There’s a set story, but it’s discovered. The world is wide open, and the player can go anywhere right at the start of the game. There’s minimal railroading at any point.

Unless I misunderstood what you meant by emergent narrative. The progression through the game requires the player to learn what to do by interacting with aliens and also exploring a bit. There is an in-game hint system (an alien dialogue tree with prices), but there are often multiple solutions to each “problem”. The player can even get through the game being good or evil – whatever they choose!

The game plays very differently than ME, but you’ll probably find the dialogue trees very familiar. And I think SC2 actually does them better than ME.

What made you buy your monitor?

Having a monitor at all has plenty of killer apps: Anything that it displays that you want to use that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise without a monitor.

But your particular monitor? Well, it looks like the Apple VR thing is about 10x to 20x the price of a basic VR headset. Is your particular monitor 10x to 20x the cost of a regular monitor? If so, there probably is some killer app that made you get a fancy monitor. And maybe it’s something that no other monitor can do… otherwise, why spend 10x to 20x as much?

If the Apple VR thing also has a computer built in (and its own specialized software), then comparing it to a monitor isn’t accurate. It’s not a peripheral when it’s a standalone device.

The conclusion I draw from this is that people don’t like having to wear special glasses or a device strapped to their face, even if it is relatively cheap to produce.

Bingo. I often used the 3D on the 3DS, but that’s because I didn’t have to do anything other than not move the device around too much. So it worked for gaming at home, not on/in a vehicle.

I forgot to mention that part – yeah, the series is still alive, and fans have been waiting for that sequel from the original creators for what, 30 years now?

A game that meaningful should always be given a look, even if it can feel a bit “dated” in some ways.

Thanks for bringing that up!

There’s the game that inspired them from the early 90s, Star Control 2.

It’s free on Steam as Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters, but the best way to play it today is Ur-Quan Masters Mega Mod. So many QoL features!

The game also had some sequels, including Star Control Origins, which is a more modern game, but the story isn’t quite as good.

Star Control 3 exists, but sucks.

And then there’s the series from the 80s that inspired this one, Starflight. That one was too dated for me to get into, though.

Thank you for getting what I meant, lol

I think a lot of people are missing the point, but the commenter that replied to you got it.

What I’m saying is that many people are happy to BS and repeat things that they’ve read or heard as if it were fact. Meanwhile they did get it from their hairdresser. But because they repeated it with confidence, someone else would then repeat it because they read it on the internet from someone who seems to know what they’re talking about.

The cycle continues.

But if people say “I heard from my hairdresser/LLM”, then people know to take it with a grain of salt, or will call someone out on it.

I’m not saying the LLM is a good source, nor am I saying it’s good when someone uses one as a source. I’m saying it’s good when someone mentions that an LLM is their source for something they’re saying.

Hey, at least some people are citing their sources.

How often do people say stuff like that without telling others where it came from? It’s easy enough to accept things as true if they sound reasonable. Having a source means that grain of salt is already there.

My first meeting working in a fully-remote job, I joined a Teams meeting with the whole team (~8 people) 5 minutes early. I wasn’t the host, of course.

People were (invisibly) giving me the side eye.

I soon learned that starting the meeting makes a popup appear on everyone’s screen saying that the meeting started…and also that a lot of people regularly have back-to-back meetings and can’t leave early. (This was mid-pandemic, shortly before it became the norm to end meetings before the hour)

After that, I started joining all virtual meetings either second (by clicking the pop-up that someone else started it), or before XX:01 (or before 1 minute after the meeting time).

In-person, I’ll still show up to the meeting room 5 minutes early, or 15 if it’s a slow day. But do that too often and people think you’re useless, lol

I like arriving early for small talk, instead of having the rushed small talk when the meeting is “supposed” to begin.

Why would I want to subject my pet companion to being forced to pose for pictures with ghosts? That just sounds cruel!

It’s the worst when they do that and have difficult restrictions on passwords.

One place I worked at had limits like “no more than two letters back-to-back”, “no more than two numbers back-to-back and no sequential numbers”.

The rules were available on the password reset screen.

The minimum was only something like 8 characters, so I have to wonder how many people had a1b2c3d? for a password.

Feed those rules to a password cracker and it’d be able to get in easily.

To their credit, I think they did support passwords that were maybe 64 characters long. But after they introduced those weird requirements (probably because some VIPs had stupid passwords like their names + birth year?), I just started hitting the character minimum because I’d have to manually type it in at least once.

Anything that requires regular password resets. It’s fine if it’s changed on the site and in the user’s vault automatically, but if a user has to type in their password with any sort of regularity, it’s a recipe for disaster to require regular changes.

People write predictable or formulaic passwords, or just end up resetting their password more often than necessary because they forgot it (making them more susceptible to phishing).

Recently (since 2020), he’s been blamed for a lot of things that are outside of his jurisdiction and are being done by (mostly conservative/right-wing) premiers (aka. governors?).

E.g…

• Healthcare funding
• Pandemic measures and lockdowns
• International student issues
• Housing
• Employment
• Eduction

In Ontario, these things have been mercilessly mismanaged by Doug Ford. Doug Ford pointed the finger at Trudeau and people are it up. No idea how we’re this stupid, but we keep giving Ford a majority government and blaming Trudeau for Ford’s problems here.

Before 2020, I wouldn’t say Trudeau was ever really hated or unpopular, at least not universally. He was our “at least it’s not the other guy” guy. But now the people who haven’t been paying attention (and don’t understand politics) are being mobilized by the far-right, and a lot of people think his first name starts with an F.

Rock Band 2. Bladder of Steel achievement playing with a full band of 4 (locally).

It’s playing the entire setlist of 84 or so songs all the way through in one sitting. Without pausing or failing.

We did it with all instruments on Medium, but we did it! (I could pass anything on Expert, but maybe not all the way through. My friends were borderline Hard players at best, so Medium was the only way we’d ever be able to do it together)

Also 0s and 1s!

The options are to hope the writing is accurate, or to change the connector to break cross-compatibility.

Buy cables from reputable sources and return anything that doesn’t do what it’s advertised to do, I guess. I like having as few ports as possible! Haha

Or the GameCube…or an add-on to the N64.

The N64’s codename was the Ultra 64 afterall!

For the formal title, yes. To have the power, you just need a bunch of money and a weak, easily-manipulated man to do what you say.

That must be a thick slice of ham. The cold cuts I was picturing are like 20cal per slice at most

There are a lot of Canadians who think Trudeau’s first name begins with an F.

There are a lot of Canadians who want change, and are going to be disappointed when we elect our version of a Republican into office and he doesn’t fix all of our problems in 4 years (or, ugh, 8 or 12).

Additionally, Trudeau has been getting a lot of hate for issues that are actually under the jurisdiction of our premiers (aka. governors, I think?).

E.g., Healthcare, housing, international students, and pandemic lockdowns