My shelf is full of Ubisoft games. I'm playing one right now in fact, Farcry 2.

Thing is, I've bought a lot of them based of my love of the series, and the truth is, all the recent one's have sucked. Farcry 2,3,5, primal, AC black flag, rocksmith 2014, anything splinter cell, ghost recon wildlands, all amazing games.

Farcry 6, AC anything after black flag, breakpoint, the new rocksmith, I hated them all. Not because I want to see a company fail, but because the games just don't have the mechanics I enjoy.

I've spent a lot of money in good faith because ubisoft made some of my favorite titles, but I'm done. The only games I might buy at this point on faith are GTA6, Kingdom come Deliverance 2, and Subnautica 2.

I won't buy anything ubisoft again until I've seen multiple reviews telling me exactly why I'm going to love this one.

No, I work in corporate AV, so I'm buying higher end digital signage for most applications at work.

NEC and Philip's I've been using lately, but they are just the cost effective ones now. LG, Samsung, Sony, all make good displays.

Digital sign usually dont have any smart apps, and if they do you can fully disable them.

They also have all the advanced features you could want. Serial and TCP api, multiple ports of various formats, auto on with sync detect, etc.

For personal use, my last three have been Visio from Costco, and while it has the apps, I just never connect to the internet.

I have seen guides online to open up a display and disable the smart elements, but that seems overkill to me.

One thing to watch for, I've heard but haven't witnessed that many displays are getting way more aggressive about auto connecting to wifi for sharing data and updates. If someone has unsecured wifi near by etc.

Yes and no. This is for parents, so ease of use is a huge factor.

The processors in smart TVs are often crap, plus who know what updates and monitoring they are pushing on you.

With a dedicated media device you only have one company to deal with. Personally, I use my playstation for everything, but for my mom a Sony bluray with the apps works fine.

At the end of the day, they'll want netflix, amazon, youtube, hbo max, etc, and you get a way better experience with a media player vs smart tv. Sony is a known evil as it were, their hardware is good, and they generally don't fuck up firmware updates.

If you want a true dumb TV, buy a commercial grade display made for digital signage. Bit more expensive, but designed for 24/7 operation and has none of the smart tv fat.

My advice is never use a smart tv of any kind.

Use a third party device like an apple tv or roku, hell even a bluray player with apps on it.

Then get what ever TV you like and never let it see the internet.

I personally like Visio, but any mid grade display is fine.

While I enjoy the humor, the fact is they'd have aimed it away from landfall.

Well, it's not like RDR2 had a short story, so I'm ok with that.

I suspect they want enough of a solo game to not piss off us old guys, then will quickly pivot to GTA6 online for the cash cow.

If the world and AI are good, I'll have endless hours causing chaos and jumping motorcycles.

I will never forget how surreal the Four Seasons presser was.

So the man has a stutter, and he's old, what ever. All I can do is cast my single vote. Last time, I voted against Trump, and honestly, even after the debate, I'll cast my vote this time for Biden.

I'd much rather cast my vote for Hakeem Jeffries, or Shift, or Bernie, or a dozen other people who aren't an option.

Thing is, I'm going to cast my vote in Cook county IL, so it literally won't matter. IL is going blue no matter what, and I feel like my participation is merely token.

I wish I could do more, I want to scream at clouds about what is happening to the country, and it doesn't matter.

Saw a stat that says Trump is 65% to win, and want to physically grab people and shake them, but what would it matter?

Had I walked into that debate blind, not knowing who those people are, what the "facts" and the facts are, I'd have thought, that Biden guy seems weak and befuddled, and boy that Trump is sure a confident leader. It made me feel sick.

As I told my mother today, I don't have kids, I live in the midwest, have a good job with a big stable company, truth is, even a second Trump term won't effect me that much. I can just sit back, enjoy my 30 so years left, and watch the world burn, but damn it, I have empathy for others, and there are many, many people whose lives and livelihood are going to be seriously impacted, and that bothers me.

Was born premature, and required open heart surgery when I was only a few days old.

When I was around 17 I had the chance to visit the hospital and tour the children's ICU I had been in. A children's ICU is not the happiest place in the world, and there were strange looks from both staff and parents as we walked around, feeling very awkward.

Then a short man with a thick accent burst through the door and hugged me. Turned out, the doctor who had performed my surgery was there and insisted on showing me around personally.

He walked me over to a woman who was about the saddest person I have ever seen, sitting next to an incubator. "This is what your son will look like in 18 years" he told her.

They took my picture, and hung it on the board for the kids who had "graduated", and I have to believe it was the first time in a long time that room had joy and happiness in it.

If someone had told me that that doctor wasn't welcome because he had a husband I think I would have wanted to become violent.

This law means that those families now have 1/3 fewer people to give a chance for thier kids, and the odds for me hadn't been that great to begin with.

I got pretty bad heat stroke once while running in Texas. Was in the military, and due to a stupid miscommunication was told I was not allowed to drink water.

Lap or two later and I started having symptoms I'd never experienced before.

I can 100% believe that my look and behavior could have been mistaken for drug use.

I had stopped sweating, looked pale and disoriented, I'm sure I was not speaking clearly. My friend grabbed me and dragged me to a water fountain.

Once I had time to recover, get some A/C, and rehydrate, I was pretty much fine, though I remember having one hell of a headache like a hangover.

It was my primary social media site for over 10 years, and only one in probably the past five after ditching Facebook.

All I ever used to access it was baconreader. When the first talk of killing off the API started with the rate hike, I had a sinking feeling this was the end.

Rode it out till the last day, and reflexively kept opening baconreader just to realise again it was offline.

Decided to give Lemmy a try, and while it took a couple days to get it sorted, I have to say, for my daily browsing fix, it's more than enough.

Yes, reddit is a giant database, and when google searches take me there I'll view the info, but for everyday use, lurking, posting, and commenting, never again.

Not sure of its bias, user saturation, bot, shills, demographic, or what, but while smaller, the quality and content of the comments here just seems better. It reminds me of the early days on fark or even back on IRC.

It really does piss me off that greed over an IPO ruined something that had been a part of my life for so long.

I am enough of a grumpy old bastard that unless they fix the API and baconreader starts up again, I'm done. The internet is a big weird place, and I'm happy to go see other parts of it.