#4 looks like a shoehorn. Is that even concave enough to use as a spoon? Likely not. That’s out.

#3 is definitely not a spoon. No idea what it is, but it’s not gonna work well as a spoon. Not gonna deal with that one.

#2 is actually a spoon, but a small one. It’ll be frustrating to use forever. I’d prefer not to use it.

#1 is actually a decent sized spoon. Oddly shaped, but it’ll hold a decent amount of food or liquid. I guess I could live with that one.

But she’s the Hero™ fighting against the Bad Guys™. Branding is everything.

But yeah, viewed objectively from a third party perspective, a lot of heroes in games and movies are actually borderline villains. Inserting themselves into a situation they don’t need to be involved in, and then the end justify the means. They may murder tons of no-name henchmen, but a greater threat to society has been eliminated!

I actually find it interesting that a lot of superhero characters came from healthy, sane family environments and fight to protect the Status Quo™, while most villains come from hardship and trauma and attempt to change the Status Quo™ that allowed their injustice of a life to exist, so others don’t suffer the same fate.

But some happy-go-lucky hero always comes by and stops them because their plan changes the Status Quo™. And we can’t accept changes to our structured social environment!

I still clearly remember others’ embarrassing, cringey moments from my high school years, and I’m in my 40s now. I shudder thinking about who still remembers the embarrassing things I said/did way back in my childhood.

I served in the US military for 20 years, from 2002-2022. At least twice that I can recall, they didn’t pass a budget in time and we were told that we wouldn’t be paid until it was resolved, but to keep working like normal and we’d eventually get paid. Both times it was a very short time before it was resolved and we did eventually get paid again. I think the longest time was about two or three weeks.

For members who used USAA for a bank (a company exclusively for military members and their families), the bank automatically deposited our paychecks in our account on time, because they said they knew the US government was good for it. Anyone who used another bank just had to wait for the government to actually pay us.

If you know anything about military members (especially young service members), a decent amount of them live paycheck to paycheck, not because they have to, but because they’re irresponsible with their money. The military pays you well, while also providing food and housing allowances on top of your pay, so your necessities are covered and your base pay is basically pocket money to spend as you like. As such, a lot of service members go out and spend that money and end up with very little in their savings.

So when a government shutdown hits like this, suddenly that safety net of a monthly housing allowance is gone and service members need to pull their own spending money to pay for rent and utilities. Which can be hard to scrounge up last-minute for some.

I was always very fiscally responsible during my service, but most of the people I worked with would go out partying and drinking every week (some every night!) and would be struggling for cash by the next paycheck. Which came bi-monthly for us; we were paid on the 1st and 15th of every month. So there was always a lot of stress and anxiety when the government announced a shutdown.

It’s not FOSS, but Plex does that. I host my music from a server I built at home (you can literally just use your desktop PC) and then I have access to it from anywhere. I like to stream it to the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car via Bluetooth, then I have my own homemade “radio” on the go. No ads, just my own music that I can shuffle through.

I paid for the Lifetime Plex Pass, which gave me full access to all their features and apps. It’s expensive, but it’s a one-time payment, vs. their monthly subscription which can add up over time.

I actually got annoyed at Plex for remembering exactly where I was in every song. I’d return to an album I hadn’t heard in a while and it would skip right to where I left off in each song instead of playing from the beginning of the song

Sometimes while trying to find a particular song, I’d skip around in a track, then move to the next until I found it. Then when I returned to that album later, every song would start somewhere in the middle. I eventually needed to turn that feature off. It still remembers exactly where I left off the last time I played music, but it doesn’t save my place in each individual song anymore. Just the last one I played.

On the app, it keeps a list of all the playlists I’ve recently played, so I can pick up on my latest playlist or scroll back in the history and start up one I played a while ago. This is great because I like to just shuffle my entire library as a playlist while I’m mowing my lawn, but my wife likes to hear specific genres or bands while we’re riding in the car together. So I can just keep alternating back and forth between playlists depending on the situation and it remembers where I left off in each one.

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.