I’m 41 and I still make this mistake all the time.

No matter how old and broken my body gets, I’ll always be a teenager at heart.

That landscape image is called a grid, and you can change it when that game is the first one in your Recent Games list (the one game showing in grid view instead of the normal poster view). If you right-click the grid image in Recent Games, go to Manage, and then click Set Custom Artwork, you can change the grid image.

Any games you want to do this to, you’ll have to start them and then immediately quit them so they’re the first game in your Recent Games list. That’s the only time grid view shows up for any games now.

Before Steam started doing posters for games, your library was composed of nothing but grids. Nowadays, the only time you see a game’s grid is when it’s your most recently played game. So there’s not really a need to change it, unless it stays at the top of your Recent Games for a long time and it’s bugging you.

By the way, you can go to the SteamGridDB to find grids, posters, logos, background images, and icons for every game on Steam. It pulls metadata for every game, then people can upload their own custom artwork and logos. So you can find unique artwork to improve your library. Or add posters to older games that have been abandoned before Steam switched away from grid-only display.

I don’t like having games with blank images, so I update every missing poster, background, and logo that I can in my library.

I still don’t understand why anyone would ever pay for access to news articles. There are plenty of free and legitimate articles on the Internet, and public access TV still broadcasts news. You never need to pay anyone.

Honestly, putting a price on access to news just makes me not trust that organization. It feels like a scam, like paying for bottled water when water is one of the most abundant resources in the world.

Paid subscriptions are only a thing because people bought into it and normalized it instead of boycotting it. That’s why everything is a subscription nowadays and no one can just buy and own a product now. We have to spend our lives paying a regular fee for access to something we never own.

37 was the year I started planning my retirement. At 38, I officially retired. I started growing a beard and was surprised to find a white patch to one side on my chin.

Now at 41, my entire chin has turned white and I have salt-and-pepper hair throughout my beard and head hair.

37 truly is a magical age.

Interesting… This was right about the time that I started getting pop-up messages on my phone about pre-ordering the Pixel 10 Pro and getting $450 off. Coincidence? 🤔

I posted a review here earlier this year, but A Way Out was an excellent 2-player co-op game! I really enjoyed it. Story rich puzzles with some action interspersed. And it’s split-screen even if you’re playing online, so you can see what your partner is up to and coordinate with them. The ending was heart-wrenching too! Such an emotionally impacting story. Check out my review for a spoiler-free intro to that game.

Diablo 3

My wife, two friends, and I all played Diablo IV online together. We beat the main campaign together and had a lot of fun with it. We’re trying to beat the expansion campaign too, but my wife and one friend dropped out, so it’s just been me and a buddy powering through it.

That’s a game where you can just have fun dicking around in the world, even if there isn’t an objective. And it has plenty of endgame content to keep you entertained after you beat the campaign.

hunter2

I literally just saw this movie for the first time last night. Long overdue. It was an excellent film!

Before anyone asks, it’s from Highlander (1986)

“Wshngton” is basically unchanged. It still sounds the same either way you spell it.

As a military veteran, this makes me a little sad… but the whole military discount thing has always made me feel weird. I mean, I’m no hero. I spent 20 years sitting at a desk, fixing computers. Why should I deserve a discount over any other office worker?

I currently live in an area far away from any military bases, so I’ve mostly stopped asking about military/veteran discounts. Most people here aren’t used to military being around this area anyway so there’s rarely a discount to offer. And I don’t really care if I get a discount or not; it doesn’t hurt me to pay full price.

But I’ve definitely worked with service members who would boycott businesses near our bases if they refused to provide a military discount. Some people get really entitled about their status. Those were the worst people I had to deal with in the service.

I’ve definitely wasted many evenings building in this game. I actually had to cut off one of my friends; he was exclusively building in my server and would message me all the time, asking me to boot up Enshrouded and leave it running overnight so he could play.

There is an Enshrouded Dedicated Server you can set up so the game is always running in the background for people to connect to. But I’ve had problems getting it working, and I’d rather not dedicate resources to hosting a game in the background if I only have a couple friends pop in once in a while.

So my friends mostly don’t play unless I’m playing too, which has encouraged me to spend oodles of time in Enshrouded over the past year. There’s a reason it’s my #3 most played game despite only being out for a year and a half.

When I first started playing, when lore was just a small thing you could piece together by reading bits of scrolls and journals scattered around the world, I theorized that The Shroud was keeping the world trapped in stasis. That’s why, no matter how much you changed, it’d always reset back to its original state after you left the area for 30 minutes (or logged out and back in again).

The Flame Altars kept The Shroud out, so you could enact permanent change near them. And your own Flameborn soul ensured nothing changed while you stuck nearby. But no changes would stick anywhere else in the world.

Of course, now there is tons of new lore in the game and my theory is practically debunked. But it’s still my little fan theory. I’m hoping that the final game will have an endgame plot to rid the land of The Shroud permanently. But I’ve been playing so long now, I’m kind of used to it perpetually being around and I’m not all that concerned with its tenacity now.

I haven’t heard anything specific from the developers about wiping gameplay for a final product, but I will say that I’ve been playing since it released and I’ve never once had my progress wiped. The devs have been pretty good about upgrading your progress to match the current build so you don’t need to start over. Even with radical changes, your base building is left untouched.

A friend and I spent weeks building a massive pyramid and temple on an empty hill once. One day, we logged in and found that a new village had been added to the game, near the top of that hill. Our base was completely untouched; everything we changed in our build area stayed the same.

It was weird to see a village spawned right up to our build area, then get cut off right at the border. But we were glad to see that our progress was left untouched.

Even stuff like XP and leveling has been progressing instead of resetting. I maxed out my character’s level and gear and spent months just exploring the game and building stuff, not worrying about character progression. Then when the latest zone unlocked for exploration, I noticed I could level up even higher and upgrade even more abilities in my skill tree. None of my progress was reset for the new zone.

Heck, even with a formally maxed out character, the new zone was surprisingly challenging and I had to work to progress my character’s stats and equipment even more in order to survive there.

When I was a kid (30+ years ago), I used to lie in the grass in my yard at night and stare at the stars. I grew up in the forested countryside, so there wasn’t much light pollution and I could clearly make out constellations.

I joined the US military and left home for 20 years. When I retired, I moved back into my childhood home to help my aging father.

One of the first things I noticed is that almost all the stars are gone. Light pollution from the nearby cities has gotten so bad, my night sky is just a haze now. I can’t see stars clearly anymore.

I’ve read that light pollution has gotten so bad globally that there isn’t anywhere left on Earth - not even Antarctica - that doesn’t experience light pollution to some degree. I wish I could go up on a shuttle and see the stars from outside our atmosphere. That must be such an amazing view, completely unfiltered. Like living underwater your whole life and then finally seeing clearly when you lift your head out of the water for the first time.

It seems like we didn’t vote for this guy and he cheated his way to winning the election. He made suspicious comments about Elon Musk and how he helped with the election, mentioning something about how he’s really good with that technology. Which Musk also mentioned, claiming that Trump would never have been elected without him.

Then there’s an active lawsuit going on where several counties in New York state found that absolutely no one voted for Kamala Harris in their location during the election, despite having large groups of Democrat residents. Their electronic voting machines received patches right before voting started, which is highly suspicious. That’s being investigated right now.

It appears that the election was likely stolen and we have a president who was never elected. This is how fascist takeovers start, and unless people organize against the government, they’re just going to keep enabling this downfall of our country.

Hodor 👀

Yeah, that’s the plan. I’m leaving the originals alone, I’ll just make a new post for those games.

It can definitely seem unfair at times. I mentioned in another comment that it feels like the game has a story it wants to tell and it punishes you for straying too far from the plot. Fortunately, it marks your conversation choices, so if you have to redo conversations, you know which path you previously took.