I hardly ever consider looking at AAA games. All my time is spent on indie games.

It’s the same with movies, music, books…the big corporations try to make a safe, mediocre, standard experience that will have the broadest appeal without taking risks. To find really good stuff, you need to look to creators who really care about the art (which is a lot more work and has higher risk of being boring, but higher potential for reward too).

Nope. I’ve never used one.

Just be careful about the sim expiring. Each network will have its own rules. The sim I have stipulates that it needs to be topped up at least once every 6 months and a call or SMS sent every 3 months to keep it active.

This is standard practice for me. You don’t even need another flip phone. Most phones come with a dual sim tray. I keep the 2nd sim in my phone and keep the sim switched off in the settings. I do all signups with this number.

Agree. AAA titles aren’t suited to run on a Deck and should be streamed from a PC with remote play…but I this k this is the appeal of having the games in a portable format, that people are willing to put up with such shit performance.

Have you tried Space Cadet pinball?

A warning before you jump in: it’s crazy difficult. It took me about 70 hours of gameplay to be able to finish a play through…but after that it became pretty repeatable once I had learnt how to do it. This is pretty standard, but the failed runs are all fun and the gameplay is excellent and hilarious. I can give some generic starter tips if you want, things I wished I knew before having to learn the hard way (equally learning the hard way is the way rogue-lites are intended to work, so up to you).

The enemies are bullets that are holding guns and shooting bullets at you. You can unlock a gun that looks like a bullet, that shoots bullets that look like guns, that shoot their own bullets. Everything in the game is a pun.

Rogue-lites are basically made to be infinitely re-playable and if I find one I like then I keep going back to it. Enter the Gungeon is a game I’ve played for years. Then there was a while this spot was taken by Slay the Spire and Balatro in turn. Now I’m back to Enter the Gungeon.

I commend you for making excellent use of this community with your very suitable question.

Heavily filter what you consume. Following all news is not the morally correct thing to do, and you can cut back on it.

I’m fighting against this by staying off all social media other than Lemmy. All my news comes from a small number of curated sources, and only in RSS feeds (so I get them in time order rather than bullshit news site headlines prioritisation). I use a lot of keyword filters on Lemmy and in my RSS news (Covid, Trump, Biden, most American news, anything that is meaningless to me is blocked before it can show up on my screen).

TLDR news is a particularly good YouTube channel. They have really well presented news and pick out a few important events to report on. I find that’s more than enough for me for news consumption.

I’m growing a bit tired of the gameplay loop

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

My chart would be even more skewed to the Deck.

The Deck is amazing with young kids around. Desktop gaming sessions are impossible until after their bedtime. Being able to pickup and play and put the console to standby in an instant and move to another room with the kids is amazing. I wouldn’t get any game time if I didn’t have a portability.

It really helps that I almost exclusively play Indies which the Deck is really perfect for.

RIP Apex on Linux

If you can charge for something mandatory (minimum requirement for a decent job, house, healthcare) then you can set whatever price you want for it. You just need to push it to the limit of what people can finance to keep paying for over their whole lives.

Understandable, but it’s a significant diifculty in migrating fully to Linux when PDFs are used everywhere and there are solutions that work well on Windows. This is one of the few things I will get my wife’s Windows laptop for.

I’m the same with committing to Linux completely.

Previously, my Apex Legends account with hundreds of hours and unlocks got banned for no reason, but I made a new account and played on. Then they banned Linux and I’ve never looked back.

Now I’m looking forward to not being able to play 2XKO as well.

OpenSUSE doesn’t get recommended enough. Great distro I’ve settled with permanently after trying all the popular ones.

I’ve been through a lot of options trying to get the same functionality you mentioned. I’ve never found a single app that works particularly well. I’m surprised the state of PDF apps is so poor in Linux. Others have mentioned a bunch of apps and each fails in some major way. I’ll come back and check this comment section later for new suggestions for my own sake too.

The world is always on the edge of destruction. There’s always an economic crisis, humanitarian crisis, war, natural disaster, etc going on all the time. Our parents lived in the end of days with the threat of imminent nuclear war, endlessly rising violent crime and endless spread of HIV.

The real problem is how news is reported and talked about. How society panics and turns on each other on public forums. How all sense of community is lost and individual consumption is all that matters.

I’m fighting against this by staying off all social media other than Lemmy. All my news comes from a small number of curated sources, and only in RSS feeds (so I get them in time order rather than bullshit news site headlines prioritisation). I use a lot of keyword filters on Lemmy and in my RSS news (Covid, Trump, Biden, most American news, anything that is meaningless to me is blocked immediately).

Also, embrace Nihilism. All of this is meaningless. If the world is going to end, then tomorrow is as good a day as any for it to end. Do what you value in the time you have. Maybe even stop following news completely. Build tolerance and acceptance in your mind.

Then you get power-creep. TTK just gets shorter and shorter as everyone gets stronger and the game becomes a twitch shooter to get the first shot in. You have to balance by bringing some things down a notch.