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I miss having hobbies. Any side project I embark upon has an immediate cost to my marriage. As in my partner gets mad at me because I should be helping deal wit

I miss having hobbies. Any side project I embark upon has an immediate cost to my marriage. As in my partner gets mad at me because I should be helping deal with the little ones.

boomerango 4y ago
Home improvement catch 22 - damned if the drywall goes unpatched, damned if I spend an hour driving to the hardware store and fixing it, away from the kids.
- caleblloyd 4y ago
  I never thought we would fight over who gets to mow the lawn. An hour of peace during the daytime!
  - vidanay 4y ago
    Ha! I have a rather large property, and I thoroughly enjoy putting on my headphones and hopping on the riding mower for three hours on a Saturday afternoon.
sgtnoodle 4y ago
I bought a steam deck. It's not a joke that I can tweak settings on it all day, but within 10 seconds of launching a game I want to play, my wife shouts my name, the baby starts crying, or the 4 year old trips and falls. At least my favorite technical achievement of the deck is its reliable suspend button.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Actually, Steam Deck is a real life-saver. The ability to play games 3 minutes at a time, anywhere, cannot be overstated (or explained to those living a more predictable, free life :). And games like e.g. "Steamworld Dig 2" or "Jack Moves" can similarly be picked up without needing 15 minutes to "get into the groove" or "drive to next mission" etc. (I've also enjoyed Outer Wilds more on SteamDeck than any other device, for whatever reason; similarly, I can't make myself play Cyberpunk 2077 on 8" screen with fan redlining, even though apparently many do!:)
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    I just finished playing completely through L.A. Noire for the first time. It was great on the deck. My wife broke her leg and our existence has been more miserable than typical. To keep my sanity this weekend, I've been working on getting a reliable stream setup from my desktop. One day I'll start playing through Red Dead Redemption 2. Steam Remote Play works fine when the deck is the server, but it seems rather buggy as the client. "Hardware decoding" freezes up, and "software decoding" has messed up color on the preview release. Software decoding works on stable, but even then it's choppy and has lots of artifacts. Yesterday I set up sunshine on my desktop, and today I got moonlight set up on the deck. Out of the box it seems to work very well. It looks better than Remote Play, and it seems to be better latency too. The only problem I've encountered is an inability to unlock my screen from the steam deck over moonlight; I type in the password, but my desktop rejects it for some reason, then after a few tries locks me out for 10 minutes. Thanks Arch Linux! Since I'm incoherently rambling, I also tried to launch linux-native Tomb Raider yesterday, as I have successfully for several years. It didn't work because that would bring me too much joy. I switched to proton and it worked, but didn't have my progress saved. Okay, I am a software engineer with multiple computer science degrees. Missing libssl.so.1.0.0. An hour later, 10 minutes of compiling half a dozen random libraries, and a 200 character LD_LIBRARY_PATH override spanning four directories, it works again. How did it ever work?! According to the internet this problem happened to everyone else in 2017. Also a joke that's not a joke, windows has become linux's most stable ABI.

I miss having hobbies. Any side project I embark upon has an immediate cost to my marriage. As in my partner gets mad at me because I should be helping deal with the little ones.

boomerango 4y ago

Home improvement catch 22 - damned if the drywall goes unpatched, damned if I spend an hour driving to the hardware store and fixing it, away from the kids.

caleblloyd 4y ago
I never thought we would fight over who gets to mow the lawn. An hour of peace during the daytime!
- vidanay 4y ago
  Ha! I have a rather large property, and I thoroughly enjoy putting on my headphones and hopping on the riding mower for three hours on a Saturday afternoon.

sgtnoodle 4y ago

I bought a steam deck. It's not a joke that I can tweak settings on it all day, but within 10 seconds of launching a game I want to play, my wife shouts my name, the baby starts crying, or the 4 year old trips and falls. At least my favorite technical achievement of the deck is its reliable suspend button.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
Actually, Steam Deck is a real life-saver. The ability to play games 3 minutes at a time, anywhere, cannot be overstated (or explained to those living a more predictable, free life :). And games like e.g. "Steamworld Dig 2" or "Jack Moves" can similarly be picked up without needing 15 minutes to "get into the groove" or "drive to next mission" etc. (I've also enjoyed Outer Wilds more on SteamDeck than any other device, for whatever reason; similarly, I can't make myself play Cyberpunk 2077 on 8" screen with fan redlining, even though apparently many do!:)
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  I just finished playing completely through L.A. Noire for the first time. It was great on the deck. My wife broke her leg and our existence has been more miserable than typical. To keep my sanity this weekend, I've been working on getting a reliable stream setup from my desktop. One day I'll start playing through Red Dead Redemption 2. Steam Remote Play works fine when the deck is the server, but it seems rather buggy as the client. "Hardware decoding" freezes up, and "software decoding" has messed up color on the preview release. Software decoding works on stable, but even then it's choppy and has lots of artifacts. Yesterday I set up sunshine on my desktop, and today I got moonlight set up on the deck. Out of the box it seems to work very well. It looks better than Remote Play, and it seems to be better latency too. The only problem I've encountered is an inability to unlock my screen from the steam deck over moonlight; I type in the password, but my desktop rejects it for some reason, then after a few tries locks me out for 10 minutes. Thanks Arch Linux! Since I'm incoherently rambling, I also tried to launch linux-native Tomb Raider yesterday, as I have successfully for several years. It didn't work because that would bring me too much joy. I switched to proton and it worked, but didn't have my progress saved. Okay, I am a software engineer with multiple computer science degrees. Missing libssl.so.1.0.0. An hour later, 10 minutes of compiling half a dozen random libraries, and a 200 character LD_LIBRARY_PATH override spanning four directories, it works again. How did it ever work?! According to the internet this problem happened to everyone else in 2017. Also a joke that's not a joke, windows has become linux's most stable ABI.