The choice to use CloudFlare is made by whoever made the website you are visiting

Analogue Pocket also supports 3rd party emulator cores, so you can very easily play ROMs or even other consoles.

Ps5 controller is like $70, the Steam Controller has more features than that, and the OG Steam Controller was pretty expensive. I’d be shocked if it’s under $100. I’m expecting it in the $150-$200 range. But we’ll see, I’d love to be proven wrong

inb4 someone says “just try xyz!”

lol fair enough

I don’t have a smart TV.

Honestly where did you get one? When I was shopping for a TV a couple years ago I wanted to get one without any built in smart TV software and I could not find one

Take a look at Sunshine and Moonlight.

You install Sunshine on the PC and Moonlight on whatever is connected to the TV. Your TV probably has a “Smart TV App Store” that already has Moonlight available to download.

It should work well with the default settings, and has very low latency.

The controller is going to be closer to $200

It’s much better for games that were designed around VR in mind.

Some of my personal favorite recommendations:

• Beat Saber
• Super Hot
• I Expect you to Die (trilogy)
• Half Life Alyx
• The Myst and Riven remakes

I just checked and I’ve gotten over 100 hours out of mine so far.

It’s kinda scary that Europe is so willing to let all of their private messages go through an American data broker company that is well known for doing sneaky things to get data they aren’t supposed to have.

SMB3 does not use its unique tools to build new kinds of puzzles or present alternate paths through a level they just make the challenges a little easier.

This is extraordinarily wrong!

There are secrets that you need specific power ups to get to.

• Raccoon/Tanuki are used to fly to secret areas or break blocks with the tail
• Fire is used to melt blocks in the ice world
• Frog can swim against strong currents
• If you start some levels with an invincible star from the map, it will cause some blocks to drop a star instead of a coin, letting you chain invincibility through the whole level
• Tanuki and Hammer aren’t necessary for anything in the main game, but they are for some e-reader levels where they can break blocks that can’t be broken normally

The GBA remake of A got color improvements over the OG NES version

The monitor stand and wheels for the Mac are targeted towards businesses. The same kinds of businesses that will spend $1000 per chair on ugly and uncomfortable office chairs.

Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:

My solution is usually something like:

• really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
• when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
• thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
• When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
• when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
• If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line

This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.

Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.

And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.

Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.

That’s funny, I love Slay the Spire, but I have mixed feeling about Balatro.

Balatro is addicting in that once I start playing I don’t want to stop, and yet after playing for a few hours I couldn’t say for sure I had fun at any point the whole time.

Playing Balatro feels like exploring the backrooms to me - just infinite bland nothingness.

Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.

Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a similar cyberpunk vibe to Cyberpunk 2077 but with better gameplay and plot IMO.

I’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.

That being said, that genre of game is absolutely not for everyone.

It means you have to learn a lot very quickly, which is hard.

Not all Steam games use it as DRM. Many Steam games you can simply launch the executable without Steam installed and it will work.

Still, GOG is much better on that front.

But even games I buy on GOG, I often launch through Steam to take advantage of tools like Proton and Steam Input. Steam’s dominance stems from unwavering commitment to building a good user experience, and I’m not ashamed to reward that with my wallet vote.

There’s a huge difference between adjusting the color mapping of the RAW data and using Photoshop or AI. It’s really hard to get an “objective truth” color mapping, and that certainly doesn’t come by default.

When I take a photo, I want to see the photo I took. If I decide to photoshop something with it, that’s my decision, and it’s no longer a real photo, and I would be a liar if I were to present it as such.

We should not start accepting manipulated images as a replacement for real images, and it’s unacceptable that Samsung didn’t give its users a choice in whether to use the real image or a manipulated one.