gila

Weed. Had to quit for an extended family holiday. I’ve had t-breaks like that a dozen times or so over the past 20 years, but was otherwise smoking daily. When I got home last September, I smoked a couple of bowls I had left behind and then just… stopped.

I don’t really have much to say about it. I don’t feel significantly clearer-headed or motivated. No profound physiological impact. Same as when I took breaks from it, had super weird and vivid dreams for a short while after stopping.

I’ll partake when I’m offered a doobie at a party, but I probably won’t go back to my old habits.

I think the reason I stopped is because I started taking (non-stimulant) ADHD meds a couple years back and the increase in dopamine made me just not feel like it anymore.

Yes, for a loading method which takes time to complete the conversion rate will generally be locked in from the time the transfer was initiated. You can always preview the received converted amount. Although the transfer method may vary depending on availability in the recipient account country, the various timeframes and fees (where applicable) have always been previewed accurately.

For myself I have set up MFA for payments via the app, so I will routinely be required to use the app to authenticate a payment. However other MFA methods are available. I can’t think of any other function the website itself doesn’t do.

Given there is no additional fee for converting at a foreign point of sale, I just load up in my home currency as there are free/instant methods available and convert to whichever destination currency at point of sale, ensuring to select not to have the balances converted by visa/master at terminals which have that function.

Hope you enjoy your time in Japan!

I’d recommend searching about their fees this because it’s going to vary a bit based on your local currency. Their documentation on the topic is easy to read and answers your first two questions better than I could put it.

I’ve rarely had to interact with support so I couldn’t give a useful response about that in earnest. They do have local support in the two major countries in which I’ve interacted with them and it’s been fine.

The KYC process is standard for a digital money account AFAIK. I signed up in 2017 originally to handle a one-off transfer between local bank accounts in different countries, so I’d not have bothered investing much time in it if it was a hassle. I haven’t had to re-identify myself or think about it since, despite migrating across several countries, starting to use the physical card etc. I imagine I gave them my government ID though.

I’ve used wise.com for this sort of thing for many years (since they used to be called transferwise). Can spin up as many virtual visa cards as you need (I think it’s max 10 active at once). I also have a physical debit card with them which will do conversions at foreign points of sale from my local currency using the mid market rate and fees much lower than visa/master. Never had an issue with them, though this is more a sort of obfuscation rather than privacy

Of course, but that isn’t what they’re saying in response to the topic of the post: the question of what the point in making steamOS available for PC’s is. Is it the main reason? I’m not sure it is, but you can be sure that if it isn’t contributing to Valve’s bottom line in some way, it wouldn’t be happening.

That isn’t really a defense of DRM’s. The acknowledgement swings both ways; if DRM doesn’t play a part in game sales, it is unnecessary.

The post’s characterisation is still accurate because of what the impact of DRM is imagined to be by game studio execs, rather than what it materially is.

Despite the headline, the length of cutscenes wasn’t their justification for the length of the game, just a separate question.

It’s going to be a story-driven action game, of course it’s gonna have hella cutscenes but from what’s been shown so far, I’m actually looking forward to it.

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO’s significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn’t really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn’t going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its “like a family”, but really there’s an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would’ve been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That’s fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren’t actually different from other companies like I had thought.

LiveCaptions

Could do that, or sideload the APK from https://repo.jellyfin.org/files/client/androidtv/

D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.

You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.

Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.

Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!

From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.

Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.

Lineage OS doesn’t include google apps or services. Jellyfin works though.

Do you need an in-remote microphone? If not, I’d suggest a degoogled nvidia shield tv (i.e flash it with lineage OS or similar)

My experience: I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector’s edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector’s edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn’t login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.

I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector’s edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard’s dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn’t feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.

I’ve played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It’s not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren’t substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.

I’m left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they’re evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn’t even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.

tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard’s MTX sales than he’s done to generate them

Same, the last straw for me was the ‘white lives matter’ Yeezy fashion show.

You could just refund it if it doesn’t work well for you. GOG are usually pretty generous

Hot, then once I’ve read everything switch to Active to check popular posts I missed, then back to Hot and there’s usually some new stuff

Same shell, mine has Intel CPU though

I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.