Not a lot is standing out to me as a must-buy (in part because I already have a lot in my library). Kind of thinking about Last Train Home, 9 Kings, and Knights in Tight Spaces. A part of me has also been thinking about snagging the old Guild Wars trilogy. GW1 is ancient by gaming standards, but still has a lot to offer.

Looking over his IMDB credits the first thing that stands out is that he’s been in a TON of stuff I’ve never even heard about. I obviously need to do some catch-up work. Of the stuff he’s been in that I have seen:

Cowboy Bebop - I didn’t really like the series as a whole, but I liked him in it.
Star Trek - I really liked his(their) take on Hikaru Sulu. The movies…eh… but his (and several other) individual performances were really solid.
H&K Go To White Castle - Incredibly stupid movie that’s also really damn fun.

As others have said, it depends where you draw the line on what is a “gadget”. But ignoring some of the obvious ones that have already been mentioned several times: I think I might have to go with my desktop audio mixing board. It lets me easily mix sound from multiple computers/devices and run them all into one set of headphones or speakers. I can adjust the volume of each input independently and without futzing with the settings in individual software applications/systems.

My other mention would go to my Raspberry Pi’s. Incredibly compact, low-power-usage, but potent, versatile computers. Even just one or two can power a broad suite of at-home/self-hosted services, removing the need for costly, privacy-invasive/insecure, third-party services.

I’m starting to think we need to reframe this a little. Stop referring to “artists”. It’s not just lone, artistic types that are getting screwed here, it’s literally everyone who has content that’s been exposed to the Internet. Artists, programmers, scientists, lawyers, individuals, companies… everyone. Stop framing this as “AI companies versus artists” and start talking about it as “AI companies versus intellectual property right holders”, because that’s what this is. The AI companies are choosing to ignore IP law because it benefits them. If anyone, in any other context, tried to use this as a legal defense they would be laughed out of the courtroom.

I haven’t worked with it myself as I’m not working on Japanese right now, but I had a recommendation recently for Satori Reader.

No way this kind of disconnected-from-the-users attitude will backfire. This game is sure to be a great experience! /s

Well, that would explain a lot.

I’m also guessing that at “up to 30%” of the company’s leadership decisions are being made by AI too.

Three things based on other comments here:

(1) <name of game engine> is free, try that!

Be wary with this. They may be free for students or small deployment situations, but may have increasingly agressive demands as your user base increases in size or your seek some kind of profitability. I wouldn’t panic about, but do make sure to carefully review the licensing terms for ALL tools that you use in your process.

(2) Learning/Tutorials

Depends a bit on how you learn best. Youtube almost always has some good instructional videos. Most of the major tool/engine makers have large libraries of tutorials to draw from as well. Even very experienced programmers routinely have dozens of browser tabs that start from web searches that read “<name of my game engine/platform> how to do <specific thing I want to do>”.

(3) If you look to hire or contract out some of the work, just realize that you will very often only get what you really pay for. Quality work costs more. One option you have is to spend the next year or three doing everything you can yourself. Get as close to complete as you can. Then go to something like Kickstarter and look for completion funds. “Look at how complete the game is. If I can just get a little bit of money, I can hire a professional <whatever> to do that one part that I couldn’t do myself”. This is especially usual for getting access to skills like art, music, voice acting, etc.

Doing my second play-through of Stalker 2. Really enjoying the game (140 total hours), but it does still have quite a few bugs. Most of the bugs are minor, but a few have been pretty serious.

Anyone considering attending a protest of any kind should probably at least skim over some of this guidance:

https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest

Follow the money hashtags! Seriously, if you can’t immediately find people to follow (a very common problem when people first join a social network), follow hashtags! Super easy to do:

• Search for your topic
• In the search results, switch to the “Hashtags” tab (or just scroll down to the hashtag section of the results)
• click into one of the hashtag search results
• Review the posts, frequency, etc. If you like what you see, click “Follow Hashtag”.

It really does a great job of (1) populating your feed with interesting, relevant content and (2) can ultimately connect you to new people with similar interests.

I haven’t used any Framework systems, so I can’t really give a proper comparison. I have owned two S76 laptops, a now-ancient Lemur Pro I bought back in 2017, and just recently, a Pangolin I just picked up a few weeks ago. I haven’t really had a chance to put the Pangolin through its paces, but it does have AMD-based 3-d acceleration built in. The old Lemur (and the new lemurs) only have basic Intel graphics.

I was able to use my old Lemur for some very light gaming. I think last time I was traveling, I was able to play Football Manager and Fallout Shelter quite successfully, but Lord of the Rings Online was just a bit beyond its capabilities. I would assume that Skyrim would definitely be beyond the Lemur’s reach.

It looks like the F13 does have some amount of built-in 3d acceleration, so just looking at specs I would expect it to do better than the Lemur. Lemur’s got a slightly larger display, but neither are very big. The rest of the specs look like they can vary quite broadly depending on your order so that makes the rest a bit hard to compare fairly.

Like I said, I’ve never even seen a Framework laptop in person, so I can’t give a hands-on comparison. I can say that I’ve been very pleased with my experience with System 76. If you’re looking at S76, consider the Pangolin. It’s only a little bit larger than the Lemur, the price is pretty close, and it comes with more capabilities.

edit-to-add: Whatever you pick, I hope you will come back and tell us how it turned out.

waaaay back in my wild and misspent youth, some friends and I bought a 5 pound case of these from Costco. It was the mintiest weekend ever. Damn those were tasty.

Thanks for providing that link. I knew about OSM, but didn’t fully grasp that (duh) it’s open which means I can help with the data. Time to get busy! :)

It’s definitely a risky move, for the reasons you already called out. But sane? Yeah, probably. I’ve known a few people over the years that have done similar moves: dropping out of high-pay/prestige positions due to the stresses and general unhappiness. They’ve almost always ended up generally happier for the change. Just don’t be afraid to acknowledge if the move isn’t working. Don’t talk yourself into staying in a bad situation because you don’t want to admit that the move isn’t working.

(but also: drop an update in a few weeks. I’m now curious to see how this goes for you.)

The shortish version is that Musk was caught recently using a POE2 character that he absolutely could not have made on his own. Fragile lil’ fella’ had to buy a top-tier account and stream himself playing to try and prove how great he is… and was immediately called out when it was clear he had little-to-no clue what he was doing.

I loathe the loss of those unique logos, but there is something to be said for the consistency across the family of teams. (still baffles me that an energy drink company has the money to own and do so much but that’s not really on-topic here)

Based on what I’ve seen over the last few years, it’s the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.

Not surprising really. Look back at the history of war and see how many occasions there was a friendly fire incident under the best of circumstances. Russia has already had numerous, often high-profile FF incidents in this war alone. Add in a completely foreign group of fighters speaking a different language, etc, etc… Pretty much inevitable.

Heh, this is exactly what I went through today. I’m a paid Proton user, but ignored Proton Pass when it came out because I was already well-entrenched with BitWarden. Decided today to give it a real look. Generally pretty pleased with what I’m seeing, though I’m not entirely committed to shifting platforms.