I love liminal spaces. I usually experience a sort of warm, soft comfort from them. Probably from exploring my dad’s empty office building back when I was a kid. He and his secretary were the only employees, so there were tons of empty, poorly lit rooms and hallways.
But the longer I played this game, the more dread started to creep over me. Probably because I have a mild fear of deep waters, and you can’t see anything in these waters unless you’re standing right over them.
I cranked my video settings to the max to really get into this unsettling game. It’s super immersive with surround sound headphones, too.
I’ve spent the last year or so playing Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint with a couple friends.
It has an interesting sci-fi/military story, tons of side missions if you’re tired of following the main campaign, and a wide open map to explore if you’re just bored of everything. Plus, there are random missions every day, so if you’re done with the main campaign, you can continue to do missions and enjoy exploring the world even more.
Also, your party doesn’t have to stick together. You can play on the same map, but go off and do your own thing. I have a buddy who can’t follow instructions to save his life. He’s always running around, causing chaos everywhere he goes. We’re trying to stealthily infiltrate a base and he just crash-lands a helicopter into it and runs in guns blazing.
So… we let him run off and grief other bases or enemies while the rest of our party focuses on the mission. Everybody wins, and we all get to play together and have a good time.
EDIT: Same goes for Tom Clancy’s The Division and The Division 2. Unlike Breakpoint, which takes place on an island nation, fighting against a wannabe dictator, The Division takes place in America after a virus plague has wiped out most of civilization, and you’re playing as an elite team that’s trying to restore order to the population.
I’ve been playing The Division with my friends for a few years now. It’s a very fun game series.
My grandfather had a massive heart attack in his 70s. He only stayed alive because my mother was a Red Cross certified CPR instructor and kept him going for over an hour until an ambulance got there. Doctors said his body was pretty messed up and they gave him maybe a month to live at best.
My grandfather said, “To hell with that, I wanna keep living!” He lasted another 10 years until he finally passed away.
Similarly, my dad was on hospice care earlier this year. He had a strong body, but his Parkinson’s was affecting his functions and they gave him less than 6 months to live. Not even a month later, he told my sister that he’s tired of fighting and just wants to die. Within a day, he had passed away.
I definitely believe that the conscious mind plays a role in keeping the body going. If you can convince yourself to keep going, your body will fight the good fight, but if you give up, your body stops trying so hard and gives in.
I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.
Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.
It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.
Oh no! Not Steven Universe! Anyway…
(Goes back to watching SU on my Plex server)
I just upgraded my cosmetic armor set to this season’s Awoken Archenemy set. I have the full set, but I don’t like how the flaming horns cover almost all of my head, so I opted for the Waning Sun Diadem for my helm instead. I definitely feel like a fire sorcerer now! Check it out:
We are. I just read an article yesterday about how Microsoft paid research publishers so they could use the papers to train AI, with or without the consent of the papers’ authors. The publishers also reduced the peer review window so they could publish papers faster and get more money from Microsoft. So… expect AI to be trained on a lot of sloppy, poorly-reviewed research papers because of corporate greed.
This sounds like every dream I’ve ever had where I’m being pursued and need to outrun something.
You could’ve saved a heckuva lot more money. I have two in my house as well, both were about $45 each and those were the luxury versions! My old ones were about $25.
They’re non-electric LUXE Bidet brand, activated solely by water pressure when you turn the dial on them. No fancy bells and whistles, but they have pretty decent water pressure and get the job done.
If I’m on the go, I’ll hook up my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable, set the TV as a duplicate screen so I can close the lid on my laptop (make sure closing the lid doesn’t lock your computer or put it to sleep), then use my wireless mouse and keyboard so I can sit on the couch/bed/whatever and control it from afar.
At home, I bought a micro PC that I keep connected to the TV via HDMI. Then I use a wireless mouse/keyboard to control it from the couch.
The micro PC has WiFi so I can connect it to the Internet, and all devices on my home network can see each other, so I can quickly copy something from my regular PC or laptop to the micro PC if I want to view it on the TV.
I mostly use the micro PC for my streaming services. I don’t trust my Smart TV to be connected to the Internet, so I don’t use any of its apps. But I’m old; I’m used to TVs being dumb devices. I don’t like handing over control of my apps to companies; I’d rather access them directly from a computer.
I did this with my Steam Link in the past. Interestingly enough, my new Smart TV has Steam Link as a downloadable app for it, so I don’t need my physical box anymore.
FPS Factorio, even.
Kind of… but it’s all about automating resource collection on an alien planet. You don’t get to actually travel to space. I would love to be able to go explore the space elevator/station you build throughout the game, but you’re pretty much stuck on the planet surface. Unless that’s part of the end game that I haven’t gotten to yet. I’m still working my way through the official release. The early access was just an open world exploration game.
Sonic the Hedgehog was my jam in my childhood! I mostly played Sonic 2, but I’ve been a big fan of the franchise ever since I was a kid.
hunter2
Reverse this for me. I shower first thing in the morning every day and my bath towels are just drying clean skin. They only touch me for maybe a minute or two before being hung to dry.
However, I go to sleep at night, after a full day of developing natural body oils on my skin. And I lie in bed for 8+ hours at a time.
My bed sheets are far more gross after a week of use than my towel will get in a month, more or less a couple weeks.
You say you don’t care for Porsche IRL. If you have any interest in driving performance vehicles and have an opportunity to drive one, try to not pass it up.
I used to be pretty big into cars in my youth. I actually took part in some drift racing in northern Japan when I lived there for a few years, and those guys are all big math/physics/car nerds (not the Yakuza gangster wannabes like you saw in Tokyo Drift; that movie was fantasy American street racing with a Japanese skin over it), so I really got into that stuff for a while. But high-end sports cars were out of our league, so I haven’t ever tried a Porsche. I guess that needs to go on my bucket list.
I suppose have finally accepted there’s never going to be another “campaign” style title. I guess that’s really the gaming industry as a whole with all the battle Royales and similar arcade-style games.
I really hate that there’s so much push to get us to play online multiplayer games now. I mean, I get it from a financial standpoint - it keeps players engaged with a game long after they’ve finished the campaign and if they can squeeze micro-transactions/seasons/DLC into it, it’s a source of added income for years afterward. But from a gaming standpoint, I just see it as repetitive gameplay that doesn’t lead anywhere, with rewards that are never worth the effort.
I’m also not a fan of playing online with strangers because the environment can be very toxic. I barely tolerate playing co-op with my friends some days. 😆
Even then, expansion packs were far and few between, and they expanded the story! They didn’t just add a custom skin of horse armor to your game. You got actual real content to enjoy with your money.
Incidentally, I just jumped back on the horse this morning by adding the latest World of Warcraft expansion to my account. I was almost done with Activision Blizzard and their awful content updates, but I decided to give it one more shot. So I might have some WoW screenshots incoming in the near future.
I had been an active player since 2005 and have bought every collector’s edition since The Burning Crusade. Only because Blizzard used to be an amazing company. But they’ve been garbage since they sold to Activision, and I’ve been spending more and more time away from it in the past decade. My wife actually gave up on it when Mists of Pandaria came out.
I barely played the last expansion; it just wasn’t fun trying to level up a dragon so I could glide just a little bit further across the map, when I have dozens of actual flying mounts in my inventory. Too much work for something that should’ve been given to us after meeting quest and/or level requirements. As far as I understand, their latest expansion is supposed to be the first in a massive 3-part story to reinvigorate the franchise, so I’m hoping they actually hired someone who knows what they’re doing this time.
Yeah the game distorts your vision slightly, to add to the subtle anxiousness. You can fine-tune it in settings, but by default, it can make you feel a little unsteady and ungrounded.