I run into that same issue from time to time. Another one I run into is when I click on items on the task bar it doesn’t bring it up as the active window even when everything else is working. I have to ALT+tab to bring up any Window or minimize every window just to find the one I want and it is absolutely infuriating.

I use windows 10 at home while I use windows 11 at work. The only thing I like about windows 11 is tabs in the file explorer. Besides that I’ve had to deal with Windows Explorer crashing on a daily basis, task bar freezing completely multiple times a week, certain software straight up not working that I need to get work done, programs crashing that work perfectly fine on 10, internet connectivity issues (usually DNS for some fucking reason), periodically hearing the disconnect sound for a device even when everything is still working, awful drop down menus, needing to change the registry just to get basic features that 10 has, and the list goes on and on. At home everything just works. I’ve been testing Linux and have been getting better stability than Windows 11 and I feel like every week there’s a new problem.

There’s only so many omens my brain can handle in the span of a year. At this rate imma have a stroke by next Christmas.

I don’t know about y’all, but my email consists 95% of confirmation emails and password reset requests. Not saying this isn’t a major privacy violation, just that it doesn’t seem like a good source of data unless the purpose is to make automated emails but with extra steps.

With how much external funding gets shoved into AI startups these days, I feel like 90% of AI startups are basically just a pump and dump with extra steps and targeted at investors. He’s probably already gotten millions in investments already just by this announcement.

Whether you like the idea of SteamOS or not, this will be the easiest way to get Linux into the mainstream for gamers. And at a time when Windows is forcing everyone to buy a new PC it really couldn’t come sooner. If Steam timed this right they could really fuck over Microsoft. I honestly can’t think of a more hilarious scenario in which Windows potentially gets dethroned.

Steam gets a lot of deserved flak for their anti-consumer practices and gambling, but it’s honestly amazing how much they can do as a company. It’s amazing the things you can accomplish when you don’t have shareholders to deal with.

I feel like they’ve earned it because they’ve put in the most work. They are the best in the game because they make the user experience the best there is. EA, Ubisoft, and Microsoft have/had their own storefronts or launchers but they are clunky and unpleasant to deal with and the only benefits they had were exclusives. They’ve never put any effort into user experience and were mainly doing it to make themselves more money and it definitely showed. The only one that’s ever been a real competitor is Epic Launcher. And while it has gotten better over the years, the user experience is still not anywhere near Steam. And even now the Epic Launcher is still unpleasant to deal with in a lot of cases unless you just use it to play Fortnite.

With Steam everything just works and is basically seamless. Not only that, before Steam the modding community for most games had an immense learning curve and most people just avoided it save for Minecraft. And as far as I can tell you can’t even mod games you buy on the Microsoft Store because their file structure is atrocious.

The only storefront I wish was better/more popular was GOG. It’s not bad and has a lot of benefits (Like no DRM and offline installers), but Steam just makes everything so easy it’s hard not to get stuck with them once you’ve started.

Well, yeah, I know that. The problem is that I do want to finish them, I just never do. I want to know the storyline, the lore, the ending, the plot twist, the emotional scenes, I love it all as an experience. I just know that if I don’t lock in I’ll never know the story and how it ends. And as long as I stay locked in I enjoy it thoroughly. If anything, taking breaks from the game makes it not my main focus and then it does become a chore which is when I lose interest. I’m grinding it out while I enjoy it specifically so it does not become a chore.

I mostly go for quality of life and stability ones. There are some decent guides on the Steam forums which I usually go through when I’m modding it. I usually just go for the unofficial patch, the view distance one, and a few more small ones. I’m kind of a purist so I don’t like all the graphics update ones but there are some that are just essential. You’ll have to get the MWSE (Morrowind Script Extender) in order to get some of them to work. I’ll link one of the guides that I usually skim through to pick and choose which ones I want. The one for view distance is called Distant Land and requires the enhanced graphics mod.

It’ll be a bit of work, but once your done you’ll have a much better time.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2208675449

I definitely recommend heavily modding it. One I cannot live without when playing is the one that let’s you increase the view distance further than two feet in front of your face. Its such a beautiful game and it’s kind of a shame that the hardware limited the view distance in the first place.

Same for me but with Shadow of Mordor. I beat it eventually after a few years but now I wanna replay it before I go to Shadow of War even though I know I’ll never get around to it. Such is life I guess. :)

You can have friends too. Do you wanna be friends?

I did that with Final Fantasy X twice before I finally beat it. I was literally two boss fights from the end of the game and just dropped it for no reason both times even though I absolutely love that game. Glad I finally beat it though because that game is amazing.

I didn’t beat the main quest Skyrim, Oblivion, or Morrowind until at least a decade after I bought them. Didn’t even beat Morrowind until just a couple years ago. :P

I do this with games too. It takes literal years for me to beat games because I always reach a point where I get distracted by something else and then drop my current game for over a year and feel no motivation to continue once I’ve pivoted. These days if I want to beat a game I’ll lock in and do nothing but play that game for days on end. New game came out? Nah, I gotta stay locked. Friends hanging out online playing games together? Nope. Locked in. I’ll even turn off my phone and other monitors just to make sure I don’t get distracted.

With TV shows it’s almost impossible to lock in sometimes because they just take too long. I can keep my attention on one thing for a few weeks at a time but I can’t do it for the amount of time a show requires unless I somehow habitualize it into my day like watching it when I eat dinner. And even then I’ll often times switch shows about halfway through.

I’m a musician, an artist, and I was even started to get into voice acting so I have hated generative AI from the beginning. These are all things that are insanely difficult to get jobs in and money from and now it is basically impossible. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are genuinely good uses for AI when it comes to science and medicine and I am a strong advocate of those kinds of AI. The problem with AI is that it is being developed in a purposefully disruptive and malicious way. They’re not innovating for the sake of innovation, they are innovating for the sake of making more money and generally making peoples lives worse.

They could make an AI model that artists can use to help in the creative process by making some of the more tedious aspects easier, but they’d rather steal everyone elses art and replace you. They could make writing easier by developing tools that can make putting your thoughts onto paper a more seemless experience that can open the door to those that may struggle with literacy and dyslexia, but they’d rather steal everything you write and replace you. They could make AI tools that can make making music easier by creating tools that make the post processing part easy and basically automated like how Autotune works, but they’d rather steal everyone’s music and make their own as they replace you.

We’ve developed the greatest technology of the past decade and put it into the hands of people that do not care about us and only want to suck as much money out of our pockets as much as possible and manipulate us against each other while we all lose our jobs to the tools that were supposed to make our jobs easier. And now it’s to the point in the US that these companies have invested so much money and infrastructure into it that backing down is not an option anymore without collapsing the entire economy. And all the while they are destroying neighborhoods and peoples lives with their data centers just to maybe one day possibly achieve AGI if it’s even possible with current AI architecture, which it probably isn’t. When OpenAI is prioritizing generated videos and being able to have sex with ChatGPT, that should be a clear sign that they have lost the plot entirely.

Just to be clear this is all aimed at generative AI. AI is an amazing technology that can do a lot of amazing things. The problem is that the companies making generative AI are actively using them to make peoples lives worse just for the sake of money and are barely even hiding it. And yeah I know, that’s capitalism baby. But this feels different. They aren’t competing against each other, they are competing against us, our rights, our freedom, our privacy, and our money. It feels like the corporations stopped fighting each other and turned all their fighting spirit onto the general population.

Back in like the late 2010s it was an old coworker of mine. He came in two years after i started and swooped in and took the promotion I was gonna get because he went to highschool with my bosses daughter. I’d be more mad at the boss but this guy was absolutely insufferable about it and would boast about it literally every day and talk about how awesome he was. Would always talk about how amazing he was at his job but would crack under pressure pretty much every time. He was also one of those guys that’s nice to your face but talks mad shit when you leave the room. Huge “fuckboy” energy too and always felt like he was entitled to everything. He was the kinda guy that would try to fuck your ex girlfriend the day you broke up yet still be friendly to your face. And I know that because my ex told me about it after the fact. Bro straight up sent her a request on Snapchat and Facebook out of the blue within a week after only meeting her once before.

Glad I don’t work with that guy anymore and that I have a much better job. That guy lives rent free in my head and I fucking hate that he does.

This is purely anecdotal, but I have been running into a lot of DNS issues over the past couple months where I work. 3 of the computers and even one of the laptops for remote work were having DNS issues that needed to be fixed. One even needed Windows reinstalled after fixing the DNS issue (Which was probably unrelated, but worth mentioning)

I’m honestly starting to think that the internet in general might be imploding. Not sure why, but replacing so many developers and programmers with AI might be responsible. Who knows, but it’s definitely very strange.

I’ve never been able to enjoy any other stealth game because of Thief 1 + 2. I played them back in the early 2000s and they were the very first stealth games I ever played. I think because they are the grandfather of stealth games and are, in my opinion, the peak of stealth games, I ended up setting my expectations too high for other games and always left them slightly or even massively disappointed. Even the shitty parts of Thief 1 where it feels barely even like a stealth game are still better than games that call themselves stealth games like Assassin’s Creed.

In modern stealth games it doesn’t really punish you for being clumsy or getting caught. In most of those circumstances it just turns into an action game. Even some of the good stealth games like Dishonered very rarely punish you. In Thief if you get caught 7 out of 10 times you are just screwed. Garrett isn’t a strong and well trained fighter like you are in most games, he’s just a Thief and that’s what he’s best at. Combat is never the smart or reliable option. And in harder difficulties you straight up fail the mission if you kill anyone.

Another thing that sets Thief apart is that it treats you like a regular dude and not some badass super human that always has all the info you need for a mission. Sometimes you get incomplete maps that you have to take notes on yourself. Sometimes you don’t even get a map that is reliable and you have to use it based on vibes. Sometimes you get thrown into a mission completely unprepared and go up against enemies and situations that are extremely difficult. Sometimes you get missions that are super straight forward and easy if you know how to be a thief.

All in all, these games are definitely peak stealth games. The first one is waaay more painful and some of the missions are just awful. But the good ones stand out and you definitely feel relieved when you get to them. The second game is 10x better than the first and has a lot less bullshit and a lot more stealth. Plus you get all kinds of cooler stuff because of lore reasons and it just makes it so much more enjoyable. I highly recommend to anyone that truly likes stealth games to play them if you haven’t. Thief 1 is a decent 8/10 for me and Thief 2 is an easy 10/10, especially for the stealth genre.

A good rule of thumb that I feel like everyone needs to know for locating bots is to look for default usernames. When you make an account, Reddit gives you a randomly generated name that consists of “[word][word][4 digit number]” unless you specify otherwise. 8 out of 10 times the account is less than two years old and barely posts outside of these subreddits, and even when they do it is very minimal and only done to “seem normal.” And when you really start to dig deep you can obviously see a “hello fellow redditors” type of behavior and writing style.

There are two examples in this very post: SwimmerPlus3383 InternationalYou4065

InternationalYou4065: Only a few months old, has all their content hidden, and yet has over 20k karma somehow.

SwimmerPlus3383: Slightly older, but still within the timeframe of mass bots flooding Reddit. Low effort posts that pretty much accomplish nothing or straight up propaganda. Only posts in a few different subs but consistently has poor English.

It’s the same thing in the majority of right wing subreddits. Even the verified ones follow this rubric. Sometimes it’s literally a post by a bot filled with bots commenting and bots upvoting. It’s basically dead and there are hardly any actual people in there except when there’s big news. These places are the definition of “dead internet theory.”