addie

We do get a lot of German tourists coming to visit the northwest of Scotland - quite often a queue of campervans with their fancy license plates queuing up in Inverness. You can be stood on top of a mountain in the northern highlands, and not see any evidence of another human being from horizon to horizon. Which is also terrifying in a way - the traditional "Land's End to John O'Groats" cycle does include quite a long way away from civilisation if your bike decides to have a mechanical.

German tourists always most welcome here, ofc. Even more welcome if you bring some konigsberger klopse and some robust dunkelbiers with you; will swap you for whisky, we've got loads.

It lets you "add game", but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.

So for example, in Lutris I could have "every Zelda game" or "every Castlevania game" as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.

I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn't be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.

Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:

• lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments

• lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them

• lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon

• keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you've finished it, ...

Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn't let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of "all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus".

Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being "only what you need" was good as well. Shame it's gone off the rails a bit...

Support for Linux has to be explicitly enabled, it's not on by default. Even when it's enabled, it causes complete bullshit. For instance, I can't use all of my CPU cores when playing Elden Ring - EAC isn't compatible with so many, have to disable some so that it can start.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1245620/discussions/0/597412189643679711/

It does just fine for claiming the free games and then otherwise ignoring the Epic store, which is perfection. Think I've installed about one out of fifty or so I have available, but the important thing is that Tim doesn't receive a penny.

Fine Young Cannibals?

What a shame - Netflix have given up on doing anything at all imaginative, and have fallen back on making Harry Potter and FIFA games, chucking everyone else to the wolves.

In some ways, having someone with a head for business would appear to make sense for a gaming studio. You could look at most of the announcements from eg. Obsidian or Double Fine on their intention to make 'Scope Creep: The Video Game', guaranteed to release massively over-budget to critical success but modest sales which will put the studio into a lot of trouble; and think that someone holding the purse strings, keeping the creatives from their worst excesses, and vetoing any really stupid ideas would be a clever idea. Unfortunately, this role always seems to go to dumb-arse dipshits without a single thought in their heads.

Would appear that an Indie Studio of three people might be ideal - Suspicious Developments, Team Cherry, Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy have put out some great stuff recently. Small enough to stay focussed, and also small enough to put in a few years of polish without running up crazy bills. Seems like Night School, being four people, was just a bit too big.

Yeah. I've got my home server set to install all security updates and restart Monday at 3 am; my first thought when seeing a two-month uptime on any of my machines is 'whoops', not 'wow'.

Amazing uptimes are strictly for machines that aren't connected to a network, and I'd start to be concerned whether they'd restart on eg. power failure if I started seeing really big numbers.

Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.

Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn't be bothered moving it - load times were good, but "fog doors" appear over doorways and cave entrances while they're being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.

It isn't a problem; mote has misunderstood the law.

https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives

"Illegal without good reason." You are most definitely allowed to buy kitchen knives to take home with you; trying to take them into a football game will be frowned upon, though.

Police are usually fairly sensible about it. I've got friends that do medieval reenactment that have been stopped with cars full of longswords and crossbows. Show them your event tickets and some of your other gear, you'll be waved on your way.

A three-inch blade is allowed provided it doesn't lock in place; as long as it just folds away (like a swiss army knife) then it's fine. Three-inch butterfly knife will get you in a lot of bother, though.

Speaking as an Arch btw user, my socks match, thank you very much. How rude.