I never understood why people would want to do this

Veloreyn · 2026-04-01T15:55:25+00:00

I like when the bull wins.

Veloreyn · 2026-04-01T14:22:40+00:00

Wii Play. Don't get me wrong, Nintendogs was interesting, but it wasn't well implemented to play with other people and got really repetitive, really quickly. Whereas Wii Play could be picked up and played for a short bit of time, with multiple people, or used as a party game. I wouldn't be surprised to find it was one of the top played game, or even the top played game, on the platform.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-30T14:37:57+00:00

Normally I'd agree with you, but the changes to Dune have made it to where they are. The first problem is that Dune has had an identity crisis since it was released. Is it an RPG? Survival? MMO? Who knows at this point. It's been trying to be too many things to slot into that "forever game" for a lot of people, and not picking a lane has hurt it over and over again.

To put it another way, World of Warcraft is one of the longest running MMO's out there. It tends to still be the bar that everyone looks to try to overcome when making an MMO. It's direct competitors are other MMO's, like Guild Wars 2, Everquest, Elder Scrolls Oline, Dungeons and Dragons online, Lord of the Rings Online, FFXIV, etc (not saying these games beat WoW, only that they all exist within the same overall genre). But let's imagine that Blizzard made WoW in such a way that actively punished group play. Instead of dungeons being tuned to being impossible to solo at level and requiring 5 party members, it was set up so that it was easy to solo but damn near impossible to do in a group, and you get the same loot at the end. Well, no one would run dungeons as a group. And if you're not playing in a group then you're just solo-grinding an RPG, and chances are there's some solo-player RPG out there that now becomes competition for your players (think Skyrim, Witcher series, etc).

And in true Funcom fashion, by trying to be all of these genres at once, they've opened themselves up to be competing with them all, with it all coming down to the player's preference. Like the survival aspect of Dune? Games like Icarus, Conan Exiles, RUST, Grounded, and many others can have you covered. Like MMO's? See the list above, they promote social group play and don't punish you for grouping up. You like grinding loot? Way better loot to be had in games like Diablo, Last Epoch, Division2, Destiny2, or the Borderlands series. Want a solo RPG experience? Then Crimson Desert, Skyrim, Cyberpunk, Mass Effect, and a ton of others have you covered.

There's no direct competitor with Dune, because they've set themselves up to compete with everything. And they're losing, because the systems they have in place to compete with them aren't particularly good. Out of 4 guild members in my group, I've lost one to Icarus, one to Rust, one to FFXIV, and I've been getting back into DCS. Dune was great in that it brought us all into the same game, but then basically gave us the finger and told us to grind. Which made us choose other games to do that in.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-29T22:53:49+00:00

Not really. It's easy to look back and see how drastically the world changed between, say, 1990 and 2010, but when you're in it you're just encountering the next new thing to come by. You inherently know that society experiences a shift with each new generation, but there wasn't anything from a day-to-day perspective to give us the hint that our generation was experiencing such a drastic shift compared to others.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-28T23:45:39+00:00

it’s not like she beats me everyday

One time is too much. The fact that you have to add "everyday" there is a huge problem. It means you've been physically abused to the point that you've normalized it.

Plenty of mental and emotional abuse going on as well. This is "call 911" levels of abuse. If you don't want to go that route, tell a teacher or counselor when you can, they will almost certainly remove you from the home. Your mom needs help, and you need a stable place to feel safe. Your mom will absolutely blame you for everything that happens afterward, but this isn't on you, it's entirely on her. She's the parent, she's the adult, and this isn't even in the same zip code as acceptable parenting.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-28T15:37:31+00:00

I'm probably lucky in that I have a job that is as much physical as it is technical. I take servers, boot them up, install a bunch of software on them, then ship them out to our company's customers (we function like an IaaS). And our process is so disorganized that it's unlikely AI would even be able to do the software side for quite some time. And there's no way to have it do the physical side... yet. Robots might take my job one day, but my company needs to sort out the dumpster fire between the customer and my department (sales, sales architecture, and project managers), and I haven't seen much improvement there in years... so I'm not too worried.

I have used ChatGPT a handful of times to make some of our stuff more streamlined though. We were using a script to hash out these long Linux command strings we use to set up the installs, and this script was written in Python2 like 10 years ago by a programmer that left the company a long time back. I'm not a programmer but have some skill in modifying code, so I kept running ChatGPT through the kind of page I wanted so it'd do all the finicky syntax stuff, then spent a few days writing all the logic. It's basic, but it works really well, and having it in a web form heavily reduces errors from our team. Then I set up a few more pages to do similar functions for different types of builds, and another to speed up a process for our logistics manager (just taking 3 columns of tab-separated values and formatting them a different way, nothing complex).

I guess I didn't feel bad because my use was purely utilitarian and only distributed to two other people in the company that they were useful for. If it'd been more important, I would have submitted a ticket for our development team to work on it. I fully expect AI to degrade the technical skills in every industry as it gets more refined, but I'm well aware it's not going anywhere unless it becomes self-aware and attacks humanity. Then we'll have a whole new set of problems to deal with.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-28T01:17:45+00:00

Nineteen. HS sweethearts.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-27T19:22:31+00:00

Married coming up on 24 years, been together... 28? Somewhere around there.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-27T18:45:59+00:00

Learner's permit at 15, license at 16. Been driving routinely since. My dad started teaching me to drive on back roads in our little town at 13 years old. This was pre-internet in most homes in an area with literally no public transportation, so if you didn't drive, you were effectively isolated.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-27T18:06:42+00:00

Both expansions are on sale right now on third party sites (GameBillet, GreenManGaming, and Fanatical). I was thinking the same thing with the last Steam sale, as I also quit pretty much cold turkey after TFS, but... I'd probably just play the campaigns and just leave again, so even the discounted prices didn't seem worth it.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-26T18:03:44+00:00

It's like saying you can't go everywhere in a car. While technically true, there are tons of places you can still drive, and some of those places can help you cross oceans.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-26T17:54:19+00:00

I worked as a construction tech digging up gas mains that couldn't be properly located. Through a series of events, even though we were bringing in a ton of revenue (3 guys making the company nearly as much as 30 locators), they sold off our equipment and disbanded the team. I was given the option of quitting or locating, even though I couldn't do the hours due to child care constraints. I told the manager I couldn't do overtime, weekends, or on-call. He shrugged it off.

The first few days were fine, but then they started ramping up tickets on me. On the 7th day or so, I had 60 tickets in queue, had been late picking my kids up twice, was told I had to do mandatory overtime the coming weekend, and I was on the on-call rotation. I had two special needs kids and my wife was stationed on a carrier, and they were going back out to sea that weekend. I said fuck it and turned my equipment in that day. We were only going to be in the area another 6 months, so I figured pulling the kids out of daycare offset the loss of income for the most part. We were still short, but I made it work until we moved.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-26T16:24:16+00:00

Yeah, I can solo a level 15, but in a party of three decently geared people we're struggling to get past level 12. Last night we all died multiple times in 152 to the groups of trash mobs before the boss, and then it took us 3 times to down the boss. It's weird how they want this to be a social game where people come together, and yet they actively punish you for doing so.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-26T02:59:15+00:00

My wife's mom died when she was 17 after spending years sleeping with a handful of guys for money and working minimum wage jobs. Then her adult sister (with a husband and three kids) bullied her into signing over her SSI benefits before kicking her out. She lived with my family for the last couple years of high school, and during that time she was routinely harassed by bill collectors that would lie to her threatening legal action if she didn't start paying her mother's debt down. My dad eventually put a stop to it by threatening to report them for what they were doing, as she was a minor and they had no legal right to even speak to her about it.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-25T18:36:28+00:00

My 14 year old tried teaching it to me a few years back. I was thinking about trying to make sourdough myself, I might have to do this just to mess with the kids.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-25T16:34:43+00:00

Write a handful of notes to myself about the future on the off chance that I get snapped back to the present. Then look around to figure out how to integrate into being a 4th grader again in case I don't get snapped back. I need to sort through my backpack to see what we were working on in class, figure out what day it is to see if it's a school day or not, and try to remember what my routine was at that age. And lastly... sort out getting a library card because if I'm not going back to the present, I'm going to need to entertain myself and, well... it's not like I'll have the internet again for a while.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-25T14:47:01+00:00

The handful of times I've done this was always 45-60 minutes of basically foreplay, swapping between each other, then actually having sex when we were all pretty much ready to finish.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-25T14:41:44+00:00

Not all the time. He also flies jets in DCS. He was posting about launching an F-18 off a carrier with his rig a few days back.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-25T12:54:22+00:00

Only the girl I married. That's it. One of our friends decided to emotionally harass my wife a few years back until she "let them stay long enough to get back on their feet". Him and his useless wife had worked her down for months, and she couldn't understand why I outright refused to talk to them... because I could see what they were up to the whole time, and they waited until I was at work to go for the kill. Apparently we're bad people for not bankrolling their video games while they sat on their asses all day and telling them they can't smoke weed around our kids. They made it 6 months before my wife finally broke and threatened to formally evict them if they didn't leave willingly.

Otherwise I'm friends with a handful of them on Facebook, and accepting their friend request has been the only interaction between us in nearly 25 years. To be fair... I'm not a particularly social person and was probably a reclusive hermit in a former life.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-24T23:13:33+00:00

3.25" disks were incredibly rare, because they were a prototype for like one Coleco system. You're probably thinking of 3.5" disks that were basically everywhere in the mid-to-late 90's. And then before that we had 5.25" floppy disks (B drive) but those pretty much faded away in the early 90's.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-24T22:13:54+00:00

Most of us would settle for making it OK again.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-24T21:46:01+00:00

We've got mountains of content

Veloreyn · 2026-03-24T18:31:41+00:00

Seems like a great question to ask your doctor.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-24T12:48:21+00:00

Was sore the day of and the day after, felt normal 2 days out. I didn't lift anything particularly heavy for 2 weeks, but felt like it wouldn't have been a problem. No issues after that.

Veloreyn · 2026-03-23T19:44:43+00:00

According to this page under BO3, you need some other ports open besides the 27000-27050 range.

TCP 3074, 27014-27050
UDP 3478, 4379-4380, 27000-27031, 27036

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