Rift crystals are earned by playing just like the first game. Their only purpose is to hire higher level pawns, but you earn them when people pay for your pawn or you complete their quests. It’s part of the interplay of players exchange pawns.

Recent Capcom games have all done this where it’s a great game and right on release they stuff a bunch of micro transactions in for in-game currency but you would have to be an absolute chud to buy any of it because it’s so trivial to earn.

DMCV did the same thing with trying to sell red orbs, the primary upgrade currency, but if you didn’t see people complain about it online, you wouldn’t even notice it in game.

They are ticking a checkbox for the suits.

Oolimo, the website and phone app is a great resource for me. It lets you enter notes on a fretboard to identify chords.

Anything not tech/Linux related. It’s 90% of my feed.

That’s about how well it fits in. You produce and find guns and can equip yourself and the pals with certain weapons. Modern firearms in a generic fantasy setting. It’s like a meme game that has too much production budget.

That’s cool that YouTube started doing a recap. It’s fun.

Top song is Comin Around by Andrew Duhon.

Top artist is The Tedeschi Trucks band, no surprise there. Best God damn band on tour right now. Listened to them so much this year as I got tickets to one of their shows this past July.

It was a good year of listening for me.

Edit: after scrolling through the comments, pretty cool seeing very few repeated bands.

Any RPG with dialogue and choices. Bonus points for custom characters or male/female options.

Before my girlfriend got into games, I would often play a new game with her and ask her to design the create-a-character and ask for her input on dialogue choices. Sometimes we would take turns reading aloud in game text and documents. It got her invested without the stress of having to handle the game.

She eventually bought herself a switch and blasted out 500 hours of animal crossing during the pandemic lockdown and now she is all in on games.

Unfortunately it’s fully supported by the statistics and multiple large channels have tried to get away from the shitty thumbnails, but those videos get significantly less clicks.

We can hate it, but it works.

As a Tesla owner of 5 years with a cross country road trip in the car, Teslas charging has never failed me. It’s rare to encounter a charging stall not working, but every location has multiple chargers and they repair stalls quickly.

Almost every location I’ve been to has at least 8 stalls if not more. The navigation in the car also keeps track of stalls in use, electricity prices, expected wait time and if any stalls are not working.

It sold 18 million copies within a few months of launch. It worked out immediately.

You can still be hyper critical of a product you use. I rely on tons of Google services and also use a pixel, but that doesn’t stop me from being disappointed in their behavior at large when it seems like the leadership is allergic to making the easy winning decisions.

The realistic alternative is Apple and frankly fuck that.

Extra Punctuation was the slower, slightly longer format videos that were more musing about broad industry trends and gaming history. It was great.

I do it constantly on Lemmy and constantly in my inner voice throughout the day.

Not accounting for rust and weather impact, EV brakes systems last much longer due to regenerative braking from the motors being used before the brake system is engaged.

I am working on my bachelor’s degree in computer networking and I still find Lemmy a pain in the ass to search sometimes.

Communities are too small, fractured and not enough people post. 1% rule and all that

I’m probably wrong but I think because it takes a lot more user effort to navigate Lemmy and find your communities, and those communities can be spread across many instances.

It’s just easier for those that are interested in the community around those interests to use something like reddit or a specific forum site.

Lemmy is mostly tech dorks, which isn’t a bad thing but that leads to the tech and programming communities dominating the feeds. Also I think people who have been using Lemmy for a while vastly overestimate the appeal of the platform and also tech literacy of the general population. It can feel intimidating and uninviting.

They are mission based and very fast paced. AC games are generally pretty challenging and designed to be replayed a lot for mastery and for trying out different mech loadouts as you unlock parts and weapons over time.

They are Balinese cats. Long haired cousin to the Siamese and they are hypoallergenic.

It took me a while but now that their face patterns have developed I can tell them apart when they look at me.

Ghost (close) and Griffin (far)

I picked up 2 copies of Helldivers for me and my partner during the steam sale. Game is great fun and runs smoothly on steam deck. Totally worth $5.