Sunless Skies was pretty well made. Certainly a niche game, but a quite well made one.

I was going to say people can play Shattered Horizon instead. But apparently that one died at some point.

That is my current solution. Currently enjoying Factorio, which had the perfect monetization scheme: you buy the game and enjoy it.

At this point to me, review bombed just means many people are unhappy with a product, likely for notable reasons. Any other connotation added would require me to trust the integrity of the journalist using the phrase, which is a bar they have almost universally decided doesn’t matter, particularly when it comes to media journalism of any sort.

indoor AC or two

Yeah, these also work pretty well, OP. Just make sure you get the ones with two hoses, not just one for exhaust. The single hose ones create a vacuum in your house that sucks in outside air making them significantly less efficient.

Install a mini-split upstairs, it will keep that zone the correct temperature using it’s own thermometer. It can be downsized a bit as the main HVAC unit will help it out using your existing ducting.

For exact design, I would say have one per bedroom or a multi-zone mini-split that can cover each bedroom.

Many (most?) mini-splits are DIY friendly as well, if you want to save a bunch of money and install it yourself.

Ryzen laptops which feature capable integrated GPUs serve light and medium gaming tasks well. For heavy use, there are desktops, which is where the real power is. Portable systems like the Steam Deck are also hitting from the mobile side as well.

Gaming laptops have always been an extremely niche product and have gotten squeezed from all ends in recent years.

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

Yeah, there is a reason everyone talks about the Steam Deck, it’s an actually good device that Valve put a bunch of effort into making soild. There is also the problem that many of these other handhelds, like this ASUS one, are running an OS full of background processes constantly sapping your battery. Again, Valve put a bunch of effort into making the Steam Deck good and it shows.

Yeah, they basically set themselves up for failure. Among many other things, the biggest thing to me was they didn’t allow the KSP2 devs to talk to the KSP1 devs. They just plopped the code base in front of a bunch of new developers and told them to have at it, rather than letting the professionals do their job.

I have unironically gotten into a power death spiral because a single piece of belt carrying a new coal line into the power generation area got rotated back. 10 min after the undo there isn’t enough power and we are mining less coal, producing less power, and mining even less coal…

These are some nice improvements. Have been wanting redo for awhile and I like that this will make it harder to accidentally undo something you did 10 min ago. I dread every time I hit undo once too many times and I don’t see an effect infront of me ‘what did I just break?!’

Yeah, that’s the issue with the argument of ‘just turn it off’. You can turn it off, then tomorrow there will be another thing to turn off (hope you were paying attention to the news to find out what it was!). The next day an update will come along and turn half of them back on. The following the mental script you made to will stop working because they moved half the settings, etc, etc, etc.

It’s a never ending battle as Microsoft fundamentally does not respect their paying users. Microsoft could add a top-level toggle box to automatically disable bloatware, telemetry, and the privacy nightmare that is OP’s story about how the OS records everything you do, but they don’t have this. They don’t want you turning this stuff off, they don’t respect you.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source

As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.

If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.

Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.

From my experience, nothing. I’m not sure what the guy is complaining about.

There are lots of random assholes on the internet. I like when they are forced to stay on the internet and not able to bring their asshollery into one’s real life.

If you have a username attached to a publicly posted comment, people will be able to see your history. The internet is forever. Publicly posted comments are, by definition, not private. Treating them as such, in any capacity, is a mistake.

The biggest thing is to not post personal details, or to even post accumulations of details over many comments that can narrow things down. The weather where you are at the time, what type of car you drive (or your lack of a car), what type of job you have, etc, etc, etc. On their own, each of these pieces of information don’t mean much, but you start putting them together and you can narrow things down considerably.

It is also not a bad idea to occasionally throw in some misinformation about yourself. Maybe you don’t drive a Corolla, but instead a Hilux.

Review sites have historically been almost worthless in judging how good a game is (user reviews are where it is at). However, I’m really hoping this game is good. Homeworld 2 was great; another installment would be quite welcome.

You don’t get to do something shitty then expect everyone to be happy. If you want that, you shouldn’t have done the shitty thing in the first place.