Main game on my center screen. RuneScape and/or Discord/web browser on my side screen.

Yup, versioned files ALWAYS get a YYYY-MM-DD HHMM timestamp. So when you sort alphabetically, they sort chronologically.

Because China supposedly used Nvidia cards to train DeepSeek, which blew all of the US AI out of the water. And apparently that raised some eyebrows, because Nvidia wasn’t supposed to be selling to China (free market, right?). Since China was eating big tech’s lunch, they cried to republicans (and gave them a bunch of reelection money) and now we have this bill. The point is to be able to remotely disable cards if they’re outside of their sale region.

My ex used to play that game religiously. Something about weapon swapping, butterflies, double butterflies, etc…

Several of the larger password managers have started requiring MFA on new accounts. Bitwarden, for example, now requires at least an email verification. They encourage you to use other MFA methods instead, like an Authenticator app. But they at least have the email as a last-ditch “fucking fine, you really don’t want to install an Authenticator app? Here, we’re forcing you to use this as the bare minimum” backup.

I have written similarly awful formulae when I needed to get a csv to export to Google Calendars, but the program I was exporting to wasn’t using Google’s accepted csv headers.

I ended up creating a template that looked at the exported csv file, and then reformatted it in a way that Google liked (and added some extra info along the way.) I needed it to only fill text if an entry actually had info in it, and hide all the text otherwise. So that I could automatically delete empty cells and avoid a bunch of empty calendar entries when importing it into Google. The resulting formula for some of the fields was… Not great. This is what controlled the “name” of each calendar event:

It takes several different potential fields, and combines them into a single field. If there are no entries, it gets left blank.

And every single time I would get it working properly, someone would add a row or change the data validation rules, so I would have to go in and update my formulae. After the fifth or sixth time that happened, I told the person making the changes that it was his job to update the formulae. Suddenly, it stopped getting changed.

Someone breaking into your password manager is a lot less likely than someone breaking into one of the dozens or even hundreds of services you probably reuse passwords on.

Exactly. Without a password manager, every single service you have reuses your password on is a security risk, because any one of them will compromise the rest. And it has repeatedly been demonstrated that even large software companies don’t follow best practices regarding passwords. So any one of them being compromised is a risk. With a password manager, as long as it is properly encrypted and secured with a strong master password, the only point of attack will be your master password.

It’s less about keeping all your eggs in one basket, and more about reducing attack vectors that hackers have access to. With reused passwords, every single individual service is a potential vector of attack.

This feels a little too tinfoil-hat for me. The reality is that one strong password is going to be more secure than 50 weak passwords. If you use something like a passphrase with 30+ characters, cracking it with today’s methods will take longer than the heat death of the universe. Yes, it means all of your eggs are in one basket. But that’s why it’s important that basket is protected like Fort Knox.

Hello FBI, this is the one

Oh, is EA the reason Popcap vanished? Honestly, if they were still around, they’d probably make some killer mobile games (if they actually sold them as complete games and not the microtransaction hell that most mobile games fall into).

The Steam Deck is actually wonderful for retro games. EmuDeck makes setting up emulators a breeze, and the roms can easily be found online legitimately ripped from your own copies of the game and loaded onto a MicroSD card.

Hah, just edited the comment for you.

that respect their time

I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.

and aren’t a glorified second job

I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.

The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.

I honestly hadn’t considered Blitzball. I kind of forget it exists, since I only ever slogged through it to get Wakka’s ultimate weapon and overdrives.

edit: also 2-300 hours in oldschool RuneScape lol

I have logged over 200 hours in RuneScape just this month.

It probably helps that I have a job where I can have it running next to me. At this point, it is basically just an idle game that I only need to touch every ~15 minutes to refresh my idle logout timer. Pretty much the only times it’s not running are when I’m asleep or physically away from a computer.

Hell, even when I’m away from my computer, it keeps running as long as I can touch it every now and then to stay logged in. If I’m AFK’ing slayer with aggressive enemies, I only really need to touch it to refresh my inventory or the idle timer. Even when I’m playing other games, RuneScape just runs quietly on my second monitor.

It’s just disappointing to see how drastically the series has changed. It started as a top-down strategy RPG, and now it’s just a generic hack-n-slash game. Game publishers have shied away from games like the original Dragon Age, because they want to sell as many units as possible. And they think generic hack-n-slash games sell better. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 have proved that there is still a large demand for more traditional RPGs, but the publishers simply don’t want to take the risk.

This is RuneScape for me. I take very long breaks, but always end up playing it again after not thinking about it for like a year or two.

My judgement will depend on which megaten game you no-lifed.

You can 100% the Sphere Grid in only a few hours, if you’re smart about it. My guess is they were going around using Clear Spheres to wipe unneeded spheres off the map and replace them. The default Sphere Grid doesn’t actually allow you to max your stats; You need to clear the existing +2 or +3 spheres, and replace them with +4 spheres instead.

Even then, maxing your stats doesn’t require 9999 hours. Unless OP was farming experience in Besaid Island (the starting area) it shouldn’t take that long to navigate the grid and farm enough replacement spheres.