I purchased the Powkiddy RGB10Max back in 2021. I think it was something like $100 or $150 and came with a 128GB microsd card. That included and operating system plus tens of thousands of games.

Based on some recommendations online, I made my own SD card using RetroOz as the operating system instead. It is better, but i’m not sure if was a big enough improvement that it was worth the effort.

People also recommended that I find my own Roms elsewhere, but that really wasn’t necessary. Sure, some of them are Romhacks (modified versions of existing games that are obviously wrong, like Sonic64). But for thr most part they are just legitimate games for these old systems that you could have bought cartridges for in a store back in the 80’s and 90’s. The problem is the same problem we face today on tbe Switch eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam: a lot of this is cheap junk.

Mine came with, as far as I can tell, the complete North American libraries for the Atari 2600, Master System, Genesis, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and N64. It also came with smaller selections of games for PSP, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameGear and Nintendo DS. Plus a smattering of arcade games, and games for other systems i’m less familiar with (Intellivision, Colecovision, TurboGrafx, Wonderswan, SG-1000, PC-9800, MXS, etc).

By upgrading tk a 256gb card I was also able to add my own PS1 collection that I ripped from discs. I pirated a full collection of the Nintendo DS library, plus more games for Dreamcast, PSP, and Saturn. I added Phillips CDi and Atari Jaguar games too. I also used a second SD card to Ru LineageOS, a version of Android, which I used for Steam Link. This allowed me to stream from my desktop for pretty much any Steam game, plus non-steam games like emulators for PS2, PS3, WiiU, Switch, etc.

The whole experience was… Okay. The analog sticks were tiny. It only has 1 speaker. The shoulder buttons sucked. The screen was only 480p. Sleep mode didn’t really work, and it takes like 4 minutes to turn the system on. Eventually the Wi-Fi and one of thr USB ports stopped working.

I am sure things have improved since then. I got a Steam Deck and have barely touched my RGB10 since. I don’t regret the purchase though.

It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal

I think this has a lot to do with it. A lot of these platforms have defaukts or even jusy tendencies baked into the development process. It takes an experienced developer to dive in the “feel”.

For making the first Spyro game, Insomniac hired a NASA engineer who had experiencing making flight control systems in order to dial in the feel of controlling Spyro. That’s the kind of thing that costs a lot of money, but made the game one of the most successful 3D platformers of all time.

Another thing to look at is assets. Models, textures, fonts, UI design, sound design. It’s easy to go cheap here: free asset libraries or cheap ones available for purchase. Some of these assets might be fine on their own, but when combined together they’re just…slightly… Off. Because they weren’t designed to be cohesive in a space together. Making one model that looks good takes talent and time. Making thousands of models that look good together takes planning, coordination, and direction.

And these are a lot of things that are easy for a small team to overlook, or at least de-prioritize. Smaller teams are usually driven by game designers who have specific designs in mind. They want to tweak numbers or implement systems. They design the game first, and then slap on whatever art assets they can to make it appealing enough to their audience.

I think my special interest used to be the Steelers the gridiron football team.

The NFL is problematic in a lot of ways, and I overlooked those for a long time. I was really excited when they finally got rid of Roethlisberger, to finally have a QB with a clean off-field slate.

A couple of years of mediocrity. Then they went and signed an ancient Aaron Rodgers, famous for lying about being vaccinated during the 2020 season. So I finally had enough and figured I would give up. This was in 2024, before I really gave much thought to autism. I figured I would move on to another trivial and irrational obsession easily. 2 years later and I’m still looking.

I feel so dumb. I have gotten worse at everything. I used to creep people out with how good my memory was, but now I can barely remember what the video essay I just watched was about. But I can still list all of the Steelers draft picks fro. 2024 back to… I don’t even want to think about it. I miss the stats. The ritual involved I watching the game. Interaction with the fanbase on the internet. Listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos.

Finally getting around to watching Frieren. So far it’s phenomenal, and depending on how it goes it could end up being one of my favorite anime ever.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who gets a diagnosis and suddenly views the whole world through the lens of autistic vs non autistic. There’s plenty of fictional characters who are just a bit socially awkward, dense, cold, eccentric, aloof, hyperfocused, whatever you want to call it, and that does not mean they are supposed to portray autism. But watching Frieren so much of her character just… Hits.

Yesterday was so long.

Went to a bar. I hate bars, but this one was having a bunch of local bands play as part of a fundraiser to restore and re-open an old closed bowling alley attached to it. Some friends of my polycule were involved and it’s in walking distance of my house, so I put my Loops in and dealt with that. It was billed as a punk show, which my bf and gf like but i’m not as in to. But half the bands were metal, which is more my speed.

After that we had already previously made plans to go out to a club for someone’s birthday. It was “hot girl summer” themed. It was not as bad as I expected, just late. And I absolutely do not understand the appeal of clubs. I guess it’s what single people do to get laid? I would have much rather spent one of my previous days off at home doing other things, but oh well. Seeing bands at the bar was cool- love music is one of the few redeeming aspects of bars for me.

I wore my knee brace all day and tried to sit as much as I could, but it is still hard to walk today. I only got maybe 6 hours of sleep. Made a big breakfast of sunny-side-up eggs on toast, plus Aldi’s frozen hash browns in the air fryer. Hoping to spend today mostly on the couch.

I thought i waa doing so well.

Every morning I put my energy level as a percentage in an app, along with some other stuff I track. I recently had a few days around 80-85%, the highest since I started tracking. I waa feeling like I had finally started to recover from autistic burnout.

Last night… Everything was fine. Everyone had a great time except for me, because it wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. And now today i’m exhausted. I can feel specific parts of my brain that are tired, like a sore muscle. I logged 20% in the app.

It was supposed to be a chill evening. A Tuesday. My wife and I partied pretty hard last Friday and Saturday, and we have plans with our bf and gf to party hard this Saturday too. This was the first time all summer that the stars finally aligned to our bf and gf coming over our house where I am much more comfortable. They just took a trip last weekend so I wanted to hear their stories from it. It somehow transformed from a chill evening to a party. My wife kept on doing more and more shots and she put on some dark trap/phonk music. The neighbors came over and joined in, and my wife instructed the retired old lady next door in how to use a bong. My wife got drunk and high.

I don’t mind partying, but I cannot do this every day. I can’t handle every time we hang out as a polycule transforming into a “party”. My neighbors are cool and I want to be a good neighbor. My wife wants to be friendly, and our boyfriend also loves people and interaction and went out of his way to make them feel welcome. But the backyard is my safe space. My place of solitude and peace. I’m trying really hard to learn to relax, unmask, and be more natural around my bf and gf but it’s hard to do that when I can’t even chill in my backyard without suddenly finding myself hosting a party.

I probably should have tapped out. Gone to the bedroom and laid down in the dark for a bit. But I really wanted to hang out. I wanted to catch up with the bf and gf. We have a pretty busy week scheduled with activities and novelty. This was a very rare opportunity for me to spend time with them in an environment where i’m comfortable and not actively managing overstimulation, but I feel like it got ruined.

I drive. I was super excited to. When I was 14 I started mentally preparing. I would pay attention to street names and intersections and directions, which lanes did which. I spent time on an early version of Google Maps practicing navigation- how to get from my house to my friend’s house, the school, my grandparents, the mall, etc. I would walk or ride my bike and try to purposefully explore and learn the entire southern half of my city and suburbs. I got a copy of the state-issued driver’s manual and read it multiple times. I bought a cheap MadCatz Mini racing wheel + pedals for the PS1/2 and practiced using it in tons of games- Grand Theft Auto, Mercenaries, NASCAR Thunder, Gran Turismo, etc. I went and took the test to get my Learner’s Permit the very first day I could. I was a year younger than most of my friends, but still one of the first to get a license.

I drove a lot until I was almost 30, when the pandemic hit. Then I started working from home. I had recently got a relatively new xar in 2018, but my wife’s car waa old, so she started using mybcse mostly. One day I went to start her car and found an electrical issue. After a bunch of investigating… We went down to 1 car, and her old car is still sitting in our garage, waiting to be traded in whenever we do get around to buying our next car.

Furthermore, my retina in my dominant eye detached itself. I had surgery to re-attach it. It was successful, but my vision in that eye is only about half of what it once was, and my brain swapped to my other eye. I can drive, both legally and safely, but I do sometimes struggle to read street names or exit signs. So nowadays I mostly just drive the same familiar local streets that I know.

Also my wife gets carsick as a passenger, so even before all that she would often insist on driving.

I tend to drink less than most people so i’m occasionally DD.

Oh yes- mostly guitar, but I’ve played drums, keyboard, and bass in bands too. I’ve been in choir and the lead singer of bands. I’ve been able to pick up and play things like mandolin, banjo, cello, and even clarinet on occasion.

In bands i’m usually known as “the resource”. The guy who knows how to play that part or what part comes. I’ve been in the awkward position of reminding people what they themselves wrote.

When I first started learning guitar, any time I wasn’t playing I was doing “mental reps”, imagining the process and result of actually playing. I would practice with an unplugged electric guitar (for noise and convenience reasons) and imagine what it would sound like with distortion or effects.

When I was a drummer in a band, there was a kit in our practice space but I have never had a kit of my own, so I was 100% reliant on mental reps for my individual work. Still worked out pretty well.

I remember back in my senior year of high school, 8th period English class, getting bored one day and deciding to attempt to write a song right there. No instrument, no computer, not even able to hum out loud. I came up with a fun riff with some weird time signature stuff going on, fleshed it out into a song, and kept it in my mind on the bus ride home. Then I was able.to grab a guitar and figure out programming a MIDI version of all of it. Every now and then if I find i’m stuck writing things on guitar or piano I try to do that just to get a spark.

TIL an interesting word for how I experience music!

My 602 is my work mouse too. Several years ago I figured I would buy a backup, but it was already discontinued. So I looked into what seems to be Logitech’s intended replacement for it, the G604.

I went to a BestBuy to get a hand on it IRL and it sucked. Everything about it felt cheap. The materials, the button response, everything. RIP.

I’ve had to 3D print a new batter cover for my 602, but other than that it is still holding on for now.

They don’t look similar to me, but I’ll upvote for Eddie anyways

Went to dinner with my in-laws and polycule last night.

I like my in-laws, but being part of a party of 6 at a restaurant in a busy, dense part of town is stressful. The polycule has been really weird and awkward for the past couple of months. I had a rough day of work with a lot of meetings. The humidity was far too high.

My wife and I got home and she wanted to play some TemTem. I tried really hard. Our portable air conditioner was really loud next to me. She had her game on the big screen and the audio playing, while I was on my Deck with no sound. She was also talking to me about the game. 2 screens + 3 audio sources. My nose was mysteriously runny (maybe from the polluted air of going to a dense area of town for dinner?). My toe hurt from cutting the nail too short a couple of days ago. It was all too much for me to handle. As soon as we got to a heal point I stopped playing and crawled into bed.

Didn’t sleep well either. Too hot and too cold at various points, too humid throughout the whole night. Congested. Joints aching from the storm system that’s about to hit us for thr next week or so.

I’m running on E today. Gonna fight my way through work. I can’t really nap, but maybe I’ll lay in the dark and try to hide fron stimulation for a couple hours after work. Hopefully that’s enough to get me through playing Elden Ring with my bf this evening.

Up until my mid-30’s, I generally knew myself pretty well. My father had bi-polar which led to my parents getting divorced when I was young, and that led to me spending a lot of time on my own just thinking about thinking.

I could see the systems and operate within them. High school and college were easy. Working in food service and retail and eventually an office were all easy. Being with my wife was easy.

Then we formed a polycule with another couple, with severe ADHD. Everything got harder. Work, marriage, running a household. My memory tanked, my mind slowed to a crawl. I stopped smoking weed but it didn’t help. My new GF, in pursuing ADHD medication, got diagnosed as AuDHD and the 3 of them encouraged me to get diagnosed too.

I finally did and I was disappointed how little it did for me. A lot of it really was as simple as “do you like going out and partying or staying home and chilling?”, and I would answer “chilling”, and that… Means I’m autistic.

So what did I really get out of it? Well for one I’m more comfortable using the word. The biggest upshot of which is that I feel more comfortable interacting with the Lemmy autism communities.

The cognitive assessment was nice. I scored the highest percentiles in Verbal Comprehension and Working Memory, with terribke processing speed. After nearly a year of feeling like my brain was melting and I waa getting terrible at everything, it was nice to have some pretty solid evidence I still have my mind. I scored very low for Processing Speed, and I think trying to keep up with two hyperactive partners may be the source of my issues.

I started reading some books recommended by the psychologist, and so far they have not really resonated with me. Autism is so broad that I think it needs to, and will be, further broken down into subcategories over time. Reading about the experiences of others always has a mix of “woe that’s just like me” and “wow that’s nothing like me”.

The diagnosis drove me to talk to my older sister, who was hospitalized several times before eventually getting diagnosed a few years ago. Talking to her reminded me of how my brain is supposed to work and helped me a lot. I should talk to her more often. She gave me a lot of good advice, but the most profound thing she said was that going out and socializing is something that was actively bad for her mental health, and that she stopped doing it. I had been treating it as a matter of taste. I had been going out tk bars and restaurants and festivals and bowling alleys and all sorts of other places with the polycule. The ADHD seeks novelty and stimulation, so I thought I was giving reasonable compromise to do things I don’t like in order to spend time with them. I thought I could just try to deal with it and focus on the positives, but it was actually harmful to my mind and functioning.

There have been negatives too. My wife has said this diagnosis has been a huge revelation for her, but… We just celebrated our 15 year anniversary. We had excellent communication for 13 years before we entered a polycule (that was why were confident doing it in the first place). I kind of feel like she got lost in the sauce of the shiny me relationships and forgot about our marriage, and is blaming it on me being autistic. We astarted couple’s therapy to work on things and its going well.

Another negative is… My boyfriend sent me a link to a BS article about a medicine to “reverse autistic symptoms” in mice. And like… I understand he means well. He’s seen his wife start Ritalin and has gotten a tremendous increase in functionality from it. But… I like who I am, and I’m incredibly functional whenever I’m not trying to deal with a bunch of frivolous and shallow distractions.

The study seems to be convinced that inducing inflamation in a pregnant mother can less to brain inflamation in the offspring. The offspring also, supposedly, have “mid brain overgrowth… Reduced reciprocal social interactions… Increased repetitive behaviors”.

The whole concept of animal autism is a bit sus. Heck, even diagnosing humans seems like more of a vibe than actual medical science at this point.

Well, there’s the saying that “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person”.

I looked around on the internet this morning to see other perspectives. On BlueSky I saw one guy reacting to the article with positivity, saying he would love to be able to take a pill to “turn off” his autism for a few hours. There is a strong argument to be made that I have personally used alcohol and marijuana in similar ways in the past. Since I got diagnosed, I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of using weed for social situations purposefully.

I like who I am. I think a lot of people, both autistic and allistic, are too obsessed with cramming every moment of their lives with social activity. I have known people who openly admit that they seek the company of others because they actively fear being alone with their own thoughts. We are surrounded by billions, maybe trillions of dollars of advertising budgets and hostile algorithms that are trying to push people towards social interaction for profit. Bars, restaurants, events, social media, etc. I wonder how many people ACTUALLY like these things versus how many people are being convinced that they should like these things. Or how many people just have a bad relationship with themselves and are looking for an escape.

I am worried that the existence of such a medication could make it harder to establish boundaries. Choosing not to take it could be seen by others as a choice to be antisocial.

I was already in a bad mood this morning. Then my bf sent me an article about some study in mice that claims a new drug can “reverse autism-like symptoms”.

I’ve looked into the article and corresponding video segment, and everything about it is shady. The news company itself, the anchor (formerly of Fox news) interviewing current the current HHS National Autism Coordinator, who directly reports to a guy who spreads a TON of disinformation about autism in the US. The drug itself, which over the past few years has been touted by influencers as a miracle cure for aging and Alzheimer’s and long covid and more. The study itself, which was partially funded by the absolute worst autism-related org (see Rule 8).

I know he means well and is trying to be helpful. He loves going out to chaotic and social things and wants me to be able to join him and the rest of the polycule. But that’s also just… Not me.

When I first looked at the Steam Deck, I thought for sure the track pads would be terrible. I expected them to be uncomfortable and clunky and horrible to use for any extended period of time, only useful for getting through some launchers on or doing some quick configuration. I expected to use an external mouse or the touch screen for any serious mousing.

I eventually bought it and was completely wrong. The first game I played fully on the Deck was a tower defense game called Dinosaurs Go Home! (I had gotten it in a Humble Bundle). It was pretty much entirely played using the right track pad, and it was fantastic. Sometimes for FPS’s I’ll even use the right stick as a coarse control and the right track pad as a fine control. When I play emulators, the track pads are radial menus to control save states and emulation speed.

All this to say- I know this looks ridiculous, but I have learned to not make such assumptions. This could totally be useful for a lot of applications. Heck, sometimes at work it gets really annoying to keep moving my right hand between my mouse and the keyboard, and this would eliminate that.

Same. I believe I’ve suffered from autistic burnout for roughly the last year. I was pushing myself to be social, for my wife and other reasons. That led to me finally getting diagnosed.

Almost all of the autism resources I have found say something along the lines of “Autistic people actually love to be social with other people! It’s just difficult because kfnthr double-empathy problem. Try making friends with autistic people”. The psychologist, therapist, books, articles, everything. It all felt… Weird.

Then I talked to my older sister who was diagnosed almost a decade ago. She realized a while ago that socialization is just bad for her, so she stopped doing it and has been much happier and healthier ever since.

Congrats on D&D! I miss it a lot! No one wants to DM anymore. And yes, that includes me lol…

I’m also still adapting to discussing other hardward in a community called steamdeck. I understand why, just still adjusting personally