Actually this one feels pretty similar to watch_dogs. Wasn't this the plot to watch_dogs 2?

I think Discord calls it Discord Rich Presence. It's such a good feature, and I always get excited when I see it implemented. Sometimes when I look it up I'm lucky enough to find mods that add it for some of my games, too.

"I'll upload a patch later this week" 12 years ago

One application I've seen for this is recording your brushing patterns for your review and to recommend ways to improve your process. This is pretty useful right now considering dental hygiene literacy is criminally undertaught and uncommon even among adults.

IoT is great, it's just that companies right now are abusing it and our lack of data protection laws to extract as much personal information as physically possible. The question shouldn't be "why is my toothbrush connected to a network", it should be "why does my toothbrush need to be connected to the Internet".

I hate to recommend people away from pure, original experiences, but Fallout 1 and 2 are notoriously buggy even on the hardware they were designed for. So I'd at least consider looking into Fallout Fixt. If you end up playing Fallout 2, which I highly recommend as I put hundreds of hours into the game both decades ago and just recently, its equivalent mod is the Restoration Project and I really enjoyed it.

In-game, I recommend making your own character, and saving often and in different save slots. Fallout can be extremely punishing for trivial mistakes, or even if it just feels like being mean during a particular encounter. Also make sure to look through your settings - for example, I believe you can shorten enemy combat animations if you find the AI's turn takes too long.

Luck does more than you'd expect. It's worth investing in if you want a weirder time or more loot.

The Heuristomancer.

That would be the Cancel button, because anything else would be giving Microsoft free data.

You can parse any plaintext with regex, but I would recommend using XPath for that use case, instead.

God I loved having a bookshelf full of game cases. A digital library just isn't the same.

Exactly! I can't even stand physical ads like billboards because the concept of reserving land for manipulating every passing person into buying something they don't need is ridiculously perverse to me. Ads are an attack against my psyche and I will do everything I can to avoid them.

When I want to invest in a better product or look for something that solves my wants or needs, I research my options. I will never make my decision based on an obvious ad because they are intrinsically deceitful.

This headline makes a ton of assumptions, namely that the ability to feel boredom means that you hate being alone with your thoughts. Of course people who are stuck in a boring ass experimentation room with no stimuli are willing to try out a minor shock. I wouldn't be surprised if most people would even consider it a fun experience. I know I've thought about playing with tasers before.

Something like "think about your past and explain how you feel, or press this button when you want to end the experiment early at the cost of a shock" would at least be a relevant premise. This is just another benign experiment turned into doomer clickbait, and I wouldn't let it paint my worldview.

MREs might be a good choice - I know the US ones come with a water-activated device to heat your food up. They're also about 1250 calories each and balanced for recovering after intense exercise.