NAM

Compulsory customer service for a couple years might make retail customers less miserable to deal with overall.

I didn't ignore it, but I did have to put up with it for months:

Discord would just never recognize that my PC was being left idle, so I would never get notifications on my phone, which constantly left me gaslighting myself into thinking my friends were ignoring me, or just didn't have any reason to message me all day.

I contacted Discord support at least once over it, and they couldn't do anything to help me figure it out, since I had all my settings set properly to have it switch over to mobile notifications after 1 minute of inactivity.

After a shit ton of googling, I found out that certain devices, namely third-party xbox controllers, could cause a PC to never actually go idle, and then I found a tool to help me check if my PC is idle, started unplugging things one-by-one, and found out that my 8bitdo Arcade controller was the thing keeping my PC from going idle.

The issue popped up with an etsy-bought Guitar Hero controller further down the line as well, but thankfully by then I knew how to troubleshoot the issue. Bonus points, my new fighting game controllers don't have this problem.

Literally the only annoyance I had with it initially was that I preferred my taskbar at the top of the screen, and you can't move it, at least not without janky registry hacks, on Windows 11.

I've since gotten over it, because for me and the vast majority of people, it's functionally identical in almost all cases.

The only other thing I can think of that's still a rare annoyance is that sometimes, completely at random, Windows Explorer, if you've just left a window open in the background for a while, will just rip focus from whatever other thing you were doing.

Yes, they're trying to shoehorn their copilot AI thing into the UX, but that was so easy to disable and forget that I refuse to call it a real problem, myself.

Killer Instinct-generated.

Probably that I met a bunch of other decently-high-level fighting game players that have similar demeanor about the games we all play. Hanging out with them gave me an entire new community to feel at home in, and got me back into content creation. Plus, they collectively made it not feel impossible to go to my local tournaments on occasion, at which I'm at least not the weakest player in the room by a good margin.

Oh yeah, I completely quit drinking as well, after overdoing it one night and teleporting to the bathroom to vomit. I'm not counting days or anything, just kinda neat that I dropped it cold turkey, had plenty of opportunities to drink again, and just haven't wanted to.

Literally viewing this thread while laying in bed with a FFXIV cutscene playing on my Deck right now.

It's so cozy playing stuff on this thing, even when I have an extremely powerful gaming PC less than 5 feet away.

And when I go over to my girlfriend's house, I just bring it with me, instead of having to lug a whole laptop over there and get it set up just to mess around with something casual that I wouldn't wanna run on my phone.

I mean, ideally I'd want a ranking of every decision I ever made in my whole life on that scale, so I could thumb through it.

My favorite concept for an afterlife is being handed a magic book that contains the answers to every question like this where it'd be impossible to track the data, and it would be able to display it in any way you want.

What was the single thing I did that had the last direct impact on myself, that had the greatest lasting impact on anyone else?

Things like spending the extra time one day making a cup of coffee made it so this specific person was stuck behind my slow-ass speed limit driving, averting what would've been a multi-car pileup or some shit like that.

If they want a third option, I usually recommend Brother, and even more I tend to recommend used/refurbished. We just don't carry those in my store.

God, the amount of times I've had to explain the EcoTank vs HP math to customers in my store, and then STILL have them pick an HP is fucking baffling.

There are a few.

1, my Mavercade KeebBrawler-01, which has been pretty comfy for Street Fighter 6, which itself I can't count as my own best purchase since it was gifted to me.

2, Monolith M1070C headphones. They're the first pair of closed-back headphones I've ever had that I don't hate wearing for extended periods.

3, Final Fantasy 14. My girlfriend's been playing since its initial release, and some of my other friends collectively convinced me to join. In the last couple weeks I've already put somewhere in the range of 50 hours into it and it's been a good way to bond with everyone.

I wonder if they'll ever flat out destroy the Millennium Tower