When physical media dies, I no longer have a good reason to buy consoles… that’s literally the whole reason I bother with them - I like browsing through the cases to pick games to play.

I have through ps5, and plan to get a series s or whatever the newest with-optical Xbox is (because I can skip the one, nicely backward compatible), but that’s likely where I end the console journey. As it is now it’s getting harder to find physical copies because so many people only have them digitally. The used game market is already ruined for modern consoles, and I’m not paying full price to rent a game.

I don’t support that user-hostile model. I’ll just pirate all that shit on pc.

Same. The struggle is real.

I read something about they are under new ownership and keeping logs now, despite saying they don’t (they aren’t in a privacy-friendly sort of place). This was like 6mths ago. I can’t find anything about it now, so I’m not entirely sure what’s true, but it’s enough to spook me on it either way.

Additionally, for me at least, the service was being blocked a ton more than used to happen (couldn’t access a lot of the sites I was using it for) and it doesn’t seem the client has been updated in ages.

It’s probably fine, but it’s not worth it for me anymore.

This is basically my experience as well.

Tho I won’t be paying for a vpn service anymore now that PIA sold out, I’m going to set up the automated stuff and subscribe to Usenet indexers or whatever (I haven’t had a lot of time to look into it yet, but I have a bunch of info saved from a very kind person who helped me) instead because they will do what I want a lot better, automatically, and less risky apparently - no uploading and no seed ratio to maintain.

Beyond that, I do have a ps+ premium account because I will easily play $86 worth of games in a year (already have in the 2 months I’ve had it, with no effort of going to a place and hoping to find the games used. Im a collector, but I’m also not well off financially) but I otherwise go out of my way to avoid subscriptions and recurring payments.

If I need to pay for it more than once to have a better experience than FOSS, piracy, or just not having it, I’m not interested.

I paid $100 for a Plex lifetime subscription 10 years ago, not a penny since. I rave about the service to people, and get friends to sign up to use mine - and I always tell them if they like it, buy it outright. It’s stable and worth it, and if it dies tomorrow, I’d still be pleased with my purchase. If that hadn’t been an option I probably would have switched a long time ago when I learned there were FOSS options.

Your first sentence made me literally laugh audibly. At work.

Our computer lab when I was in high school was all those eMacs. I hated them and their single mouse button.

I definitely deleted the system drive from half of them at one point or another. It wasn’t hard, either, it was on the desktop.

Sure it didn’t actually delete anything on the drive, but it did force an intensive repair (they reformatted all of them, idk if there was another fix) :)

I’m with you, the 5 controller is so heavy!

Imho, get the case. You’ll regret it slightly if you don’t.

I was also messing with hardware/software starting in teens. Grew up during the brief period in which home computers were fairly common though still quite expensive, but pc repair shops weren’t really around.

I will try to remember, but it might not be for a while. :)

I still have one of those in clear blue, along with clear blue extender cords. Have clear purple GameCube controllers, and a light-up clear Xbox controller 😁

Now controllers are so heavy I have to skin them to help with hand fatigue, so no point getting clear cases.

I miss that aesthetic, though, and I’m glad it’s starting to reappear.

Clear craze.

As in technology. Translucent gadgets were all the rage. Not quite one word, I was going to go with translucent, but found it actually had a name.

If I made enough that I didn’t have to worry about money while working full time, I’d be much more inclined to spend money on arts and entertainment. As it stands, my entertainment budget is almost entirely going to get food I don’t have to make myself.

But until society shifts focus to living wages (and not just enough to live, but enough to thrive)…… welp. Maybe those ceos should think on that, and start paying better.

No worries.

It’s a thing I’ll probably do at some point. Just for kicks. I’m a big fan of playing around with hardware to save money 😁 but it’ll probably be a while before I get to it. I have some self hosting and automation to learn to do first (not super knowledgeable presently, but omfg is the fediverse helpful with tech stuff 💜)

Not yet, but I looked into it before I bought it and I’ve seen that it can be done as sort of a viewing unit? If I understand correctly that’s all it would be, which is still probably a powerful tool, but I just got the vr like a month ago and then immediately got two surprise kittens so I have not had time to play at all, much less do anything fancy with it.

However if you want to tell me all about it, I am more than happy to learn from a person rather than an impersonal article. Really.

🤮

Sorry I’ve been offline for a bit and came back to this and couldn’t help myself.

Haha thanks friend have a great day!

Yeah that’s kinda what I was expecting.

I don’t really have a vr setup right now (have a psvr, the tracking sucks but I want to like it) but I was thinking maybe an index at some point…

Tho tbh if I need to keep a windows pc for that to work… I can… I won’t be thrilled for it, but my laptop is touchscreen and running 11… idk how Linux does with touchscreen so I haven’t changed it out yet, probs could upgrade the hardware to game off it.

I lost all my games when I swapped to Linux.

But that’s because it was a decade ago, and I was way too lazy to figure out why wine wouldn’t work, tho I don’t really pc game anyway and these were mostly older games, even then. Small loss.

I know there’s a lot of stuff either native dev or ported/cracked for Linux, just never really spent the time to look into it.

The only thing that’s going to cause problems for me now is idk how Linux handles vr. I assume not terribly well, since none (almost none?) of it is native dev. I’m looking to move away from consoles now that they are moving away from physical media (no point collecting if there’s nothing to collect), so Linux being more robust is great! But vr maybe my stick point. Depends how well developed it gets I guess.

Idk, given that scenario, I’d still wfh and just not do anything those extra 2 days, since clearly the work can be done in 3. Or work really slowly, and do lots of other things instead like play games make things, or clean.

Nothing for me also.

The flexibility to do things when you have a few minutes (like breaks) is worth a lot to me, it makes me more productive and less stressed about time management.

Plus I have cats and no other humans here so it’s a quiet, comfortable, loving environment, and no job can provide that for me.

Pretty sure it’s already here, just not as flashy and futuristic as we were expecting. Just sort of boring and tiring, trying to get through the day as it burns around us.

That’s why everyone knows what “this is the worst timeline” means.

The article said it was redesigned for 3

I swapped to Ubuntu after windows 7 (refused to use 8/10). I find it much easier to work with than windows, but Ubuntu is the only distro I’ve used.

I’m not really an advanced user; I do some minor self hosting, and sometimes enjoy looking into new functionalities, but I’m not a huge computer person at all. Ubuntu worked perfectly well once I got the display driver issue sorted.

Holy shit is drive/file management sleek as fuck, especially if you move drives frequently. The disc management gui was just what it needed to be. The bulk rename utility being a standard, and easy as hell to use, was so so so fucking helpful, especially fixing all 26 seasons of original doctor who (each season is broken down into several miniseries, and were named like S01E01P01, S01E01P02, so not a workable naming scheme for Plex).

I learned a bunch of terminal commands because I like command line, it’s just more transparent and easier in the long run. Learned to add my software’s repositories for updates, which was super nice. But it’s a super nice and easy OS, and learning stuff in general was pretty optional.

The mobo died and I replaced the whole thing with a cheap win 11 computer. I can’t stand it and will be rebuilding my beast. Once my self-host servers are properly migrated to Linux, I’ll format the windows one to throw a different distro on to play with as my daily use computer.