TheRealKuni

although it also has a much higher display resolution.

I was about to say 1920x1080 isn’t that much higher resolution than 1280x800, but it’s twice as many pixels! 🤯

And 4K is 4x 1080p! No wonder 4K gaming makes graphics cards chug.

using Steam remote play to the deck

I’m going to pass on some advice that a friend of mine gave me: get Apollo (a fork of Sunshine) on your computer and Moonlight on your Steam Deck. You can install Moonlight in Desktop Mode and add it to your Steam Library so you can access it in Steam mode.

It’s far better at streaming than Steam’s own streaming system. Apollo treats it like a monitor on your desktop. I have it set up so that the Steam Deck is the ONLY monitor when I’m streaming to it. You can also specify resolution in Moonlight, so I tell it to give me 2560x1440 or 2560x1600. Because of the way chroma subsampling works, this looks much better when downscaled on the Deck’s screen than simply streaming the Deck’s resolution. Cyberpunk 2077 looks GORGEOUS on the Deck like this.

(Note this is best if your PC is on a wired connection to a router with WiFi 6/6E/7 support.)

I forced myself to complete the Diablo 4 campaign because of them.

That would be a lot easier now. The game improved enormously around season 4 I think. Whatever the Loot Reborn season was. And nearly every season has included some QoL improvements.

I honestly love Diablo 4. It’s a great podcast/audiobook companion.

Everything is spelled out phonetically, but you can bet I was nerdy enough to correct our chorus master when she said we were singing in Orcish and it was actually Dwarvish.

I get to sing in a live performance of the Fellowship soundtrack this fall. The movie will play on a projector, the symphony and chorus will perform the soundtrack.

I’ve done this before for The Two Towers and Return of the King, over a decade ago. This year I get to complete the set!

Hank Green did a great video about this on his channel recently.

Depends entirely on the story being told. All can be impactful.

Games where the main character is a blank slate can allow you to build meaningful relationships and aspects to your character, but it takes a lot more work from the devs to flesh out those story branches. When done well, it’s excellent. Mass Effect did a good job with this. Skyrim is an example where it’s well done but with less of a rigid framework and therefore less specific handling by the story.

Games that have a specific character but still allow you to shape their path can be beautiful. The ending of Red Dead Redemption 2 has audio callbacks to important decisions you made during the game that shaped who your version of Arthur Morgan was, and it brought tears to my eyes.

And games where the decisions are set in stone and the character development is entirely in the hands of the writer, director, and actor, like a movie, can still be phenomenal. God of War (2018) and Ragnarok are excellent examples.

Sounds like Linus Torvalds’s code review comments got into the training data.

Important thing to remember about the “console wars.”

Other than the Nintendo Wii (iirc), most consoles sell at a loss at the beginning of the generation. They eventually turn a profit on console sales, but console sales aren’t the point.

Game sales are.

When each console was its own very specific architecture and games needed to be designed specifically for them, console sales matter a lot because that’s how you’d sell games.

But now that architectures are similar (if not the same), cross-compilation has become easier than ever. It’s why you see Sony finally releasing first party titles on PC.

Microsoft knows full well that their console sales aren’t great, but that’s okay for them. Their PC sales are. Many of their titles sell on Steam. And they sell some of their titles on PlayStation.

They’ll continue to make some form of console because without it they lose out on millions of Game Pass subscriptions from people who don’t want to make the initial investment in a gaming PC, or deal with the complexity, but their goal of making that next console more and more like a PC fits perfectly in their model.

It’s a shame the Series X has sold so poorly, it’s a great console, but I doubt Microsoft is too worried about “losing” the console wars to Sony. The game has changed.

Thanks!

Xenoblade Chronicles, especially 2 and 3 in my view.

And Halo, obviously.

Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

God of War (2018) and Ragnarok.

My degrees are in music

Sometimes I wish I had better training. I grew up on Suzuki violin, but I never really studied theory. I survive on talent rather than skill, and am very thankful for the skill of those around me!

People think singers aren’t good musicians as a rule and that’s total garbage.

It is wild to me the way some of the orchestral musicians treat the chorus. Most of them are friendly and complimentary, but some of them sure seem to think we’re beneath them. Could just be that they’re not very socially adept, I suppose.

We sing some really difficult stuff as a chorus and you have to know what your note sounds like before you sing it; you can’t rely on just knowing the fingering for your instrument.

And this can be so terrifying for some entrances!

It’s so much fun but also a great mental challenge. I’m thankful to have it in my life as my intellectual musical outlet.

I agree 100%.

Not really sure, but I’ll probably join what I find.

My sister was in a local youth chorus when I came home from college, and told me about the adult version. I found out when auditions were, tried out, got in, and have been loving it ever since!

I had sung in church choirs growing up, but now regret very much not singing during high school and college. A lot of my fellow choir people have great memories of singing in school choirs.

Turns out choirs are a great way to meet a significant other. Other than my wife and I, there are several married couples who met in this chorus (including a couple of married men)! As I tell guys looking to meet people: if you can carry a tune, have a vague understanding of music notation, and live near a medium or large city, you can probably find a volunteer choir. There are a lot of them, they always need people (especially tenors and basses), and are often full of very intelligent and interesting women, some of whom are probably single. 😂

I’m a semi-professional choral singer! I very frequently sing on a volunteer basis in a symphony chorus with a professional orchestra. And also sing with a smaller 12-person choir, really tight harmonies and blending. It’s a lot of fun.

Sometimes I get paid, but that’s rare.

I’ve gotten to sing some pretty awesome stuff (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, video game concerts, Verdi’s Requiem, etc. etc. etc.) and gotten to meet some pretty cool people (including my wife)!

If you haven’t played It Takes Two (same developer) I highly recommend it. I liked it even more!

I liked Split Fiction, but It Takes Two was better. I hope for more good things from the developer in the future!

Well then that’s Oscar. Dude is generally level-headed and mostly flawless.

Lando is good, but he suffers from pressure. Whereas Piastri just seems to be immune to it.

The Pandora section of Animal Kingdom is pretty cool, especially at night. And the Flight of Passage ride is incredible, a very easy suspension of disbelief once you’re on the “banshee” and feeling it breathe beneath you, and the wind and the spray of water as you fly.

Say what you will about Disney, they know how to make a theme park experience.