The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.

It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.

I had the same issue at first, but once I learned that the game actually expects you to spend some time in the training ring with Bernard to both level up Henry’s fighting and build your own skills, it got a lot better. The game will let you do one round of training and move on, but you should do quite a few to level up, and you should revisit the training ring periodically as you level more to learn new techniques.

I would say a little more repetitive than Horizon. The structure is very similar, but there are really only four or so types of enemies and they’re all human, so you lose a lot of the variety that comes with fighting the machines.

That said, I still enjoyed it. Even though it gets a bit stale in the mid to late game, the gameplay is solid, and the story is good enough that I didn’t mind too much.

So I’m an insurance agent who has also been through a house fire personally. Any of the options people have suggested here would be fantastic and far better than what most people have, which is nothing.

What I suggest to my clients is to make a video once or twice a year walking through your house, inside and out. Video makes it less likely to miss a small detail that turns out to be important later than pictures, but pictures are also helpful. Insurance aside, it’s kinda fun to look back and see how things have changed through the years. I like to do it around Christmas.

Ideally that would be in addition to a spreadsheet or something with receipts and serial numbers and individual photos of specific items, but that’s a lot of work and hardly anyone keeps up with it on a consistent and long-term basis.

Whatever you end up doing, it’s useless if the only copy is stolen, burned, or sprayed with a hose. This is one thing I keep with a major cloud provider with a local backup. At the very least, make sure you have an off-site backup that’s reasonably up to date.

That’s always my first thought when I see these.

PSA for those who don’t know, if a store finds refrigerated or frozen food outside where it’s supposed to be, they have to throw it out. They have no reliable way to tell whether it’s been out of the cooler for five minutes or five hours, so it’s a food safety concern. Stores are forced to throw out an absurd quantity of perfectly good food for this reason.

Even if you don’t care about food waste for its own sake, stores incorporate this type of loss into pricing and stocking decisions. It makes food more expensive and less available for everyone.

Tracking for my LE was like that all weekend, but it updated with details last night. It was actually picked up Friday for delivery tomorrow, so something might be wonky with UPS tracking.

If it matters, mine is headed to Pennsylvania. It was shipped from Illinois. Ordered at 11:57am PST according to the confirmation email. You ordered quite a bit before I did, so hopefully yours is on the way too.

I mean, the only reason I hardly ever use 10x zoom is that it looks like a shitty impressionist painting. If optical zoom made it look better, I would use it often.

Same. The “topical” episodes are rarely great, and they’re often among my least favorite. Who looks forward to Decision 3012, Proposition Infinity, or Attack of the Killer App coming up in their playlist? I generally skip those. There are some good ones, like A Clockwork Origin, but they seem to be the exception. Those episodes also tend not to age well (Attack of the Killer App being the worst offender here in my opinion), and, as you said, several of these themes have been old news for several years now. I’m definitely looking forward to the second half of the season more than the first.

I’m an insurance agent and I’m constantly frustrated by shit agents and shit companies giving all of us a bad name. Not that I always agree with the decisions from our claims people, but they generally try to be fair. I’m assuming this was long enough ago that it’s too late now, but for anybody else reading this who runs into a similar situation, you may have some recourse.

My first stop, if I have a local agent, would be their office. I would calmly and politely (agents don’t make coverage decisions so it isn’t their fault) explain the situation to them. They have a vested interest in keeping their customers happy and they may have access to claims supervisors who can make it right. They probably don’t want to lose you as a customer, especially over such a small claim.

If I’m still not happy, I would start pestering the adjuster to talk to their supervisor. Don’t be rude, but be persistent. Call every day. Leave messages and emails until you get the supervisor.

If they won’t give you a supervisor or the supervisor is no help, you can go above the claims department. It’ll be different for each company, but look for contact info for the “office of the president” or something like that. In my experience, those calls always get looked into by someone who has the power to really ruin your day as an agent or claims person. If you get a call from them, you had better either have a good explanation for why you did what you did or fix it in a hurry.

As a last resort, check with your state’s insurance department. You may be able to file a grievance.

I take claims practically every day and I can’t imagine this not being paid. I’m not sure why it would even be questioned, since it’s your first claim and it’s not huge. Could be that that particular adjuster is an idiot or on a power trip, but it’s also possible that the company is just shady.

If the neighbor is doing this intentionally, I’m pretty sure it violates some pretty serious wiretapping laws.

Adding to this for more context, in America, credit card fees on merchants are like 3-5% of the transaction. That’s why some places have started to pass them to consumers, especially in low-margin businesses like restaurants and movie theaters. If your margins are around 5% and Visa is taking 3.95%, that’s not super sustainable. Card network fees tend to be much lower in Europe. I’m not sure about elsewhere.