I viewed “let’s play” series of Alan Wake 1 and 2. Just wanna share my thoughts re AW2. There are spoilers below.

So much reading. Yes, you can skip a lot of those. Yes, the title is Alan Wake 2 and Wake is a writer. But a gamer who very much dislikes reading may be turned off or think “I may be missing much by skipping most of the reading, so I’ll drop this game.”

It seems Alice is alive. So she’s been living sans Alan for 13 years minimum. Extremely :(. I wanted a :) end for them. I can imagine an AW2 where the year is 2013 instead of 2023, and Alan was able to escape the “dark place” in 2013 and live with Alice happily. The writer (I dislike Sam Lake’s writing so I’m not saying Sam Lake) can figure out the plot gymnastics in between to make the game so interesting.

Scratch slew Jaakko Koskela so easyyy. So powerful. He could just slay Anderson, Casey, Cult of the tree and the Fbc at the start.

The Fbc’s light arrays placed far from each other outside the sheriff’s station were plot convenience.

Anderson aided Wake with writing the end despite Wake inserting Logan and David in the tale. Meh.

Sarah and Barry were sidelined. :(

Sam Lake most likely disliked a fairy-tale :) end for AW2 but don’t say that in horror, the hero must pay a price to save his pals (or something like that) like it’s a rule.

It’s time.com’s best 2023 game but it’s 👎 for me.

Frequently unresponsive or very unstable apps shouldn’t have been in the Play store in the 1st place.

Anyway, to the Play store’s credit, I downloaded many bank apps and I never got a fake bank app.

Been using Samsung messages for years, not Google messages, but I just wanna comment.

I’m OK with it. It’s been an ai race. It’s natural that Google is taking advantage of the millions of Android phones and of the fact that many are using Google messages and Gmail. Adding Gemini to Google messages is sensible to me. I just hope it won’t be annoying.

Gmail has been my main email but I didn’t see Gemini in it. Maybe in the future?

I’m OK with the ads. The coder didn’t put disappointingly many ads. And the few ads I saw weren’t annoying. I hope the ad $ has been a 👍 reward for the coder for making and maintaining Sync.

I <3 the user interface’s design. It’s Google’s design.

When I wanted to install Revanced extended on my Samsung a70, there were the easy way (which didn’t involve Termux) and the kinda hard way (which involved Termux). I’m not an Android expert but I thought I would be able to follow a well-written process. So I chose the kinda hard way. It went well. I appreciated Termux.

While the left mouse button is held down, I can put the window on the left or the right. I have no concern. But I noticed the difference compared to Chrome. In Chrome, the new window is there while the left mouse button is held down. In Firefox, it’s a thumbnail.

For many monitors, I never had more than 1 monitor, so can’t talk re it.

I can drag out tabs. What do you mean?

No performance issue on my Firefox too. I have Ublock origin.

I’ve been using Firefox and Ublock origin on my Samsung a70 for a long time. I’m :).

Gmaps wv is if you wanna use Google maps privately right? If Gmaps wv is on an Android (which is by Google) phone, can Google track your map browsing?

Props to Readera for having dark mode and being able to handle very long books. Been using Readera for a long time.

dark mode

native and user-created bookmarks

It’s 👍 but barebones. No dark mode and support for native and user-created bookmarks.

Agree. I think you’ll be :) with the Pixel 7 or 8.

You want your Pixel 6 pro to be bigger or smaller?

The S23+ is my dream. Big screen and flagship Snapdragon. The S23 ultra is overkill for me. Of course, if 1 needs the features that only the Ultra has, he should buy the Ultra.

I’m excited re the upcoming big phones but I won’t be :o if the S24 ultra will be the best big phone of 2024. It seems Samsung knows how to make 👍 big phones.

No ads on my Samsung a70 but there are preinstalled 3rd-party apps. I just disabled those that I haven’t needed.

There are some Samsung apps that I haven’t needed like Radio and Tips. There’s a not-so-easy way to remove those. But those never annoyed me so I won’t bother to remove those.

The Pixel 7 pro is 👍. No ads. Are there preinstalled 3rd-party apps like Facebook or Spotify?

It’s 👍 that tester1121 isn’t focused on Pixel and considers other phones. But if his Pixel 6 pro is still 👍, I suggest using it for minimum 2 more years. If he needs to replace it now, I suggest the Pixel 8. USD 641 on Amazon.

If you <3 10, downloading 11 isn’t a must, I think. I was still on 7 when 10 was released.

I started using Windows 11 in December 2023 and tried to just use sleep. My 🔋 drained fast while my 💻 was on sleep. I expected it. AMD and Intel processors generally aren’t as efficient as the Apple M soc.

While it was on sleep, there were times it suddenly needed to restart.

I once had a blue screen of death too.

So now, I shut it down most of the time. Windows 11 boot-ups and shutdowns are surprisingly fast. :)

What I noticed – I turned on my 💻, opened Firefox then Firefox was updating. It was fast. So it hasn’t been annoying so far.