Sometimes not even money. Microslop was left holding the bag when they jacked up the price of Gamepass and suddenly it became unaffordable for a lot of customers, and spent billions on a lemon. Sony is actively alienating their supporters, rejecting their largest market, and going all-in on a game that can’t even reach five thousand daily concurrent players on Steam because they’ve also already spent billions on a lemon. Bad calls and sunk costs all around.

I didn’t mean that in a very positive way.

I know there’s a post-hoc artistique justification where Alan is a hack writer and everything in the dark place is only as good as his imagination… but a poorly made game is still a poorly made game, and trying to shove half of a Max Payne action shooter into an Alan Wake game is just asking for disappointment (just ask Amnesia fans about pigs).

But they okayed Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.

That’s valid. The only thing I miss from my previous XBone controller was the ability to use the D-pad with my right thumb, or even the middle of my left thumb to an extent. The asymmetric Xbox layout is supreme.

I’m pretty sure you can also combine radial menus with mode shifts. Dishonored 2’s default Deck config has a mode shift bound to L1 (which opens the in-game weapon wheel), which temporarily reassigns the left analog sticks as mouse input while the button is pressed. I’m pretty sure the same could be done with Steam Input’s radial menus too.

You should give radial menus a try. I use one in Dishonored 2 and a different one in Warframe, both on the left trackpad.

In Warframe, the entries send keypresses for the eight numpad numbers corresponding to the direction that I press on the trackpad (bottom left is 1, top is 8, etc), which activate some of the hotkeyed gear items. In Dishonored 2, it just sends a number row keypress in order (first entry is 1, second is 2, etc), which switches the active power or weapon.

In other games, I just use it as a secondary D-pad (usually directional swipe) with a mode shift on one of the back buttons. My ideal setup would be to have an eight-way directional swipe without having to define a radial menu.

Steam Input is great, I just wish the config app was better.

Is it unstable, or resource intensive?

Yes and yes. Most of the Steam client is implemented, poorly, as a web app running in a web view derived from (I believe) an old version of Chromium. It’s needlessly resource-intensive, even more so than Electron apps. The suite as a whole uses its own libraries in ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_{32,64} and I’m pretty sure it still depends on some 32-bit-only things. The overlay sometimes causes ridiculous performance issues related to input events (I move the mouse and the game drops to single digit framerates) even if the overlay isn’t active. The Steam Input config utility is poorly designed and horribly implemented.

Lately it’s also been trying to murder my PC.

I love Steam as a service, but the client is in an unacceptable state.

I broke my entire OS just tochown the /lib/*s

On the other hand, Sky TV somehow managed to successfully sue Microsoft to force them to rename SkyDrive.

Do you get excessive RAM usage?

I’ve had three hard system crashes because something spawned an endless amount of winedbg and conhost.exe processes until the memory is full and I can’t figure out why.

Someone should use a sticker with the first amendment’s text on it.

jiff

Rust developers come up with the worst fucking package names.

Oh cool, they’ve replaced the bird with an orangutan! I didn’t know they were native to North America.

Thinking back to the sins I’ve committed in C# as a high schooler… maybe I should start publishing my works. Put some poison in the soup.

We are the pig, professor. We are all the pig.

Popularity does not imply quality.

I’ve played the recent Zelda games. They’re okay. But also disgustingly overrated.

most BIOS updaters

I’ve had to RMA plenty of otherwise perfectly usable motherboards because Windows had fucked up their firmware with unprompted updates, bordering on zero-click malware behaviour. The farther that shit stays from Linux, the better.

A blackout is just a loss of power. Nothing complicated about it. There are obvious human and societal consequences, but as far as the infrastructure is concerned, a blackout usually means that protection devices have been tripped and the system has protected itself from greater damage.

A brownout means that the electric grid (or interconnection), for some reason, can’t supply enough power to satisfy the demand, but protection devices haven’t tripped yet. It can result in momentary power losses, drops in voltage, drops in frequency, or some generators getting desynchronized with the rest of the grid. If reactive loads (like HVAC motors) go offline momentarily, they can cause spikes in power consumption, which can overload circuits and trip safety devices.

A UPS needs to immediately switch to battery power when there are signs of an imminent power loss. A brownout might cause a consumer-grade UPS to switch on and off repeatedly, which the inverter circuit probably doesn’t like.

This channel is run by a real civil engineer, he’s released some great videos about the challenges of maintaining an electric grid.