There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

I bought the JSAUX dock (from Amazon). Has been really good. It’s a fair bit cheaper than the official one and there are a load of reports.of the official one having issues.

Black Skylands. A friend gifted me a copy on steam after he had a transaction error and got two copies. Thought it might be fun for a few hours but I’ve been obsessed.

It’s an open world exploring game where you’ve got an airship and go from island to island, and it’s a top down twin stick shooter. The mobility is really enjoyable with the grappling hook, the combat is fun with interesting weapons, tech and upgrades and you have an airship!

From that quote I took “that salmon is ok, but this dish that it’s in is overall good”.

There’s also Stormgate coming out later this year from a load of the former StarCraft developers.

What do you mean by Phase 2?

There’s some stuff about the roadmap for most of this year: https://blog.beeper.com/p/state-of-the-app-spring-2023

If it’s dead then it’s no risk, right? Afterwards it’s either working or still dead.

Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

See “Password Hashing” here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function

It is actually important to have a controlled cost to calculate in the forward direction too.

Gaming laptops are really just portable PCs. If you’re playing on them on in the usual “Keyboard and Mouse” way then you need to put it on a table to make that work properly. Maybe you could do it on a sofa but it’s very quickly going to get uncomfortable.

Handhelds on the other hand are extremely portable and happily usable anywhere. They’re also a lot cheaper than a gaming PC! I’m a big fan of my Steam Deck and recommend it a lot, but I should admit I also have a Gaming PC which I use for multiplayer stuff with my friends

There’s different levels of playing to win though. I play a lot of R6 Siege. In the evenings I mostly play casual with my friends. I’m either using the random button to pick my operator for variety, or I’m playing all shotguns for a battle pass challenge or I’m trying to find ridiculous places to put a frost mat.

Within that structure I’m trying to win the rounds, but it doesn’t matter if we lose. I’m just having fun in a game with my friends.

Do you have a citation for this? It conflicts with what I know about GDPR.

Mostly GDPR encourages companies to delete personal data they were holding once they no longer have a legitimate use for it. There is a rule where you can demand your data be frozen if so that misuse cam be investigated and in that case you’d be right. But in general companies can and should delete personal data.

This is great news! I was debating getting Battlebit and even though I was planning on mostly playing on my PC this put me off, out of principle. But now Deck compatibility too is great.

I bought Tametsi recently based at another recommendation thread. It’s really good - it eliminates the big issue with minesweeper which is that sometimes you have to guess. In Tametsi you always have enough information for your next move which completely changes how it feels. It almost ends up feeling more like Sudoku with the “ok so if that’s true then that can’t be true” type steps in logic.

Have just bought Shadow Tactics and Tametsi based on this. I used to love Commandos (and even better - Desperados).

It’s more limited because it’s just WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram but Element One does the same thing (and no waitlist): https://element.io/element-one

I use it and it’s great - it’s “just” a paid service that runs on a Matrix server with the relevant bridges running. This is actually the same technology underneath that Beeper is built on (Beeper uses all the matrix bridges to do its work).

Have you played Deep Rock Galactic? It’s a wonderful games where you play a dwarf mining things, fighting off bugs while you do it. You play in a group of up to 4 people trying to complete your objectives together.

I find it really hard to explain what makes it great, so you’ll just have to trust it’s avid fan base!