my understanding is that BG3 is more similar to Larian’s earlier games, Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 (which, full disclosure, I’m a big fan of). so if you want an inexpensive PC game that’s likely to have a similar feel, mechanically, those games have been around a long time and are still well worth playing (if you ask me).

laughing a stupid little laugh after I’m done talking. probably comes off as nervous and awkward. I hate it.

and that was like 6 years ago!

I’m in the U.S. Eastern time zone, so like 8 or 9 am your time would be the middle of the night for me, which would be ideal, but honestly 10 minutes of downtime in the afternoon (this update will be 4 pm my time) isn’t going to hurt. you do the work running the server, you should do updates when it’s convenient for you.

I don’t mean to be an aggressive anti-capitalist (but I’m gonna), but the suggestion that the solution to “dopamine addiction” is to “throw yourself into your work” makes me extremely suspicious.

I’m perpetually pleased by the Verge’s vendetta against Reddit. fuck spez.

you know, this meme is old as hell, but I still like it.

In cryptography, a “nonce” is a number used only once. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce

Setting aside the issue of whether this post is overstating the risk of MDM software on a personal phone, I had a tangentially related experience that might provide a tip for anyone who’s in a similar situation.

I like to have the convenience of checking my work messages and chats on my personal phone, so I have Teams and Outlook installed and using my work account.

When I first went to sign in to my work account on Outlook, I got this message like “Outlook needs to run with administrator privileges in order to provide the necessary security for this account” and shunted me off to some system settings to approve the permissions. Big nope.

So I tried Outlook Lite, and it made no such demands and works perfectly. So for anyone else who’s run into this, try Outlook Lite! I hope this helps somebody.

there are some print-on-demand card and game manufacturers that might be less expensive than you think. I’m a hobbyist game designer and I’ve used thegamecrafter.comthegamecrafter.com as well as makeplayingcards.com to have custom cards printed, and it wasn’t particularly costly.

but if those services do charge more than you want to spend, the thing I recommend most strongly is that whatever stock you decide to print on, cut them with one of those sliding-blade paper cutters. don’t try to cut them with scissors. they’ll come out a lot more even.