Damn! Matchmaking is definitely really hard at high MMR levels, and I remember back when I read reddit about how many people would post angrily about matchmaking - there’s no easy solution to that problem at that point. I remember watching a twitch stream after TI9 where Ana was fountain farming an opposing team until they got an abandon. (The deserved it for being asses in the allchat to be honest, but the skill gap was still obscene.)

But at the same time, your experience is exactly how I figured things would go if I ever tried to play Dota seriously. When I played football in my teenage years, I realized that eventually, you reach a point where getting better stops being fun because everyone else is equally talented and trying their hardest to get to the next level too. At that point, I realized that I just wanted to have fun and stopped competing. Still played recreationally in my regional league though. We had terrible results, but losing on a bad team was a lot more fun than winning on a good one.

Glad to hear that Dota helped you kick all your bad habits. It’s always good to find a silver lining, no matter how crappy the situation is.

In my case, it’s age. I only have so much free time during a day, and ruining it on a shitty Dota2 pub match just makes me feel like trash for weeks later. Even today, I cringe when I think back on some of the stupid things I did in that game.

The last thing I need is more embarrassing memories running through my brain when I’m trying to sleep at night.

I got to about the same level of ascension in Slay the Spire. Eventually, I realized that dying 10 times in a row before getting the dream deck for finishing a high ascension level just… wasn’t that entertaining. When a game has too much RNG, it becomes about as much fun as flipping a coin and trying to get heads 5 times in a row. Oh and also, when you do get that perfect deck, it becomes even more stressful making sure that you don’t screw it up and have to start from the beginning all over again!

Now I just play with ascension off entirely. The A20 achievement is the only one I don’t have, and probably never will.

I feel this. I can’t even play a game of chess online without feeling stressed out. I love playing against friends, but against anonymous strangers, I just can’t do it. It’s a damn shame - I sank about 3000 hours into Dota 2, and about 98% of it was against bots.

I do enjoy co-op games these days though, but again, it’s still better with friends.

Super Metroid. It’s supposed to be a classic but I can’t stand it. I just hate the way the physics feels so slow. Jumping and left/right acceleration just made the game feel terrible to play.

The Metroid prime series were great though.

My current favorite game (Valheim) is Swedish, I believe.

Agreed, and it feels like a waste of so much great potential when you consider the fantastic development they poured into it. Such a shame.

I enjoy it. It’s a relaxing, peaceful game. I just wish there were more objectives. The idea of just exploring and finding things doesn’t appeal to me all that much. The game has a lot of potential for combat, both in the spaceship and as a FPS, but both of these areas feel like they could be expanded a bit. Overall, I just wish that there were more combat-focused missions after completing the main storyline.

But it’s still pretty good and I enjoy it when I want to relax.

When is the last time anything Microsoft made was an upgrade…? Word 97??

Does this mean we can freely distribute Tintin in Thailand now? Outstanding piece, everyone should read it!

I’m working my way through Valheim. I started last year and then stopped shortly before fighting the second boss and never got around to picking it back up. Now I’m back at it and working through the third biome. I still have a long way to go and hope that I can continue to sink at least 100 more hours into it.

I also got Metro 2033 and Last Light on the Steam winter sale. I started Metro Exodus a few years ago and also stopped pretty early, so I’m hoping that this time I can stick with it through the whole series. I also got Grim Dawn and it doesn’t play great on the Deck, but hopefully I’ll be able to get used to it with a bit of effort.

Outside of those, Wildermyth and Brotato are my main chillout games and I’m pretty sure they’ll also get 50-100 hours each this year.

Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.

The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.

When will people learn???

Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.

Yeah, the biggest problem with Firefox is that its engine is so hard to embed. Chrome has endless clones because it’s just so damn easy to embed. And Firefox just has some weak forks like Librewolf.

I’d really rather see Mozilla focus on this rather than all their other stupid endeavors…