This one is great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffè_sospeso

I am a fan. Live long, and keep wasting my time please!

Yes. We should embrace it. _/notsorry

More seriously, we don’t know. Only time will tell. Take-Two will definitely be looking at redundancies, so it might not be good for all employees. For the IPs, hopefully it can’t get much worse than sitting at Embracer while the company sinks like the Titanic. But Take Two has also had layoffs and shelved projects. One can only hope for the best.

In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.

I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.

There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.

I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.

A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.

I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.

If you buy Backpack Battles you can get a copy of Slay the Spire for free … just sayin’. I mean I am totally not hoping for a lot of people to hop on Backpack Battles, so I will have a lot of people to play against forever. 😏 It has a demo, so no blind buying necessary. It is Early Access but worth every Cent in my eyes.

I am too old to sail the seas. Either I get it legally and convenient or I just stop watching and read a book instead. Not saying others shouldn’t, I had my fair share of years out there, but it’s not for me anymore.

Me: “I would like to uninstall Edge and use Firefox for everything!”
Netflix: “With Firefox I won’t give you best quality even if you pay for it! Use Edge!”
So Edge stays my video streaming browser for now, but only that.

In the past I had to upgrade my PC every 4 years (my first PC run on Windows 3.1), but my last one just works and even the GPU only fell out of minimum requirements of the newest and graphical shiny games end of last year (it even managed to run Starfield although it looked bad and lagged in cities terribly), but my backlog is huge, so I don’t care and if I care I can use Geforce Now or Game Pass for PC and stream that one game I can not play on my rig directly anymore.

Our planet is on fire and consuming less is the only actual solution to that. Everything got more expensive. I literally don’t want to spent a lot of money on a PC that I do not need, because the one I have plays the games I want to play just fine (currently Dave the Diver) and on top throw a perfectly fine machine away, add to CO2 production and need to cut back on other needs I have because everything is so expensive.

My machine is an i7-6700K 4GHz with a GTX 970 and 16 GB DDR 4. And the only reason this is not working with Windows 11 is the CPU and upgrading that would need a new board and at that point I need a new PC. Oh and I tested it at the beginning when Windows 11 came out, I can circumvent the restriction and install Windows 11 anyway, it’s just not guaranteed it will stay working and getting upgrades can be a hassle, but at least for the time I tried it I did get automated updates.

I do not hate Windows, I tried to get Windows 11, I just don’t want to accept that a security feature for businesses makes my consumer PC invalid for it. I am a gamer and I would like to stay with Windows, but I am not buying a new PC unless a vital part of my old one breaks. I rather stay with an unpatched system and do anything that needs security on my phone/tablet on android. And no, I am 58 y.o. and I am not learning Linux, maybe if I were interested in the Steam handheld it would make sense, but I am not.

Oh, hi there!

Microsoft has clarified that it wants its games to be experienced across various devices

Microsoft, please give me streaming with keyboard and mouse. It is not rocket surgery ™ to do that and it is promised now for so long.

Yes do play Malkavian, but maybe not as a first character if you do not know the universe and what a Malkvian is, because it might fry your brain.

Plants vs Zombies on PC.

Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.

They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.

I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that’s it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.

• selling cigarettes to children:
  https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/press-releases/2023_12_08-social-media-report

“The findings of this report make it crystal clear: Big Tobacco is going all-in to target youth on social media and it has to stop,” said Yolonda C. Richardson, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “Tobacco companies are among the most sophisticated advertisers in the world – marketing that reaches millions of kids does not happen by accident. Governments need to urgently address tobacco marketing online and ensure that social media companies are held legally accountable for the tobacco and nicotine marketing appearing on these platforms.”

X-Men, it’s in the name. :D (also: Great reference!)

Germany:

Price indication regulation (Preisangabenverordnung)

All prices stated on the menu must include any applicable surcharges. In other words, the price of the meal is also the final price. The quantity served must also be stated for drinks.

And they do things on Valve Time, not when a stupid plan says it should be done!

That’s why the kid was distressed and the relationship with the father went south, because he said “no” and tried to help his child. That’s the point when kids start to sell their belongings to school mates, steal from parents purses or take their credit cards or spent all money they make with a job on the game and even when they have no money to spent, their minds are in the game all the time and family life is 99% fighting about screen time.

This is not solely about parents not restricting money, this is game developers and publishers hiring psychologists to find ways to make their games as addictive as possible vs. normal people and their children, a multi billion industry vs. ordinary customers. To blame this solely on parents is just wrong.

They probably allowed the kid a decent amount of screen time and some money to spent, like normal parents do. That their kid got pulled into an addiction by an industry that does everything possible to make that happen did happen over time, hard to notice until it is already a problem.

Most people blaming only the parents do not have children and have watched their child cry for days because it can’t have the skin “all the other kids have” and therefore gets bullied in school. All these games on purpose work with group pressure on top of addictive game and loot mechanics. They prey especially on neurodiverse children and adults, FOMO and more.

I only know about this person, probably not who you think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Harbisson

Will two 5 y.o. that shot their grandmothers by accident do?