My favorite sci-fi game is probably Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. ME1 was the only game in the series that I enjoyed, but it still felt like a de-StarWars-ified KOTOR game.

I believe this to a degree based on my personal experiences with being thought of as either a brilliant wizard or evil hacker for unimpressive things. It even would happen at different jobs until my current job where my boss is the opposite. he thinks that anything and everything is possible and should be “easy” despite being technically illiterate. His new AI obsession has made it so much worse. I actually miss the super annoying “OMG you can do that? You’re a wizard/hacker/demigod!” days.

In my head, I am picturing the Goatse guy popping up in the corner of the screen like the “TOASTY!” guy from Mortal Kombat.

Sceptre was more of a TV company in the past, but over the last decade or so have definitely moved more into the monitor business. I have actually owned 5 different Sceptre TVs over the last 20 years, but back in the day it was because they were some of the least expensive LCD televisions on the market.

I also bought a Sceptre “dumb TV” within the last year or so and highly recommend it. I had been recommending it over and over, but recently I found that the model I bought was no longer offered. I hope Sceptre didn’t abandon them.

Hah, indeed. That Epic is long dead, just like the Id that made Commander Keen and the Blizzard that made Rock n Roll Racing.

Sounds legit, I turned down multiple higher roles in my last company after doing a test commute to the more remote office. It was consistently 90-120 minutes each way. That would end up with me be away at work for 12-13 hours each day for 8 hours of paid work.

Let’s hope we do in fact get other challengers because Epic is the last company that I want to succeed as a major platform.

Maybe it’s because Epic sucks and are total hypocrites. Google absolutely deserved to lose in court, but Epic and Sweeney can go to hell.

Thanks for looking. I’ll see if I can poke around in their forums.

My Pixel 4a was perfect, but it is sadly gone now. I ended up with an 8a to I could keep using grapheneOS, but without a headphone jack I just started using a standalone portable music player. It seems ridiculous because it is, but that is what they forced on me and I will never forgive any of these companies for it.

SHIFT

I just looked at the site and it looks great, but parts of it didn’t look available in English. Do you have any idea if it’s fully compatible with US networks?

They are one of the few OEMs that still offers headphone jacks and they are overall decent midrange phones. If they weren’t so damned big and had an unlocked bootloader for ROM support I’d be on one right now.

The trackball that had the customizable notification LED under it on the Nexus One was so damned cool. Since it was raised up and I had work emails, texts, personal emails, and GTalk all on distinct colors, I could tell from across the room whether it was worth even grabbing my phone.

Give the browser extension uBlacklist a try if you want to always filter out specific sites. I did that to block some AI slop and content mill sites that are good at gaming search engines.

I have certainly have seen some cheap knockoff retro consoles at Aldi in their random seasonal aisle, but I’ve never seen any of the proper, branded retro remakes like this, the C64, or the NES/SNES/etc consoles.

You definitely see a lot less of them. Some of that was intentional, at least in the US, as the “love bug” problem was supposedly something that we caused and the solution was to spread sterilized bugs that would mingle with the regular bugs and prevent the population booms. No idea how well it worked, it could just be that our overuse of pesticides did the real work.

You probably didn’t know about this as it didn’t get the attention of the NES and such, but here is a remade Amiga PC. https://retrogames.biz/products/thea500-mini/

Mine was obviously worse than before, but still lasting well over a day before the previous update. I ended up having to buy a new phone as it was unusable.

It was truly wild to meet him briefly at Defcon after years of seeing “FREE KEVIN” and such.