Isn’t a cracked (old, I think?) Kindle the only way to pirate KU/DRM titles? At least, that’s what I recall from the last time I looked into it. There’s a book I really wanted to format shift from KU since Google TTS was fucking up all the proper nouns, but I gave up. (It was an obscure book that isn’t available anywhere pirated.)

Yeah, I agree. I’m not at all interested in what score they gave the game; I’m more interested in what they liked/didn’t like and, more importantly, why they felt that way. Then I can get a sense if the game will match my tastes/interests.

Longest I’ve been out of Canada is a week.

Proroguing Parliament for 2½ months to pick a new leader isn’t a good look for the Liberals on this one, but I can see why they went for it. That’s a lot of news cycles for things to cool off before a likely election.

I doubt it will be enough to keep the anti-trans bigot party from winning a majority government, sadly.

Weird to hear that. My only issue so far has been how hard it is to get movement speed on boots. Granted, I’m only just about to start Cruel, so my playtime is low compared to many, but I’m absolutely loving all the boss encounters, particularly with the dodge mechanics. And not needing to worry about socket numbers, colours, and links on gear.

Maybe I should read what others are saying, but I have nothing significant to complain about so far, aside from move speed being a bit too slow.

I think about the 5 games for $5 bundles with amazing indie games whenever this comes up.

You can still get deals like that from Humble, Fanatical, and a few others, but nothing like that on Steam anymore. I don’t really understand why people buy so many games on Steam, tbh. 90% of my game purchases are bundles.

Then again, I’m a very patient gamer who prefers short and targeted indie games to AAA games, so that’s probably most of the answer. I’m cool waiting 5 years for a game to be cheap. I have literally thousands of games I would be interested in playing sometime, so it’s only the very rare game that I’ll buy the year it’s released.

Same experience for me on the other side of the country in small-town BC. I had a minor non-urgent issue that needed imaging. I just walked in and got it done immediately after my doctor appointment. It took me as long for me to change into the hospital flasher “clothing” as I spent in the waiting room.

That sounds really cool. Thanks for sharing; I hadn’t heard about this one previously.

I was gaming exclusively on the Deck from January to the start of December…

…But Path of Exile 2 I’m streaming from my desktop to get acceptably clear visuals and smooth framerates. I’m back heating my house with my desktop.

I was wondering, lol. My numbers are very inflated, too.

What’s funny about mine is that almost all of my “Windows” playtime is actually from streaming to my Deck, too.

Bankruptcy seems like a stretch, indeed. But those assets are largely not income generating, aside from donations and tourism. With those on the decline, their value situation is worsening.

Hopefully, they’ll be forced to sell their “priceless” artifacts until there’s nothing left.

Holy shit, that’s huge. I was trying to wrap my head around those numbers.

Russia is about 3½ times Canada’s population, so 30K deaths is, per capita, equivalent to about 8.5K deaths in Canada. That’s higher than all-cause mortality in Canada from ages 1-35. Just from HIV.

Whoa. That’s not good.

Or, another perspective:
More than 1% of Russians are infected with HIV. (Estimated 1.5mm out of ~140mm.)

Regardless, they need to have it in their terms of service that they can host the file, encrypted or otherwise, on their servers and reserve the right to serve the files to other users.

But yes, that’s true that they can’t necessarily access the files they’re hosting/serving.

To be fair to Discord, it has to work that way. They serve the files to you anywhere in the world on any device you use, don’t they? That requires hosting the content.

But it could very well be used for other purposes, too, of course.

I would expect this kind of Puritanical pearl clutching in the US, not Europe.

Apparently, any game that uses straights, flushes, and full houses gets an adults-only rating, but games with addictive psychological dark patterns designed to maximize microtransaction revenue are fine for children. What a world we live in.

1080p would also be great for streaming from a desktop.

There are university classes analyzing children’s picture books. It’s not about the difficulty of the book, it’s about the level of the analysis.

1984 is quite unique as a piece of fiction, since almost a third of the book is an appendix about language and history. It’s an excellent book to analyze.

Loving it.

On the Steam Deck, it was playable, but I couldn’t find settings that looked good and were visually clear, so I finally got around to setting up Sunshine and Moonlight (in-house streaming) and it’s amaze balls.

I’m using a script that switches my desktop to a virtual monitor that’s the Steam Deck’s native resolution, and I recently upgraded my house to a WiFi 6 mesh network, so it’s working almost flawlessly. (I often get crashes on startup, but it’s never taken more than 3 tries, then no issues.)

I’m still only in act 1 (limited playtime) but I’m so excited to be playing PoE again, and PoE2 is perfect for playing with a controller.

I don’t want to simp for a corporation, but what is Valve doing that’s anticompetitive?

Like, don’t they need to be doing something to limit competitors’ access to the market to be anticompetitive?

Steam requires base price/same price parity for selling Steam keys, but they’re literally giving their services away to developers for free in those cases, so that’s pretty clearly not anticompetitive, right? And there’s no requirements that I’ve seen written anywhere that they require price parity for non-Steam-key sales.

And, based on the massive numbers of bundles of games I’ve bought with Steam keys with total historical-low game prices below best-ever Steam sale prices, they pretty clearly don’t even enforce this rule strictly (it seems like so long as the total bundle price is in line with individual title sale prices, they’re fine, even if consumers get other games as well.)

So I’m not sure what the basis for this suit is. Not saying it’s healthy for the market to have an effective monopoly in this space, but the reason Valve is maintaining its marketshare is because they’re consistently offering the best value to consumers compared to other storefronts, which isn’t illegal.

/Insert “prove me wrong” meme

It’s particularly nice for the Deck, since launchers often break things that otherwise work great with Proton.