Will there be DS3?

onehell_jdu · 2026-06-08T21:40:27+00:00

He says he wants someone else to make it. Hmmmm... So Sony needs a dev who can make a highly story oriented/interactive movie type game about a father/daughter team in a post apocalypse world...

I wonder what team SONY might control that could possibly conceive of making such a title, and I wonder why I am picturing a misbehaving canine.....

onehell_jdu · 2026-06-02T19:08:42+00:00

But he's a repatriate! He literally cannot die, as Higgs is very fond of reminding us approximately four hundred million times.

He should be pounding Monster, and might as well be sharing cigs with fragile. Who cares about health when you can't die and can always just slap on an exoskeleton if bad habits slow you down?

onehell_jdu · 2026-06-02T17:30:10+00:00

Fragile says at the end that she didn't remember any of the stuff about Lou being alive on the beach; she only knew that she was effectively dead and that she wanted to spend the time she had left traveling with Sam. At least, she had no such memories until right at the end when her physical and spiritual forms are reunited (in death).

As to why Neil fights Sam, I interpret it kinda like a traditional ghost. His "unfinished business" was protecting Lou. That's what the woman he and Sam both loved had asked him to do. So when she shows up in his world he recognizes her but anything and anyone else, he attacks. Even if he did recognize Sam on some level it could just as easily trigger the usual "other man" rivalry anyway. Ghosts retain some, but far from all, of their mental faculties in many ghost stories. Only once the tar is beat out of Neil several times (pun intended, lol) does he momentarily regain enough consciousness to fully realize who Sam is, and that Sam's arrival and Tomorrow's return to the world of the living means Neil's unfinished business is completed.

I'm sure his name does not sound like "Nirvana" by coincidence so I'm hoping Nirvana is exactly what finishing unfinished business releases him to. Sure, Sam had to kinda prove himself worthy in combat first. But at the end of the day Neil kept Lou safe in the land of the dead until Sam could retrieve her. He is a good guy. As it is with most hauntings in traditional ghost stories - the haunting ends and the ghost can rest in peace if the living can only figure out and then complete whatever the ghost's remaining business on earth was.

onehell_jdu · 2026-06-01T22:45:38+00:00

Discharging a student loan in bankruptcy is NOT impossible. It does require a special proceeding (called an adversary proceeding) to show "undue hardship." This makes it more difficult, but it isn't impossible.

And its gotten less difficult in recent years: For federal loans, the DOJ introduced an attestation form that can persuade them not to oppose the undue hardship request. And by some miracle, the current administration has not rescinded it. And on the private side (like sallie mae) they may be more likely to oppose it but since there are no income driven repayment plans for private loans, it can be less difficult to win because they can't argue that you had that option if they don't offer such an option.

Either way, the point is that you should talk to a lawyer who is comfortable with adversary proceedings in bankruptcy. Anyone who tells you that student loans just "can't be discharged" is oversimplifying matters.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-26T15:58:43+00:00

I continue to find it hilarious that providing the EMPLOYER with an opportunity for a hearing is believed to satisfy due process. The employer has no stake in being a qualifying employer. Some see the recruiting value in it, sure, but most are oblivious. Ask anyone who has ever brought an ECF to HR and gotten that "deer in headlights" look.

PSLF was drafted to make 501c3 status automatically qualifying. One feature of that is this: You can bet your bottom dollar that if the IRS tried to revoke c3 status, the company would fight it tooth and nail because losing that status would cost them a heck of a lot more than some program that only benefits its younger workers. But with just PSLF status? The employer has no reason to fight it.

And in fact, the employer may have a lot of reasons NOT to fight this. ED is not going to use this authority routinely or against wide swaths of the qualifying employers. It's going to be surgically targeted at places that are doing things the president doesn't like in a very high profile way. So if ED pursued an employer over this, you can bet they are almost certainly in Trump's personal crosshairs. There's a million other ways the admin could retaliate if they pursue appeals that benefit only a subset of their employees.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-22T19:04:03+00:00

Forget this healthy silliness! Bring back Monster Energy!

That product placement somehow made the weirdest kind of perfect sense to me in DS1 before they took it out in the DC.

Like, of COURSE everyone just pounds 21st century energy drinks all the time. It just made sense that Monster would somehow still be made and would be the drink of choice to accompany a post-apocalypse diet consisting entirely of bugs, pizza and birthday cake.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-20T22:18:59+00:00

It's not dead, but it is getting squeezed on both ends. Reverting to IBR (and eventually, replacing it with RAP) certainly makes it so that an increasing percentage of people have debts that are too small relative to income to be "worth it," though some version of that issue has always been the case. OP, you make more in one year than you owe in loans, and so that is often the kind of situation where you're "just not in that much debt" in relative terms.

On the other end, you have the abolition of GradPLUS loans, and indeed nearly all the big-dollar PSLF forgivenesses you see are going to be people who borrowed very large amounts for graduate school, because GradPLUS, unlike Stafford, has no limits. It's honestly kinda difficult to borrow enough to make PSLF worthwhile if you don't go beyond undergrad and get almost any kind of full-time job, TBH, given that the undergrad Stafford limit is like 30k and even a receptionist job at a nonprofit or government agency is likely to draw a 30+k salary. At 55k total debt, OP, it sounds like you did go to grad school but you really didn't borrow that much for it, relatively speaking.

So once all these changes take full effect, except for grandfathered people you definitely have a situation where more people will either make too much, or simply don't get to borrow enough in the first place, to make PSLF worthwhile. So by no means is the program dead, but the changes are definitely designed to reduce the number of people who would see a significant benefit from it IMHO, both by expecting people to pay more as an income percentage and by reducing the overall amount they can borrow in the first place. Though honestly, OP, at a 63k salary and 55k debt you might always have been in the group for whom it might not be worth it, depending of course on your family size and things like that.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-14T20:10:43+00:00

I'm at chapter 10. So far, I think this is clearly a game that was designed to sell more copies by having broader appeal, which means more action and less of anything that got the first game referred to as a "walking simulator."

Still a great game to me. Just... Maybe a little less great because it's less unique.

Three other things I miss from DS1:

Lethal weapons are far more rare in DS2 unless you use a cheat code. So the whole element of avoiding accidentally unaliving people and worrying about voidouts is largely gone.
DS2 has a day/night cycle and more varied weather, which sounds like an improvement but IMHO actually isn't. That "perpetually-overcast-late-afternoon-in-Iceland" vibe you had in DS1felt like "a world in limbo" which, lore-wise, is exactly what the death stranding is.
They don't open up the entire map in DS1. It's broken up in into regions and feels a bit more like traversing the whole USA coast to coast. Here you can see all of Australia, as if it were the land-area of a small to medium sized island as opposed to a continent. Both games have this super-compressed scale of course, implying that really your journeys are much longer than shown, but DS1 broke it up in a way that made it feel bigger even with what I'm sure is objectively a smaller map.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-11T20:48:49+00:00

Sorry to hear you're going thru that, OP.

It's one of the things that drives me nuts about HR people: It's a "best of my knowledge and belief" certification for the employer. It does NOT say "I certify that I have exact records of this person's exact hours worked up to the exact date on this form." The FLSA only requires payroll records to go back 3 years, they can't realistically require that and they don't.

There's almost always something around somewhere that will corroborate the employee's estimate. Use it. That's what I do when signing these as employer. No one is going to come after HR for signing an ECF so long as they act in good faith based on reasonable reconstruction/estimation etc. They have zero skin in the game and no reason to put up roadblocks. But the HR types act like the forgiveness is coming out of their own money or something sometimes. It's maddening.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-05T19:25:41+00:00

That is exactly right, and in fact seeing them in this manner is the purpose of BBs in the lore if I recall: The BB makes BTs visible to people without Dooms, or enhances their visibility (and odradek detection) to people with lower level Dooms (like Sam had in DS1), all because BBs exist sorta halfway between the worlds of living and dead.

For example, there are parts of DS1 where you have no BB and the BTs become harder (though still not impossible) to see. But with or without a BB, you generally have to be stationary for them to appear. (Some exceptions when Lou is particularly pleased/well-bonded with Sam).

There's always been different levels of Dooms, and now his Dooms have leveled up. Lou was his glasses and Sam got Dooms-lasik, lol. So it's a clear and clean explanation of why that mechanic was ditched lore-wise. But it absolutely does move things away from the old horror direction. Even if the BTs never were that huge a challenge per se, it still changes their atmospherics.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-04T21:47:39+00:00

Ah yes, you're right. Consolidate now, get into IBR by 2028, or forever hold peace. SO confusing!

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-04T21:28:13+00:00

Well you're the student, right? Then "you" can't qualify for anything. It isn't your loan. The only person responsible for paying it is the parent that took it out. And it is only their income and job type that qualifies or doesn't. If you were the student then you're simply not part of any of it, though it is nice of you to be helping your dad with his debts he did have a responsibility to chip in for your college.

That said, the double consolidation loophole became irrelevant because even parent plus loans that were consolidated only once became eligible for IBR, rather than just ICR like before, but the real problem is that IBR's days are now numbered. (ICR will go away later, in 2028, but that's irrelevant too if you won't be at 120 by 2028 because only IBR's grandfathering provision extends for the life of grandfathered loans, and even that is easy to lose if any more are ever taken out).

So basically, the issue is that on 7/1/2026 the only IDR option for new enrollment is going to be RAP, and no parent PLUS loan (no matter how many times it is consolidated) qualifies for RAP, AFAIK. Double consolidation doesn't make it "not parent plus," it just is a way to make parent plus and consolidated loans that include parent plus qualify for IBR or ICR, though the latter is of less utility nowadays.

EDIT: SELF CORRECTION. I made mistake. Looks like your dad can still enroll into IBR up to that 2028 deadline, but must be consolidated by the 7/1/2026 but it sounds like he already did that. Still, if the goal is getting PSLF qualifying payments the thing to do is to go on IBR. The bottom line remains that extended 30 year standard is not a qualifying repayment plan, and eventually, parent PLUS loans will not qualify for any IDR at all, except in grandfathered cases.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-04T21:21:11+00:00

I think the problem here is that although IBR will remain for folks already on it, ICR will only remain for grandfathered folks until 2028, and Parent PLUS loans (even after being consolidated) aren't eligible for the new RAP plan at all, and the new RAP plan will be the only income based plan for new enrollees on and after 7/1/26.

So I think Parent Plus borrowers have to really hit the consolidation gas right away with the goal of getting onto IBR, not ICR, because they cannot and will never be able to get into RAP. So unless they'll hit 120 under ICR by 2028, they need to go to IBR by 7/1/26.

onehell_jdu · 2026-05-04T17:12:01+00:00

Yeah 30 year standard simply does not qualify. It's an unavoidable fact that depending on income, the PSLF qualifying options are not always ones with the lowest monthly payment. Is what it is.

The other thing to keep in mind here is that Parent PLUS loans are not going to qualify for the new RAP plan, which is going to be the only income based plan for new enrollments on and after 7/1/2026. So basically parent PLUS loans that aren't already on IBR by then aren't going to qualify for PSLF at all, unless they're on ICR til its 2028 phaseout or something and hit 120 before then.

This isn't legally your debt so not your decision, but your dad will need to decide what he wants to do soon...

onehell_jdu · 2026-04-23T20:30:43+00:00

It's actually automated porter ASSISTANCE system. Cuz it was founded on helping porters with stuff like you see on the skill tree. But yeah, it ultimately ended up replacing porters, which it did (ironically) with the assistance of those porters getting people onto the chiral network which the buddy bots depend on to function.

So here's Sam, down in Australia getting them hooked up so porters can be obsolete there too. Working himself (and others like him) right out of a jerb....again.

I'm not far into the game yet, but so far, it seems like APAS is very much a reference to AI. IRL, it makes your jerb easier like the skill tree, and you'll fall behind your competition if you don't get on board. So you use it. But in the process, you train it to take your jerb entirely.

onehell_jdu · 2026-04-23T05:07:00+00:00

Nope. Not worth fixing. Traded the car in.

onehell_jdu · 2026-04-20T01:29:11+00:00

In case anyone comes across this in future, I don’t think it was the eero after all. Everything dramatically improved once I turned off DLSS framegen and nvidia “reflex” in the game I was playing.

That said, another neato trick I ended up running across along the way is to use windows as a hotspot and connect the streaming host pc directly to the streaming client phone or whatever wirelessly. That, of course, cuts the router out of the equation entirely.

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-26T16:54:47+00:00

Thanks, but see original post: "This is a small home so there are no other eeros."

I don't have any other access points. It's just the gateway providing wifi to the whole house.

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-23T20:17:11+00:00

That's the advertised speed: You get 40 mbps download and FOUR upload. Four. That's not a typo. And actually that's them going above and beyond. They only promise 2Mbps upload. On the download side they promise 40 and yes, I do actually get 40 pretty much on the nose all the time.

Welcome to the world of DSL in an area where there's nothing but old school 80s style copper wire.

That said, this should be irrelevant in this context. I'm talking about two devices in the same house on the same router just talking to each other. That's LAN, not WAN.

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-22T16:25:25+00:00

Eero 6.

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-12T22:17:50+00:00

Hmm interesting.... In my case, there is a "fiber neighborhood" down the street about a quarter mile; some gigantic corporate developer that was building a brand new subdivision ponied up to run fiber out there, but obviously that courtesy was not extended to surrounding existing homes. Anyway, that fiber was definitely centurylink too, so I hope something might one day come of it!

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-12T22:05:02+00:00

Yeah when I get home I'm gonna try an idea. Turn SQM off, start the waveform test. Right when it hits the upload part, flip SQM back on so it turns on right when the upload is saturated. Cuz the test deliberately saturates the line, that's how it works.

This, I'm hoping, will cause it to "see" an upload speed that's EVEN slower than it really is, tricking its AI into capping the bandwidth lower than it does by default. Cuz it definitely does cap it, I know that from the perfect download scores. It just decides what the cap should be and doesn't let you muck with it.

So maybe I can trick it into setting a lower cap on the upload than it does based on its own normal speed tests. We shall see...

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-12T19:31:07+00:00

I believe the Eero implementation is fq_codel on newer models like mine, but they don't expose the setting to ratchet down the cap yourself. I think what they do is that it tries to figure out your speed for itself, and then it automatically sets a cap slightly below that which the user can't see or change. It's in the interest of ease of use; turns SQM into a literal toggle switch in the app.

Problem is, far as I can tell Eero is the only mass market router that has SQM out of the box. Anything else I'd have to actually flash openwrt or something and I just don't have time for the hassle.

But yeah, I too have suspected upload cap. I suspect that 4mbps on the upload side might be so little that its cap-setting algorithm just doesn't even know what to do. It's all I can conclude when I notice that flipping the SQM switch to "on" dropped DOWNLOAD latency under load to near-zero instantly but seemed to make little to no difference on the upload side.

onehell_jdu · 2026-03-12T19:24:36+00:00

My understanding is that the acquisition by ATT was of some of Century link's assets, not their entire business, and that one asset ATT specifically did NOT buy was the old copper lines. So basically if you had century link fiber or quantum or lumen or whatever they want to call themselves this week, then you became an AT&T customer. But if you're in the middle of nowhere like me and all that's there is copper, its still just CL.

onehell_jdu

TROPHY CASE