Big sack of cash and a good mark on her CV. And Obsidian has been kind of a clusterfuck the past few years with Avowed having been more or less restarted from scratch like three times?

Netflix games is a sinking ship but so is… a lot of the games industry. Whereas working as a creative at Netflix is potentially a way to pivot out and away from games entirely. Carrie is also a writer (I think self published?) so that is a further way to seem like someone who can transition to a different department.

At a glance (haven’t enabled yet, will later today), GoG uses the RFC standard TOTP model. This means you can use whatever app you want whether that is the google authenticator that ties it to your cloud account, something related to your password manager (e.g. keepass or bitwarden), or even just a python script you have in a random directory. It gives you control of your 2FA and protects you in the event you lose a device without properly de-authenticating it.

Valve use their own model that, to my knowledge, is only accessible through the Steam mobile app. Which is a huge nightmare if you ever have a device stolen/damaged (and is why you back up the recovery code)

Just enabled. Yup, bog standard TOTP and they even provide the plaintext key so that I don’t have to extract it from a QR code.

There are a few layers to it. I’ll start with the legit reasons and hope the jackasses don’t read too deep in:

1. EGS was built around the idea of providing what people need/want rather than EVERYTHING. Some of that was truly asinine (no shopping cart for like 2 years?) and some was a conscious choice based on everyone saying they don’t want their video game store to be a social media network. Unfortunately… people apparently DO want their video game store to be social media.
2. Every store handles regional pricing and distribution differently and, allegedly, EGS had worse coverage in a few of the countries The Internet actually knows exists.
3. Tim Sweney is a complete and utter dipshit and always has been and it is REALLY hard to not hate everything he touches.
4. EGS rapidly entwined itself with Fortnite because Fortnite makes more than the GDP of some small nations. But we are hardcore gamers so we all hate Fortnite.
5. Sweeney/Epic actually accidentally argued for consumer rights against Apple which, in turn, led to the full force of Apple running smear campaigns against Epic to make sure that we all realized how much we love walled gardens
6. Sweeney/Epic ALSO kind of picked a fight with Steam by pointing out how little developers get from any given sale. Which… because we all love Valve means that Epic are assholes and developers all actively want to strive to get the negotiating power of a Call of Duty or Rockstar.
7. Speaking of. EGS isn’t Valve and any alternative is inherently evil because we all love Valve.

So what was a mediocre store with a lot of free games and a tendency to give developers a giant sack of money for one year of exclusivity became The Devil.

Then whatever facebook nonsense you read doesn’t apply? Because the heat never gets hot enough to even reach the smoke point?

Having the gall to talk about social issues or the state of the industry as a whole rather than just being an “apolitical” hype machine.

It really sucks that Polygon is dead because they wrote some ridiculously fun and even thought provoking articles over the years. But, silver linings, it is an even bigger magnet for people to show their asses than ronnie radke.

Block list getting LOTS of exercise out of this.

Quick google puts Canola Oil’s smoke point at 450-ish Fahrenheit. You can do the real good stir frying with that. Even the “get a pan ridiculously hot to sear some meat” is in the 300s and MAYBE capping around 500 which isn’t great with canola but is still doable since the food will lower the pan temperature pretty quick anyway.

So if your pan is getting that hot then you are doing it wrong or are specifically trying to do restaraunt style sous vide and don’t realize they use (char)broilers for that.

A soft (e.g. silicone) spatula is all you really need to avoid damaging a non-stick pan. And they are incredibly useful for other uses (a rubber flipper is awesome if you are perpetually impatient when it comes to flipping meat and don’t want to damage the skin).

But yeah. They are inherently a consumable which is why nobody should ever spend more than 20-ish (pre-trump) USD on one. It is up to an individual to decide if they would use it enough to justify that.

Different oils have different temperature ranges with the “smoke point” what is commonly considered. As long as you are under that temperature, you are fine according to everyone that isn’t facebook.

For the majority of cooking? Yes, you don’t need a non-stick pan. A properly used steel (or even aluminum) pan will work. Cast Iron is obviously loved but Carbon Steel is actually what most people want and has almost all of the same properties. But properly oiling your pan (and I actually love cooking sprays for dishes where I am using a neutral oil. Glug of “real” oil, get it up to temp, and then give a quick spritz just to make sure EVERYTHING is coated) and cooking at a high enough heat that your proteins can properly react and not “stick” to the pan will get you almost the entire way.

That said? Eggs and fish. Eggs very much are in that “nobody ever complained about too much butter” category but there is a lot to be said about a quick egg without any additional fats. And if you are cooking eggs these days, you can afford a 20 dollar specialty pan… And fish in particular is the kind of food where it is very easy to overcook it while waiting for all the appropriate reactions to occur so you can cleanly flip it.

If I were to downsize my kitchen (which I hopefully will be doing in a few months…)? That shit goes in the appropriate bin. But if you have the space? A 20-ish dollar restaurant supply store non-stick pan is AMAZING. And cheap enough that you can afford to get rid of it the moment you see any scratching.

Open ended boycotts don’t work. People MIGHT boycott until they see nothing changing and give up and companies are under no incentive to change anything because it won’t make a difference. It is just a storm to be weathered.

Whereas a boycott with an actionable end state gives the company something to change if they don’t want to try to outlast the outrage, as it were.

Its why the traditional protest call and response is “What do we want?” “X!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”. It immediately makes it clear what will make the angry people go away.

For the BDS boycotts? Microsoft is sort of “Break these major contracts in ways that will make every single potential business partner wary going forward”. The Disney boycott, from what I can gather, is basically “tell gal gadot et all to fuck off”. Which… agreed. But you can also just look at the ongoing lawsuits from the last time they fired a chud for why there will be no public statement and the best we can hope for is to silently stop hiring zionists.

Which is my problem. Most of the BDS boycotts are effectively “burn down your entire company and then we’ll give you money again”. Which… yeah. I still try to support them to some degree (most of what I have settled on is “I’ll grab what I want later so that I don’t contribute to the big numbers on launch”) but there is no end and it is just going to fade away as more and more people decide they want their shiny.

And, for what it is worth, I think at least some of the folk behind these boycotts understands that. The MS boycott discussion was particularly good about stuff like “If you can’t stop using Teams of Office, consider changing to this business plan that is cheaper and turns off copilot”. Which speaks to “We know you aren’t going to drastically change your life but you were probably going to do this so you might as well do it and claim it is related to human rights”

I have a lot of issues with the BDS boycotts having no actionable end states but… there are a lot of reasons to not want to give any business to microsoft at all at this point (borderline weekly layoffs at this point) and… their market share sure ain’t what it used to be.

Good riddance I say.

Go fuck yourself, chud. Celebrating people losing their jobs because of whatever self-hatred you have that you project on the world.

Yup.

I want to say we all found out he was a piece of shit in the lead up to Ori 2? Very much led to a lot of outlets doing the “The game is good but up to you if you want to support this kind of worker abuse”. And he just got worse and worse since.

Buying the dip works until it doesn’t.

But a “safe” thing to do? Just continue what you were continuing, if you are able to. The idea is to not say “I can buy some nVidia stock!” and to instead just continue making your contributions and getting your matching from your employer.

Long term… yeah. But if there is a future, that is how you don’t end up up shit creek without a paddle.

Obviously the ultra wealthy can really abuse this.

But if you are in a position where you can put money into a 401k? You will, “benefit” from this because the investment firms using your money are taking advantage of this. Whether you come out better than the massive losses that you have had lighting up your email (because this was the BEST time to turn on all the LLMs to let us know what is happening to our investments and why all these companies are down on a given day…) is questionable but… it is also questionable whether the ultra wealthy are actually benefiting either. Since you tend to not become an 0.1%er without a LOT of investments.

Now, whether there is any form of long term stability is a very different question. Which is kind of “great” for getting across the point that: Either the market will stabilize and your 401k/pension will have value or we are all fucked.

Ethics are very much a personal thing.

That said: it is conceptually no different than any business banning someone. If you were to, for example, masturbate in a Rain Forest Cafe, they would be well within their rights to never allow you back on their properties ever again.

It is obvious Nintendo finally figured out what Ubi et al did… 15 or so years ago and is making EVERYTHING online. That way they effectively brick a console by turning off updates and immediately locking it upon authenticating with the chat server or whatever.

Depends how it is done

Full console brick? You have an argument that will surely end well against the legal team that puts people into indentured servitude.

Disable of all online functionality? Perfectly valid and no different than banning someone from a store.

And the latter effectively provides the former if you can’t download any updates, connect to any online servers, or even download your game from a “game key card” or whatever the hell they are calling those.

But err, protesting never accomplishes anything and just drives away us genuinely good people who want some Starbucks. You need to find a better way to get your point across without leaving your designated spot.

This bullshit is a long time coming.

No, this is going to be cops and other feds using a different charge code.

Where is the us army ?

Something something Posse Comitatus means that they are actually heroes for doing nothing about a violent uprising and you are a bastard for not supporting the troops in their hour of need. I hope you’ll think about your words and deeds while you get shipped off to a concentration camp.

This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.

That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.