What is this service, exactly? Do they host games on powerful PCs for you to play remotely or something?

It’s the warm blend of its cozy art style, ambient audio, and the unparalleled soundtrack. You go through the grandpa intro and observe his strangely thin bed all over again. Then the Jojamart corporate hell scene. You open the letter and reading it even for the fifteenth time gives you an immediate sense of peace and relief, because you know you’re going back to the valley. It’s all good vibes from here.

The music fades away and you’re greeted with a quiet scene in the mountains, watching a grumbly coach bus speed past the sign, and you’re left with a moment between you and the countryside. There are a few trilling birds and one lands in the sign. You arrive at your stop and immediately that uplifting little song starts playing and Robin’s cute-ass face appears, probably with wood shavings in her bangs, and she still has that voice you crafted for her in your head after all these years. The mayor will too. She’s an old friend.

She ushers you away to your first long view of the farm. Now, you’ve already been here several times in the last decade, but that music. That warm, orangish pallete. That overgrown little cabin on that rugged patch of land. The music grooves on and right away you get butterflies in your stomach over the prospect of getting to be here everyday, cleaning it up and carving your own little life and operation. There is a sense of joy and freedom, and a million possibilities laying under that brush-strewn mess that used to be a field. It never fails to bring you right back and feel that magic again.

It’s like the developer perfectly captured our most innocent human desires in a tiny bottle.

Stardew Valley is a beautiful love letter from Eric Barone’s soul. I don’t want to see it fizzle out either. I’m a straight male but I would marry that man based purely on the gift he gave us.

Fallout is excellent.

Bigger, hornier tigers.

https://youtu.be/L7RtJ1scnfk?si=Dp_17vlyy6MvV5eC

Nah. Crash Bandicoot has always been trash.

This is me any time my wife comes home and asks if I want to just order pizza.

It might be. It’s hard to remember. Two characters are waiting on supplies somewhere and they see the headlights way off suddenly come complete stop. After a while they know something’s up and they go to investigate, and wind up finding the truck half destroyed, with the driver’s hands still gripping the wheel and the rest of his body devoured by the little zergling guys. I feel like you might get to see a flashback from the driver’s perspective too, but again, it’s been so many years.

(looked it up and this is the Pedro scene)

The scene where the truck’s headlights in the distance come to a stop in the night used to scare the absolute shit out of me as a kid. I don’t know why it was so horrifying. Left a lot to the imagination, I guess. Then you see the aftermath.

I’ll give these a shot if other approaches don’t work. Thanks for the info!

That’s a good idea. I have strong double-sided rug tape for hardwood floors that would work well.

I’ll try these things. Thanks!

My one cat has soggy noodles for brains and has decided after nearly seven years that she’s going to start scratching on the corners of our couch. She hasn’t done any real damage yet, but she’s caught in the act and ran off at least once per day. To make it worse, her cat tree (complete with multiple scratching posts) is in front of the window between the two couches, and 2/3 of the time she chooses those.

The couches are old at this point and covered in stains (they’ve survived nearly five years of parenthood), so they’re not of significant value to us, but we would like to buy a new livingroom set. I don’t know how to break this cat of her noodle-brained choices before doing so. Spray bottle doesn’t do much good, as the noodles don’t store enough memory to ever connect her actions to her consequence, and de-clawing is extremely cruel and not something we’re open to.

In Michigan’s lower peninsula we had Devil’s Night on the eve before Halloween, where teenagers would wreak havoc on pumpkins and egg or T.P. property, but I’ve never heard of this.

It irks me greatly that it takes place ~2,000 years before the main series, but architecturally and technologically they appear to be on par or perhaps even ahead of the 3rd/4th eras. The entire game just feels like a giant fan-fiction blunder. There is a near zero risk of death in the overworld due to an obnoxiously low difficulty, and the class system being bound to stupid themes like Templars and Dragonknights rather than just using the original skill/magic trees is one of the worst parts of the game to me. Base classes could have easily been signs of the Warrior, Mage and Thief, and then specialized to your hearts content from there.

My four-year-old daughter is shockingly proficient with a mouse and keyboard. Kid goes to town on Spyro: Reignited. My wife snagged an old PC from her office and we want to set it up for her eventually for learning, light gaming and MS Paint. We figure in another year or two we can set up a family Minecraft server and get her in on it. The dream is to get her playing Valheim with us when she’s older.

Hoping she will be as good with PCs and I am, and would love to help her build one when she’s grown.

I moved to Alberta like eight years ago and I’m still appalled at what passes for good pizza in this province. Someone told me it’s Greek influence, which explains why so many donair places are hailed for having the “best pizza in town”. To the average Albertan, it’s not good pizza unless the crust is five inches thick and incredibly dried-up.

What kind of dumb-fuck thinks Machine Elves look like eldritch horrors?

Other than being one giant wasted potential in general, this is reminiscent of ESO. That game was packed full of expensive mounts (among a million other things) that didn’t fit in with the lore of the Second Era whatsoever, though fans of the game will certainly argue that the lore has been so muddied by Zenimax at this point that maybe the Second Era really was packed full of superheroes with glowing eyes, dragon wings and mechanical unicorns.

Prices were also designed so that no matter how many crowns you purchased, you always had some bullshit amount left over that couldn’t buy anything of real value, driving you to purchase even more crowns so that your leftovers aren’t wasted. I don’t think any of them were this expensive, but definitely just as frivolous.