We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code

It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money

(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)

Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks

Glad to hear it…I also found it helpful to know about the “pregnant pause”. It’s when they just look at you silently, waiting for you to continue. It makes you want to keep talking out of awkwardness

It helps me to think of that like an invitation, I’ll think if anything else comes to mind and if I’ve got nothing left to say I’ll just wait it out

Ideas have both quality and value, and they interconnect to make the backbone of interactive experiences

That’s it exactly. The way the ideas interconnect and the way they’re presented to the player is everything. That’s execution, that’s everything - the ideas are just what’s in your head

It’s both. It’s an invitation to bring up anything recent, but you can also treat it like a normal greeting if you’d rather not go there right now.

It’s also open ended enough that you can say “I’m doing well, I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot lately” and take the session wherever you want organically. It could also just lead into small talk while you get comfortable

Ideas are nothing. Everyone has a million daydreams, the most special and creative idea in the world is worthless if you can’t express it.

Execution is everything. Hell, you don’t even need an idea - you can draw random design elements out of a bag and come up with something great

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

I had the original with the expansion, I used to play Tony hawk online

There was no psn back then though, you just plugged in and were good to go

Exactly… And ultimately they are beholden to shareholders. Which are largely in it for the stock price, not the dividends - they want numbers to go up, and they don’t care if it crashes the company in a few years when they’re no longer holding the bag

Money today is worth more than money tomorrow. With enough data and analysis, riding companies into the ground is the optimal way to make money

I take lots of pictures, I just don’t post them anywhere

But the switch isn’t just an underpowered console… It’s a handheld with an HDMI port

Ditto. I’m not going to put in the time to clean up a project working fine for me just to have it ignored or complained about. It’s all expectation, very little reward

And even if I did get volunteers, I’m not coordinating people on my personal projects. Sounds like a great way to take all the joy out of it…

Open source is just broken right now, it runs by draining the passion out of people

“We’re just asking questions!”

Well I just learned the term today, but it seems to have the implication "these are men who could be military. They could be hidden insurgents

Military-aged thing?

As long as you’re not doing it now I wouldn’t worry, you’d need very detailed information to tell you apart from steam. Privileged information I’d never have considered Microsoft yanking a year ago, but a year from now? Unlikely, but not unbelievable anymore

Shooting yourself in the foot trying to punish users seems to be the new SOP for tech giants these days…I no longer would put anything past them

Exactly! I left two achievements in Prey because while I loved it, a fourth playthrough was too much - years later I still remember the map intimately

But then there’s games like saints row 4…I loved it, it was just pure fun. I was having such a great power fantasy I even got all the collectables. I tried to keep going, but I ended up just mindlessly jumping around until I faced reality

Or for a more recent example, satisfactory. It was great fun - I restarted just before the endgame to extend the experience. Then I did everything… There was so much more map left and I could’ve built so much more if I just had a reason. They get a partial pass because it’s still in development and mods could give me a second, longer, playthrough but I wanted to enjoy the updates before I burned up all my desire to play

Give me some stat scaled enemies, maybe a bit more basic progression, and a flimsy reason so I can have my fill of the gam

I’d be careful about that friend

With the aggressively anti-user and poorly thought out moves tech companies have been making lately, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to start using little discrepancies like that to go after people

It would be dumb, way more effort than it’s worth, and likely extremely invasiv… Probably not likely, but I would’ve said the same about a lot that’s happened in the last couple years.

But all the same, in your shoes I’d look into blocking that on the off chance it puts a target on your back

Personally, I love having a ton of them - I wish there were more

I don’t mind standard progression ones, they at least give me a rough idea how far through the storyline I am

But the high end ones are way too few - I like having an unlockable goal to work towards if I’m not done with a game by the time I finish the in game progression. I want them to be hard, maybe even require multiple playthroughs with a severe handicap. Not tedious collecting… But like in Prey when you had to play through with only human, typhoid, or no abilities unlocked. Then you had to save everyone and murder everyone - I had fun trying to combine as many as possible into a playthrough

My problem is that people get upset when 100% is a long and hard road, and a lot of games have lowered the bar to keep them from getting upset. Might as well make prestige achievements that put the total over 100% at this point… Hell if I launch something on steam I might do free DLC just for that

Well hey listen, I appreciate it. I would’ve spent who knows how long waffling between distos that I don’t feel drawn to, and even if I came across an atomic flavor, I probably would’ve just assumed it was marketing fluff

Good ideas need advocates, and this is a good idea… It’s a promise of an OS I want, not just running from one I don’t

I’m probably going to look at bazzite first. If I have containers that can run LLMs on my GPU, that checks off everything on my wish list except gaming. I’ll read up on it though, you’ve given me the context I need to care about learning more