blindsight
@blindsight@beehaw.org
- Comment on Steam Families is here 2 months ago:
I’m excited for this. I just got my wife a Deck used to play Escape Simulator together, but this will make it a lot easier for her to play most of my other games, now, too.
Sadly Dragon Age 3 can’t be shared, which I should have added to her account, not mine… But we only had 1 Deck at the time! (On the other hand, I’ll be able to play most of my library on her device while she’s playing, so not a big deal!)
- Comment on Steam Deck gets stuck on "connecting" to WiFi among other weirdness, persists after factory reset. Basically a paperweight at this point, please help. 4 months ago:
You could also try booting something from MicroSD so it’s easier to revert.
Seconding contacting Valve support, too.
- Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale 4 months ago:
Downloading content is almost definitely legal in Canada, and non-commercial digital distribution has never gone to court, so its legality hasn’t been established.
I can’t find the source, but I recall reading speculation that sharing backup copies between owners of the media is likely legal in Canada but, again, it hasn’t been tried by courts, so its legality hasn’t been firmly established.
Anyway, with non-commercial digital distribution not having any legal teeth in Canada, it’s effectively legal and its literal legality is unknown.
- Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale 4 months ago:
Depends on your jurisdiction.
As far as I know, that’s never been tried in court in Canada, and there’s reason to suspect that may not be the case here. (Although I’m not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken.)
- Comment on Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs 4 months ago:
This could be huge, but we’ll need to wait and see. The economic and ecological footprint of LLMs is problematic.
That said, will this actually help, or will they just use 3T parameter models to outcompete competitors 1T parameter models using GPUs? Really, this is more about small-scale models competing with midsize models. Like, this could bring a model as big as GPT 3.5 down to be something you could run on affordable hardware, right?
That would be really compelling for my sector (education) where there’s a lot of concern about student data privacy. I could definitely pitch building a local $5K-cost LLM server that could handle a dozen or so simultaneous users. That would be enough for a small school district.
- Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale 4 months ago:
You can if you own the Mario game…
… but I just downloaded a 1TB Batocera Switch image to run from MicroSD.
- Comment on Shovel Knight is getting online co-op as part of a new Shovel Of Hope DX edition for its 10th anniversary 5 months ago:
lol, this isn’t the first time I waited so long to play a game that a remastered version is announced. I guess I’ll wait for the remastered version to be released and go on sale… And maybe they’ll make a remaster of the remastered version before I play it!
Seriously, though, that rewind feature makes me excited to try this version. I ain’t got time for too much challenge in my games, but I usually get bored of easy modes. Unlimited attempts at reasonably hard content sounds perfect for me!
- Comment on What do you use the back buttons for? 5 months ago:
I’ve been playing a lot of Ziggurat 2 which is a roguelite fantasy-themed FPS with 4 categories of weapons. Instead of spamming Y to cycle through weapons, I can select my weapon directly with the back buttons.
- Comment on Do you still use your Steam Deck much? 5 months ago:
Yeah, I don’t blame them.
I looked into this after posting, and it seems like getting Android emulating working on the Deck isn’t too hard. I haven’t checked FTL’s compatibility with the emulator, though.
- Comment on Do you still use your Steam Deck much? 5 months ago:
It’s a shame FTL has such terrible touch controls on PC. I wonder about emulating the Android version of the game; I haven’t looked into it at all, but that might work well if possible.
- Comment on Do you still use your Steam Deck much? 5 months ago:
Same with me. 90% of my gaming time is in bed after my kiddos have gone down to sleep, so there’s no substitute. I’ve used it almost every day since I got it in December.
I do want to set up game streaming from my desktop, but I just haven’t got around to it yet, mostly since it means I need to set up my WiFi mesh which I’ve been procrastinating.
- Comment on Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives 5 months ago:
Yeah, I’m not sure how to actually use this keyboard. You can’t type with two hands and hold it up with two hands at the same time, and it’ll be easy too wife to thumb type while holding it.
I’m skeptical. The dual-trackpad typing on the Deck is pretty slick, too. With each thing controlling half the keyboard, it feels very similar to “real” typing, and it’s fast enough for the light use that’s needed for most gaming-related tasks. So, this is a very big (and therefore expensive) component to be including fire very limited value.
If I really need to type a lot or quickly, I can grab my cheap Bluetooth keyboard (that would cost way less than the marginal cost of including a sliding keyboard like this one!)
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 6 months ago:
I’ve mostly been playing a F2P game called Minion Masters. It’s a card game, but the cards come alive in 2-lane combat like a tiny auto-battle MOBA. It has short game lengths (6-10 min are typical), is generous with F2P players (I’ve paid $0 so far), and has enough strategic (deck building) and tactical (card playing) depth to stay interesting throughout.
It plays great on the Deck without any configuration, even though it’s “unsupported”. I suppose some of the card text might be a bit small for some, but that’s only relevant in the deck building screen where you can easily zoom in on cards. There’s a UI option to read your partner’s cards in 2v2, but I’ve never felt the need to. By the time you’re good enough at the game to react to your partner’s hand, you’ll already know the cards well enough that you don’t need to read them.
I should maybe add that I got a bunch of free cards when they had free DLC to celebrate the release of the game on Android, so idk if my F2P experience is typical.
- Comment on Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules 6 months ago:
I might have changed that setting. I don’t like Google Assistant on my phone since it interferes with my Google Home devices.
- Comment on Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules 6 months ago:
On my Sony phone, holding power with the screen on brings up the power menu, which includes Lockdown mode.
- Comment on Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus 7 months ago:
This is fascinating to watch happening. As numbers-must-go-up businesses chase profits in a world where subscribership has peaked, they cannibalize their own value proposition to increase profits. This encourages more users to shift to piracy, accelerating profit losses.
Will we ever reach an equilibrium? My understanding is that total entertainment spending doesn’t decline or grow much, so it’s all just trying to compete with rivals for a bigger slice of the pie. I wonder if the major TV and film producers are just going to have less total money heading their way, and we’ll have less high-budget content created.
I don’t really care either way; lots of lower-budget content is amaze balls. I barely ever play AAA games or watch blockbuster movies, and I think it might be better for everyone to get more diversity in content creators (that lower budgets will likely enable.)
It will be very interesting seeing how this all plays out over the next few decades.
Now excuse my while I go pirate low-budget UK panel shows (that are region-locked internationally) while playing Final Fantasy 5 on an emulator modded with several fan-made romhacks.
- Comment on Meta's 'consent or pay' tactic must not prevail over privacy, EU rights groups warn 7 months ago:
I really hope they make the right decision!
- Comment on Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites 7 months ago:
This article goes against what I’ve noticed in schools, as a teacher.
In schools I’ve worked in that block sites students want to reach (games or video streaming, almost exclusively), one kid in the school figures out how to sign up for a free VPN, and it spreads quickly until everyone in the school is using a crappy (likely unsafe) VPN. They don’t have the knowledge to seek out a reputable VPN; they just get whatever spyware they find first that works.
There’s no point filtering school Internet, except for known porn sites. Block PornHub, obviously, but as soon as you block YouTube or Cool Math Games, then every student in the school will be using a shitty VPN by the end of the month.
That said, students aren’t going to put the effort in to get around blocks for schoolwork. Obviously. They aren’t going to open the VPN for that!
- Comment on Battlefield V now broken on Steam Deck / Linux with EA anticheat live 7 months ago:
EA has published some absolute bangers:
SimCity (1989)
SimCity 2000 (1993)
Dungeon Keeper (1997)
Lots of Ultima games (90s)
The Sims (2000)
Medal of Honor (2000)
Command & Conquer games (early 2000s)
SSX (2000)… Was Battlefield 2142 (2006) good? They didn’t make the first two games.
Does Spore (2008) count? The game was shit, and had DRM that only let you install it 3 times ever per license, and didn’t do what it said it would with massive over promise and under deliver. But it was ambitious and different, at least?
Dead Space (2008)
Mirror’s Edge (2008)
Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
Mad Effect 2 (2010) (they didn’t make 1)
Plants vs. Zombies (2011)I’m tired of going through this list, lol. There are a zillion “next sportsball version” games and mobile games to sift through. Also, turns out some of the best EA games I remember were only published by them but made by another developer… Until EA bought them out, lol.
- Comment on Owners Report Valve’s Priciest Steam Deck Model Has A Cracking Problem 7 months ago:
Shit. I’ll need to check mine tonight. Hopefully, it’s not too late to loosen the screws!
- Comment on Third party docks 8 months ago:
I don’t know if this is related, but none of the third party docks I could find offered full resolution, full refresh rate, multi-monitor output, as the official dock can offer.
Every dock I looked at with a decent number of reviews either had 1 star reviews mentioning monitor connection problems and/or docks dying shortly after purchase, too, but it’s hard to know if that’s relevant or just the baseline noise of electronics failure rates/user error.
I just ended up eating the cost (and long shipping times) to get the official one.
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Deck? - March 2024 8 months ago:
Thanks for posting! I appreciate it.
I think I need to increase my gyro sensitivity by a lot. I’ll try that next time I play!
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Deck? - March 2024 8 months ago:
Thanks for this! I’ll give that a shot. (No pun intended.)
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Deck? - March 2024 8 months ago:
I’ve been playing Ziggurat 2, which I picked up in a Fanatical bundle that I think is still going? It’s my service FPS on the Deck, but Super Hot isn’t in real time, so this is the first time I’m struggling with aiming accurately at speed. It’s hard!
I have gyro controls enabled to help with fine-tuning aiming, but I’m really struggling. I just realized as I’m trying this that I haven’t tried touch controls for aiming, though… I’m an idiot. I keep forgetting the touch pads exist. That will probably be a lot better!
I also played Luck be a Landlord. The first run I lost, but in the second run I already beat the game so hard that endless mode has absolutely no challenge since I scale faster than the endless mode difficulty increase. I can’t really recommend it for that reason, especially since there’s absolutely no challenge once you’ve figured out a strategy and get your combo pieces.
And more Stardew Valley. I’m in Spring of Year 2 for the first time. I’m thinking of going for Perfection in the file, now, since most of the game is incredibly easy now with sprinklers and the greenhouse. Then I might start over with mods if I’m still not tired of the game.
- Comment on how to run sunshine + moonlight (steamdeck) + virtual monitor + scripts to turn on/off monitors 8 months ago:
If you’d be willing to post your .bat file, that would be fabulous! I haven’t had a chance to set this up yet.
- Comment on how to run sunshine + moonlight (steamdeck) + virtual monitor + scripts to turn on/off monitors 8 months ago:
Seems like a good idea, but why didn’t the off script reset the SetPrimary monitor? And does the “turn off” command just temporarily turn the screens off, so any action on the desktop will turn the screens back on?
- Comment on Jon Stewart's first episode back on The Daily Show 9 months ago:
I forgot how sorry they were. Watched at 2× speed, granted, but it was over in a flash.
Still, it was good. As a Canadian, it will be nice to have a succinct, entertaining summary of America’s descent into fascism. (I’m not feeling very hopeful, can you tell?)
- Comment on 9 months ago:
I’ve been playing Soulstone Survivors again, recently. They’ve added a lot of great stuff with updates since I last played. Lots of “Bullet Heaven” (?) games beyond Vampire Survivors to enjoy!
(Is that what we’re calling this genre, btw? It doesn’t make much sense, imho, so I hope we have a better name.)
- Comment on (TRUTH) New year and reflection time for past 6 months 10 months ago:
I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks, but it’s been ~95% of my gaming time. I have a decent desktop gaming rig (I need a video card for work, so I built a computer last year), but I have a time-consuming job and I want to be present for my kids. My only gaming time is in the evening, which is also my only time to spend with my wife (without kiddos), so I’m not going to leave her to have on the other end of the house. I play in bed next to her.
I’m a patient gamer, too, so it’s a plenty powerful machine for all the games I play anyway. I’ve mostly been playing Stardew Valley since it doesn’t require complete attention, so I can also watch a show with my wife at the same time and catch most of it.
I have so many games I want to play on it, but I’m in no rush. I’ll be using the Deck for many years, I’m guessing. With the OLED screen, I don’t see why I’d need to upgrade, either. I don’t need a faster machine. I literally have 100+ PC games and even more console games I want to play that the Deck can handle, so I’m completely happy with this device’s capabilities.
- Comment on [Discussion] What were your favorite and least favorite games you played on Deck in 2023? 10 months ago:
Not sure if I should post since I’ve just had mine for a week, but my highlights so far are Stardew Valley and Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed.
Stardew Valley is a charming game that’s really nice to play while watching something with my wife. It’s chill, and doesn’t take much attention usually, so it’s perfect for the mobile nature of the Deck to play in bed.
Sonic Racing I’ve been playing with my 5y.o. son. I suck at it, lol. I can’t consistently get 1st place in normal mode yet, but it’s fun, looks great, and plays smooth as silk.
The one game I tried and immediately put down was Against the Storm. I’m really excited to play it, but the controller is just moving a mouse cursor around. From the little I played, I was instantly frustrated that I needed to move the cursor over small UI buttons to open menus; it doesn’t seem to have a sensible control scheme for the Deck, and I mostly play in bed, so a mouse isn’t really an option for me. Disappointing, since I was so excited for it!