and if I care I can use Geforce Now or Game Pass for PC and stream that one game I can not play on my rig directly anymore.

Our planet is on fire and consuming less is the only actual solution to that. Everything got more expensive. I literally don’t want to spent a lot of money on a PC that I do not need, because the one I have plays the games I want to play just fine (currently Dave the Diver) and on top throw a perfectly fine machine away, add to CO2 production and need to cut back on other needs I have because everything is so expensive.

My machine is an i7-6700K 4GHz with a GTX 970 and 16 GB DDR 4. And the only reason this is not working with Windows 11 is the CPU and upgrading that would need a new board and at that point I need a new PC. Oh and I tested it at the beginning when Windows 11 came out, I can circumvent the restriction and install Windows 11 anyway, it’s just not guaranteed it will stay working and getting upgrades can be a hassle, but at least for the time I tried it I did get automated updates.

I do not hate Windows, I tried to get Windows 11, I just don’t want to accept that a security feature for businesses makes my consumer PC invalid for it. I am a gamer and I would like to stay with Windows, but I am not buying a new PC unless a vital part of my old one breaks. I rather stay with an unpatched system and do anything that needs security on my phone/tablet on android. And no, I am 58 y.o. and I am not learning Linux, maybe if I were interested in the Steam handheld it would make sense, but I am not.

I am handicapped and in early retirement. I had a hard time going on walks, got tired fast, there was always the fear of stumbling/falling again and carrying a bag was painful using a backpack made me getting tired faster.

I bought an expensive walking helper /walker with 4 wheels (not something you sit on and drive, but walk behind), a seat and a big bag for shopping. I feel like superwoman now when I am on a walk, because I can walk longer, buy stuff and just put it on the thing and it is so easy to get even heavy stuff home and whenever I get tired and no matter where I am, I just sit down, relax, power comes back and I can keep going.

The best thing I have ever bought in my whole life.

I was told this is only for very old people and that it looks ridiculous at my age and that I would not need it by everyone, fuck them. It is pure quality of life and increases my power to over 9000! I have been more outside in the last 12 months, than in the 5 years before that because of it.

Microsoft has clarified that it wants its games to be experienced across various devices

Microsoft, please give me streaming with keyboard and mouse. It is not rocket surgery ™ to do that and it is promised now for so long.

Yes do play Malkavian, but maybe not as a first character if you do not know the universe and what a Malkvian is, because it might fry your brain.

Plants vs Zombies on PC.

Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.

They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.

Also the less noticeable stuff like prices of common goods increasing

I mean Putin had to apologize for high prices of eggs, that was very noticeable (of course a show to make him seem to care for the common people, which he doesn’t give a f*ck about). https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rare-apology-over-price-eggs-2023-12-14/

what games have you play as a gay protagonist

Dreamfall Chapters, one of the three main protagonists you play as is a gay man.

I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that’s it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.

Bish bash bosh.

I do the same, but the meal did not have a name. Until today, it’s called “Bishbashbosh” now. I had to use google to translate to understand what it means, I am from Germany.

More than 500 people were sent to hospital after the incident … 423 people have been discharged from hospital … 25 in serious condition

What is stupid is the headline, why not “500+ injured in subway crash” instead of using the number of one kind of injury. As stupid as writing “two people lost a tooth in subway crash”. Still one of the seriously injured could die, but of course I wish everyone a speedy recovery, from injuries but also from the shock of the accident.

Not so funny when it actually happens to you:

Because of really bad experiences with alcoholics as a child, I am afraid of people who drink. My psychologist and my doctor wrote that down.

When I became seriously ill and could no longer work in my old job, I had to retrain. To do this, you have to go to the German employment office and get an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, including what your doctor and therapist have to say.

They read the paper from my doctor and my psychologist, but just skimmed over the words and decided that because the word “alcoholic” was there, I must be the alcoholic. They told me that I could get paid retraining and benefits, but only if I attended a therapy group for alcoholics once a week - me, who is afraid of alcoholics because of the abuse I suffered as a child. … I immediately started crying and swore that I had no problem with alcohol, only with alcoholics!

It took 6 months to get someone at the job centre to actually read the papers word for word to find out that me saying “I’m not an alcoholic” was not me being an alcoholic in denial. I got a half-assed apology and my retraining 6 months after I could have started it because of this. Not to mention that every time I refused to go to AA meetings they threatened to take away my benefits and I was in such a bad mental state that I probably would have killed myself without the help of my family. Oh, and my family who tried to intervene were labelled as co-alcoholics, holding me back.