I had a really solid year, all things considered:

• ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
• ⭐ Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
• ⭕ Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
• ⭕ Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
• ⭕ Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
• ❌ Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse

People have put worse things in their bodies. Some mildly contaminated chips won’t kill you and probably won’t even give you cancer.

Let’s be honest, though… a standard bag of chips is already kind of bad for you – maybe you should toss them out because you’re better off without them either way? It’s just a bag of chips at the end of the day.

I’ll answer your question with another question: is it Vegan to eat bacon made from a pig you personally raised up from birth after it dies naturally having lived a full life?

If you define Veganism as a diet, then bacon’s bacon. If you define Veganism as a personal reaction to the cruelty of industrial farms, then perhaps this is how you get Vegan bacon. If you define Veganism as something more spiritual, then perhaps desecrating your dear friend’s corpse by eating it is even worse.

ARE YOU SURE?

• No
• Continue

Now that you mention it, isn’t it odd that it feels weird? I wonder exactly where the line starts to come into focus between something as innocuous as paying for a meal and something as taboo as paying for sex? Obviously that’s a question of culture, but it’s entertaining to think about nonetheless…

Like, there’s definitely something kind of unusual about this specific taboo. Speaking from the perspective of modern western culture, I’d say that the following things which share some characteristics with prostitution are all individually qualified as being relatively socially acceptable:

• Paying for therapy (i.e.: buying the service of social comfort)
• Paying for a massage (i.e.: buying the service of physical comfort)
• Having a one night stand (i.e.: receiving the service of sexual comfort without buying it)
• Buying a sex toy (i.e.: buying sexual comfort without involving a service worker)

I posit that there’s something uniquely specific about the direct intersection of service, money, and sexual pleasure which makes prostitution uniquely uncomfortable for (modern western) people to think about. I might be overthinking it, though. Perhaps these three things are already uncomfortable topics to really think about so we naturally want to resist the idea of combining them?

I’m a plaintext git patch sent via email and lost in the maintainer’s spam folder

That’s why my terminal is emacs

I think both are worth playing, but I’d say that it’s a better experience to play the original HL1 first. Black Mesa doesn’t obsolete the original at all IMO – they have very different level designs and aesthetics.

Definitely give it a shot sometime next time a Steam sale comes around (it almost always goes on steep discount). It holds up remarkably well and has a very accessible time-to-beat (12hrs).

Oh! I’d never heard of Premium Lite so I thought you were speaking hypothetically. TIL.

Yeah, that is a lot lower. If they offered that option I’d definitely use it over the $12 one… but I suppose that explains why the pilot never took off, eh?

Fair enough, you need to look out for you. If the money would be missed, don’t pay the bridge troll. Block ads and be free.

FWIW: YouTube Red was basically what you’re asking for and it cost the equivalent of 9 EUR/month. Red wasn’t available in Europe so this is a moot point, but that’s the rate that YouTube previously valued itself at as a standalone product if you’re curious.

Eh, I’m not here to hawk product. The higher bitrate is nice to have, but the impact of bitrate on video quality is perhaps a bit overblown. In a lot of situations, you’d have to pixel-peep to spot the improvement – youtubers are pretty good at making videos look nice under the core quality settings.

On the other hand, ads suck. I’d have never watched enough YouTube to buy premium without years of heavy adblocking (shoutout to ReVanced Manager). Getting an ad-free experience out-of-box is very convenient and could possibly be worth the value of the subscription depending on your usage & means.

I’ll say something unexpected: I pay for YouTube. With money! Why?

• I use it every day and I’m a human who likes boosting the things that I enjoy
• I think YouTube’s content recommendations are a genuine value-add and not easily replaced
• A cut of my subscription fee goes directly back to the video creators that I watch
• The “premium” encoding levels are actually a substantial improvement to video bitrates
  • Important: the premium bitrate is higher than anything previously offered and probably would not have been otherwise practical to serve for free

So yeah. I personally like YouTube enough to pay for it and I have the financial means to do so. Am I a clown for expressing personal appreciation towards a faceless megacorp? Yes. Yes I am. Constantly trying to win at every transaction in life is a drag though, so I think I’ll continue to enjoy getting swindled.

+1 for Dicey Dungeons. Playing it on the Steam Deck might actually be the ideal format, too. I don’t think I could have cleared the Witch campaign at all if I hadn’t broken that up into dozens of micro-sessions.

One thing I will lament, however, is the Steam Deck’s current poor support for Bluetooth headphones. Being forced to resync headphones constantly forces me to play on mute most of the time, but it’s practically a crime against fun to play without the Dicey Dungeons soundtrack.