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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • These days I’m mostly playing rhythm games and for those I much prefer the trackpads. Less finger strain, I can tap faster, less wear and tear for the buttons, less noise for my surroundings. And in other games with toolbars, even if they have console support, you usually have to sift through shoulder buttons to switch between your items. With the trackpads you can have a tiny macro pad right underneath your thumbs.

    As someone with tiny hands who usually uses an extra small xbox controller, I still find myself loving the deck controls more, simply because there is more stuff to configure to my liking. Yes, I have some trouble reaching the shoulder buttons when my thumbs are on the pads, but so far that’s been less of a problem in the games I play.





  • The screen protector you see on mine is the second one because I fumbled the first and it still has bubbles. So as someone who also struggles with screen protectors: it’s not the same.
    Yes, it has a lot more pieces, some of which are quite thin and fragile and you need more patience to follow the instructions properly and the whole process takes a lot longer, which may seem daunting.
    But the material is so, so much more forgiving than the average screen protector.

    First of all, it’s not transparent, so trapping some stuff that doesn’t have much height like fine dust and fingerprints is not an issue, since you can’t see it.
    This means that you don’t have to drop everything into place perfectly on the first try. Because a small amount of fingerprints is not an issue, you can fumble around with it a lot more. Because fine dust is not an issue, you can also take your time doing it.
    Secondly, even if you do trap larger pieces of dust, unlike rigid screen protectors that create a huge penny-sized bubble dome around it, skins are meant to wrap tightly around complex shapes, so in my case I just have a teenie tiny bump exactly the size of the dust + skin thickness, which is barely noticeable.
    The glue on my skin also seems different and more forgiving to ripping and reapplying. In particular, you can reposition things a lot of times before pressing down to fixate it for good. So you can e.g. fixate one side, then lightly drape the skin across to match the cutouts on the other side, then fixate that side, and then smooth out the middle parts.
    Which takes us to bubbles. Whenever the flat skin doesn’t fit the 3D shape 100%, you’ll get a lot of wrinkles and bubbles and that is totally fine. With the hairdryer, you can melt the material into place and most of my bubbles disappeared completely. The few that didn’t turned into tiny creases at the ends. I think this is the only imperfection to expect. It’s really hard not to get any creases and you don’t get more tries here because you need to press down to smooth out the bubbles, so you can’t reapply.
    But that’s it. Everything else can be repositioned until it’s perfect, so the only thing it really takes is patience.











  • You may want to check out isthereanydeal.com to build your wishlist. It allows you to set the price thresholds at which you want to be notified and also supports other fully-legitimate (as in devs actively collaborate with them and get paid) stores than just Steam. Many of which sell Steam keys which are codes you can redeem in Steam to activate the game there.
    You have all the benefits of Steam games such as no to little extra fiddling to play games on Linux, library and cloud save sync, Steam community and workshop content, playtime tracking etc.
    The only real downside is that you’re not covered by Steam’s super lenient refund policy, which is actually quite good to have, since not all games run perfectly on Deck yet. If you buy from other stores, it’s usually hard to refund games that you’ve already redeemed. But if you’re fairly confident that it will run and you won’t refund it, you can sometimes find really good sales “off-season” this way.
    Hope that helps :)



  • Before getting the Deck, I pretty much gave up on gaming because I started working fulltime remotely and I didn’t want to just continue sitting on the same desk after work and continue gaming there. It’s bad for my physical and mental health.

    Since getting my OLED end of November, I’ve been playing an average of 3h per day despite fulltime work and spending holidays with family and friends… oops :D I think it will definitely go down once the honeymoon phase is over, but its impact is already made. Through it I’ve found a new way to fit an old hobby back into my life.
    I’m also using it to watch stuff on TV in docked mode. The portable format is just perfect for it.