My takeaway is that if I don’t go broke on groceries this year I sure as hell will go broke buying some phenomenally promising games (or at least supporting the devs anyway).

Here I am, snorting my wife awake at 2 am because of an unexpectedly hilarious cock joke

I have so many thoughts on this that I’m having trouble articulating. On one hand, Remedy has built such a rich and lore-filled world beloved by fans, and they’ve already tried their hand at live action with Quantum Break (meh). This could and maybe even should be successful. On the other, those worlds are already pretty solidly built by the actors that portray them like Courtney Hope, Matthew Porretta, Ikka Villi, and James McCaffery. I can’t imagine anyone successfully stepping into those roles.

But then, we have the major flops like the Witcher adaptation and Halo (I think? Never a fan but I’ve heard good and bad things). I know those had even more lore and perhaps even bigger worlds, bigger budgets…and they still managed to disappoint the entire fanbase.

Can you imagine them doing justice to the Ashtray Maze on TV without a bunch of blurry CGI? Or the insidious self doubt and psychological terror in Alan Wake without a bunch of jump scares?

I love AnnaPurna and Remedy so I’m truly hoping for the best.

Yesss! I so wish I had picked that up during their launch sale when it was cheaper. I’ve been holding off cause of the comments while in Early Access but it looked phenomenal at launch. Seems like it just needs a bit of polish. It’s on my list for the next sale.

I’ve tried Hollow Knight 3x now and given up on it. I just can’t get into it for some reason. Loved Ori and the Will of the Wisps. HK goes in the bucket with Outer Wilds, universally loved games that didn’t click for me.

Love that the art style reminds me of a grown-up version of Rugrats. Looks interesting and fun. I’ll have to wishlist it for the current price.

Gris and Monument Valley hold very special places in my heart. This looks really promising.

Edit: for the sake of discussion, after looking at some of the comments on the vid. Any other games that fit this niche? Someone said:

• blasphemous

as a pre-schooler non-social media parent, this is fucking hilarious.

Whenever I have to brave the Google abyss, I usually use Startpage. Obviously uBlock Origin but if I can avoid being bombarded by devious and distracting ads altogether, I’d rather that.

True but I see this more as a critical thinking problem - which is pervasive in our society and worsened by the tech bubbles. People should want to seek out information that both argues for and against a topic.

The way our education systems work now, at least in the US, that method of thinking only begins around college and varies widely by academic pedigree.

I don’t run VPNs at the router level. The speed and latency hit, plus the spambot triggers aren’t worth it for me. This is purely a non-privacy minded preference, mind you, and I’m totally not an expert.

You bring up a good point though. Regardless of what’s running upstream, if my device is running private relay, it all gets bypassed. So I have to disable private relay.

My preference is to run nextdns over DoH, AdGuard locally on iOS + Stop the Madness, and a VPN when I’m feeling sheepish.

On iOS, I’ve tried quite a few combinations and I’ve gotten feedback from users with others.

When I ran pi-hole or AdGuard home, I also used AdGuard on all my iOS devices - both the DNS pseudo-VPN and safari extensions cause otherwise ads would sneak in. The Adguard app removes the annoying ads from Apple News and NYT apps.

Now I just use NextDNS and the same AdGuard iOS app setup.

The few people on ours are local real estate agents and severe weather alerts lol

Oh! I’ll have to watch that. Hadn’t realized Apple toys with this theme quite a bit. Constellation had so much promise but it flamed out for me. Severance might be tangentially related with the theme, compartmentalized lives, being equally fascinating.

Mr. Robot and Counterpart did things to my brain questioning reality.

Yup. I quit everything but Reddit several years back without a second thought in all that time because I lived in a big metropolitan city.

Now I live in a small suburb where all the towns and businesses post to FB, neighbors have tradeposts and active interest groups on there, the schools and Police post info there too. My wife has connected to “friends” we otherwise wouldn’t exchange info with.

All that has had me wanting to create a new account - just to connect. I was completely ignorant to the role it plays outside of big cities beforehand. Nextdoor is a really crappy alternative.

This is both a terrifying and astonishing thought.

This introduces the possibility that we’re experiencing 2 universes and creating a third within ourselves.

Speaking of. On an off chance, I went to BK a few days ago and got a Whopper. Like $12 for the meal, and just like the other fast food chains, the patty was so thin I couldn’t taste anything besides the bun, ketchup and mayo.

Pretty much cured me of any further fast food spending. What a scam!

Wait! Have we come full circle? Is Orbs the end before we come back to Beans?

Just like my Harbor Freight paint sprayer!