Yeah, it’s high on my list. Along with a half dozen other AAAs from the last decade. I think Cyberpunk is next on my list, though there’s a Fallout languishing on my Deck I keep meaning to go back to.

At this point, I think my pavlov-like reaction to Thursdays and grabbing the free games is the game now. I know full well I’ll never play these games.

Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.

Oh, fine - if you’re going to just Willy nilly divulge your (checks notes) family Secret Santa present list to just anyone. You may as well write your medical history with a nude picture of yourself on a postcard and send it via UPS to People Magazine!!1!

R’amen

I think I read your title differently - as in, gravity would ebb and flow like wind or rain or barometric pressure or temperature. In normal days the gravity might be mostly constant, or may fluctuate a few percent as the day goes on, rising and falling over the diurnal cycle. But at times a gravity storm could blow through, causing wild fluctuations from just a few percent (or even reversing!) to a couple hundred percent, causing travelers to lose their un-secured cargo or to be pinned in place until the storm subsides. Locals would know the dangers and have things easily tied down, or beds for riding a gravity storm in relative comfort, but any huge storms people would evacuate, praying that the fluctuations wouldn’t destroy their homes or farms. (And now I’m imagining the end of O Brother Where Art Thou with the cow on the roof)

That’s an urban legend. Prices are aggregated and cataloged by ITA matrix (purchased by google/alphabet a decade ago). The only time a price change is when the airline itself changes the current retail price.

Now, if you’re using a third party service - like Priceline or Travelocity - to check and book tickets (which is a terrible idea, btw) they may track your history and alter their price, but the master index (served by google flights from ITA matrix) will not change for you, personally, or your specific ip or other identifier.

Note: Airlines will adjust their prices based on interest/purchases, so if you’re hitting a flight with requests to bill so hard that the airline thinks the flight is popular, or you go through the reservation process far enough to “fill” a particular fare class, then the price will change - but it will change for everyone, not just you. Similarly, Amazon will raise pricing during a buying surge - but it’s for everyone, not just you.

On the (mostly) plus side for untracked browsing - as long as it’s so tight that you’re hopping ips and avoiding any back end fingerprinting of your system - Many merchants do source-based pricing. Ex: if you go to book certain services direct vs following a referral link (like via a cash back site or association) you my find different pricing. Using and AARP link to some travel services will result in a 25-30% price increase, to offset the 20% rate coupon they offer, plus a little coin for themselves. Other sites will also trigger cost basis alterations - especially for services which are hard to identify or compare a fixed cost.

All my main numbers VoIP are Google. I’ve got two others at a large (Canadian, iirc) provider.

A second sim is the only options for some. Either ChatGPT or one of those requires a real-world mobile number. Anything on a VoIP is blacklisted. I literally can’t sign up for it or a couple other oddball services (like the Dunkin’ app*) because I refuse to divulge my carrier number to anyone but my family and 2-3 close friends. I have a (former) mobile number and two former landline numbers on VoIP that are my real, active numbers but some services simply refuse to use them.

* I’d use my freebie backup sim for registration, but many use that # as their required+sole 2FA “security“ so signing up with it is useless as I’d have to use that phone every time I interacted. Maybe it’s time to look into eSIMs.

Blood, Gore, Violence and Nudity? For free? Sign. Me. Up.

I kid of course. Nowadays I just get all of them (except that PC builder and 911 operator stuff…). I only have about 30-40 years left in my life, and I doubt I’ll ever clear my Epic freebie backlog.

Your passport contains biometric data (your photo - not as complete as a depth scan or multi-spectral image, but still biometric).

There are two (well, threeish, legitimate) reasons for biometric. First, it is currently harder to fake. Digital passports are difficult but not impossible and non-digital are relatively easy, especially for state actors. Second people are stupid (or unlucky) and lose their passports, which leads to a shit-ton of paperwork to fix. Third, and this is really the rule for which lost docs are a sub-problem, efficiency. Even the cheapest front-line human costs about $100 an hour, including management, training, benefits, etc and I’ve yet to meet an international (or domestic) traveler who enjoys waiting in hour+ lines to get through passport control. Less contact time / zero friction interfaces are both better for passenger attitude and cost efficiency.

Until we stop the practice of drawing imaginary lines on the planet and regulating which side each person is allowed to be on, nearly every travelers and pretty much all the boarder control apparatus is going to want to spend as little time and money on one another as possible.

From a practical perspective? They could eventually cross reference the exits to arrivals, automatically flagging those who have overstated their visa (or, more specifically, automatically clearing those who have left). The data (exit data) is generally useful for all sorts of mundane statistical work. From an automation standpoint it’s both cost effective and time saving. Anyone who’s queued up in an hour+ line to get through border patrol will attest that the prices can be infuriatingly slow.

Of course, that the data can be used for non-official or privacy-adverse uses doesn’t make the collection ok, but that fact also doesn’t mean that the data isn’t useful for its overly intended purpose (automated tracking of everyone who leaves)

Sounds like the real problem is publishers not actually finishing their games before release, so even if reviewers did try to play the whole thing, they couldn’t. The switch to digital downloads (over pressed media) has created an opportunity to do more with a game, but the reality is that it’s simply made games more expensive (since there is no resale market) and, worse, created an entire generation of game developers and managers who think that the launch date product is like a rough draft copy of their book report for Freshman English.

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Though exclusively single player, ABZU is also a nice, atmospheric game as well.

Esp. when you get to the Blood and Wine expansion. The stars at night are beautiful.

Huh, I didn’t think it was too bad. The movement/sense/fighting I thought was pretty good, and that was back when I was just (re-)starting gaming and hadn’t touched a controller in decades. Granted, it didn’t go much into any of the crafting or stat/character enhancement strategy except as a “first time in” walkthrough of each screen.

Funny, thinking back to that tutorial they teach you a couple of mechanics (like rebooting your ship) that are almost never used in game. OTOH, there are, what, 300 different bindings in the game now?

I found the Odyssey tutorial was frustratingly opaque as to how the entire new UI worked.

Evernote. I’m not sure why I even stayed with them for so long; probably the pain of moving after so many years. Switched to Joplin before they doubled their fees for zero new (useful) features.

CNC can still be fun. You just need to be confident in your safe word.