Nope, that’s the insufferable James Cordon

That’s great to hear. I collect game soundtracks. That’s like when I play a new Life is Strange, it’s an instant soundtrack buy.

Well done soldier! Been seeing a lot of your posts here and I always enjoy your retro gaming pics, especially if it’s one of my favorite formative games like Ocarina of Time.

You’re making me want to dust off my old consoles and hook them up. I need to replay Chrono Trigger to honor Akira Toriyama who passed away this year. Would give me a good excuse to get the SNES up and running.

Celeste for $1.99? Hell yes! Insta buy for me, been wanting to play this game so bad.

I, too, was forged in the fires of Macromedia.

Before the dark times. Before the empire.

What good is a 2nd breakfast, if they’re taking the breakfast to Isengard? (Gard, g-g-g-gard)

Luckily the Konami Code prepared you for this moment.

Found the shirt!

https://gatatee.com/campaign/alex-schaefer-bankers-behind-bars-bad-for-america-shitibank-were-felons-crooks-shirt

Edit: Ah these are just American banks. Would be nice to slap a big ol’ Deutsche Bank on here too in the largest possible font.

They’re strange markings to me, like some form of elvish. I don’t even read it anymore.

Microsoft has been radicalizing me more and more these days.

I have an i7-12700k and an RTX 3080. I heard Nvidia is tricky because of drivers, but any issues with using intel CPUs with Linux?

Where should I, a complete noob, begin? I’m intermediately technical, moderate/semi-intermediate with command line, etc. Is Mint the best way to go?

I tried pop_OS! a few years ago but my computer couldn’t run it well for some reason - lots of lag despite having an i7 7700k at the time and installing it on a separate spare SSD. Reinstalled it twice but still had issues with noticeable lag in the OS. My specs were great, but that OS turned me off unless it has substantially improved since then.

Totally agree with the modern gaming landscape. It’s exhausting dealing with all the predatory tracking, root kits, privacy invasion, heavy monetization, broken games with promises to “do better”, etc. Thankfully there are many games out there to enjoy that don’t do these things.

Personally I love the option of devs selling DLCs where the value is there: it has a reasonable price and it expands the game in a level that I’m comfortable paying for. I will happily buy DLC of games I love.

What I can’t stand, and absolutely am repulsed by, is games that have kill switches or can be taken away from me without my permission. If when I buy the game, if the button says “Buy”, then I should own it. If they’re going to have kill switches or activation server shutdowns that render my game unplayable, then they should change the button to “Temporarily pay to lease it for some time where we will later take this game from you without your permission”. I’d at least appreciate their honesty that way.

Ever since Ubisoft warned it would shut down activation servers for my Wii U copy of Splinter Cell Blacklist where I paid full price for all the DLC (since I loved that game so much), I discovered I wouldn’t be able to play my DLC. Thankfully due to significant complaints from gamers, Ubisoft backpedaled and decided not to… for now. But now that I’ve seen that, and continue to see this predatory behavior happening to this day (e.g., The Crew, Helldivers, etc.), I am much more hesitant when it comes to buying video games.

My favorite is the 3DS Era. I was a young adult then, and sure I could say I loved 16 bit, 64 bit eras because I was younger and had much more time to play video games. But I had so much fun with my 3DS.

Specifically - 3-D integration into certain video games introduced a new way to play them, and I enjoyed the new layer in puzzles for games like Mario 3D Land and especially A Link Between Worlds.

But what I miss the most about 3DS was StreetPass. How fun it was taking my 3DS everywhere and getting visitors in both my games plus in StreetPass Plaza! I loved the hell out of those mini games and would drive all over the place to different hotspots and collect visitors! Carrying it work and making friends over StreetPass was also such a nice bonus.

Gaming was so much fun in this era and on this console. Probably still my favorite console due to all these memories tied up with it. I could get in so many gaming sessions, and if I needed to handle something quickly I could just fold it shut and go about my day. The OG suspend lol.

P.S - Street Pass is of course officially dead along with many other features of the 3DS era. However, there are archival projects so you can at least get visitors to your console. It requires custom firmware, but look into StreetPass 2 for more details.

Ugh - same here! I found this out maybe 6 months ago. Several years ago, I put together a moderate gaming PC to use on the family room TV. My spouse and I wanted to play Stray on release and figured this was the best way to go. The bluetooth was so spotty with our Xbox Series controller we had to sit really close to the TV and near the computer in order to play this game. It wasn’t the best experience playing since sometimes the controller would disconnect, but it was a great game nonetheless!

What was interesting at the time was that my spouse had asked, isn’t there supposed to be an antenna for the wifi, maybe that’s why the bluetooth isn’t working well. And me being dumb and relying on old knowledge, told my spouse, “It’s just for the wifi, not bluetooth, so that won’t help us here.”

Flash forward to 6 months ago, and I was reading the manual for the Gigabyte motherboard and discovered I need to plug that antenna in. I made sure to talk to my spouse and tell them they were right, so they certainly rubbed it in that they were correct (playfully of course)! :)

Good reminder that it’s good to always read manuals because of things like this!

I don’t recommend you do that. You need cool intake air to reach your motherboard and CPU. If you switch those three side fans to exahaust, there is no more cool air reaching your CPU and motherboard. The only air that will reach the CPU is the hot air from the GPU.

Try this setup:

• Bottom - Two intake fans
• Side - Two intake fans
• Rear - One exhaust fan
• Top - One exhaust fan

Tl;dr:

With your current setup, aim for slight positive pressure by setting your exhaust fans at a higher speed than the four intake fans (e.g., exhaust - 900 rpm, intake - 800 rpm). This may give you the best balance in noise, cooling, and airflow.

Advantages of this new setup:

• Reduces noise since you can set all fans to a comfortable speed
• Optimises airflow to achieve either neutral pressure (ideal) or slightly higher positive pressure to reduce dust
• Exhausts hot air at a rate that does not allow the air in the case to heat up

Explanation:

Mount the top exhaust fan as far left as possible (over the top left corner of the motherboard). The ideal airflow pattern in any system, not just computers, is to get air in at the same rate as you get air out. The ideal is neutral airflow where there is no pressure buildup in a case - air leaves as quickly as it comes in. The next preferable pattern is positive pressure - simply because it helps to reduce dust - where a slightly higher volume of air is brought in than exhausted.

With your current setup, you have too much positive pressure, which is very bad for cooling. You’re introducing an unnecessary volume of air that’s bouncing around in that case. The reason your temps get worse is because, while in theory it sounds like shoving more air into the case would be great for cooling, but the problem is that air isn’t leaving the case fast enough! So what happens? You’re shoving so much air into that case at such a fast rate, and it has nowhere to go! Sure you’ve got one exhaust fan that’s trying to pull some air out of the case, and I guess you have some breathing holes at the top, but there’s nothing up there to direct that air, so air will partially get pushed out of there slowly, but it also is forced everywhere in the computer and gets pushed in all the cracks and crevices in that case (e.g., between the glass and the case). In other words - the air in the case is somewhat trapped and it actually gets hotter since it has nowhere to go! This is why your temps are worse by adding those three intake fans. You need to get the hot air out at the same rate it is coming in, and exhaust fans will do that for you.

Key: The air coming in should leave the case at the same rate. A compromise, where the only benefit is to help reduce dust, is to have the air leave the case at a slightly lower rate than it came in.

You only need one rear and one exhaust fan. You’ll see other builds with three fans mounted on the top, but that is extremely wasteful and misguided. Those extra fans end up exhausting cool intake air before it even has a chance to blow over the motherboard.

Set your exhaust fans slightly higher than the speed of your four intake fans to help balance them out. It is two exhaust vs four intake, so you can try something like this: intakes at 800 rpm, exhaust at 900 rpm. Of course, set up appropriate fan curves when you’re introducing load to the CPU and GPU so they ramp up appropriately.

As for optimization, your definition of noise may be different from others. Introduce sustained load to your PC, and then while you have that load, play around with your fan settings to figure out what you’re comfortable with and set the fan curves appropriately so that they gradually ramp and stay at consistent speeds.

Load Balancers everywhere named Samwise: “You mean we don’t have to share the load?”

This is something I’ve thought about too. I have some rare items on old DVDs that should be preserved. I’d love to upload it to Archive.org, but I’m hesitant because I don’t know if personal identifiers get attached to the media.

If I use a program like MakeMKV to rip my DVD to a computer, how do I check the file if there’s any personal identifiers? I’m aware I can right click and pick “Remover Personal Information” or whatever in Windows, but is there anything else that would attach any hardware identifiers to it? I want to preserve some of these discs since they’re long out of print and the company that distributed it is no more and you can’t buy this anywhere. I just don’t want my uploads to be linked back to me.

Ubisoft in 2031:

We’re pushing AAAA gaming forward, to grow our fledgling AAAA Gamer-base! We are excited to introduce AAAA-as-a-Service. We think you’re gonna love our AAAAaS.

Stay tuned in 2032, when we launch our connected AAAA-as-a-Service-Subscription! Now you’ll be able to get ground-breaking AAAAaSS gaming at an affordable value. Paid subscribers will get even more checklists, even more overwhelming map icons, and an even larger empty world with no payoff to explore to complete in our games! Do you love going here and pressing the A button? What if you could complete those map markers while not only pressing the A button to end the mission, but instead, having to swipe your credit card while timing the press of the A button? We feel this rewarding challenge will introduce a sense of pride and accomplishment in gamers, and introduce more money in our coffers.

Gamers:

Dude, just create new innovative games with new IPs that aren’t monetized to hell! We’ll buy those! We miss the old Splinter Cell days.

Uibsoft:

MoNeTiZaTiOn, you say??!! Splinter Cell as a Service, you say?! We hear you loud and clear!

The different school in 8 months after Skull and Bones launch:

Our curriculum isn’t doing well. This is not the curriculum we wanted to deliver. Players expect better, yada yada yada, you know the usual school’s apology stuff. We need to lay off 100% of teachers so as to realign, synergize, refocus, retool, and remoney our money-making money curriculum disguised as a “game”. We will do better. We hear you loud and clear (kind of), and we probably learned a lesson of some kind.

User accidentally opens Uplay when trying to double-click Steam

A store banner ad shows ‘Skull and Bones’

User immediately frowns in disgust and tries to spam the X button to quit Uplay

Uplay privacy-invading telemetry captures an image of the user frowning via the webcam, and tracks the movement of the mouse cursor moving across the banner ad of ‘Skull and Bones’

Uplay closes, telemetry is uploaded to Ubisoft’s servers

Ubisoft: