If you buy ARC Raiders, you’ll have your money’s worth by the time you decide whether you’re enjoying it.

You can easily avoid PVP most of the time by not engaging in combat with other players - the game will put you into like-minded lobbies in a few raids.

ARC is often fairly big and has multiple ways to destroy, as well as multiple points to damage them, with some weapons definitely being easier to use, let alone the grenades. On top of non-combat ways of dealing with them.

And most importantly, the people. You can just join raids solo and run up to people and team up to go do whatever together. You can get helped on most, if not all, things that you might wanna do, but struggle with due to your vision.

And even if you don’t, you’ll love the game for what your vision won’t affect: the chatting and the community and the cool shit you all do.

I’d say go watch some specifically friendly videos, but they just do such lobbies justice.

Fire will still damage them, so Fireball Burners and Blaze Grenades are still there as an option. I think you can also stun your teammates.

There’s been reports of griefing randoms doing this for profit.

That’s a lot of very misdirected effort, with a lot of bad and not-at-all-necessary consequences.

I could not imagine myself in this timeline.

Every time I’m done with it. Same for work. Even for laptops.

The only gaming device I can put to sleep for a longer period of time without feeling weird about it is my Steam Deck, and even in such cases it either means I’ll be back in minutes (essentially putting a game on standby) or a few hours tops.

Your reasoning is solid, but you’re not a KGB agent with a financially challenged background and extreme paranoia with likely assortment of other psychological -pathies that shape your entire worldview.

Also, Putin sure seems like someone who isn’t planning escape routes or anything - he’s burn everything and everyone around him, maybe even himself, if he had to give up power (which we’ve been witnessing for a while).

Even if he had to flee Russia and rely on stashed wealth and secret locations and whatever, he would have probably used another framework, not some already well-known American citizen that does finances.

We’re not in the timeline to doubt anything, but Putin strikes me, a Russian living in Russia and closely following the politics at least of my own country, especially from the not-so-safe side, as someone who would not choose someone he can’t control and have in his grasp to run anything like this.

Not to mention his paranoia, ego mania and the alleged financial skills that, again, allegedly let him win a lot of trust among the people de-facto making big decisions in Russia before he wriggled into presidency.

I don’t doubt that Putin had dedicated financial managers at some point, it’s just hard to belive it could’ve been anyone like Epstein, i.e. someone outside Russia or even Moscow where Putin could blackmail and hurt them or at least first treaten them into obedience, even with the eventual murder somewhere outside Russia (Litvinenko poisioning).

Not that nothing unexpected and hard-to-believe hasn’t been surfacing for a while already, though.

RIP, thanks for the fun.

I used to do this when I delivered pizza.bMy phone wasn’t playing well with the GPS because I had put a custom ROM on it that happened to be too much for the thing, plus aging, but the ROM was too good in every other aspect. So I just studied the map on the same computer we clicked through orders on, remembered my route, and in a couple of weeks I didn’t even need to look at the map before going around our zone.

Still helps me navigate cities to this day, even now that I don’t drive at all.

Although living in a post-Soviet country helps with city/road design, making it rather predictable in ways lol

You’re forgetting the public transport availability, walkability, and facilities being part of the planning, i.e. the design was to include kindergartens, schools, hospitals, shops, etc., all not too far away to access on foot or a short commute that is regular and predictable and also easy to get to. Admittedly, it didn’t always happen, but still resulted in more liveable cities and areas than many of the new neighborhoods being built today in the same cities.

I’m here to offer no answers, but a few fun activities that help me get out of that same mood. I feel you.

• Play some DOOM WADs. It’s December, the Cacowards are here, and it’s a beautiful time of the year to play through some of the most revered levels and mods. Pretty pure if you remember that the original devs open-sourced the engine, the community then built many source ports and now continues to churn out all levels of quality of mods and levels.
• Read some books. Feels bizarre and unusual these days to consciously choose something slower and ad-free and intentional, with nothing to interrupt you (per the power of the medium alone, alone). Not to mention the endless choice of genres and works to choose from. The bonus here is writing stuff yourself, which has a super low barrier of entry.
• Play THE FINALS. It’s been going well for over 8 seasons now and offers the most unique FPS experience so far with its core gamemode and some twists on staple mechanics. As a long-term Counter-Strike player and a massive FPS enjoyer, this one is a breath of fresh air in so many ways.

That’s on top of other wonderful suggestions in this thread.

But I think the most important would be to learn when to slow down and step away from the attention- and data-hungry apps and sites and whatever.

I just wanna say hi, and I remember those days, too.

For a long time, I couldn’t understand people saying they hate the Internet or their phone or anything like that, because I had been having a blast for so long and thought it was one of the most vibrant, fun, educational and useful part of my life that has taught me a lot.

But at some point I found myself scrolling the same site for hours, trying to tear my eyes off screen and telling myself that I wasn’t enjoying myself and that I should stop, but I just couldn’t. That’s when I finally understood.

I try to bring back intention to this. I think what I want to do online first before I do it – what topic to look for when I want to watch a video, what kind of news or discourse I want to read, what’s that on my mind that I want to share. Talking to my peers, I often feel like this kind of approach has long been lost to not thinking for yourself and wanting entertainment to just sort of happen to you, predict what you want, guess.

Big money figuring out the Internet has been a very bad thing.

The “work-in-progress” video proof in question basically showed some interface similar to a video editing program with assets popping in like layers, i.e. no actual drawing or concepts or anything.

Your point is very valid, but it also reads like you haven’t seen the proof – which, if anything, was even more of a nail to the coffin.

Not appreciated here!

I’m going to give you no source for this, but power users are not the people that big tech usually extorts for money and data that easily, not compared to the most of the clientele, and that’s not something that makes the line go up – sometimes the power users manage to educate the non-power users on how to be more of a nuisance to the company, too, which also does not contribute to the line very well, and we all know that MBA considers this treason, theft and punishable by death.

Fair enough. Thanks for the proof!

Fuck Google and all, but don’t dismiss used tech like that. There’s absolute bangers out there going for prices that shouldn’t be reasonable for the value you get out of them with proper software.

Like ThinkPads and Linux, although worse and not entirely semiofficial.

Both of your comments are a testament to why I love the new Doom games – they’re different and don’t seem to be meant to be enjoyed by every fan, every release, every time.

Apart from the first two games (and Doom 64 for that matter), each offers different gameplay and feel and it’s so, so beautiful.

I feel lucky having a blast in each one. Doom 3 is my favorite, actually, especially with the vanilla flashlight (for the uninitiated: where you can either have your weapon out or the flashlight).

I have very similar feelings towards my memories. I’d like to tell you why and offer a solution that’s been very transformative for me – and even for those closest to me.

Writing them down is one of the best things you can do here. Maybe for yourself in general, but that’s a different rabbit hole.

I’m approaching 30 and it’s only for the past couple of years that I’ve been journalling things consistently. I started after stumbling upon a very old notebook that I used for all sorts of stuff: writing short bits of fiction, making small notes, processing my feelings, doodling, etc. Between that moment and the oldest entry passed maybe 5-6 years at the time – and I was shocked to find out how much of that I had forgotten to a point that I felt a jolt reading about them; like a memory injected into my brain, suddenly and all at once.

I can’t say every single one of them was pleasant, but over the years, each and every one of them felt valuable. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be reading about your past self from 10, 20, 30 years ago – that’s gotta be like reading about someone else entirely, but much weirder, because you know you’re the same person.

Write that down. Don’t overthink it – don’t look for systems, don’t optimize, don’t make it pretty. Just write, and in time, you’ll find the way that works for you the most.

And backup. You’re one accident away from losing years or decades worth of your life’s most dearest memories. If you write by hand, either take photos and back them up (multiple times, different mediums), or digitalize them and then do multiple backups as well. I am speaking from experience.

Kaneda… What do you see?

– Searle, Sunshine (2007)

The idea of every nation on Earth actually rallying behind a cause is such a romantic one.

I recently watched Arrival (2016) and teared up thinking about this. Probably because these days it seems to be the most fictious and implausible part of any plotline that has to deal with anything truly global.