sylver_dragon

When you die, they will put two dates on your tombstone. The day you were born and the day you died. And, in between will be a little dash. That dash represents everything that mattered about your life. All your achievements and failures, all your joy and all your pain. All roll up in just a little dash. Make the most of it before that second date is written.

A brick and mortar store has a lot of overhead. And, even with merch sales, GameStop doesn’t have enough to offer to differentiate itself from online stores for that same merch. Why would I take the time to walk/drive over to the GameStop to buy some cheap crap from China, when I can go online and buy that same cheap crap from China for less online. Especially, when I can often get it direct from China (via AliExpress or the like) for even less? Without the sales of physical media and the used game market, there just isn’t a viable business case for GameStop anymore. Sure, I found the whole GameStop stock meme funny too. And it sucked that some big fund tried to short them into the dirt. But, looked at from a dispassionate perspective, the current business model is doomed.

It’s not nice as something to target, but it makes sense. Employment is about more than just straight money. When evaluating an employer, I consider everything from the top line salary, to benefits, work culture, work life balance and work environment. The non-tangible factors can mean that I would be willing to take a lower salary. That is why companies will do things like decked out rec rooms or the like. And ya, I might consider a lower salary to be part of something I love or believe in. E.g. If NASA were looking for remote cybersecurity workers, I might consider a lower salary that I would get elsewhere, just to get to be part of NASA.

Employment is a negotiation between you and your employer. And while I do think technical folks could really use a trade union (something like the IBEW for electricians), for now you have to represent yourself and make sure you get what you are worth. And this might mean not working on the thing you are really passionate about. Especially if the people in charge of it are a bag of dicks.

So, the goal is to try and fragment the market further and hope that makes more money that putting out good games, across the current landscape of platforms? I mean, maybe. But, isn’t that exactly the reason Sega gave up on making its own console and started putting games out on other platforms. It works if you are the winner of a console war, otherwise it sucks to be the “also ran”.

They did.
While it’s been co-opted by shitheads these days, the Gadsden Flag started off as something pretty close to a meme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otdii_hrT4Q

Expect a lot of boredom.
While my experience is from different states, I’m pretty sure that part is universal. Bring a book. Listen to instructions and just go with the flow. But mostly, expect to be bored.

Had another thought late last night. Have you looked at the thermal paste on your GPU? I’m guessing that 1080 you have has a few miles on it and is also MSI. They went through a period where they were using some pretty terrible thermal paste on their cards, which tended to dry up and stop working well after a few years. My wife had an RX980 which this happened to and the main symptom was random freezes under load. Perhaps the new driver is running it just hot enough at idle to cause problems.

I noticed you have an MSI motherboard. Do you have XMP enabled in the BIOS? Sometime after I switched to Arch, I did a driver update (NVIDIA 3080) and started getting random freezes. The whole system would lock up and I would have to hold the power button down to force a power off. I went crazy trying to find any sort of fix and decided to turn off XMP out of desperation. I haven’t had a freeze since. Maybe it’s not related to your problem, but it seems that something about the newer NVidia drivers just didn’t like what MSI was doing.

There’s a gulf of difference between jumping to an obvious conclusion and actually doing the investigative work to really answer the question. The police aren’t dumb and are probably just as sure as the rest of us as to the motive that will be found. However, they still need to make that determination based on real evidence, especially if it’s going to go to court. So, “it’s unclear” until they have something which provides strong evidence of a motive.

Ya, I’d be putting all my chips on this being someone who was on the receiving end of a denied claim. But, you never know when it’s going to end up being the guy failing to pay up to the Russian Mafia or some other situation which resulted in a targeted attack. I’m not going to defend all the actions of the police, but they do occasionally stop shooting kids long enough investigate crimes properly.

They also aren’t all that expensive to replace. There’s always some asshole who is happy to step over the corpses of other people to get to the top.

I was lucky that, despite being somewhat religious, my parents were fine with me being an atheist. We would even debate the merits of religion and they did not have any issues with my questioning of their beliefs. Both were Lutheran and they had raised me in that tradition. I went to Sunday school, attended the Lutheran Catechism and reached the point of Confirmation. And that was right about the time I realized that the whole thing seemed to be based on a bunch of old stories with no more evidence than elves or faeries. And that was always the crux of my issue with their religion, and one they could never argue past.

When it came to my kids, they have been raised with my complete lack of belief and my wife being agnostic. We spend our Sunday mornings sleeping in and not going to any sort of church/temple/forest altar. Though, that last might happen, if it’s ruins at the end of a nice hike. My parents never expressed any disapproval and the lack of religion was never an issue. Technically, my mother is still kicking about and could suddenly go off the deep end, though I strongly doubt that’s in the cards.

At the same time, my wife and I had discussed religion before we had kids and what we might do in the event it became an issue. The simple answer was, “fuck 'em”. I love my parents, but my kids come first. If my parents had decided to get stupid over us not indoctrinating our kids in their fairy tales, then I would have just removed them from my life a few years before death did it anyway. Sure, it would have meant the kids never knowing their grandparents. But, there are lots of assholes in this world, I don’t see the need to personally inflict them all upon my children.

The best thing you can do is talk to your partner and have a plan. I would say that, if you expect it to be a point of contention with your parents, you might want to talk with them about your views on religion before it gets to that point. It doesn’t need to be anything confrontational, just be up front and say, “I don’t believe what you do”. You don’t need to go on a Dawkins style, “your religion sucks and you are morons for believing it.” Just make it clear that you don’t believe. It’s still entirely possible to have a warm, loving relationship with folks who don’t believe as you do. It just requires that each side treats the other with basic human decency and respect.

I generally use the OS which fits what I am trying to do. For my desktop PC, I run Arch Linux as it lets me game, run VMs and have a high level of control over what the system is doing. The VMs are mostly Windows for testing stuff and one running Ubuntu as a host for PolarProxy. My server runs Ubuntu, though really just as a platform to host docker containers. That was a decision I made years ago when I knew a lot less about Linux and was looking for something which was more turnkey. My work laptop is Windows, because my work is mostly a Microsoft shop. But, I have WSL running both Ubuntu (for the SANS Sift framework) and Kali.

An Operating System is a tool. Don’t get wedded to any one OS.

This seems like good news to me. Elden Ring was a good game; but, it’s nice to see a studio doing new things and not just trying to beat every dollar out of a successful name.

Guess someone declined to cover his life procedure.

Popular beliefs influences people’s beliefs, which reinforces popular beliefs. Step back even farther from the question for a moment and ask, “why do you think of ghosts as dead human spirits at all?” That a “ghost” is some sort of dead human spirit is a concept that has been built into Western society for a long time. It is something we just accept in story telling and mythological belief systems because it’s been in them so long and is told to us via authoritative figures in our lives from an early age. To tell a story where a ghost is anything other than a dead human spirit or the echo of a dead human, makes people call bullshit on the story, because the story has broken a long standing societal expectation. Sure, some stories can get away with it, and more so in the modern age where we are starting to appreciate stories which subvert long standing expectations. But, we still tend to fall back on old tropes and devices which we can expect readers to understand, without having to spend too much time on building a world. It’s far easier to save the term “ghost” for something much like a dead human spirit and just create a new term when trying to describe something else.

Hey now, this will be a very unique game. Did Horizon: Zero Dawn have horribly grindy MMO game mechanics and monetization so far up your ass you could taste it? This is Tencent after all. Checkmate, haters.

~/s for the blindingly stupid.~

It was the Limon 7 ones. I would have never remembered that. But seeing them now, yup that’s them.

I don’t think so. I recall Fundip being in large pouches with the pressed sugar sticks for dipping. These packets were a lot smaller and didn’t come with the stick.

Yes, Ubuntu version 16.04 was called Xenial Xerus.