“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”

I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.

You should. The next time you want to use it, it’ll probably do some bullshit. Better to be rid of it now than be coerced into giving HP money in the future. If you need a printer, replace it with whatever Brother laser printer is on sale at the moment.

I saw my friend playing the beta and asked how it was going and he showed me a screenshot of it still compiling shaders.

GOTY contender /s

I never buy games before reviews but bought KSP2 early access. It was so bad I returned it less than four hours later. I joke they put more effort into the ads than the game itself.

I think what really confused me is that I saw a demo of KSP2 at PAX East several years ago. The game we got looked no different than that demo. I was like, wtf have they been doing all this time?

I don’t know about that. KSP has a mod that adds N-Body physics so it’s not some momumental obstacle.

This reminds me of the pumpkin carved with the tip screen… in other words absolutely horrifying.

And no one wants to pay for the turn signal subscription service!

Sony and completely unnecessary PSN login requirements. Name a more iconic duo.

Fucking PHONES had more RAM. It was so fucking stupid. And despite their arguments, it was proven time and time again 8GB was not enough.

I think you’re confusing Thunderbolt with the lightning cable. Hell, even basic USB-C is faster than lightning cable.

False. I was issued that mouse at a previous workplace and it pissed me off so much I brought in my own mouse. And my experience was that when the mouse was fully dead it needed to charge a long time to be usable again.

If it just simply let you use it while it was plugged in there’d be absolutely no issue. It’s a dumb design.

It feels like we used to be spoiled for choice and now there’s only a few select titles out. A lot of racing franchises got ruined by micro-transaction garbage. Project Cars decided to go in an entirely different direction with their latest installment and basically ruined the game. Most games no longer support split screen so if you want to race locally with friends you basically only have Mario Kart.

There’s still games though. Forza, Gran Truismo, F1 24, Asseto Corsa, Need For Speed… But even so it feels like something is missing. There’s not a lot to fill in the Wipeout niche, or the Burnout niche. I miss random things like Midtown Madness and Twisted Metal. I really want a good racing combat experience again.

I think a lot of studios aren’t willing to take chances and a good racer isn’t something you can make easily since people want good graphics and excellent racing physics.

Oh… it’s got Denuvo… well, so much for that.

omg I’m kinda the same. I always need to know the consequences of every decision to try to get the best possible outcome. And then I get frustrated or annoyed with a game.

With LiS1, it came out as episodes so it wasnt possible to know the consequences of every decision beforehand and I was forced to make decisions based on limited information. This ended up leading to some happy surprises I probably wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

I’ve found that I tend to enjoy things a lot better if I just play it through blind at least one time. Trying to min-max everything has been a tough habit to break though.

Yes, that’s what I meant. True colors. Sounds like I’d enjoy it. As an aside, I did enjoy Before the Storm. And I did enjoy LiS2. Just that LiS2 wasn’t something I wanted to replay to try different decisions like I did with the other games.

I love LiS1 but found the second one to be… not as good. I just enjoyed the redoing time mechanic a lot more than telekinesis. I’ve yet to play the third one despite owning it. I should probably do that.

It’s so fucking stupid. If you can sign up with a click, you should be able to cancel with a click. There’s no justifiable argument against that other than corporate greed.

I do remember one of my most satisfying cancelation calls though. I just kept saying, “No.” Just “no”. No added explanation. No added reasoning. It frustrated the retention employee so much. They were like “but WHY?” They couldn’t try to convince me not to quit since I didn’t give them any reasons for why I didn’t want it, just that I didn’t want it.

At the time it was like watching a train wreck. This was much earlier in my career and I was like, “there’s just no way, right?”

I did get lunch out of it.

Dude, so much of your experience resonates with me! I was applying to a small start-up and they were like “oh, our new CEO is former Amazon so you’ll be doing a half-dozen hour-long interviews over the course of a couple days.” Wut? Other times the company would claim they don’t care that most of my experience is in Java and then after final interviews they’ll turn me down because most of my experience is in Java and they think it’s not possible for someone to use a different programming language or something. And people who reach out to ME then ghost me.

Sadly I’m still trying to find a new role.

As the interviewee?

I show up at their office for a round of interviews. IIRC it was 4 interviews of about an hour each. Every single interviewer comes in 5-10 minutes late. They all look completely exhausted. Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.” I did not take that job.

Another place wanted to do a coding “pre-screening” thing. You know, where you go to a website and there’s a coding question and you code it and submit your answer. THIS place wanted you to install an extension that took full control of your browser, your webcam, your mic, etc. So it could record you doing the coding challenge. No, thank you.

As the interviewer? omg, the stories I can tell.

We had a guy come in for an hour interview. We start asking him the normal interview questions. Literally everything he says is straight up wrong or he says, “I don’t know” and then just gives up and doesn’t try to work out a solution or anything. But we have a whole hour with this guy and as interviewers we’ve been instructed to use the full hour otherwise candidates complain that they weren’t given a fair chance even when it’s TOTALLY obvious it’s going to be a “no-hire.” So we start asking this guy easier and easier questions… just giving him basic softball questions… and HE STILL GETS THEM ALL WRONG. We ask him what type of variable would you use to store a number? He says, “String.” WHAT?! I’m totally flabbergasted at this point. So finally I get a brilliant idea: I’ll ask him an OPINION question! There’s no way he can get that wrong, right? Looking at his resume, it has something like “Java Expert” on there. So I say to him, “It says on your resume you’re a Java Expert. What’s your favorite thing about Java?” His response? “Oh, I actually don’t know anything about Java. I just put that on my resume because I know they used that at a previous company.” So now on top of this guy getting every question wrong, we’ve established he has also lied on his resume, so basically just red flags EVERYWHERE. Finally, after a grueling 45 minutes we decide to give up asking questions and just end with the whole, “So we like to reserve the last bit of time so you can ask us questions. Do you have anything you’d like to ask?” Without missing a beat, this guy goes, “When do I start? I feel like I NAILED that interview!”

At another company I worked at, we would do online interviews that took only an hour. The coding portion of the interview had a single question: “Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.” That was it. Sure, we could make the coding question harder if they totally aced it, but the basic question was nothing more complicated than that. The candidate could even choose which programming language they wanted to use for the task. That single question eliminated half the candidates who applied for the job. Some straight up said they couldn’t do it. One person hung up on me and then when I tried to call back they said the fire alarm went off at their place and they would reschedule. They never did. Many people forgot that I could see their screens reflected in their glasses and I could see them frantically Googling. There was one candidate that did so insanely poorly during the interview that we believe it must have been a completely different person that had gone through the initial phone screen, so basically they were trying to bait-and-switch.

I have a bunch of other stories but this post is already getting quite long.