Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
512 GB storage is miserly
Eh, my 256 GB Steam Deck is totally fine for the games I play.
upgrading should be cheaper and easier than on something like the Steam Deck. Inside is a full sized, 2280 NVMe drive, instead of the usual 2230 short stack
Yeah, complete non-issue.
At $800 though, it’s a bit pricey.
Hmm, I have some nostalgia for these games, but I’m not sure they’re worth playing today. That said, I may want to play them at some point.
Why can’t Blizzard stop being terrible?
Same. Maybe get a router w/ 2.5G uplink and you’ll get most of the benefits. 2.5G uplink isn’t too expensive, >2.5G is quite pricey.
I mentioned it, but mostly signups bonuses.
For example, here are a few checking accounts I did recently:
I’ve closed Citi, but I’m keeping the others open for a bit before closing (branches are convenient for depositing checks around the holidays).
Likewise for credit cards, here are some I’ve done recently:
I actually use 2 banks (Fidelity brokerage for main, and US Bank for cash and zelle) and usually two credit cards (US Bank Altitude Reserve and some 2% card; was my Costco card and Citi double cash before I got the US Bank card). However, I have some category bonus cards I rotate in every so often, such as my Discover card, which is 5% at Amazon and Target through the end of the year.
Anyway, since I have so many accounts, I need something to keep track of them so I don’t pay maintenance fees or miss a payment or something.
It sounds complicated, but I’ve automated pretty much everything, so I just check in every couple months or so. And I think it’s worth the hassle because I make thousands every year on it.
No, JBOD is not the same as RAID0. With RAID0, you always need the disks in sync because reads need to alternate. With JBOD, as long as your reads are distributed, only one disk at a time needs to be active for a given read and you can benefit from simultaneous reads on different disks. RAID0 will probably give the biggest speedup in a single user scenario, whereas I’d expect JBOD to potentially outperform in a multiuser scenario assuming your OS and filesystem is tuned for it.
RAID0 is pretty much never the solution, and I’d much rather have JBOD than RAID0 in almost every scenario.
RAID1 gives you redundancy while preserving the ability for disks to independently seek, so on competent systems (e.g. Linux and BSD), you’ll get a performance speedup over a single disk and get something that rivals RAID0 in practice. You wouldn’t use it for performance because JBOD is probably just as fast in practice without the storage overhead penalty (again, assuming you properly distribute reads across disks), but you do get some performance benefits, which is nice.
I’ve never used it because it doesn’t work on Linux. However, Heroic works just fine w/ GOG, and apparently the Heroic dev gets a cut from purchases through Heroic, so not being able to properly use GOG Galaxy isn’t really an issue anymore.
I feel this so much sometimes…
I prefer to play, but I don’t have time to dedicate to it. I can listen/watch a game stream while working, on the toilet, or doing chores around the house. I can only play in the evenings and weekends, and only when my kids are otherwise occupied or in bed.
Yeah, watching is worse than playing, but it’s better than doing neither.
If I want to do my hobby, I need to make time for it, whereas if I want to watch videos about my hobby, I can do it on the toilet. It turns out it’s a lot easier to watch than make time for a hobby, hence why I do more of it.
If I didn’t have to work, I’d spend more time doing my hobby. But I do, and I have kids, so hobby time is quite limited.
There are more chores than dishes:
That’s when I watch/listen to streamers, I almost never do it when I could otherwise be gaming. I’ll occasionally listen/watch while gaming though.
They’ll also show replays of important plays, often in slow motion so the fans can get frustrated when a call doesn’t go their way.
I don’t find gaming stressful at all, I just honestly don’t have the time for it. Gaming means my butt needs to be in the chair doing nothing other than playing the game. Watching/listening means I can be doing dishes, folding laundry, or even commuting to work. Very rarely am I totally focused on watching/listening to someone playing a game, and I’m never involved in the chat.
If I had the time, I wouldn’t watch nearly as much, but I don’t, so watching is my surrogate.
Same. I watch VODs about a strategy game I really like playing (EU4) because I rarely have the time to actually dig in to a campaign, so watching/listening to someone else (while I do chores) do what I don’t have for allows me to get some of that connection to a game I love. I do play the game quite a bit (have nearly 1k hours), but not nearly as much as I’d like.
There’s a pretty big difference in what I play vs what I watch though. I generally play action games and watch strategy games, because action games are easy to jump into for an hour or so at a time, whereas strategy games usually need an hour just to remember what I was doing last, so I tend to wait until I can block out an entire evening.
I’m old enough to know that governments should care about taxes and payment traceability.
And cryptocurrencies (esp. the bigger ones) are perhaps the most traceable store of value and is highly regulated. At least in the US, cryptocurrencies are regulated like stocks, so any transaction needs to be properly reported as either a capital gain or loss or you’ll run afoul of the IRS.
Also - all it does it raises energy prices for me and makes GPUs more expensive for me.
It really doesn’t. Crypto mining is only profitable if energy prices are very low, especially if you do it at any kind of scale. Crypto mining in the US is estimated at 0.6-2.3% of total energy use, which is a drop in the bucket.
And mining on GPUs isn’t very profitable, with profitability timelines at ~3 years assuming a very low energy cost of $0.10/kWh. So it’s not really a good option. The big miners have pretty much all moved to ASICs, which won’t impact your GPU prices at all, so the only ones buying GPUs for mining are hobbyists, which are a pretty small market.
Why should I support that?
There are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies, such as:
I think there are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions, I don’t see much point in supporting it as an investment option. So if a vendor supports transactions in cryptocurrencies, I’ll go out of my way to pay w/ crypto, but I’m not interested in trading cryptocurrencies as an investment.
Yup, I have a ridiculous amount (like 8? bank accounts and 15? credit cards), so having something that automatically pulls in transactions is nice.
That said, my main “bank” is a Fidelity brokerage, so I don’t really need those other bank accounts to sync since they mostly exist for temporary transactions, such as Zelle and cash transactions (Fidelity doesn’t support those) and transfers for bank account bonuses (I net a >$2k/year on that). And for credit cards, I mostly use 1-2 credit cards these days, the rest are mostly for signup bonuses.
So for me, the $1.50/month is totally worth it to keep track of all that nonsense. If I only had 3-4 accounts, I’d probably use something like GNUCash instead, but I have >20, and I will for the foreseeable future.
Actual Budget, because it supports SimpleFIN to import my transactions.
It’s still not “automated,” but I have a lot of rules now so it’s getting there.
I’m not super happy w/ how it works, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe I’ll end up adding SimpleFIN to something else, idk.
Because $0 is less than $10.
It certainly does, or at least trading does. There have been times when I want a friend to try a game, but they’re not willing to buy it. If I could swap a game with them (or just gift one), then they could.
When my internet goes down, my devices can still talk to each other. So while I can’t use the internet, I can still stream my shows and access my files and whatnot.
That’s not what a UPS is for though. If everything between you and the ISP had a UPS (including all the infra under the roads and whatnot), you could probably keep the internet going in a power outage. But that’s incredibly unlikely.
That’s really not that much different from 1080p.
1280x800 is totally sufficient on my Steam Deck, and I would very much rather have some better battery life and quieter fans on a handheld than more pixels.
The only things this has that I wish my Steam Deck had are:
The joystick layout seems worse, the bezel doesn’t seem any better, and the trackpads seem uncomfortably low (I use them a lot on point & click adventure games). It’s also unclear if Steam OS is compatible (though I imagine it or something like Bazzite would get there soon). And for $800, I don’t think the negatives outweigh the positives here.