I live in one of the more humid areas of Canada and when people tell you it can’t get humid when it’s that cold I wonder if they’ve ever experienced how the cold can just cut right through your clothes.

Summer humidity is absolutely the worst though, and people die here every year because of it.

I still strongly dislike limiting cosmetics so much, especially in a setting where they can mean so much. Darktide’s $20 skins pissed me right off: role-playing is 100% part of the game and that price is absurd.

Quick Celsius breakdown from a Canadian:

• 40+ - most Canadians stop eating food and hope for a quick death
• 35 - you might just be able to live with this if you do nothing at all
• 28 - right about the place where comfort gives way to a general sense of warmth, something that makes any Canadian uncomfortable
• 23 - room temperature, and why “room temperature IQ” is an insult only Americans could have come up with because their scale was made by a madman
• 15 - If it’s Autumn you are wearing a light jacket, if it’s Spring you are sweating
• 5 - sweater time
• 0 to -10 - that stereotypical TV winter experience, where everyone is skating and sipping hot chocolate? Yeah that’s like half the year here. You better like hot chocolate.
• -15 - We enjoy the fresh air, others will probably find it painful to breathe directly; put on a scarf! Do not brush your teeth immediately before going outside unless you want to experience mint-flavoured pain.
• -20 - Canadians put their boots on by now. Exposed skin on a windy day can get frostbite in as little as 10 minutes.
• -30 - We will debate putting a coat on to put the garbage out at this temperature, usually erring on the side of caution in case your kids lock you outside again. Seriously invest in good winter gear for this, this temperature can kill surprisingly fast and it only gets increasingly unpleasant from here.
• -40 - turns out you can’t form snowballs in hell because the snow is too crispy

Here in Canada I’ve seen much the same behaviour for both Liberal and Conservative voters. “I vote Liberal because I’ve always voted Liberal” is a surprisingly common statement especially among the older generations, and to a small extent even the Green party has a few loyalists in BC.

Always voting the same way no matter what happens is just giving your vote away for free.

It doesn’t help that the Rust community tends to bring extremely divisive politics with it in places and ways that just don’t need to happen, starting battles that aren’t even tangentially related to programming.

I’m not buying this game at launch but could be convinced to do so after private servers come out.

No thanks.

mobility scooters with RGB under glow lighting

This but unironically. I think I need to find someone willing to let me do this to their scooter or wheelchair; I’ve got parts to spare and if it gets even a few chuckles it will be worth doing.

I’ve seen some concepts for mall-like communities based around retirement homes and elementary schools. Add a library, some shops, and other services, and you’re off to a great start.

The old-but-still-able folks can serve as crossing guards, read books to kids, play games with them, perhaps help with coaching or other tasks, etc… The young kids benefit from the wisdom and time spent with good role models, the retirees get much-needed social interaction, structure, and purpose.

A man can dream.

Yeah it’s becoming a bit uncanny when I pickup a game and see Mandalore, SplatterCat, or AlphaBetaGamer covering it a few days later.

Even without Steam around, do you really think Average Joe is going to check a bunch of storefronts looking for a game? Nah, they’re going to see what comes up on Twitch/YouTube and then play that. That would have meant nothing but sponsored garbage forever. Steam saved us from that fate with Greenlight and later opening the door entirely (and favouring indies in their upcoming and new lists)

Do you remember Direct2Drive? Opened up in 2004, digital storefront for games run by IGN? No? That’s ok, neither does anyone else, and it had the pull of fucking IGN. That’s the market Steam was launching into at the time, a time when many people were openly exclaiming PC gaming was dying.

At the time gamer chat was a mostly text-based affair over several places and services, and voice was the realm of the few people with the skills to get TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble going or a connection to those people. Steam did something wild and brought the whole community together in one place. All the games, all the gamers, and all the developers in one place.

That’s how Steam ended up a monopoly, and with their collection of mature services no one is going to beat them at everything. If you want to beat them you’re going to need to focus on one aspect of their service, beat that, and then work with other people who have targeted other parts of the service and connect. In other words, you need to do the exact opposite of Battle.net/Epic/Uplay/Origin/etc. but none of those companies will do that because they are too selfish to give up any part of the profits.

Only the FOSS community would have the required mentality and why would they step on Steam? Linux gaming has never been this good. It’s almost like the only people who could take on Steam view it as an asset.

Oh and just to be clear: virtually no other service has even tried to do anything but be a worse version of Steam. GOG and Itch.io instead opted to focus on what made them different and thus occupy meaningful niches, but everyone else continues to be worthless to this day and they only have themselves to blame.

I had a friend refuse to use any 7 Days to Die modlets because they’re “unsafe” despite being simple XML translations. He wouldn’t even use one I wrote myself.

Yeah I enjoyed it for longer than that but it just becomes so tedious once you have a few ships.

I prefer Starsector and Avorion.

My library and tastes are pretty eclectic so I think Steam’s recommendation engine struggles with me lol. That said, I love how it sends me shit no one seems to know about at the time, like Kenshi, Volcanoids, PULSAR, etc.

As I understand it the issue is actually that people weren’t allowed to sell their game for less on other platforms, but they weren’t necessarily trying to sell Steam keys.

Oh wow I’ve owned this game for quite some time. Decent game but ultimately I think Starsector and Avorion are better.

What about GOG and its DRM-free games? What about Itch.io and its exceptionally low cut and pretty much completely open-door policy? There are other services that are good. Origin, UPlay, Epic, and other stuff sucking does not mean they’re all bad.

All I ever wanted was good fights and for that short time where SBMM was actually what it said on the tin, I got them. But then somehow devs started getting it in their heads that what people really want is noobstomping, and while I’m sure some people want that, they can go fuck themselves. That shit made me want to play less because it was too easy all the time, and then when the cheating became too rampant to ignore I just stopped playing competitive shooters.

You would think that the kind of person who loves Factorio knows the rule: never book launch day off.

At least now we have options like Pikapods where you can just throw a containerized server up cheap. Even people who might be overwhelmed by a VM can do that.