Okay, technically late, but I’m surprised no one nominated The Beaches - Last Girls At The Party (English). It’s probably a little mainstream for Lemmy? Seems to be getting lots of radio play, and fairly popular (or at least Canadian popular).

I’ll nominate them, if an exception can be made, even though I already nominated a couple of other songs. Otherwise, add them to the playlist and jam out. The real prize is the music we listened to along the way.

The “3PMS” (3 Peak Mountain Snowflake) is a performance certification. The tire line will have been tested and passed a certification. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sold as a winter tire or all-weather, it’s purely test based.

Among tires with the 3PMS, they might exceed the test standard by various amounts, but that’s going to need individual tire reviews and Consumer Reports or something. Any 3PMS endorsed tire should be good in poor winter conditions, but some will be better than others.

As an aside, I usually just get All-Seasons M+S or whatever All Weather tires are on sale nowadays. My secret is I don’t drive on the Malahat or the Coquihalla in winter conditions, and I’m not passing anyone in a snowstorm. Plus I don’t live in northern BC or Alberta. I used to carry tire chains in case I got caught out by a sudden storm or freezing rain, but I haven’t done that for a few years. I should get new chains. I will also say that when I was in northern BC, AWD or 4WD made a big difference, on top of tire selection. I don’t have AWD or 4WD now, so I double drive more cautiously in winter.

A final caution, even the best winter tire will perform worse than a bald tire in summer, and even 4WD is simply reducing the performance hit. My impression from seeing cars in the ditch up north is that there were just as many 4WD and AWD vehicles in the ditch. You can do 90 kph along a clear stretch but then hit a small snow drift on a corner or patch of ice. Just because people are passing you doesn’t mean they are driving to the conditions.

Ha! I agree, the extra level of extraction helps. I don’t know why, it feels bad to be mean to animals and NPCs in a game, but it’s okay if it’s a game within that game? Feelings aren’t rational I guess.

Besides the only animal companions I have are my treasured walking towers/bastions!

Steam, GoG, Humble Bundle, and Itch are the platforms I regularly buy PC games on. By far and away, Steam is #1. It’s got the games, it’s well integrated into everything, easy to use (especially on Linux). GoG is good, although I set up Heroic to use with GoG. It’s close, but not as many games that I want, and Heroic+GoG is a little less polished than Steam. Humble Bundle and Itch are generally too niche, although so much of my Steam library has come from Humble.

GoG was my second digital store, I resisted Steam for so long, but over the years, Steam has become my #1 source for games. It’s just so easy, plus they are relatively consumer friendly. With the revamp of Steam Families, it’s just so so much easier to have everyone playing on Steam. Plus I have a Steam Deck.

I try and buy games on GoG, set them up with Heroic, and it works great, better than EA, Epic and other storefronts, but just not quite as slick as Steam.

One day St. Gabe will be martyred, and Steam will undergo the unavoidable descent into enshittification, as to will GoG. I do not pledge undying loyalty to any platform, but Steam and GoG have been awesome for so long.

Besides, other than Itch and Humble Bundle, who even comes close in being good to use?

Cribbing has a less negative connotation than that definition implies. Back in grade school in the eighties, you would crib your friends notes from a class you missed or something. Closer to sharing information. I guess you could crib from a friend for an essay, but the implication would be that although your essay might share the same information, you would not literally copy theirs word for word, that would be plagiarism and risk getting your friend in trouble.

In this context. I would read it as taking inspiration from, or in the style of. It’s not like you are trying to cheat Psygnosis out of sales by selling knock-off games. Rather you are creating a retro style logo in the style of a much beloved eighties icon.

I should’ve included Bandcamp links, it’s a good way to support the artists. Thanks!

Suffer - Boy Golden (English)

Never heard of Boy Golden, and only heard this song on the radio while driving a month or so ago. Thank goodness for our modern high tech radios, I noted the song info, and it is now in my regular offline backup MP3 collection.

DIminishing Returns - Dan Mangan (English)

From Dan Mangan’s Natural Light album, released in May 2025.

Dan Mangan is a longstanding favourite of mine, and I believe I nominated Call Me Up High last Lemmyvision. As such, here’s some bonus Dan Mangan tracks:

• Robots, live at Granville Island, probably his biggest song, performed live in his hometown, outdoors.
• Troubled Mind, one of my personal favourites.
• There’s A Tumour In the White House, no reason…

Edit: extra plug, Dan Mangan will be doing some BC shows in September, maybe I’ll see you there!

I have lots of shelf space, but it’s full. Plus shipping is painful, so similar boat.

The filenames aren’t too big a deal, since I use directories, sub-directories, and sub-sub-directories. Still, meaningful filenames aways help.

Hilarious! Appropriating this for redistribution!

The real NFTs were the AI models we saw in VR along the way.

Ironically Meta’s Llama model that ran well self-hosted. I’m sure Meta will get around to enshittifying it eventually.

New favourite website!

Problem is those same Americans are perfectly happy with deploying the National Guard to cities like Portland, DC, and Chicago.

Second installing Heroic or Junk Store. Get those Epic freebies, but games in GoG sales as well.

As you are new with the Deck though, using Heroic does involve using desktop mode. If you have Minecraft, you can set up Prism Launcher as well. There’s also EmuDeck for emulating older systems.

This is a bit more involved than just buying Deck verified games on the Steam store though. Get comfortable with it first. Watch some YouTube tutorials.

Those PlayStation supercomputers were wild. I don’t think it’s analogous to the various bits of Steam hardware coming out though, since Valve sells directly through Steam. You can’t order anything by the pallet.

The other thing to consider is that the PS3 was used for clustered computing primarily because of the Cell processor. I have no recollection of why the cell processor performed better on certain types of problems. PS3 wasn’t being used for Excel spreadsheets, it was used for niche academic use and that one Air Force supercomputer. The Steam hardware though uses pretty standard hardware, AMD processor and Radeon graphics card.

Considering the added friction of buying through Steam, i doubt it will have same draw.

Microsoft has been placing Bedrock before Java ever since they named it Java Edition, but Java has survived. I’m sure Bedrock is much more popular now, but I would be worried about Microsoft enshittifying Java further to push players to Bedrock, and any new microtransactions they figure out.

Okanagan Spirits makes “BRBN Bourbon-style whisky”. Bourbon (as you say) is a protected designation of origin product, meaning that it has to be made in the US. It’s not on the PDO list on Wikipedia though, so it appears it is a separate designation, same idea though.

Point being that you can boycott US products and still have Bourbon “style” whisky. Kind of like how some distilleries outside Scotland make Scotch style whisky, which is often very very good.

My Steam Deck is a second wave pre-order 256GB modern, and that is exactly my feeling. Between the internal 256GB and the excellent Steam Deck micro SD utilization, it was good enough that I never opened it up just to change the SSD. When I started to get some stick drift, I finally upgraded the SSD at the same time.

The 256GB is “good enough”, but 512GB is “enough” and 64GB is tight.