Apparently, Starfield is not a good as the hype. Reviewers say it lacks imagination and is weighed down by cliches.

I hear that Dutch is an easy language to learn for English speakers.

nostr:npub1lf6uqvw37hrsmvul24lxj093gmhfsr3vpjtt2fnymhng8rgadjaqfmfkm6 No, it isn’t. A Steam Deck does not have the performance to do true 4K gaming.

Instant noodles, spam, sliced beef, and cabbage in laksa broth.

Nothing fancy, but my kind of dinner.

When did Germany suddenly get good at hockey?

I looked at the IIHF rankings, and they’re rated 5th in the world – ahead of Sweden, Switzerland, and Czechia.

By some bloody miracle, my iPhone suddenly turned on. Last night, it was completely dead.

I’m beginning to think my wife is right about Chinese Halloween.

My iPhone SE, a little more than a year old, gave up the ghost and suddenly doesn't power on.

This, a few days after my Switch no longer powers up 🤬

I’m excited with where PC gaming is going because it looks like it might become truly OS agnostic soon.

I’ve mentioned Steam Deck many times, and I must emphasize again how many games are playable—seeing how it runs Linux.

Games that were only meant to run on Windows work flawlessly on Linux now without missing a beat. Yes, even games made in the 90s and 00s.

Want to know how far things have come? Baldur’s Gate 3, Street Fighter 6, and Elden Ring are available on Linux. And this is just a fraction of a library that would have been exclusive to Windows that’s now available on Linux.

I’m listening to modern hip hop and so much of it sounds like… rock.

And not in the Run DMC way but in the ‘00s emo way.

Tommy Wiseau should review Doug Walker’s “The Wall”.

I’m also noticing that more movies and TV shows are a spin-off of video games. Twisted Metal and Gran Turismo are cases in point. M

But these aren’t even video games I would want movie adaptations for. I think they make for a pretty poor movie premise.

Here’s a better movie adaptation for a video name: Hotline Miami. A Hotline Miami movie would be incredible. If someone makes such a movie, I’m buying a ticket.

Or how about a Metal Gear Solid movie?

I like movies but I haven’t been excited about a new movie in a really long time.

Nowadays, it seems the best stories are coming from video games. And I don’t say this lightly.

Movie theatres are way too reliant on the same tired franchises. And they keep churning them out like a factory.

Now over-reliance on franchises can be a problem in the video game world too. But you also get moments like Elden Ring, Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, and Stray.

You don’t get those kind of moments in cinema anymore.

Oozi: Earth Adventure is the 3rd game I ever bought on Steam.

Made by Polish indie devs Awesome Games Studio, Oozi is about a cheerful alien who comes to Earth only to discover that all our local creatures are hazardous to his health.

At the time I bought this, I was tired of FPS games and the “gritty” and “realistic” that entailed. I wanted something fantastic and colourful. And what better way to experience that than with a platformer?

Now I didn’t want to go back to the well of my childhood. I had experienced enough Mario and Sonic to last a lifetime. Further, retro pixel art wasn’t on the menu – I wanted something that was obviously a modern PC game.

So Oozi came calling. It is indeed a 2D platformer. And while it’s not fancy by any means of the imagination, it’s obvious Oozi does stuff that an 8-bit and 16-bit console can’t do. Hell, it does things not even a PSOne could do.

There’s no polygons here. There’s no particle effects. But Oozi has nice smooth cartoon-like and hand-drawn animations that make it a joy. And it’s very apparent that this is purely about platforming.

What I particularly like about Oozi is that it’s simple enough for anyone to get started, but challenging for even the most practiced of platformer fans. Yes, it’s primarily about jumping from ledge-to-ledge, collecting points, and killing baddies. But you have to have a little bit of clever thinking to get you to the end of the stage.

Oozi is nothing like Mario or Sonic. The closest platformer I would compare it to is Rayman in terms of aesthetic and level design.

Now there is double jumping, wall jumping, and stomps. But there are no puzzles, one touch deaths or traps. This makes Oozi very suitable for casual pick up and play.

Because this is a 10-year-old game, it doesn’t demand much in the way of specs. You just need a 2Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, and 200MB space. Integrated graphics will do. It was originally made for Windows, but I got it to work on Linux via Proton. Oozi works perfectly on my Steam Deck.

Originally, Oozi was released digitally for the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. But Microsoft no longer supports Xbox 360, and Oozi isn’t for sale there. To date, the only way to play Oozi right now is on PC – it’s not available on modern consoles.

And this is a good time to remind everyone why I prefer PC gaming. Again, I bought this game almost a decade ago. It works not only on my tower but also on my Steam Deck. No tweaking required.

You can’t really do that with consoles. Sure, one upon a time, you could buy console games on disc. And if you kept your old console around or the next generation offered backwards compatibility, you could play the disc.

But now console gaming depends largely on digital-only downloads. So many of these digital-only games disappear either because the original developer doesn’t want to support it anymore, there’s an intellectual property dispute, or the storefront that sells the game gets shuttered.

Now I’m not saying these same risks don’t exist on PC. But they don’t exist to the same degree as on console. This is largely in part because games on PC don’t have the same planned obsolescence as they do on console.

That, right there, is why I’m glad I got Oozi on PC – because Oozi is a very good game, and I don’t want to stop playing it just because specific hardware or storefront is no longer supported.

Just created a variant of chess, played on a standard chessboard (8x8) which I call “ChessBall”.

It blends the strategic movement of chess pieces with the offensive and defensive dynamics of American football 🙂

The goal is to move a designated piece, the “Ball Carrier”, into the opponent’s end zone (the opposite back row), just like scoring a touchdown in American football.

ChessBall has 6 phases to the game:

1- Move phase 2- Pass phase 3- Tackle phase 4- Touchdown 5- Extra Point/Two Point conversion 6- Turnover on downs

The game ends in three ways: 1- One player reaches 21 points 2- One player checkmates the opponent’s King (this is an instant win, regardless of the current score) 3- All of one player’s pieces are captured (except for the King), resulting in a win for the other player.

I’m tweaking the rules for ChessBall right now, but I think it’s really fun.

Does anyone think the concept of “ChessBall” is interesting?

When it comes to sports, Vancouver is a strange city.

Most people really only care about one team: the Canucks. I don’t know why this is. The team hasn’t even qualified for the play-offs in 4 of the past 5 seasons. And any time the Canucks have any kind of success, the fans get obnoxious. Look, I’ve lived through two Stanley Cup riots now. I’m talking from experience.

The most successful pro sports team is the BC Lions who are the local Canadian football team and have won 6 Grey Cups. I love the Lions. Attending a live game is a blast. But even when the Lions win, good luck getting people in Vancouver to care as much as they do for the failing Canucks.

The Vancouver Whitecaps FC is our MLS franchise. They’re not the only major pro soccer team, and I’ll get to that other one in a second. The Whitecaps have less fans than the Canucks or the Lions, but Whitecaps fans are hardcore. It’s definitely a more international fanbase They’ve reached the CONCACEF Champions League multiple times, so I can’t deny they’ve had their successes.

The other pro soccer team simply called “Vancouver FC” and they play in the Canadian Premier League. They’re less than a year old, so I’m not sure they can be sustained long term. Nevertheless, seeing how Vancouver is Canada’s 3rd largest city, I understand why the CPL wanted a Vancouver team.

But wait. There’s another pro sports team. That’s the Vancouver Whitecaps FC 2. They’re the Whitecaps development team, and they play in MLS Next.

Then there’s the Vancouver Warriors. They’re the local pro box lacrosse team, and they play in the NLL. If you’re not familiar with box lacrosse, it’s different from field lacrosse in that it’s typically played in an indoor arena. It’s also a lot like ice hockey in terms of culture. The Warriors don’t have that big of a fanbase, but the fanbase that does exist is pretty hardcore – in part because lacrosse is a pretty big deal in Vancouver. However, I don’t know if the Warriors can stay around forever seeing how the NLL competes with the WLA, which is probably one of the best amateur box lacrosse leagues in the world.

Rounding out the major sports teams, there’s the Vancouver Bandits which plays for the Canadian Elite Basketball League. Canadians generally like to say they invented Basketball, and they’re pretty hardcore about it. However, I don’t think the CEBL is particularly good, and if an NBA G League team played a CEBL team, I guarantee the G League team would blast them. Nevertheless, they’re a “major” sports league in Canada.

We also have a minor league baseball team, the Vancouver Canadians. Not very many people follow them but every game is sold out because there’s nothing like enjoying a hot dog and a beer on a hot summer’s day. I get it. But the Canadians are a “A” minor league team. This is not serious baseball.

Vancouver also has a pro Twenty20 cricket team called the Knights. Most Vancouver residents are completely unaware of this, but they have a big following in the South Asian community. And South Asians are a very big demographic in Vancouver.

Now these are the pro sports. Amateur leagues are something else.

Like I said, ice hockey is pretty big here. And junior hockey in Vancouver often has a bigger following than some pro sports teams.

There’s the WHL, a major junior hockey league, represented by the Vancouver giants.

There’s the BCHL, a junior “A” hockey league, and probably the best of its kind in the world. That’s represented in the Metro Vancouver area by the Coquitlam Express, Surrey Eagles, and Langley Rivermen.

There’s the PCJHL, a junior “B” hockey league, which has 14 teams in the Vancouver area.

Meanwhile, as I said, amateur box lacrosse is pretty popular. That’s represented by the Western Lacrosse Association (WLA) which is almost as good as the NLL – but it plays in the summer instead of winter. In fact, a lot of WLA players also play in the NLL. 5 of the 7 WLA teams are in Vancouver. This league is 91 years old, and it’s got a long, long history.

There’s an amateur Rugby Union team called the Wave. I know nothing about them.

There’s also a roller derby league called Terminal City Roller Derby. I’ve known quite a few women who play this, and they seem to like it a lot. But I don’t know much about the sport.

We once had an NBA team called the Grizzlies that moved to Memphis. They were horrible, but people still wish they were here.

There was a roller hockey team called the Voodoo back when rollerblading was huge.

Back when the WHA competed with the NHL, the Vancouver Blazers existed.

And back when ultimate had a following there were two semi-pro ultimate teams that competed with each other called Riptide and the Nighthawks. They both folded.

Snowboarding, skiing, skateboarding, golf, and hoking are huge but I don’t know enough about how those sports are organized here.

So the Queen’s Gambit is a great TV series. And Beth Harmon is one hell of a fictional character.

But I think her real life equivalent is even more interesting.

Judit Polgar isn’t just the greatest female chess player of all time, she’s the only woman to bust into the global top 10 FIDE chess rankings and beat the world’s best.

That’s right, Judit Polgar beat Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Magnus Carlsen, and so many others. She’s beaten 11 current and former champions, in fact.

What’s further amazing is that Judit Polgar actually broke Bobby Fischer’s record of becoming the youngest grandmaster of all time. Which she accomplished at the age of 15.

She is the first girl in chess history to have won the boy’s junior world championships—and she did it twice!

Judit reached the stunning height of a 2735 ELO peak rating—an unimaginable accomplishment for most chess players.

While she was beating everyone, she took the time to write several books about chess for young girls to encourage them to start playing the game.

She’s retired now from international chess competition. But what does she do now? She is the coach of the Hungarian men’s chess team.

In 2021, she was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. And I can’t think of anyone more deserving. What a legend!

nostr:npub1ukcz3c3ek9ugnmrj37cjm2q9gsaqss5j9dqwpqmx0tgkzudsseqqcp40jn You could but good luck doing that without being sniped.

High end mushrooms should be called softsuites.

I still buy DVDs for two reasons:

1- If I own it, nobody can take the movie from me—unless they literally steal it. Which is unlikely to happen because no one wants DVDs anymore.

2- I can actually hear dialogue without turning it up to an ungodly volume. At least DVDs have good audio mixing, unlike so many streaming services.

nostr:npub1dgf6nn6u2q78krxeevjvykrqg84np0kef876s0jhk8tgl5a6dwpqjnu9m7 That’s pretty cool.