Torchlight 2 should scratch that itch. To me, Path of Exile is something the Diablo series could have been but wasn’t exactly? Though I haven’t played it in a number of years, so I may be mis-remembering exactly what it was like. I seem to think it was more like a point-and-click RPG with kinda Diablo-like combat.

If it has EA as only the publisher, I might buy it later on sale. But if it’s first-party within EA, nah. Take-Two is actually the same for me these days. I won’t touch Blizzard-Activision anymore either (which is sad because I bought Warcraft and Starcraft when they came out originally and would play over modem with my buddies).

A first-person, single-player AAA shooter could be exactly my cuppa. However, there’d be zero chance I’m buying a game from EA so there’s that.

Well, that can’t be right; they didn’t make anything after SC2k… (bring back archologies!)

Download the messaging app of your choice. Get friends to download it if they want to contact you. Use that app and too bad if no one else does shrug

I’m not seeing a setting to disable updates. Do you know where that might be? Thanks!

Thankfully, I don’t have this update yet. Not sure if because my region is Japan or if that’s not how they decided upon the staged rollout.

I don’t mind that epic, etc. exist; I mind the exclusives. When Epic first launched, they didn’t have payment processors in a number of countries so there was literally no way to legally play the games for people; that’s super shitty.

I had a mouse where one was vertical and the other horizontal, but I seem to think the horizontal scroll was oriented horizontally. Having googled the mouse in the picture, it says one is programmable and suggests it starts with volume.

I tried Chronometer but there are no japanese foods and they won’t add any to their DB so I basically gave up on it :/

I have a goole pixel watch I bought when my Garmin died. It’s fine for my needs.

IIRC, they paywalled a bunch of previously-free features

This is a fantastic game. Definitely grindy by today’s standards. I also remember getting it when it came out and how many hours upon hours I sank into it. I would also say using something with savestates and maybe some other strategies to cut some of the grind out.

Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I’m not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.

Never touched it. The bait-and-switch with some of the products they offered and then the trainwreck of the actual game at launch ruined it for me. I actually unsubscribed from ESO, which I was paying monthly for at the time, because of how shady Bethesda looked.

Entire movie needs to be with this guy from my childhood. I shall accept nothing less.

I thought it was due to their poor grasp on mathematics and inability to count beyond two.

That may be. I do remember somewhere in a documentary that they kept re-developing stuff for different libraries/technologies. I think at least one was voluntary. I can’t recall which doc this was, though.

Somewhat, but they mostly kept chasing newer tech and had to redo stuff over and over again.

Duke Nukem Forever enters the chat

I spend something equivalent to around $2k in USD every 5-7 years and I’m fine.

How about even older: HEAT (HEAT.net)? https://web.archive.org/web/19970601031026/http://www.heat.net/

My last Ubuntu install got destroyed by some package update and I was unable to fix it after hours and hours of futsing within it (I think it was related to graphics drivers, but I can’t say 100%). This made me put it aside again since I just don’t have time to deal with it and really just wanted something simple and reliable on my laptop. It’s annoying because, aside from some games, I can already pretty much do anything I need to do on Linux just fine, but I won’t risk issues like that taking down my whole setup.

Good question! “Standard” In terms of characters refer to the 常用漢字 which are the -er- “basic” 2160ish (I will try to remember to update with the exact figure; it was expanded in the last 5-10 years) kanji that are the basis to be considered “literate”.

To look at it a bit different for Americans (which is the only basis I have; other counties even within English differ), one could think of reading at an X-grade level. Many publications can be around 5th-grade level (though this comes with its own can of worms).

In English, we have 26 letters of the alphabet. I guess we could call it 52 differentiation lower- and upper-case. We could also double that to 104 for cursive. If we’re feeling generous, we could add a couple of shorthand signs (such as an & that is more shorthand).

Now, for japanese, in addition to those 104ish, you now have to learn at least 2160ish Chinese characters (and, if you’re japanese, all the latin alphabet as described above, but this isn’t applicable to those of use whom are native English speakers looking to learn Japanese).

And, until here, we’re only talking about the squiggles used to represent sounds. After this, we actually get into things like vocabulary and grammar and registers ( think something like manners.

Edit: oh! And those 2160isj characters! Unlike Chinese or something, they can have multiple readings (pronunciations) based on whether they are alone, in a compound, a person’s name, etc. Some knaji have over 10 readings. Much like many languages, the most-used words and grammar patterns are the most irregular.

I’ve reduced my usage to ~3 subreddits also specifically to do with living in Japan. There’s just nowhere else with this info or discussion and people are just not presently interested in moving over here. I mostly lurk (between two reddit accounts (I nuked my online presence because of a stalker and took most of a year off all social media), I had something like 13 years on reddit and maybe 20 submissions), so it’s not like I’m producing alluring content on those places.

I also don’t use facebook, meta, instagram, twitter, tiktok, etc. which further reduces any interaction I might have.

EDIT: also having to deal with government, legal, visa, etc. things are not fun when little to none is in English (and that which is in English is out-of-date) and a lot of the characters and grammar are not in the standard set. Living and working in another language and culture is also not without its own difficulties and having people to talk to is important. For further info on just the language, 2 sets of characters containing roughly ~50 symbols each are required (not hard), and then you need at least ~2100 Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) just to be able to read a newspaper. That doesn’t include a lot of jargon used in legal, medical, and other things. I wonder if my downvoter /u/Veraxus has ever had deal with anything like this. I can speak conversational Japanese, know a lot of IT jargon, and can somewhat read Japanese and it’s still very difficult at times.