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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I was just about to set up ErsatzTV for this exact thing, but the maintainer announced recently that he’s not updating it anymore and nobody is taking over. It’s probably fine for now, but I’m hesitant to start running it. He’s encouraging forks, but none are really the clear successor yet as far as I know. I don’t know if there’s anything else comparable.



  • It’s much less spicy than most other curry. Even the “hot” versions are like barely detectable heat. It also often has apple and honey added for sweetness, and I would say it’s saucier than other curries. It’s good if you approach it as its own thing, but very different from like a British-style curry and even more different from anything you would find in India.

    The product in the picture is a curry roux block, which looks a bit like a big Hershey chocolate bar with squares that can be broken off. It’s like a sauce concentrate. You start cooking your meat and vegetables in a pot, add just enough water to cover everything, then add cubes of roux. The roux has everything necessary to make a complete sauce, but lots of home cooks have their own blend of things they add to adjust, like the aforementioned grated apple and honey, or ginger, garlic, mirin, tonkatsu sauce, etc.


  • I can’t help but feel like they’d make more money if they charged like $20 annually. I’d have signed up years ago just to support them. But considering that…

    • I play most games without modding them at all.
    • Quite a few of my more heavily modded games have Steam Workshop support, which doesn’t require a second application, updates automatically with the game itself, and is free.
    • Most of the rest of the games that I mod have maybe one or two mods installed and don’t get frequent updates, so waiting for slow downloads is an annoyance more than a problem.

    …that leaves like one or two games a year that would meaningfully benefit from what they’re offering, which makes it hard to justify spending so much. Plus, intentionally degrading the free service in ways that don’t save them money doesn’t entice me to pay for premium so much as make me resent it. So they’ve made $0 from me.



  • Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.

    There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.





  • I honestly had no issue with Indiana Jones at launch on the Deck. My tolerance for performance issues is probably higher than average, granted, but I started playing it within a few days of launch on the Deck and beat the main story within a few weeks of that. It was officially unsupported and there were absolutely some framerate hiccups, but it was totally playable and enjoyable. It actually ran better on the Deck than my desktop (also Linux, to be fair) for a while because of nvidia driver issues. The faster pace of Doom will make it more of a problem, though.


  • It’s truly a non-issue, unless we’re talking competitive multiplayer games. The only single player game I can think of that I’ve had Linux-related problems with since I switched my desktop over a couple years ago has been the new Indiana Jones game, and that was patched within a week of launch. Proton makes it brain-dead easy. I have a pretty big library and not many games have official support, but they just work with Proton. I don’t do any tinkering with custom proton builds or anything either. On a fresh Steam install, you have to go into settings once to enable Proton in games that haven’t been tested with it, but then you just forget about it and play like you would on Windows.





  • I mostly take issue with the paid exclusivity deals from Epic. That kind of thing can stay on consoles. I also don’t trust Tim Sweeney or Tencent, and I feel that they’re kind of openly hostile to consumers.

    I don’t care for intrusive DRM, but it’s clearly marked which games have it on Steam and which don’t. I won’t buy anything that requires a second account or has Denuvo. I don’t do online matchmaking games anymore, but if I did, I’d also avoid anything with kernel-level anti-cheat. I don’t really mind Steamworks DRM, though. It’s not intrusive and Steam is useful enough that I normally have it running in the background anyway.

    I also like buying on Steam because they’re contributing so much to Linux gaming and FOSS, even if Steam itself isn’t FOSS. It’s because of them that I can have a Windows-free household without any significant compromises.


  • That’s always my first thought when I see these.

    PSA for those who don’t know, if a store finds refrigerated or frozen food outside where it’s supposed to be, they have to throw it out. They have no reliable way to tell whether it’s been out of the cooler for five minutes or five hours, so it’s a food safety concern. Stores are forced to throw out an absurd quantity of perfectly good food for this reason.

    Even if you don’t care about food waste for its own sake, stores incorporate this type of loss into pricing and stocking decisions. It makes food more expensive and less available for everyone.



  • This has been (probably unreasonably) my biggest complaint with Starfield since I went into the club. There are gameplay and story issues that realistically should be bigger problems for me, but for some reason I’m actually offended by the Astral Lounge. I don’t expect nudity or even topless dancers, even though thematically it seems appropriate there, but what the fuck were they thinking? The game is rated M for some reason anyway, so why are we being so prudish? Baldur’s Gate 3 gets away with sexually aggressive lizard-person pussy in your face and that seems to be fine with most people, even as a modern mainstream AAA game. Why can we not have a simple space bikini/speedo when the setting calls for it instead of whatever that fucking monstrosity of an outfit is? If you’re not comfortable doing that, maybe don’t put a “club” with “exotic dancers” in your game at all, especially if the story describes that club (and entire city) as particularly libertine and lawless.