I have a Viture One and an Xreal Air 2. They’re both solid for gaming as a screen directly attached to your face. Neither do floating or body-anchored screens out of the box. The Xreal can do it with a breakout box, and the new generation of the Xreal that’s coming out in March is supposed to do it on its own.

Viture One came with a better carrying case and is easier to hook up in the dark. It’s slightly more comfortable to wear, and it has built-in focusing dials. Picture quality is good for gaming and watching videos, but not good enough for extended text reading - books and websites aren’t recommended.

The Xreal Air 2 has a much better screen, good enough for reading for an hour or so. The edges get some chromatic aberration, but most of the screen is good. It requires prescription inserts if you need glasses - a mixed blessing since it adds a hidden $80 to the price, but means you can wear them as real glasses. The nose bridge has size options, but none are quite as comfortable as the Viture. The Xreal uses standard USB-C cables, which is good for compatibility, but bad for attaching in the dark. As mentioned above, Xreal has a breakout box that gives different options for how the screen is displayed - attached to your head, attached with a delay (better for motion sickness), PiP so you can look at the real world with your media in the corner of your vision, and attached to your body giving the illusion of a TV screen sitting a distance from you.

It depends on what you’re looking to do with the screen, but I’d probably wait until the new generation of Xreals.

Mine’s around somewhere, too. I didn’t do a lot of gaming on it, but it was a very solid media streaming box for the time.

I enjoyed my Ouya back in the day.

My current setup has 6, but that’s across 3 PCs and a devkit.

I find 2 per PC is my useful limit. Which means my current 5 isn’t quite enough. Monitor arms are always a challenge at that scale, though.

My family was religious enough that they made it super clear that Santa was fake. Us kids still got little gifts “from Santa,” but they were of the stocking-stuffer variety. All other gifts were from specific people. As a kid I liked getting stuff, but the more important thing about the holiday was spending time with family, and them showing their love. Gifts was one way to show, but spending time, preparing meals, and just being present without worrying about other life issues also did it. It is the thought that counts, but you have to show that you’re thinking about them. Honestly, your kids might appreciate not having to pretend they still believe in Santa. As other people have said here, don’t catch your kids in the crossfire. If there’s something they’re really looking forward to, get it for them, but label it “from Dad” or Mom and Dad if you’re feeling generous. If they don’t have their hopes on something, a trip or experience might be good. Not sure what experience fits both a 6 year old and a 12, but I assume you know your kids better than I do. As for the rest of your family, they can stick it. They don’t seem interested in participating in the holiday, so don’t include them.

I don’t know if it’s gotten better these days, but back in the 90’s “being a man” was more a definition of absence. Being a man was “not being a woman/girl.” This caused a couple years of real difficulty for me as a high school boy, since women were (finally) allowed to do all the “male” things, which ended up defining the male identity out of existence.

Additional context: the squirrel bit one of the officers that was confiscating it. So they absolutely needed to test for rabies.

Don’t post your crimes to social media folks. Or do, I’m not a cop.

Aleve (naproxin sodium) is the only OTC painkiller that reliably works for me. So first I take one, and if that doesn’t work after an hour or so, I take another and a nap.

Raytracing is still very computationally intensive, and doesn’t have enough market penetration to make sense on most modern games. Devs need to implement two solutions: a raytraced path and a raster path. The game needs to be fully playable in both, across a wide range on hardware. The largest install base for most games is still console, where RT barely exists. So RT is generally relegated to eye candy for high-end PC. Which makes it a marketing feature, not a game feature.

It’ll be interesting to see if that changes with the PS5 Pro. I expect we’ll see more first-party titles support it, but not much else until the next real console generation.

The worst thing about standups is that about once a month I catch a problem early because of what someone says. The tradeoff doesn’t feel worth it time-wise. But it keeps me from skipping them.

Panzer Dragoon main theme

That’s not necessarily true. I want my gaming to just work, and that’s not the case in Windows. It’s becoming less the case with console gaming, but I can still be confident that when I buy a game for my PlayStation it’ll actually boot, I won’t need to use third-party software for controller support, and I won’t need to tinker with drivers. That said, I already have a PS5. The TV I game on is still 1080p, so I don’t understand what $700 would get me over my current hardware.

Sounds like an argument in favor of mandating bollards to me.

Chants of Sennaar - adventure/puzzle game where you need to learn the languages of the world. It’s not super difficult, but finding all the secrets was challenging.

Manifold Garden - no real story here, but a trippy 3d spatial puzzle to navigate.

I got a Viture One on sale last Prime Days for $300. I also have an Xreal Air 2. The Viture One has a better case for traveling - it has a separate compartment for the cord - and it’s better if you want to share it because it has focus controls on the glasses. But I’m still trying to get the nosepieces into the right place to get full top to bottom clarity. The Xreals need a prescription lens insert, but that means they’re better if you want to use them as real glasses, and the nosepiece is more comfortable and adjustable. The case can hold the cord, but there isn’t a separate compartment so there’s a risk it’ll scratch the lenses. I can’t recommend the Xreal Beam accessory, the battery life is really short.

I picked up a set of AR glasses for my last flight and was surprised how much of a game changer they were. I plugged them into an older Samsung phone and the Samsung Dex software let me switch the main phone screen off. This gave me something like 9 hours of video time on a larger screen that I could watch in any head position, with shows I brought myself.

That’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve met anyone in person who claimed to have a photographic memory. I definitely don’t do the “recalling long strings of numbers” thing that TV shows imply. But I can pull up a fairly accurate picture of the inside of my fridge and take inventory.

For me, I wouldn’t equate my ability to visualize things in my head to sight, but maybe hearing or smell. Could I interact with the world without it? Absolutely. But I do a ton with that ability. I hold lists, draw maps, plan routes, visualize models, check the contents of my fridge while at the grocery store. It also helps me make connections between disperate pieces of data. A lot of this I could do with a pencil and paper, but it’s so much faster to pull it up in my head.

Different species. Jar Jar is a Gungan, the lady is Queen Julia of Bardotta.