I like the ds4 - so much so that I want to get a new one and mod it for more modern features. But it’s still distinctly larger. It can be kind of surprizing to re-experience just how small and light the ds2 is compared to newer controllers.

I would call it less of an issue (at least in my case), and more of something that became apparent only after going back and experiencing the smaller controller to compare others to.

I really wish there were a modernized controller in the exact form factor of the classic ds2. Like if it had tmr sticks and a better dpad, but was still a wired controller and had 4 shoulder buttons instead of two triggers. Don’t get me wrong, triggers have their place, but there are some games that work better with all buttons, which probably partly explains the popularity of hair trigger mods.

As someone also with large hands, I still love well designed controllers that fit well for smaller hands - like the classic Dualshock 2 controller. I used one again pretty recently. Had to stop because the analogs were virtually useless, but the smallness of the controller stood out to me because after enough time playing a game I noticed I could more easily forget the controller itself and focus on the game (except those damn broken sticks).

When I went back to the DualSense, it felt clunky and unwieldy by comparison. I feel bad for gamers with small hands, because all the standard controllers must be monstrous for a lot of people. No wonder mobile gaming gained so much traction - game companies forgot that kids play games too.

I do appreciate that the grips are flared out at least a little on this controller. The 90° ones on the Steam Deck can be quite uncomfortable, especially given that it’s a pretty heavy and cumbersome device.

My biggest skepticism is the dpad though. It looks nearly identical to the Steam Deck’s, which is easily one of the worst dpads I’ve ever used. Hopefully the underlying mechanisms and feel of it has been improved.

I don’t like the look of this controller… I’m still gonna get one. Everything else I love.

Especially that SteamOS is apparently going to become available on ARM devices.

Had a Game Gear and really wanted one of these as a kid.

Still have that Game Gear and still really want one.

An underrated place to start is with Doom modding. The various ports of Doom engines have grown to have surprizingly rich feature sets these days, and a lot of indie games have been getting made in these engines. It’s easy to get into because you can get started pretty much right away by making mods for existing games.

So for example, you could download the free game FreeDoom, get the UZDoom engine to play it on, the map maker Ultimate Doom Builder to make maps for FreeDoom, SLADE for the other aspects of editing, and then finally the ZDoom wiki should be able to point you toward everything you’ll want to learn to be able to make whatever you’d like.

So you can start learning and producing content very quickly by making maps, learn and develop those maps into more extensive mods, eventually learn and develop those mods so far they become “total conversions” - meaning that it’s still technically a mod, and still would depend on the Freedoom game you’re building on, but has grown extensively enough to replace all assets; and then finally it is possible to convert that total conversion into a full fledged standalone game.

And of course once you have enough experience with this, you can develop standalone games right from the start of a project.

I did the same thing with my last phone, and this whole sub-model thing drives me crazy.

Have they considered that they’re just not a great channel?

I didn’t say they were?

At least twelve lanes on a single track. If I recall, the cool keytar instrument you could get for… was it Rock Band 3? might be able to make a song with that track in it. Not sure how many other games or instruments could do that though.

I banned Apple from my life a long time ago.

If you’re going to make claims, you need to prove them. Let’s see real studies.

Because it is the most well researched dietary pattern out there, and has proven beyond any other to have a host of beneficial effects, provide complete nutrition, and be most associated with reductions in all-cause mortality.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9710405/

I’m so tired of this whack-a-mole game of one unfounded, usually dangerous and usually corporate-backed, dietary fad after another.

From a purely scientific and public health standpoint, the Mediterranean dietary pattern - as defined by Ancel Keys - has been the gold standard for decades, and will continue to be so unless something fundamentally changes about the human condition. Every well studied, consensus-backed reference diet from every leading nutritional authority around the world promotes some variation of that diet. If there are better diets, or diets with optimizations for specific conditions, they are still built on that foundation.

And while I tend to prefer to err on the side of no oil, if I’m going to use any added fats, it’s going to be olive oil or canola oil.

And also, there are more things to consider in diet than personal health. Go vegan.

Those don’t take gas. So, like, to set it on fire?

DRM in cars makes me want to stick to a car-free life even more.

So, going from Mealie’s instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you’re working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?

Such as?

A large part of it is the obnoxious monetization and general enshittification and privacy violations, but that’s not all. There are a number of usability annoyances. If I’ve been away from Discord for a little while and try to continue where I left off in a thread on a server, it never properly preserves where I last stopped reading. There are often times when I get notifications but it won’t actually take me to the relevant message, and that can even result in situations where the ping just gets lost entirely.

Then there’s things inherent in Discord’s design and how people use it. It’s become a tool that people have decided is a convenient replacement for chats, wikis, and forums - but it’s a shittier version of all of those things. Pinned messages are such a tucked away and half-baked feature. The fact that people are using Discord both to organize and discuss projects - as well as using that same space to host documentation or other critical knowledge-bases has made information significantly less accessible. I don’t want to join someone’s niche club just to “learn more.” If I want to read something I would rather just go to a wiki on the actual open web.

Discord is hot garbage ultimately for the same reasons as Facebook. It’s trying to be everything to everyone, and dropping a black box on the open web by doing so. It’s just another example of people trading convenience for actually using the appropriate tools for the kind of job they’re trying to do.