If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Fight Club. Rewatched it a couple days ago because my gf didn’t know anything about it except the meme of “First Rule of Fight Club…” and I had last seen it possibly 20 years ago.

If we factor in failure rates, definitely the Valve Index Controllers.

I fucking love them when they work, but this is the second or third time that I had to get one replaced by Valve in the 7 months of having them. Please, Valve, Index users are already paying premium money. We’d like controllers that don’t just stop working properly despite NOT having hit them against walls repeatedly or anything of that sort. It also can’t be super lucrative for you if for every sold pair you create and ship out 5 replacements.

Yup, now the only reason for me to occasionally switch to the actual YouTube page is to give videos likes and subscribes (that actually count for the person and aren’t just bookmarks for myself)

I’d love to know that, too. I understand craving the security of a monthly “paycheck”, but I avoid subscriptions whenever possible because all those individual “Giving that cause/software/YouTuber 2€ per month is barely noticeable” do become noticeable at some critical mass

I love Sky and most people there genuinely are so nice. And now on Steam I can finally play it with a decent framerate (the Switch was a big step up from my phone already but that still struggled sometimes)

Try not to lose sleep over it. As @[email protected] said, don’t call attention to it and you’ll be fine. It’s even less weird than getting a boner in the middle of your physics presentation. Here, you at least have an obvious reason for the boner.

Mhmm, I played a couple dozen hours now and I like the game a lot!

Interesting. I doubt my next statement, but I have to wonder if this is a setup that was carried over from when before gas stations were self-service (I was actually shocked how you used to not be allowed to refuel your own vehicle). Maybe something along the lines of “This setup is cheaper to run and if it’s only the underpaid employees complaining about a less-than-ideal way to fill up tires, that’s a cost I’m willing to eat.”

Don’t you fill your tires at the gas station? Here in Germany they have a stationary compressor with a hose (that doesn’t sound like it’s the correct word) that’s about 5 m or so and the buttons to fill in or release air are at the station itself. So you connect the valve and then have to get up and walk away to push the air in.

At the risk of going off topic a bit, I am very confident that there will be a plethora of new areas with loads of content coming from modders as soon as the Creation Kit drops. With Skyrim, adding new areas was often slightly awkward because you had to make it a dungeon that would then maybe lead to a bigger, open area simply because the Skyrim “overworld” was relatively crowded already and it would easily risk breaking other mods that added stuff on the main area. But in Starfield there is so much empty space on the three dimensional galaxy map that it’s virtually impossible that two distinct modders would choose the same exact spot for their custom solar system.

Well that sure is an article I never expected to read.

But I also think Jagex should have given it a more firm “No”. Or at least a “Please don’t”. Depending on how long it takes to grind mining and what the potential reward is, I can see one or two people going for this without having their appendages removed for actual medical reasons.

Perfect. We’ll name it “The Extreme Fighter Jet Experience” lol

I did just now contemplate the feasibility of wind turbine amusement park rides. Aside from fixed seating and safety belts, the only real thing stopping that from being a thing are (safety) regulations, no? The blades themselves are probably already hollow and they could be pretty good money makers, even if the power output were diminished because of the heavier weight.

I was so confused over how answering machines worked, but I don’t remember the specifics anymore! I think what confused me was, how and especially where the messages would be stored. As in, can my neighbours call the number of my answering machine (if we had had one) and then listen to the messages that were left for us?

Fair point. I would agree to say there should be a healthy middle ground. I think coming across theme park-like spectacle around every corner would remove a lot of immersion and most authenticity (specifically trying not to default to “realism” because then we’d specifically want 99,999% of areas to be lifeless rock) not only from Starfield but many many games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption and the Metal Gear series would be incredibly different games, if it was just from one action sequence to another and then a beautiful story cutscene immediately and with only loading screens separating them from each other.

I guess I’m trying to say that immersion into and attachment to a game is increased if you give opportunity for (or sometimes force) the player to calm down. Red Dead 2, for example, does this masterfully by its generally slow and deliberate pace for most actions (cooking steak by actually making you hold the meat over fire for a couple seconds, making you walk/ride for long passages to get somewhere even during missions, etc.) and by sprinkling in quite a number of relaxing quests, like watching a movie with your girlfriend, in a game that’s mainly known for shooty tooty cowboy action.

To wrap up that wall of text, I guess I’ll see if the ratio of interesting tidbit for every dull landscape is too low for me in Starfield once I get my hands on it c:

Update: Game’s good, if your expectation was “Space game made by Bethesda”. I like it and am very happy with the amount of barren planets for every lush world. Sure, they lack the “discover flora and fauna” activities but there’s still plenty fun stuff to do.

I haven’t played Starfield yet. That being said, I think I will enjoy most planets being rather dull (as long as you still occasionally have reason to go there). I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.” One of the bigger reasons (aside the gameplay usually not being quite to my liking) why I don’t play MMOs anymore is, because about every MMO culminates in 80% of the people wearing “the armor of fabled legends” and being “Slayer of Demonlord and Demigod Sckholzhlak”.

Thanks, I’ll check it out.

Thanks, that’s pretty cool! I did fear that a lot of Bethesda’s traditional environmental storytelling would be gone.

So Audacity is fine to use (again)?

I’m very much the same. It mostly depends on “does the open source program do what I need/want?” If not, I’m okay with using a closed source version of it.

My current number one example here would be spreadsheet calculators. Years ago (and for my personal use) I only used LibreOffice/OpenOffice because it did/does all I need. But at work I need to use MS Excel not only because it’s what the company has but also because the tables function and everything that relates to it (like data slicers, automatic expansion of formulas and formats, etc.) is really awesome and either super complex to replicate or straight up impossible in LibreOffice. And a couple months ago I decided to optimize the Excel sheets at work by incorporating some VBA macros. It’s super useful and I couldn’t find an open source alternative to it that would not run into problems on existing VBA-Excel sheets very, very quickly.

On the other hand I have photo editing / art programs. For those, I happily hopped from one FOSS to another (GIMP to Krita and I think I had a third one at some point as well) because I actually only need the “basic” and “on the surface” tools of such programs. And so I never even began feeling a pressure to use a closed source program.