pory

There's a startlingly large quantity of meals that start with olive oil and seasoned meat in a pot and end in being served over a carb that you can make ten pounds of in less than an hour. I keep dried onion flakes and a jar of minced garlic on hand for when (buying and) cutting fresh aromatics is too many steps. But really, skipping enough "you should do this it makes the dish better" steps can turn everything from beef stroganoff to japanese-style curry to cottage pie into one-pot meals that provide "leftovers" for a week or more. If you crave variety, you can compress the effort and do the same amount of work "per week" but commit more time to one day: this lets you make three or four ten pound Meals that are then divided into freezer-safe portions that can be defrosted or reheated as desired. So instead of "red sauce pasta week, teriyaki chicken week, bacon and egg and hashbrown bowl week, etc" you spend a day per month prepping 3-5 meals and then just microwave those meals for the next month. This strategy basically requires a chest freezer though. Pairs well with compressing your month of grocery shopping task into one big trip to Costco where you can buy 40lb of raw meat to prep into meals.

Take shortcuts, be lazy, compress all the effort into one "task" ("meal prep for 2h a week" or "meal prep for 6 hours once a month" instead of "make 3 quick meals every day"). Basically ask yourself "what is actually wrong with eating hot pockets for three meals a day" (expensive, not actually that good tasting, lacks a lot of important nutrients) and fix that problem by making something better that takes just as little effort as a hot pocket does when you're actually hungry.

Oh no, it's gonna steal all my crypto. the crypto i totally own. my crypto. you know, the crypto i use so frequently that i need an extension in my browser to manage it. that crypto.

For whatever reason, a game company can make your "physical copy" require a digital download to function. If a company decides they don't want you to play a game (or version) anymore, it being on a cart or disc is not insurance against it.

And if this practice continues for Switch 2 games, or was in practice for the Wii U, or etc etc...

It's a bad practice, even if right now there are ways around it for one game. It's a bad practice even if it's only for the current console on the current firmware. It turned a physical copy someone bought into a keycard. I'm of the opinion that all physical console games have been keycards since the day they started having day 1 patches, but at least that argument has the reasonable counterpoint of "you can still play the buggy incomplete v1.0 that's on the cart/disc, that makes it better than Switch 2 Game Key Cards, which are better than account-locked Digital Games".

This is direct and complete proof that your physical copy means nothing. The company can still restrict your access whenever they want to. The Switch 1 still gets firmware updates, after all, and firmware updates can't be rolled back. The physical copy guarantees fuck all in the face of every preservation concern that's a criticism of digital downloads. DRM-free digital and piracy are the only trustworthy methods of preservation.

This is still yet another point against those people insisting that physical copies mean anything. Right now, it's "just update the game and you can play it". But that's exactly as limiting as a digital copy - you still need an internet connection, an account in good standing, the company's CDN to be online, and everything else to play the game that's "on" your glorified $60 DRM key.

As more Switch 2s get firmware updated, this change means every "physical copy" of Mario Wonder has become a "Game-Key Card" retroactively. The only difference is that the download is slightly smaller for a GKC.

I'd love to see an extension that, instead of removing the client ID tracking information, instead randomizes it - and does so on inputting a link too. Removing tracking parameters needs 100% certainty, a single link clicked while signed into Google or whatever on another browser can be enough to establish a connection between you and the friend who sent the link. If I show up as clicking one link from Bob and 9 links from null, I'm still connected to Bob. But if my 10 links are from Bob, Jane, Alice, Fheism, Bggur, Daxi8, Michelle, Sssssssssss, Mgke7d, and BRomgi, good luck targeting any ads with all that noise. Especially if the systematically replaced clientIDs are recycled within the addon's database and end up creating ghost profiles on the advertisers' end.

I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game

Do you not consider Expedition 33 a well-made game?

I have less issue with smaller devs doing it

The comment I replied to says "we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots."

Indie games on shoestring budgets are also the games that can least afford to pay employees to learn the "better" tool set on the job. Hiring devs that are experienced in Unreal or Unity means your onboarding is just about teaching them your studio's stuff, and the demands of your game. Budget is a zero sum game - if something like Expedition 33 (UE5) did it "right" instead of doing it "easy", they might not have been able to afford or produce the phenomenal mocap/VA/soundtrack/environments in the game.

Godot continues to mature, and some relatively big names in the indie space are publicly dumping Unity for it (like Mega Crit with Slay the Spire 2). But "pushing" smaller devs to ignore the onboarding problem isn't the way. It's the smaller devs that benefit most from engines with "good enough" defaults - bigger studios can afford to pay someone to "do the lighting".

Picking an engine (including the option of rolling your own shit) has to be a decision made very early in the game development cycle, like "before you hire anybody" early, and it's a really hard one to change your mind on later. For a lot of studios, the right decision isn't the "best, most capable, free-est" one. Hell, for Balatro the dev chose LOVE, which is usually used for VNs, because he didn't need all the other features he'd get out of something like Unity or Godot.

Plugging *arrs into public torrent trackers is always a losing proposition. Consider either paying for usenet or getting into some entry level private trackers (lurk on Reddit's /r/opensignups)

Since nobody else posted it in the comments yet: 600 euros for the base version, 900 for whatever the X version is.

OP, remember this isn't Reddit, we can put the actual number in the title of the post.

I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin's Android TV client still can't handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.

Yeah. If this is a case of "publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground" or "leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game's dev team" or anything in between... The game won't be good. It certainly won't be good in early access. It's an easy "skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch" for me. A downgrade from its prior status of "the only thing that'll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it's complete dogshit".