absolutely astounding how so much of the feedback to this article i’ve seen across social media amounts to “artists don’t deserve a living wage” or “they don’t do real art”.

don’t use LLMs or GenAI. support your artist friends

Just more Crusader Kings 3 and whatever the hell goes on there.

I also went back to Stellaris for a bit now that it’s stable since the big change uhhh a few months ago. It used to be to my favourite Paradox game but at the moment it’s just not hitting right.

Playing a bunch of Crusader Kings 3 and Civ V. Have half a mind to learn EU4 right as (relatively) EU5 is coming out for some reason. Also played some Lost Eidolons which is kinda fun, the between combat stuff isn’t very fun however.

This past weekend Steam had a Darkest Dungeon 2 free weekend and I finally realised that those games weren’t roguelite deckbuilders (ohhh i hate those so much). So I finally tried them and they are…fine. The “I’m so edgy and dark” aesthetic gets stale really quickly, as does the slightly-but-deliberately-obtuse UX that appears in games that are supposed to be “difficult and unforgiving”.

i remember really liking Grey Goo and yeah no one i was friends with back then had ever heard of it

Apparently I’m in a 4X & RTS mood: Age of Wonders IV, Civ V & Civ VI, and some Age of Empires 2 & 4 matches. Also on holiday for the next couple of weeks so I’m debating whether or not to do BG3 or Pathfinder: WotR (my patience for CRPGs runs out at ~50-60 hours so perhaps neither)

funnily enough i’ve only learned of this term from people saying it’s wrong and not real, so it’s more ‘friendslopslop’ to me

I’ve been trying to not use Steam on linux for a while now unless necessary (I have too many games there). GoG + Heroic keeps me pretty sane. Otherwise it’s Lutris for starting them (which I’ll agree is VERY clunky but you can get things done). I think we’re actually getting over the hill of “Linux gaming means Steam” that we’ve been on since the SteamDeck launched.

While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?

This is a pretty valid-ish concern I would say. It’s one of the reasons I’m using GoG mainly now (which yes, still buying licences so similar concerns just maybe not as great or maybe I’m kidding myself)

This whole article is great but the last section resonates with me pretty hard at work rn:

But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless.

At work we’re being pushed to use Copilot because “you shouldn’t spend your time coding, you should spend it designing” (actual quote) and my guy, I enjoy coding and writing and doing things, not sending it off to the plagiarism-pollution machine

Still working through the Dishonoreds. Almost done with 2 and I’m enjoying it WAYY more than I did back when it came out (and I gave up after 90 minutes).

I would like to get back into Vic3 since I’m hearing lots of good things about 1.9 and the new DLC, but I tend to fizzle out of every Paradox game after 3 hours. Maybe that will change this time?

Since getting an Anbernic something and really liking it, I’ve been trying to use my SteamDeck more but it’s just so not nice to hold or use for more than 30-45 minutes. Alas, I’ve been playing WarGroove (badly) on it.