Tomato sauce and everything hot tomato, especially if you use canned tomatoes, needs a bit of sugar. It makes it 100% better. It does not make it sweet, but all the flavors of the tomato just pop while otherwise it is only sour and bland.

I am too old to sail the seas. Either I get it legally and convenient or I just stop watching and read a book instead. Not saying others shouldn’t, I had my fair share of years out there, but it’s not for me anymore.

Me: “I would like to uninstall Edge and use Firefox for everything!”
Netflix: “With Firefox I won’t give you best quality even if you pay for it! Use Edge!”
So Edge stays my video streaming browser for now, but only that.

In the past I had to upgrade my PC every 4 years (my first PC run on Windows 3.1), but my last one just works and even the GPU only fell out of minimum requirements of the newest and graphical shiny games end of last year (it even managed to run Starfield although it looked bad and lagged in cities terribly), but my backlog is huge, so I don’t care and if I care I can use Geforce Now or Game Pass for PC and stream that one game I can not play on my rig directly anymore.

Our planet is on fire and consuming less is the only actual solution to that. Everything got more expensive. I literally don’t want to spent a lot of money on a PC that I do not need, because the one I have plays the games I want to play just fine (currently Dave the Diver) and on top throw a perfectly fine machine away, add to CO2 production and need to cut back on other needs I have because everything is so expensive.

My machine is an i7-6700K 4GHz with a GTX 970 and 16 GB DDR 4. And the only reason this is not working with Windows 11 is the CPU and upgrading that would need a new board and at that point I need a new PC. Oh and I tested it at the beginning when Windows 11 came out, I can circumvent the restriction and install Windows 11 anyway, it’s just not guaranteed it will stay working and getting upgrades can be a hassle, but at least for the time I tried it I did get automated updates.

I do not hate Windows, I tried to get Windows 11, I just don’t want to accept that a security feature for businesses makes my consumer PC invalid for it. I am a gamer and I would like to stay with Windows, but I am not buying a new PC unless a vital part of my old one breaks. I rather stay with an unpatched system and do anything that needs security on my phone/tablet on android. And no, I am 58 y.o. and I am not learning Linux, maybe if I were interested in the Steam handheld it would make sense, but I am not.

Thank you for your explanation. Google gave me a lot of insight into a lot of things and none had to do with this problem. :D

so if a feature sucks, they can just remove it

Unfortunately if you liked that feature, it is gone now.

I like the GOG approach to EA:

“Rollback in GOG GALAXY — Keep playing your game if the newest update is not doing it for you, or revisit historical version snapshots.”

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000591705-Early-Access-as-it-is?product=gog

Plants vs Zombies on PC.

Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.

They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.

A shutdown and a fresh start also deletes files that aren’t used anymore and the PC does check itself for hardware problems. Starting a PC could take a long time in the past, but my current 7 year old system starts in about 10 seconds, a newer system could start faster. I also turn off all peripherals like monitors and printer etc. with one switch after the computer is off, to make sure there is not a single light still wasting electricity. Standby devices in a common houshold use so much electricity, that it amounts to a lot of money over a year. But I guess we are still in the phase of convinience over climate and people have money to waste too.

From your link:

but the option to choose a new time was greyed out

Which only ever happened for me if I had already pushed back an update multiple times. Which then means they had all the time in the world to make sure they do the update before they start such a critical, multiple days long process. These are people without forced update they would never make updates and they are the reason forced updates have to happen now.

I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that’s it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.

Bish bash bosh.

I do the same, but the meal did not have a name. Until today, it’s called “Bishbashbosh” now. I had to use google to translate to understand what it means, I am from Germany.

German here. A woman was starting to play loud music on her phone while I was sitting at a bakery having a cup of coffee, trying to relax from a bad morning. I opened Spotify, checked for this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBDtIOxUsI Every Maaaaaamaaaa I was singing loudly along. She lasted half of the song then fled the scene, even left her coffee on the table. My ears were bleeding, but it was worth it.

Fight them with the most terrible old people song you know in your country, be aware that it might hurt you too.

Do Pee!

X-Men, it’s in the name. :D (also: Great reference!)

I managed to clean the kitchen and do the dishes every evening for two weeks in a row now and it is a start to be nice to tomorrow me. If it becomes a habit, I will try to do more, but for now it is hard enough, but also so, so satisfying the next morning! Past me, today me and tomorrow me are a team!

The more control over your privacy the better.

I was once (long ago) sick on Monday and my employer called me and told me that I should be able to come to work when I was able to play World of Warcraft on Sunday, because he looked my character up in the armory and saw me getting a boss kill or something.

I was sick, because I had my wisdom teeth removed on Monday morning…

People can get in all kinds of trouble because of their gaming habits. A game critical of religion or religious, a game about sexuality and/or gender, a political game about dictatorship or capitalism or unionizing. A historical game about something your country doesn’t want you to know or a game that mentions Tian’anmen and Winnie-Puh. A game from a Russian developer that fled Russia when the war against Ukraine started and you are a gamer in Russia who wants to play it.

Good if Steam allows more control over our privacy, it took them long enough.

There is nothing more interesting than a “forbidden fruit”. Funny how a religion that bases on a human eating from the forbidden fruit is all about creating another forbidden fruit. And if you can’t have your own sex life then the next best thing is to think about the one others have or might have or even obsess about that. One could learn from the bible, but they chose to not do that. Sometimes I wonder if they have even read it.

Bro, your kid just figured out how to workaround your nanny filter.

Or he watches porn with a friend on their phone and they jerk off together. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Whether you are a current player … or maybe you jumped off the WoW train a few expansions ago, now is the time to come home

Sorry, but I left this abusive relationship years ago for a reason. Not coming back. I am also not sure if multiple expansions in a short time frame will be what the users want that are fine with going back every 2-3 years for a new expansion for three month and quit, if there is not enough time inbetween to forget why they stopped playing. Just saying.

And for the story side of things, they have messed up everything to the point that I do not even want to read about the story anymore. I am just done with the world and the lore and the graphics. There are so many interesting worlds and ideas out there, so many great games. I have fond memories of the friends I made ingame, but I also regret the massive amount of time I spent in one single game. It wasn’t healthy for me.

I am from Germany, our crime rate is very, very low. I doubt that many people here would think beating up or even killing a person is “as easy” as doing it to a funny looking delivery robot. Depending where you are from, that might be different though. If you live in a place where people actually see no difference between both and do one as easily as the other, then please stay safe!