Because it annoys me deeply when people nerd out over difficult-to-search-for acronyms without ever bothering to explain it for people not in the know:

The web comic’s called “the Parking Lot is Full”.

It ran from 1993 to 2002, and while the original site has been down for years, you can still browse parts of it via archive.org.

I always liked their UX, and never noticed any outright bugs?

But, yeah, definitely dislike the Spyware - I recall having to adb shell into the device and manually disable those processes after each update.

Shame they include that, their devices are (otherwise) really great.

It has a little something for everyone.

Pricey!

That garlic cilantro compound butter sounds like a great addition; well done!

As a player who’s played 4U, GU, World, and Rise; I’m kind of okay with that loss. The hunting side of things was always very weak and unintuitive (to me).

I think putting more emphasis on interactions with the world kind of help justify the existence of the open world - but more emphasis on finding and tracking monsters just seems like a step in a direction the teams - historically - haven’t been the best at.

This is just my opinion, though - shame to see a part you liked about the games being reduced.

Turkish middle school, high school, and university exams are very serious.

Basically everyone takes the same set of long exams (with a few additions you can add to your standard exam sets, for specialized schools) and when the results come out, you are compared to all other students in the nation.

Like, think global leaderboards.

The best universities will outright reject you if your ranking isn’t high enough.

It’s very intense and cut-throat; so much so that - when I was a young’un growing up in Turkey - I just opted to try my hand at the SATs instead. Ended up going to school abroad.

The SATs were so easy, compared to the exam prep we did in our Turkish classes, it almost felt like a joke. Though, college tuition costs definitely made sure I wasn’t the one with the last laugh.

Mine is in 6 days, oh boy.

Well, that just looks incredible. 2025 can’t come soon enough.

As a Turk, let me just add:

It’s very well known that the AA is basically just Tayyip’s propoganda machine. It’s a very hard bias towards whatever he’s looking to say, at that point in time, not necessarily right or left wing.

Other than the slightly similar camera angle - and emphasis on slight: those games have very different styles of camera - those are completely distinct games.

I get the idea that you’re not a fan of those titles for their design choices which led to mainstream success, but holy crap give them an iota of credit.

That was Sony’s site. Super shitty what they did there.

But on the Steam Store page it was always “a PS account is required”.

Well, to be fair, they did write - in bold letters - on the Steam page that a Playstation network account is required to play.

They simply didn’t enforce that rule up until now.

A game where you pay up front for access, as opposed to a free-to-play/freemium title where the initial download is free.

Same here, my dude… Same here. Why does my back suddenly hurt?

Oh god my heart… Please, please stop…

Steam goes down for maintenance at this time every week.

Edit: Tuesdays ~3pm PST

Well, that looks great. Hopefully it’s as good as the last DLC.

I hope they continue to do good, but am also skeptical.

And, man, I miss the old Gravatar.

The not cool parts just relate to any sort of hosted bridge. If you don’t trust them with decrypting messages on their end, then don’t give them your data - there are no bridges capable of doing that, anywhere.

So it really comes down to “trust someone else with your data, or host it yourself”; and if you’re - understandably - frustrated with those options blame companies like WhatsApp or Discord that make it nigh impossible to integrate their services with outside networks.

Functionally, these bridges just forward your content to a library acting like a headless client - there’s no way to encrypt that as the reverse engineered clients are not libraries and need to take raw input. You can’t end to end encrypt it as the client is one of the “ends”.

As an example, the WhatsApp bridge uses WhatsApp web as a backend, and has all the limitations of WA web.

As a result, I find the expectations to be a bit unrealistic.