I personally look to see if the company has their own storefront. And sometimes it pays off in unexpected ways.

For example I was in the market for a soldering iron. I found a solid Hakko one on Amazon, but I decided to check their site first and, lo and behold, they had the exact same one for sale for the exact same price. BUT I could choose what color I wanted; Amazon only had the standard blue/yellow, whereas they had two other color choices.
On top of that they included an extra goodie of my choosing, which I chose their coffee mug (I forget the other options).

So because I took the extra time to look around, I was able to get one in a color I preferred, got an extra item out of it, and cut out the unnecessary middle man. Win-win-win as they say.

Sometimes, though, it’s just not possible. I was in the market for a triple monitor stand as I use a unique configuration (ultrawide as my main, with two regular widescreens side-by-side above it). The only viable stand I found was available either through Amazon or Walmart. They did not sell directly from their site. So I had to choose which devil I wanted to support.

Can confirm about the unrest. My friend group is discussing these events daily. And a few of them are actually going out and protesting. I’m likely to join in this summer.

I’m gonna have to buy a 360 now to jailbreak and rip its games.
Been doing that for PS1-4, GC, Wii, Wii U, Switch, and OG Xbox. Now it’s time for the 360 to join the ranks.

Agreed. 2/10, would not recommend to a friend

Younger 30s AMAB here. It’s between shoulder and armpit length now and I love it despite the amount of work it takes now.
I’ve never had it this long before, mostly out of fear about what others would say, particularly my dad. But shortly before 30, I just decided to say, “fuck it,” and started growing it out. Now after growing it out for the past few years I’ve never felt more like me.
And the best part? I have received almost nothing but compliments about my hair. I learned to care for it correctly and found out it’s actually pretty curly. I always thought it was just wavy. It makes the ladies jealous and I get to establish my dominance with the best hair in the room.

The only issue with Stuntman on emulators is it’s one the last remaining games not playable on PCSX2. There’s been consistent issues with the AI pathing on one of the levels and they haven’t been able to patch it after all these years.
I’m not saying it won’t ever be, but it may continue to be unplayable on non-native hardware for a while longer.

I am not ashamed to admit it either. I even made the effort to get the PS2 ports of the two games that released on PSP, however I still need to play those.
It is a goal of mine to have every single R&C game playable on my PC. The only one I’m still waiting on is the PS4 version, and it’s only a matter of time with ShadPS4.

I haven’t tried the R&C collection on RPCS3 yet even though I have a copy. The compatibility list has it under In Game with some graphical bugs and glitches, but it was last updated nearly 5 years ago, so things may have improved.

Luckily since you have a Deck, you can realistically change your thumbsticks should they get damaged.

No one mentioned the Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank games. Those were my childhood growing up and in my opinion hold up gameplay-wise to this day.

Plus the Jak series have a native launcher called OpenGOAL.

While I never played them myself, I have heard good things about the Sly Cooper series.

Rayman 3 Hoodlum Havoc is where it’s at. I consider that peak Rayman. Would love another game with that vibe.

I really hate that man

When I tried Sony’s 5 IV last year, it came with a headphone jack. Most of Sony’s lineup comes with it I believe.

They say the best gift is one they keep on using. By that logic, my best gift is the tea kettle my brother gave me on Christmas 2018. I was getting into drinking tea, but I had no convenient way to heat up the water. It quickly became my most used Christmas gift ever. Then when the pandemic happened and I started working from home, I used it multiple times a day. It’s been used easily a couple thousand times in the past 6 years and it’s still going strong.

Edit: Another arguably best gift is the headphones that my brother also gave me. I forget what year, though, somewhere between 2014 and 2016. They’re a pair of Sony headphones and I started to use them a lot when I started office work at the end of 2017. Basically every day for most of my shifts. I used them so much the (admittedly mediocre) ear pads wore out and I had to replace them at the end of 2019. The 3rd party replacement pads are significantly better and show absolutely zero wear. I stopped using them as much when I upgraded to a wireless pair in 2022, but they still get used every week for work meetings and calls on Teams. I’ve definitely put a few thousand hours of use into them over the past decade.

I’m sorry :/ There’s gotta be a way to get those screws out. It’s 100% worth jailbreaking your Switch. Being able to play BotW and TotK on your 27" 1440p monitor significantly improves the experience.

Woops, I meant RAID 1. I’ll go fix that in my post. But I do have an external 4TB SSD with all my games except for the PS4 games since they’re so large. It has about 750 GB of space remaining on it.
I also backed up my games on a friend’s NAS in a separate location.
I also purchased a small rack server that can hold 4 hard drives. I want to buy a few 8 TB drives and set up Gamevault on it to better manage my few hundred games in my collection.

I love iNaturalist. I lived out in the woods for several years and would see so many different bugs that I didn’t recognize. So when I discovered it about 2 years ago, I started taking pictures of every bug I saw and uploading them to the app to learn what they were. And then in August last year there was an unusual explosion of mushroom varieties in our yard. That’s the one area where iNaturalist is a little weak as it really struggled to give me good ID’s for a lot of them. But it should only get better with time.
I’ll see if I can find some mushroom photos to share here.

Edit: one of my favorite mushroom pics I got during the mycological explosion:

Game preservation. I got into it last fall when I learned about OpenGOAL for the Jak and Daxter games. I grew up with those games and were some of my favorites from that generation.
I then learned how easy it was to rip PS1 through 3 games and how simple it is to set up the emulators for each console. I have a sizable collection of games for those generations, so I started ripping.

I then remembered watching LTT’s video about how to jailbreak the Switch. I bought a used Switch from a friend pre-pandemic, but never played the games because I never cared for playing on the Switch itself. So I checked if mine was old enough to jailbreak (Nintendo patched the exploit out of the Switch about a year after it released) and, lo and behold, it was.
It wasn’t easy jailbreaking it. It took several hours over 3 days to do it; I would make some progress, then hit a roadblock I couldn’t figure out, so I’d stop and come back the next day. I’d get a little further, hit another roadblock, and repeat. Once I managed that, I ripped my (small) collection of Switch games and played them on Ryujinx. Now that I could finally play them on my laptop whenever I wanted, I actually had a desire to play them and managed to get through BotW in January.

Then I figured out how to jailbreak my Wii (which is pretty easy, I recommend everyone do it to theirs), so I could rip those games. It can also rip GC games, so I didn’t need to find and jailbreak one of those to do it.

When I learned of shadPS4 this summer and the progress it was making toward playing Bloodborne, I spent $400 on ebay to get a gold PS4 with firmware 9.0 so I could jailbreak it and start dumping PS4 games.

At that point I saw how much space all of the games I ripped took up on my laptop, so I bought a NAS from a friend who was upgrading theirs and set it up with two 8TB hard drives in RAID 1 and stored all my games on there. It’s currently about 60%+ full.

Over Halloween I went to a used game store and saw they were selling a Wii U for $160. I bought it and jailbroke that as well and started ripping those games.

I bought an OG Xbox to jailbreak, but I need to open it up to replace the clock capacitor first. Otherwise it could leak and my effort would be for nothing. I just haven’t got around to it yet.

I realized this was a passion of mine when I accidentally borked my PS4 and it would only boot into safe mode. I was 100% willing to completely wipe it and start the jailbreak from scratch so I could keep doing it.

All told, I’ve ripped about 400+ nearly 600 games (I finally counted) in the past 15 months, spent dozens of hours ripping them, and have zero intention of stopping. I only think about how I can keep expanding my collection. Right now my next consoles will be the 360, PSP, and Vita.

Edit: rephrasing and adding a little more info

I bought that Saturday morning at full price. No regerts. In 5 days, I dumped about 30 hours into it.

Define “meaningfully”. There have been several different types of innovations in recent years depending on how you look at it.
Mazda made a gas engine that can switch from spark plug ignition to compression ignition. Though I don’t think they brought it to the states.
Nissan made an engine that can vary its compression ratio on the fly. Something no other engine can do to my knowledge.
Hyundai made a cam shaft that can vary the length of time it opens and closes the valves rather than just varying the time that they open.
There’s a company called Speed of Air that designed piston heads that have dimples in them like a golf ball. Those dimples apparently can significantly improve the engine’s power and, more importantly, its efficiency. Though I don’t have a video link talking about that. Just their site.
Porsche also designed a 6 stroke engine. Though I’ll have to watch the video again as I don’t remember much about it.
If you want to get more experimental, someone made something called a rotary vane engine.

People are definitely still trying to find ways to improve the internal combustion engine. It’s just this technology takes time to reach the mainstream, if it ever does.