So I kind of impulsively bought a Steam Deck OLED this weekend, I hadn’t really done much research and I haven’t really played any games in about 15 years.
Now I have to wait for it to be delivered and, I’m worried this is something I’ll use a few times and forget about it.
What’s something you impulsively bought and fell in love with?
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An electric keyboard (Casio Privia s1100). I played the trumpet in high school and wanted to get back to it but trumpets agent exactly the kind of thing you can practice regularly when living in an apartment. One weekend I decided I was just going to switch instruments and picked up a keyboard I could play with headphones on. Its been almost two years now and I love it.
Right as Covid quarantimes hit, I found a deal on an old decommissioned Bird electric scooter for like $250. Snapped it up immediately. I have gotten SO MUCH use out of that thing just running out to grab takeout to save on delivery fees. I’ll also use it to commute to work nowadays when I’m too lazy to walk (I am lucky enough to live only a couple miles from my office) and don’t feel like biking. It’s probably paid for itself several times over at this point.
Steam deck.
Hi-Point .45 carbine, total impulse buy but it scratched several itches.
For those that don’t know, Hi-Points are stupid cheap and stupid looking guns. But everyone says they work great, so I was Hi-curious, if you will. The design makes me think they took a gang of skilled engineers, showed them pictures of guns, and said, “Make one.” Everything about the assembly is bizarre, no idea how to take it apart.
Stumbled on this thing for $300. Love me some .45, wanted a PCC (short rifle that shoots pistol rounds) and it’s white, looks like a Stormtrooper rifle! True to their rep, it won’t misfire, even with the cheapest remanufactured ammo. Taking it out today, it’s a hoot. God help me if it ever needs cleaned.
I bought their 9 mil a while back and when I got it I took it out to the range to test fire it. Some decent Winchester ammo, fired through the first clip fine.
Loaded up the second clip fired five shots, misfire, turned the gun to the side about 30° and downward with my finger off the trigger and the gun clicked and fired at the ground.
That was the scariest shit. If I hadn’t had the small modicum of trigger and pointing discipline that I have I could have shot someone without pulling the trigger.
I never fired that gun again, and I am now radically against hipoint weaponry
the steam deck is the first pc gaming console. Steam deck, 3ds, and original PSP slim were my 3 big impulse buys that went well. The PSP only because it rules when you install homebrew on it.
I remember a ton of amazing LUA-scripted games running on it after that PNG-based jailbreak. There was these crazy Smash Bros and Dance Dance Revolution clones running on my PSP in 2005 and it blew my mind haha
7 watt blue laser I bought for shits and giggles. Didn’t realize just how stupid powerful that is. Now I feel like I have a highly effective long range weapon in a country that bans almost all kinds of weapons. It won’t blast through skin but I guarantee if someone points it at you and keeps it on you’re going to run, and FAST.
If I ever get bothered by illegal drones, I can also use it to destroy the camera from far away. One fraction of a second and any optical sensor is 100% toast.
One concern I have with those things is people casually using them outside. I mean, I’m not a big fan of heavy regulation in general, and I also think that lasers are cool devices, but even if someone’s got eye protection – which I would be using if messing around with something at that kind of power – and is not trying to aim at someone, it’s damned easy to flash that across someone else’s eyes, and that’s way outside of the range where your blink reflex is fast enough to avoid permanent eye damage.
I mean, most people won’t take a firearm and go blasting the thing randomly in a city or something. They register that they can mess up whoever the thing is being aimed at. But there are people who will be dicking around with seriously souped up lasers without regard for who might be downrange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety
A Class 2 laser is considered to be safe because the blink reflex (glare aversion response to bright lights) will limit the exposure to no more than 0.25 seconds. It only applies to visible-light lasers (400–700 nm). Class 2 lasers are limited to 1 mW continuous wave, or more if the emission time is less than 0.25 seconds or if the light is not spatially coherent. Intentional suppression of the blink reflex could lead to eye injury. Some laser pointers and measuring instruments are class 2.
Like, that’s 1 mW that’s listed as the max for safe exposure before the blink reflex is no longer able to protect a human eye against permanent damage. You’re talking about a 7,000 mW laser, almost five orders of magnitude up the scale.
And that’s not even considering the fact that there are various reflective surfaces that can be hit, can be riccocheting the thing all over.
Like, at that kind of power, if a laser isn’t in some kind of confined case or something, that’s something where I’d want someone using it a room with eye protection on everyone in the room, only adults present (so some kid doesn’t yank off their eye protection or something), an access-restricted door, and a warning sign on that door telling people that high-power lasers may be in use.
Here’s a laser engraver that uses less than half of the power of that laser:
https://www.amazon.com/Bisofice-Engraving-Accuracy-Household-Woodwork/dp/B0BVVRFN5L/
You’re absolutely right. I don’t play around with that thing lightly - it actually requires a physical key to unlock before use. I also don’t intend to mess with wildlife or whatever, or risk any kind of fires. It’ll be used indoors, in a shielded basement, while wearing the appropriate safety gear.
Many years ago, some guy was trying to impress my girlfriend with his super powerful laser pointer by shining it on a building a few miles away. He shoved it in his pocket very fast when she told him he was shining it at a hospital.
An unkind part of me was pleased when less than 30 seconds later it was revealed that he forgot to do whatever he needed to do to prevent it from turning on accidentally, and bumped it, burning his pocket/pants slightly, and getting soot inside the lens.
Meta Quest 3. I had been saving for a Valve Index but I was getting impatient. Turns out it was an amazing buy and (for me personally) having an untethered headset was more important than I realized. My computer room is small but my living room has plenty of space. Plus the Steam Link app works so well nowadays I can still play Steam VR games but wirelessly anywhere in my house. Pretty awesome deal for something that costed half the price.
Honestly, steam deck lol
It’s an odd form factor that people don’t really have much experience with, hence they don’t really know how useful it’ll be to them. To be fair to myself, I had been holding back on purchasing one until maybe a year after the initial launch, so I think I would personally describe my experience as a leap of faith.
In any case, it turns out to be a great little thing. There’s a lot of games in my backlog that don’t feel “desktop-y,” and therefore I’ve never played them, if that makes sense. But with a handheld form factor, now I have more motivation to go through those games. Emulation on the steam deck has also been great, for a similar reason. And sometimes I just want to be in bed than on my desktop. Or sometimes I’m just on the bus or waiting for something.
I think SteamOS also taught me how usable Linux was, and that’s been pretty instrumental in getting me to minimize my Windows dependence
This makes me feel so much better! Its kind of one of my thoughts, playing the steam deck in bed, those evenings where you don’t really want to do much but also aren’t fully ready to go to sleep!
You’ve definitely given me some reassurance 🙂
Steam Deck is definitely one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. And I don’t play a ton of games these days.
My wife and I have our own separate ones. It’s such a blast and we also got gog/itch working on them.
Emudeck is fun too.
Are you using a controller friendly front end for gog/itch? I haven’t found anything that’s comfortable for using them
My collection is small enough that I just hook into steam. You can add non steam executables so then you can use your controller. You can even set up mappings. If you find a more all in one setup let me know.
Heroic launcher supports gog
Same, it’s the holy grail of gaming, such a great device that keeps getting better.
A gaming computer that was the most expensive one they had. Beyond a faulty wi-fi adapter, it’s held up incredibly well and I can run pretty much anything on maximum settings and achieve a frame rate of 60 fps or more, even on RPCS3, which is a PS3 emulator that is known for being rather slow on most systems.
My house lol.
TLDR: Unfortunate life event caused me to have to accelerate my house shopping by 2-3 years. Bought right before COVID hit and everything could not have turned out better (and I’d have been worse-off buying a house in 2022 than I was when I had to impulse buy on in 2019)
right before COVID hit
Isn’t that a year before house prices and mortgage rates dropped to all time lows?
Yeah. But it was hard to actually house shop due to COVID restrictions, precautions, and such. I did refinance my mortgage in late 2020 (less than a year into it), though, since rates had dropped so much.
Oh yeah, forgot about refinancing. So you were still able to take full advantage of that.
For me it was an extremely lucky circumstance that my company’s stock hit an all time high at the same time that mortgages hit an all time low (well, not entirely luck, both events were due to covid). I would have never been able to buy a house in my area otherwise.
I’m wearing a mask while house shopping right now. Idk how that’s any harder.
Not sure what exactly you’re saying, many places were not allowing real estate agencies to do showings of houses during COVID, it wasn’t about wearing a mask or not you literally could not get an appointment to look at the house.
On the flip side I sold my house in December of 2019. Then decided to rent for a year to figure out where to buy next. Didn’t pay close enough attention to the market before it was too late. I still stay up at night sometimes thinking of how bad that went.
Don’t beat yourself up over it. You can’t time the market.
I have power tools. I had like 7 batteries for them. I saw that they offered a USB adapter so I could charge my cell phones. $20. I quickly stopped using wall warts and standard battery packs. 5 amp hours, hot swappable, always a battery in the charger so I could never run out of power. Power tool batteries are built to higher specs than typical cell phone chargers so they didn’t die after 10 chargers. The batteries are rugged so a drop doesn’t destroy them.
My tools were stolen. I replaced all my Makita with Harbor Freight Hercules brand, their premium brand. Half the cost of Makita and actually better designed in a lot of areas. I quickly bought the USB adapter because I could never live without it again.
If you have power tools and always use them, I’m a handyman, then a USB adapter is a must.
Neir: Automata and Nier: Replicant were on a steam sale recently and I picked them up.
Automata had been on my radar for a while and I assumed it was just one of those annoyingly difficult souls-likes throw the controller at the wall type games that also (feat.) a Waifu—color me surprised with how in-depth and bizarre the world building and game design was.
Replicant had its issues but the remake was equally fantastic.
Both were wonderful surprises. Considering you just got a steam deck I’d say get both.
Fun fact: NieR:Automata is the sole reason DXVK (a huge source of Proton’s performance) exists. The avatar for it on github (or its developer) is fanart of 2B
Well, I wouldn’t call it a strictly impulse purchase, but I did get a steam deck because I was missing gaming and I’m glad I did. I haven’t played in maybe a week or so, but I’ve put a good number of hours into BG3 so far. You’ll enjoy it. I’m glad I got it.
You have made a solid impulse buy. I love my steam deck as does my wife. If you get a dock you can also use it as a regular laptop too.
I bought the official dock and have struggled a bit with it. It sometimes doesn’t recognize my TV and has other connectivity issues that seem to only be solved by repeatedly restarting it. I had an extra HooToo adapter lying around at work and holy crap that thing is such an awesome adapter for cheap that connects to the TV or my monitors and peripherals so easy and I’ve never had issues.
