Ugh. Well, sounds like I made a good choice dropping it…

The Sword of Truth series.

I read the first book as a teenager. I was rather skeezed out by the roughly one-third of the book that was a poorly-disguised authorial kink fantasy.

Then the second book had a lovingly detailed description of a witch gaining demonic power by getting railed by a demon.

Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.

Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It’s like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it’s the contents of the book itself.

For the longest time, Sanderson was utterly terrible at writing romance, and it was very obvious. A lot of it was probably due to a lack of personal experience. He’s gotten better, but a lot of the ‘lack’ you’re feeling in his writing probably stems from the same place. Despite writing about dark topics - apocalyptic events, oppressed populations, the failures of heroes, etc. - he is missing the edge that you get from other authors who write similar stories. Personally I don’t mind, and I really enjoy his books - but I can understand why others would find them bland.

Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.

The hardware has to break even. The software already has.

They’re buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.

I have that and an ‘OnLive founding member’ T-shirt that I wear to tech events. Especially when I suspect there’s going to be something tone-deaf getting launched.

I got both for free.

Since when has breaking the rules stopped this administration?

You’re thinking of SUV’s, which typically have the flat, giant grill that is hard to see over and is far more likely to kill people on impact.

Minivans typically have a short, sloped front which not only provides good visibility, but also is less dangerous to pedestrians in accidents.

Your standards are weird. Several of these games are considered the current pinnacle of their genres.

The implication is that they’ll have to jump ship to Linux, and thus become a member of the unixsocks community.

Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.

It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.

It does make him an ephebophile though if he preferred them to adults.

And a rapist. Let’s not forget that.

He can only do it for federal crimes. If a state government tossed you in jail, the president can’t do jack about it.

Yeah, but the AI bros don’t want to imply that the LLMs are lying to you.

And usually with an HOA all you’re funding is people who will fine you for letting your grass grow too tall.

You’re absolutely right on all counts.

That said, my RAID setup is on a Synology, so it’s brain-dead simple and not especially prone to falling over.

That’s true until it isn’t.

Unrecoverable hard drive failures definitely occur, even early on in the life cycle of a drive. I like having a RAID-5 array … but then again, I don’t really have any other backups (which I really should fix).

What I really need is an ISP that doesn’t have a 1.2TB data cap.

It’s also going to result in the destruction of the Xbox brand though. Whatever they release, no one’s going to buy it. Anyone who’s smart already releases on multiple platforms if they release for Xbox, and this will only exacerbate the issue.

Soooooo they’ve crippled their game making divisions with layoffs that obliterated employee morale so that they had more money to throw at AI, and now they’re demanding that this same section of the company offset even more of their AI costs because it’s one of the few parts of the company that actually makes money?

Reminds me of how Hasbro is milking WotC for all they’re worth while destroying faith in the brand.