Bittersweet. I just came off 10 weeks of parental leave today and while I like what I do, a large part of me just wants to stay at home all the time with these adorable knuckleheads. It’s tough balancing out what’s important in life (them) vs. what keeps a roof over our heads and I am grateful to have a job that has always understood and respected those priorities.

Otherwise, the mental plate is FULL. Wife’s got some major health stuff we’re working through, potty training, and an AuDHD diagnosis for one of the kids. Just a lot happening and we need it to quiet down juuuuust a bit.

he never shit his pants once

Are you sure? Does he climb out of that suit every time he needs to go to the bathroom? Is there a Wookiepedia entry on Vader’s bathroom habits?

Thank you! Yeah, it’s a tough spot right now but I keep reminding myself this is temporary and in the long term, people generally aren’t the sociopaths that toddlers can be 😀

Broadly fine, though sometimes it’s feeling like the dog in the burning house…

My oldest (4.5) is proving to be extremely difficult right now at daycare with hitting others and they’ve been sent home twice now for being to disruptive at nap time (like running around and not settling down, keeping everyone up). Even when there’s no obvious trigger, just something strikes them the wrong way and it just spirals out of control. It’s taking quite the psychic toll on my wife and I right now dealing with what is essentially a “PIP” for our child. Youngest is just getting super cute and more talkative every day (turns 2 on Thursday). And we realized we’re like 60d away from #3 being here which has sent us into panic nesting mode.

I think Sniper Dan was sold for me when I’m shooting the door to leave or items in a shopkeepers stall to purchase them. The only way you interact with the world is through this sniper rifle and I found that hilarious.

For how quickly Seance came out after Blue Prince, that’s probably hard to say BP influenced it. I loved the Golden Idol games and to me, it feels like that formula but in a fully 3D world you can explore, even down to building up your hypothesis in the same ways (eg: ____ (blue word) was ____ (red word) because of ____ (blue word)).

For Titanium Court, I definitely enjoyed it and wishlisted it, but I would agree that there seems to be a ton of raving about what seems like…not much there? I guess more to the point of not understanding the hype behind it. I liked the style, I chuckled at the jokes, and it seemed interesting so I’ll keep an eye on it.

Finished Spider Man 2 early last week. Just as great as the first one. I really like how lived in the characters and the storyline is, so they can do the bigger city-ending type stuff. Now I’m really curious to see when they’ll make a third one and whether that will come to the PC eventually too (considering Sony’s looking at pivoting away from PC single player).

Started The Seance at Blake Manor and oh man is this thing scratching that Curse of the Golden Idol itch. Still don’t feel like I have my head around all the systems but I can feel it sinking its teeth into me.

Played a ton of Steam Demos, most of which I enjoyed…

• Everything is Crab - Vampire Survivors + Evolution/Spore + crabs obviously

• Australia Did It - Little tower defense to protect a train, then more Vampire Survivors-y as the train is in motion

• Titanium Court - Match 3 strategy with a weird quirky vibe to the humor

• Sniper Dan - Use a sniper rifle to solve lots of problems in this hidden object game

• The Eternal Life of Goldman - Gorgeous hand-drawn style to a metroidvania. I tried enough to know I’d like it then set it down.

• Let’s Build a Dungeon - Design an MMORPG, manage the studio, hire testers, and get rich.

News outlets should watch. It’s their job so that’s fine.

Everyone else should find something far more interesting to do instead and avoid the big whining baby. We can catch the lowlights later.

We have a ton of regular staples we’ll go to but this is probably our favorite - Instant Pot Chicken Burrito Bowls

Someone made this for us after the birth of our first child and we immediately needed to get the recipe from them! We’ve had to tinker with how spicy it is so both our kids would eat it but it’s great and pretty easy to make. My wife prefers it with tortilla chips to dip in while I’ll make mine into taco/burritos with it as the filling.

Finished my time with Clair Obscur and feeling a bit adrift. Such a beautiful game and one I hope I can go back to and experience again some time later (plus I left one achievement behind before quitting).

Jumped in and out of a few things. Currently playing Monster Train 2 some more in preparation for the DLC today and not sure when I’ll dive into Spider-Man 2…but that’s my next big one on my radar.

My millenial is showing with my username :D

We’re at a spot where we’ve more or less switched off subscriptions with a few exceptions (some of which enable us to not have OTHER subscriptions in the first place). Spotify is in a weird place where our kids have a playlist of music they like and they’re more or less the primary user of our Spotify playlist now. I’ve got all of my music self-hosted and my intention with this latest news is to try and bring the kids’ music over too.

I feel like the main thing these subscription services need to do is keep it chill. The fastest way to get me to question whether a service is worth it or not is if the monthly cost keeps being thrown in my face. Grandfather in old prices for a lot longer or something to keep people hooked longer. That’s probably why I’ll never be a C-level exec.

Spotify’s been fine but it’s just obnoxious at this point and THEY are pushing me to look elsewhere at this point.

I did see a tip about turning up the volume for sound cues when I was digging around trying to find if there was some kind of setting I could enable for a more visual cue (like you get for a Jump attack). I don’t usually play games with headphones on but I find myself doing that with this one!

The Steam Deck experience is pretty good. The issues I’ve had with the characters’ hairstyles catching the light weird seems to be more an issue of the lighting in general. I was in the Stone Wave Cliffs which has a lot of caves to explore and a lot of instances where there’s a “light at the end of a tunnel”. What I noticed was the light at the end was almost too bright/overpowering and it made it impossible to see the cave around me which, while maybe accurate to what you’d experience in real life with losing night vision and whatnot, makes it really hard to see/navigate. Similarly some of the menus are noticably darker as if I would need to turn the brightness up but not every menu is like that either. Just some weirdness there and I haven’t tried that section on my PC to see if it’s just how the game is or how the Steam Deck is handling it. Otherwise though, the Deck experience is pretty good and I’m getting into it for a couple hours a night without much issue. Definitely not the cleanest/fanciest graphics but in the “good enough” camp for me that aside from the lighting woes, I don’t notice much of a problem.

All the Game Awards chatter and the current sale made me take the plunge on Clair Obscur" Expedition 33 and I’m so glad I did. Only ~8h in or so but it is such a vibrant, wild world to explore and it makes me think of the classic JRPGs I played growing up. The introduction of more active battling mechanics like parrying and dodging adds a level of complexity to the combat that I enjoy, even if I cannot for the life of me get the parry timing right.

Steam Deck took a couple minor tweaks to make it look good and the hair effects still are a bit janky (eg. Gustave’s hair will light up from a light source making it look grey). The soundtrack is phenomenal and was the first time in a long time that I’ve wanted to buy a game soundtrack (this battle track in one of the early areas cemented this as something special to me).

Super worth it and excited to dive in deep on this one.

Interesting that I had a lot of these already set to False and I definitely haven’t gone through this process before. Maybe there was a prompt somewhere that I said no to?

Appreciate the list though just to be extra sure!

Hey, just a super random follow up but this thread sparked me messing around with Bazzite again and I got some things figured out that originally did trip me up. Just set it up on a separate hard drive for dual booting to give it another chance.

Whenever I find a few minutes to sit down with the time to make the switch official, I’m probably going to install Bazzite properly over my Windows install!

Could I play something new? Sure.

Did I end up starting a new save in Stardew Valley for the umpteenth time? Yep.

I wrapped up Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown maybe a week ago and really enjoyed it, ending somewhere around 85% of completion and calling that good enough. Not sure why Stardew looked appealing but it did, I’m over the usual hurdle of Spring/early Summer Year One and just enjoying my time with it. I’ve already played for well over 500h across multiple saves and if hard pressed to pick one game as my favorite, it’s probably Stardew. This time around is a modded playthrough primarily on the Steam Deck/with a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard, so some mods are a bit clunkier than I’d like (renaming chests and chest groups is a real pain) and settling into the end of my first year now.

Honestly, it’s my assessment of turning my only PC, which is primarily gaming, into a Linux machine and the struggles there with day-to-day usage. I have no idea what OP’s comfort level with Linux or tech is in general but my assumption is it’s enough to think “Yeah, I could install Linux and do this.” which was where I was at too. Nothing I’m doing was exotic but the investment required in finding suitable alternatives that worked nearly out of the box was too high at the time.

Gaming was decent by all accounts. I think I had a few compatibility items that will iron out as developers support Linux more and the technology that enables gaming on Linux just gets better and better. I have an AMD card and from what I gather that’s better for switching to Linux. A lot of my frustrations were not related to gaming and I recognize the issue is time and knowledge on my part. If those are in short supply when something breaks, you could have a bad time is all I’m saying. Everyone’s got to start out somewhere and if you’ve had Windows forever, it can be a mental shift.

Both were on my radar as well. I want to say I tried Bazzite before Pop but one of those workflows I could not solve was a problem on Bazzite (some virtual kvm switch software I’ve used forever). Nobara was almost where I went after Pop before retreating back to Windows :)

Looks like I’ll be the negative one. I gave it a solid try dual booting for about 6 months before I went back to Windows.

I think I took for granted how much is abstracted away in Windows when it came to being my daily driver for my computer. Wrapping my head around things that “just worked” in Windows proved to be more difficult than I anticipated and I dealt with more friction. Trying to learn new concepts stood in my way of fully embracing it as well as not understanding what the “Windows equivalent” was for a given feature/function/action so I could wrap my head around it better. I also had a couple of workflows that I never got working in Linux despite all my attempts at searching for answers.

And I know people will come out of the woodwork with all sorts of questions or input on how if I just tried it again I’ll get it. For the record, I tried out Pop OS since it bills itself as a dead simple. I know the problems for me were more around my knowledge, years of built up muscle memory with Windows, and limited time to game so messing with whatever my current problem was made it more frustrating and soured me on the experience.