Same. How could a machine steal its own IP address? It doesn’t make sense!

When I was deployed to Iraq in 2007, I worked for a Communications Squadron, which managed the base’s computer network. Someone built a media server in our server room, so we could legally host movies and music on our network for other military members to enjoy at work.

We would borrow copies of DVDs and CDs from our base library and rip them to the server, then we built a rudimentary website where people could browse the catalog and stream content through the site. Nobody could download copies of anything, so we weren’t guilty of government-sponsored illegal filesharing. It was basically a way to digitally access the content from our library.

A part of the server that was locked down just for our squadron included video games we could install and run from our work computers. Our squadron especially liked to close up shop around lunchtime for some “simulated warfare training” and then jump into a giant Call of Duty multiplayer free-for-all map and shoot each other up for about 30 minutes.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way to explain that one day, I noticed someone added World of Warcraft to the server. I thought it was odd, considering MMOs needed an Internet connection and our military networks are specifically designed to block most non-work related content. Battle.net would definitely be on the block list.

Still, curiosity got the best of me and I installed it on my PC. And to my surprise, it was a local server instance! I could access all of vanilla WoW, and I was the only person online.

I don’t know what exactly that game mode was. I thought maybe it was a beta instance, but I’ve never been able to get any of Blizzard’s beta or test servers to run locally without an Internet connection. Someone had obtained an actual working offline copy of the game to play!

Suffice to say, that kept me entertained for most of my deployment. Back in those days, there were a lot of griefers online and you didn’t have much of a choice in avoiding PvP (this was before they started making specifically RP servers), so I was frustrated when other players would interrupt my gameplay to fight me. Having a whole MMO to myself was fantastic!

The only downside was that my character was isolated on my local server; all my progress couldn’t come with me when I left Iraq. But I was addicted to WoW back in those days, so it let me continue to enjoy the game while I was unable to access my actual account back home.

I was gonna say, “what ads?” I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in years now. If they ever force their way through, I’ll just stop watching YouTube videos. I’m not tied to the platform; there are other ad-free places to watch videos from.

There was a moment in that fight where Pink got killed and dropped a bunch of grenades when he went down (an ability one of your custom uniforms grant you). And we all happened to be grouped a little too close together, so we all got blown up by him. That’s my one death in that mission - a team kill. I wonder if that did enough damage for his score, or if he kept flagging people with his rifle while shooting enemies.

That’s one of the interesting things about this game. Some players have asked the devs for the ability to turn off friendly fire, but they refuse, saying that friendly fire is funny and part of the ridiculousness of the game.

Right? The way I hold controllers, I can barely reach the bumper buttons without shifting my whole hand, so it’s much easier to just use those underside buttons.

This is my situation too! I bought the original LCD one when they were on pre-order, then my right bumper button broke (a common issue with the first models) and I took too long to request the free fix/replacement from Valve.

So my wife encouraged me to just buy one of the new OLED ones that had just released and she’d take my old one.

She hardly games on it anyway, and when she does, I showed her how to remap that bumper button to a different button. Almost no games use the trigger buttons on the underside of the Steam Deck, so those are always available.

In India, it’s a huge taboo to kiss anyone whom you’re not married to. Public affection in general is mostly frowned upon there, and sometimes charged as a crime depending on where you live.

That’s why you never see lovers kiss in Bollywood movies. They always just hug or hold each other at arms length. They would be outraged if two actors who aren’t married to each other kissed on screen.

This is from a video game called “Among Us.” Everyone plays members on a space ship that has been infiltrated by a shape-shifting monster, who is killing them one-by-one. One of the players is the monster.

The players can call a meeting to vote who to eject into deep space, hoping to discover who the monster is and eliminate them.

In this case, one of the members claimed the monster is the red member, but they’re really annoyed by the black member. The whole crew voted to throw out the black member instead. Red is sad for being accused, but happy not to be ejected.

I use Voyager. I have NSFW posts set to blur. I need to open the thread to see it un-blurred.

I do this so I don’t have random NSFW images popping up on my phone while I’m being antisocial out in public. Yes, I could have the app just block all NSFW posts. But then I would miss beautiful works of art like OP’s post.

I was wondering why this was marked as NSFW. That explains it.

Yeah, they must mean the original, since this mod just released today. But if you read their whole review, they don’t directly reference the original game once, they just gripe about all the things they don’t like about this mod.

I love this negative review. Notice their hours on record.

Replace Digg with Imgur and you have my progression over the years.

I’d heard of Digg, but never really took notice of it until it suddenly collapsed. Now a former Reddit cofounder and a former Digg founder are revitalizing Digg? No thanks. I’ll continue to avoid that site.

I haven’t had any problems, except for fighting that Goliath alien. I managed to take one down solo, but only by jumping across a chasm and then taking pot shots at him while he stared at me from the other side. I could not get clean shots off at him while running away. I actually killed him by throwing a grenade behind him, and when he turned around to shield from the blast, I shot him in his soft unprotected backside until he collapsed.

I personally have yet to die in the game, but two of my friends who joined me just ran off without any introduction to the game and proceeded to get themselves killed over and over again. So if you pay attention to the training at the beginning, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

The farther you wander from your starting area, the more difficult the aliens get. So stay closer to home until you’ve leveled up your weapons and base defenses and you’ll be fine, even solo. Of the 7 bases I currently have set up, only one has been attacked by aliens so far, and they were easy to clean up by myself.

As far as factory automation, it can sometimes be a chore as a single player, but it’s not too hard. As long as you have the patience to plot out resource production lines, it’s not too bad. The hardest thing right now is that there’s no transportation between bases besides walking there yourself, so it can be time-consuming going back and forth to check on various bases. Especially since most of the resource nodes are scattered. And you can’t just build anywhere like Satisfactory, so you need to drop Base Cores here and there so you can run rails between bases for resources.

I still don’t know how large the game’s map is, but what I’ve uncovered so far is massive. It takes me maybe 10 minutes to walk across my currently-explored area, and there’s still a lot of black undiscovered areas on my map in all directions!

■■■ Proton ■■■■■■■ donated ■■■■ to ■■■■ Trump.

Did they? I know one of their CEOs was pro-Trump, but the organization as a whole spoke out against having any political affiliation. Do you have a source for their donation to Trump?

I considered that, but I apparently have a really lumpy, scrotum-looking scalp. I do NOT look good bald. So… I gotta put up with what’s left of my hair as long as I can.

The only reason my hairstyle has changed over the years is because of thinning hair.

I used to have such thick, soft hair, people would joke that I was actually growing fur. Everyone loved to scruff my hair and I got compliments all the time.

But now I’m in my 40s and the family balding curse has caught up with me. My hairline is receding, a bald spot is starting to show, and I needed to change up my style to avoid looking 20+ years older than I actually am. Eventually, I’ll just give up and let it do its own thing, but I need to experience my midlife crisis first. 😉

There’s a pretty big difference between criticizing and harassing.

My introduction to Tim Curry was when he played Rooster in Annie waaay back in 1982.

It’s always been wonderful to see him pop up in movies and shows (and video games) over the years, even if he’s just doing voice acting. I know it took him a while after his stroke to be able to talk normally again (he was slow and slurred in his speech for a while), but I’m surprised he hasn’t done more voice work since 2012.

I always attempt to play a game the way the developers intended the first time through. If I decide to give it another playthrough and I don’t want to put up with the extra grindy parts of the game, I’ll look for legitimate cheats to help me fast-forward through the rough parts.

I mean “legitimate” as in, cheats the developers put in the game, not outside hacks or mods that alter the game itself. I’m not big on mods in general, and I don’t usually use cheats, but I will in rare situations.

Back in the day, Warcraft III had cheats that let you power through each level with stuff like infinite resources, invulnerability, or just letting you automatically complete a level. I used those on recurring playthroughs because each level could easily take 30 mins to an hour to beat, and it was very grindy.

In Satisfactory, there’s a cheat where you can add a single stack of a resource into the back of a factory cart, then deconstruct the cart. You’ll get all the resources of the factory cart in your inventory, plus double the resource you put into the cart.

Do this dozens of times and you can exponentially grow resources without having to wait on factories to make them. I’m pretty sure the developers are aware of this “glitch” because it’s never been patched out, even after a bunch of people started pointing it out on official Satisfactory forums.

I played hundreds of hours of the game and made some pretty massive continent-stretching factories. Upon building a new world, I started to implement this “strategy” to hurry up and acquire rare resources so I could get factories off the ground. Saved me from hundreds of hours of gameplay, waiting on production lines to make basic resources into more advanced resources so I could get to the next step.

A buddy of mine asked to be part of my Steam Family so he could have access to my 4,000+ game library. He regularly streams games online and figured it’d save him tons of money buying games to play.

But he’s also completed all achievements on almost every game he’s played on console and uses some website to automatically complete all the achievements for his Steam games, so he doesn’t need to redo them on PC.

The thing about Steam Family is… if someone’s caught cheating and earns a vac ban, the owner of the family account receives the ban, not the individual player. I told him I was worried that cheating of any kind might affect my immaculate record and/or library of games and he decided to just buy his own games instead of risking my account. Good friend; he didn’t even argue. I was still willing to let him have access as long as he was careful, but he chose another route.