Don’t count on people who never breathe through their nose to look deeper than what some personality on YouTube said. They don’t care about definitions, they just hear words and repeat them without looking any further. Like happy little dumb parrots. Some jackass said, “we ain’t no democracy, wurr a cawn-stuh-toosh-uhnool republic!” and they said, “huht huht! That’s right!” without bothering to learn what a constitutional republic is.

But nuthin hayuh-pinned! It wuz aint teefuh! Reeuhnt freeee…

My uncle can navigate windows xp with his eyes closed. It took me years to get him there. He was fine with vista and 7. When 8 hit, it was over and it has been since.

This is a religious man who I’ve only ever heard cuss twice in his life before, and they were the milder words. “What the fuck is copy as a path? I’m just trying to copy and paste a file to my Zip drive! I can’t find computer, I can’t find my computer. I can’t find copy and paste! I’m gonna throw this thing across the room! Seriously, show more options? Why not leave the options I’ve had since 1996 where they were? Do people just not copy and paste any more?”

I have given up and I just remote connect and do it for him. He tried for a few years with the “slow down and let me learn” thing but he’s almost 70 and he’s given up.

He calls his usb drives “zip drives”. He was the only person I knew who had an actual Zip drive when I was a kid and I loved it.

I had to do this today on my wife’s laptop. The settings menu just wouldn’t do it. It just sat there for a thousand years.

Ex X executive is fun to say out loud.

It’s gotta be temporary. It’s intel.

Oh no I don’t play games with money I don’t have. I’m ok losing what I already have though. Beats a lottery ticket.

I do not. I could probably qualify though.

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose bud. That’s where I’m at in this moment. If I lose every penny I have I’m still poor. If I don’t, maybe I can get a start on a damn house or something.

Well, I guess I won’t need one then. Hardware is a bit older but if I can get the same performance I’ll avoid the windows partition.

Oh yeah, people who need more power definitely want something else. It’s all I need really. I’m about to inherit my daughter’s old gaming laptop though so I’m not sure what I’ll do then. Definitely Linux with a small partition for windows to play some VR games. I’d say I’ll still use the Steam deck for most things though because it’s so portable.

I’ve been docking mine and using it as my primary pc. The only issue I’ve had is that I was able to play CSGO perfectly, and CS2 don’t do so good.

Me too. I personally think it was brilliant.

I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.

I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.

My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.

I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.

Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.

I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.

I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.

It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.

I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.

It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.

I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.

You’ve tied my head up in knots with this one. Haha

As to the argument above yours, fostering a space for Nazis to grow their movement is scary. I get that some segments of society think that posting gay porn is scary too, but gay porn never led to death camps for anybody.

I think all ideas are worth discussing, because if they’re hiding in quiet corners there are no voices of reason to refute them. It’s hard to take that stance nowadays with the internet working the way it does. Algorithms feeding information to people just because that information gets engagement is frightening.

I had a conversation with my neighbor yesterday about how he got interested in the whole furry thing. He said that initially, he read the critical comments online, took them seriously, thought it was funny, so he engaged in harassment of furries. His engagement led him to more furry videos. He began to like some of the people he was engaging with. Fast forward to now and he’s got fursuits hanging in his closet and everyone he hangs with is also a furry.

It got me thinking about how a lot of kids end up going down these rabbit holes online. Not that I consider being a furry a bad thing. My daughter is into that stuff and I support her being herself. His example just made me think of how other people fall into extremism online.

I seriously have a boiling hatred for computers now because I couldn’t even be a little bit mean. I’ve snapped a few times when people blamed me for problems years after I worked on their stuff, but mostly I just got trampled on and robbed at every turn because I didn’t want to upset anyone.

By the time I was mean enough to demand payment and things like that, I already hated it.

My daughter is passionate about computers, so nowadays if I so much as want to tweak something a little bit I let her do it unless she don’t want to. I don’t want to burn her out too.

Your dad sounds like the childhood hero of mine who got me into computers.

Severe ADHD prevented me from ever learning to code, but I became damn good at repairs and things and just general understanding of computers because he was available to ask questions at almost any time.

He went to school auctions every year and got me a pile of hardware to learn from. He never asked for anything in exchange. All around great guy.

I heard him on the phone a few times dealing with the people who he worked with though. Good god he was mean. I couldn’t imagine him being that way with me ever, but he was brutal when it came to work and money.

A dude called him one time while I was sitting there, he listened for a few minutes and he said, “I’ve got a 14 year old kid here, he’s been doing this stuff for about 2 years. I’m gonna let him walk you through this for the 10th fucking time because you’re a goddamn idiot and feeling like a fool when you hang up the phone with a grown man isn’t teaching you any lessons. Maybe get a pen for this one because if I have to remind that a child walked you through it last time, I’m not going to be so fucking friendly.” I was so nervous, apologized multiple times, when I was finished walking him through it he took the phone and said, “now don’t you feel stupid? 25 years and this kid just schooled you.”

He told me, “you gotta be real with idiots or they’ll bother you with stupid problems every single day of your life.”

I wish that lesson had stuck haha, it just wasn’t in me to be mean. As a result, a hobby that I was passionate about all of my life is something I avoid like the plague now. People ruined it for me by bothering me constantly.

I paid full price for my original 512gb. Best purchase I’ve ever made. I love the damn thing.

It is so depressing how much I lost as a kid.

My backup method was almost entirely optical. Oh well. I’ve kept myself from feeling too bad by keeping in mind that I am waaaaay too lazy to ever go digging through it anyway.