Chronologically, Metal Gear Solid 3 is the first game in the series. It shows Snake’s origin story, which leads into the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 games for the old Nintendo Entertainment System (long before the Metal Gear Solid series). So it’s a perfect place to start if you’re picking up the Metal Gear franchise for the first time.

Metal Gear Solid ∆ is just a modern remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, so it’s basically the same thing but better graphics and controls. I read once that due to the falling out with Hideo Kojima, Konami can’t legally re-release the original MGS3 game, so a remake from the ground up was their legal compromise.

Now Metal Gear Solid 4 is the only Metal Gear game that hasn’t been re-released on any other platform since it debuted on the PlayStation 3. But Konami plans to finally release it for PC and all modern consoles in August this year. Woo!

I had planned to review Metal Gear Solid ∆ for my Lemmy screenshot series, but I was having so much fun with the game, I forgot about preparing a review and just played my way through it. MGS3 is my favorite of the entire franchise! There’s something rewarding about actually trying to avoid detection in a game. It’s easy to go in guns blazing, but sneaking past guards and not alerting anyone? That takes skill and dedication.

I live in a forested countryside in the Northern Midwest. Leaving the windows open invites in bugs and other small critters. Even with screens on the windows, insects crawl through the cracks, and I’ve definitely had several field mice chew their way through screens. I also have rabbits and possums who tend to nest up against the foundation of my house, and if a lower window is left open for prolonged periods, I sometimes find babies nesting in the window frame.

If I open my windows, it’s for a limited time to get some fresh air moving through the house. I’ll turn on strategically placed fans in various rooms to encourage rapid airflow through the house so I can close the windows sooner.

I only open windows in the winter if I need to cool a room quickly. For instance, I’m renting my first floor to a friend and I live on the second floor. But I only have one HVAC unit and thermostat for the entire house. The first floor always stays a few degrees cooler than the second floor (heat rises), so I keep it a little extra hot upstairs to ensure I’m not freezing out my friend. But I’m always hot in general, so I’ll either have fans on me all winter, or I’ll occasionally shut myself in a bedroom and open the window for 15-20 minutes, just to lower my body temp a bit and help me tolerate the hot house.

There have been a few winter nights where my wife and I have left the bedroom window open to cool down our bedroom, while burying ourselves in thick blankets. We don’t sleep well if we’re sweaty and stuck to the bed. I usually get up a few hours later and close the window, so we don’t freeze overnight.

This is why I keep a tablet next to my bed. When I want to recline in bed but watch something, I can do it on a decent-sized screen instead of squinting at my phone.

But my couch also has two “zero-G” recliners on either end of it, which basically means they recline so far, my feet are slightly elevated over my head. So I don’t really need to go to bed to lie down and watch something.

It’s more about if I’m trying to settle down for the night or not. I have wireless headphones for my TV, so I can watch shows late into the night without disturbing anyone, but if I’m gonna fall asleep myself, I’d rather be in bed already so I can just set down my tablet and sleep without any more effort.

The Gary Jules cover of Mad World, for the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

Similarly, the original song by Tears for Fears sounds really upbeat and happy, but you’d never know it was a sad song unless you paid attention to the lyrics. I love both versions!

I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.

Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.

I don’t know if it’s a standard feature or a setting you can adjust, but my Steam chats seem to disappear after a certain amount of time. If I can’t keep a history of chat logs, then I can’t use Steam as a Discord replacement.

Also, I have one friend who constantly spams our chat groups with random links and videos, no context. I kind of like having channels so I can filter some of that stuff into categories and keep some of our chats from being drowned out.

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.

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.

Yeah it was my Reddit app too. But when I switched over to Lemmy, there were a lot of initial issues with the app, and the dev would vanish for months before responding to complaints.

He was very reactive when he came back, addressing every issue people pinged him on. But then he’d just be gone again and any further issues were stuck until he decided to return.

I remember that being a problem I had with his Lemmy app in the beginning. I specifically remember webm files didn’t load at all, until I pinged him right before he pushed an update and he added it to his patch. But then his patch broke a few other things and nobody could reach him for another 3 months.

I still can’t remember what the final straw was for me, but I had an ongoing issue that had no resolution until the dev decided to show his face again and I decided that was it. I needed an app with a more reactive developer.

When I was living in Japan for a few years, I ended up dating a Filipino lady for a while. But she had no concept of colloquialisms; she took everything I said 100% literally. I quickly discovered that the English language is riddled with colloquialisms and we use them constantly.

One evening, she had called me maybe 6 times over the course of a couple hours. On the next call, I picked up and said, “Damn, you’re killing me!”

She immediately broke down crying. She wailed, “Why would you ever say that?! I would never want to kill you!”

It took maybe a half hour to calm her down and get her to understand that this is an English expression and not meant to be taken literally. She finally agreed that I didn’t mean it, but she told me I’m not allowed to use that expression again, because it hurts her heart to hear me accuse her of wanting to kill me.

I actually switched away from Sync. I forget why, it’s been a while, but something about that app was bothering me, so I shopped around and ended up on Voyager.

The lack of profile pictures and custom username fonts is probably the only downside to Voyager. But I love everything else about it. And it’s free; I had to pay for Sync to get rid of ads and other junk in the app.

I turned 24 in 2008. I had been serving in the US military since I turned 18, and in 2008, I was stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, my second military assignment after 3 years at Misawa Air Base in Japan. I got orders in 2008 to relocate to Osan Air Base in South Korea for a year, with a follow-on assignment to Germany.

In January the very next year, I would marry my wife and she would join the US Air Force as well, leaving for her basic training literally 5 days after our wedding. Oh, and we got married over webcam, from opposite sides of the globe. I was stationed in South Korea and she was living in Nebraska at the time, so we mailed the marriage license back and forth to pre-sign it, then we did the ceremony over Skype from our respective bedrooms. We would meet up in person later that year in Germany for my fourth military assignment (and her first).

I’m turning 42 this year and have been retired for almost 4 years now, after serving for 20 years in the military. I’m fully retired, as the military kind of beat me up physically and mentally. My wife and I both qualified for the coveted “100% Permanent and Total Disability” through the VA, so we can afford to be retired at such a young age.

I used to see you everywhere. Then I got the “Voyager for Lemmy” app. Now I rarely ever notice you.

Voyager doesn’t do custom username fonts or icons, so everyone’s username is just plaintext. You blend in with every other user in my feed, and I rarely look at usernames, so I tend to miss users that I haven’t specifically tagged myself.

I’m pretty glad to not see my name popping up in any of these comments, ha.

Same here. At one point, I tried to be known for providing a certain type of content here, to help fill out a then-quiet community. But I’m kind of glad no one really recognizes me until they see a post by me. I’m here daily, but I mostly lurk, so I don’t particularly want to wake up to hundreds of comments in my inbox every day.

And yes, I’m still trying to provide that content despite my apparent hiatus. I’m just dealing with seasonal depression (as well as all the national news drama going on in my home state 20+ minutes from my home), so it’s hard to get motivated to be creative lately.

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.