I think it’s the first time they’ve done pinball live like that? I was astounded at how good a player he was.

I own the same pinball machine, TNA, and it was awesome to have the creator Scott Danesi on the couch talking with the main couch host, the player’s wife.

It’s got to be a cozy game that doesn’t stress the hardware. Probably Stardew Valley or similar :p

They are doing a pinball speed run this year that I’m super excited about.

Looks like Thursday on the schedule, 16:45 PDT. Total Nuclear Annihilation. Oh I see they have the creator sitting in too, Scott Danesi! That will be great!

We’re number one! /s

Depends on the state / county / city.

In my county, King County in WA state, servers make the same minimum wage everyone else does.

That being said most places offer more than minimum wage when I see signs out with their hiring rates.

Fuck no please don’t start these rumours. I know of no one who tips 25% unless the service was exquisite.

No.

Generally the historical rule is sit down restaurants only, where someone serves you, or tip a driver if your food gets delivered.

So even if you sit down, if you got up to collect your food and/or bussed your dishes yourself then it’s not expected.

At bars generally you tip on all drinks, though I’d say less if all they did was open something and/or pour. Definitely tip on cocktails though.

That being said two things have happened in the past 6 years:

• there was a lot of community support to tip on take out orders during Covid to help local places survive. A lot of places still expect this on take out nowadays which is a shame. That being said I still like supporting local places so tip when I can, but less than I would sitting in and dining there.
• with everyone moving to electronic point of sales systems the owners of lots of places of “fast food” or coffee shops these days are now setting them up so they ask for tips after any transaction, and in many cases where they previously didn’t ask, those tips are not going to staff, just being collected by the owners which may be illegal in some places. Not to mention they always have three suggested tip rates, and there’s no legal rule they be set to anything specific or they be in any order. So one place may be 15%, 18%, 20%, and another place may be 25%, 23%, 20%. So if you’re used to hitting the first option (generally used to be 15%) automatically now you’re way over-tipping your usual amount. This results in customers just not returning if they realized what happened, hurting the overall business. But like most owners / marketers they can’t see past the next quarter or so of transactions and don’t care about long term.

Yeah they had their chance. Audio streaming services have (mostly) managed to figure out licensing agreements so all music is on all platforms.

Video streaming services all created their own walled gardens with various levels of advertising. Paramount even offered an advertising free tier but would happily advertise their own shows before other shows (noticed specifically on Star Trek shows but I imagine other providers do it too).

In the end… Fuck them. I give up on trying to figure out streaming video with all its complications. Back to the seven seas to procure my own.

Yeah also early 40s. Hoped to retire in 3 - 4 years or so based on my finances but it’s getting harder and harder to stick it out.

We’re just going to NIMBY the problem onto someone else?

As is tradition.

Yeah it’s particularly weird in this case because Ubisoft and Valve both have publisher, developer, and distributor departments within each company. So the agreements they signed and put into place are probably somewhat complex.

Looking at the Steam page though it says

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Publisher: Ubisoft

So in this case it’s whatever Ubisoft as a publisher signed / agreed to with Valve when they accepted their distribution terms. These are probably not the same boiler plate terms an indie dev would sign if self publishing.

Yeah but it’s fairly simple.

You can generate Steam keys using the Steam developer tools. This allows a game key to be purchased on any storefront that supports selling them, which can then be activated on Steam.

The main requirement? You can’t price those steam keys on a 3rd party store cheaper than on Steam itself.

For that, it means if the 3rd party store takes a smaller cut than Steam itself would take, the developer makes a bit more profit through almost no additional effort. Steam is the system users use to download and update the game, and cloud save syncing, and community guides, forums, workshop, etc.

The developer is, afaik, more than welcome to also sell a UPlay key if they partner with Ubisoft at any price point they want (regardless of the Steam price) because Ubisoft is the taking on the burden of distribution, etc.

The only price requirement Valve imposes is on selling Steam keys on 3rd party storefronts. Not UPlay keys. Not Xbox keys. Not Epic Store keys.

Edit: and I read the article, while albeit short (can’t access the linked Bloomberg article sadly), they claim exactly that, that the version on UPlay was significantly cheaper than the version on Steam for essentially the same game. Valve was arguing that Rainbow Six Siege needs to change their pricing on UPlay or they would be delisted.

Not sure about Mac support but I suspect Outbound checks most / all of your boxes?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2681030/Outbound/

I’m not sure if you’re making a joke that the rockets are the explosives or if they actually have rockets they launch that are like cluster munitions that drop a bunch of mines in to the water.

Yep. Back in the day all the MUD servers ran on Linux. I wanted to set up my own. I knew my cousin used it so I asked him about it.

He never answered my questions directly. But he did show me how to look up the answer to my question using man pages and/or search for info online.

That first install was so painful… My friend and I didn’t know how to set up the network and it turns out the tulip driver wasn’t installed by default. So we’d boot to Linux, try something to get the network working, write down the error message on a sheet of paper. Boot to windows to research the fix to the error message. Rinse and repeat until we finally got it working.

The funny thing I’ve been reading / seeing is that the paralympics are still ongoing.

The Olympic truce says no one will start a war during the 7 days before the Olympics and for 7 days after the Paralympics finish.

The US and Israel should be banned by the IOC from competing at the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games (even though the host country is the US).

It won’t happen though.

There’s a concerted effort across many dataholders (at least /r/dataholders for sure) to make a full site wide backup across at least 3 copies across volunteers machines before it shuts down.

Alongside the backup team, another team is working on the best way to distribute to others after that (magnet links, archive.org, etc.).

https://minerva-archive.org/

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought “I got this”. Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

I ended up doing Tidal’s free trial. I couldn’t tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).

I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.

What the fuck is up with the huge “swipe for the next article”?

I can’t even read this one with that in the way why would I want to swipe for the next one?