“One does not simply walk into the plane of Oblivion!”

Saxhleel: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”

Well, that’s one way to get closer to your god, I guess🤷‍♀️

The deceased has not yet been identified

Yeah, you need a DNA test to ID someone who’s gone through a turbofan. I’ve seen pics of an aftemath of such incident. You can’t even tell the species from remains that have the consistency of tomato juice.

Elder Scroll series. Skyrim for the modding and eyecandy potential, Oblivion for the madness that is spellcrafting (also Shivering Isles is the best ES DLC), Morrowind for the true alien fantasy.

Thief II is the quintessential first-person sneaker.
Independence War II still has one of the best flight models and a great story.

X3: Terran Conflict is the best first-person strategy game.

Half-Life 1 and 2.

Il-2: Great Battles is the best WWII combat flight sim.
DCS is the best jet combat sim.

Elite: Dangerous is the only space sim with actual 1:1 scale galaxy, including many real-life stars and is the best life-in-space simulator with flight model as good as I-War 2 and decent enough on-foot parts (even though there is some jank and glitches).

Considering that Russia is regularly commiting cyberattacks at it’s neighboring countries, what the fuck do they expect? That we’re going to let Putin’s forces hack away at our critical infrastructure with abandon? What a bunch of clowns🤡

Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.

The main reason I don’t like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don’t have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.

Best strategy game I’ve ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don’t have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your “villagers” standing around idle because they can’t figure out there’s a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.

Plus you’re there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.

You’re not alone. I’m in the same spot. I love the humor of Fallout and I really liked the TV series; I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, more Skyrim playthroughs than I can remember but I bounced off FO3 pretty hard. For me it was the dreary environment and overall decay of the world.

People in FO3 just didn’t seem to care much about their living conditions and this doesn’t seem like what would happen in actual post-collapse society. People in general love surrounding themselves with art and beauty, rusty scrap metal shacks wouldn’t be around two centuries after the bombs drop. Earthship, stucco and clay bricks are low tech but can be made very pretty and livable. Murals and paintings made using various pigments, colorful textiles, basreliefs, carvings and sculptures of ceramic, wood and stone would be everywhere, sprinkled with surviving pre-war artifacts that’s been restored, maintained and cherished with pride.

Plant life would also recover quite fast and be lush in a post-atomic war world—Chornobyl is a prime example how nature claims back human-abandoned land just decades after a nuclear event. Deserts in FO should not be all dreary brown misery; there would be a thriving ecosystem of both flora and fauna. Two centuries is enough time for the most dangerous radioisotopes to decay away and you wouldn’t really find places where radiation would stop wildlife reclaiming the land. More mutations and birth defects, yes, but life will find a way.

And this overall miserable representation of post-apocalyptic world is the reason FO games never really clicked for me even though the satire and tone hit the spot.

Tilt trailers make transporting loose materials even better. Lower bed so loading is much, much easier, too. And these can easily be towed by sedans or vans.

Ever heard of trailers? You can rent one of these for cheap and haul whatever crap without needing to worry about your car interior. And any old sedan can tow a trailer, not to mention vans.

Fucking get a van, then. You wouldn’t believe how much shit you can fit into a Renault Master, one of the most popular vehicle in Europe for contractors and other people who need to haul actual stuff, not their inflated ego. And Mercedes V-class has a very nice interior while still being able to haul more than an average american pickup “truck”. These vans can haul boats, too, easily.

At this point there’s just a few pieces of software that keep me on Microshitty’s teat. Foobar2000 being the biggest one—there simply ain’t no good alternative for Linux, and I’ve tried them all. Freesurround, actual dB scale volume control via Jscript, waveform seekbar, precision spectrum analyzers, modtracker player are just some of the essential plugins, as is ASIO (in addition of bypassing all OS audio stack shenanigans it has the accidental benefit of not only auto-muting , but also auto-stopping auto-playing videos on websites that might slip through uBlock).

Also, Paint.net is so good for converting .dds files. Never got .dds to work properly with Gimp.

Use it or lose it.

What’s the point of saving when real inflation rate* is higher than the interest banks apply to saving accounts? Or even average investment account interest rates? Saving now only makes sense in short term, for things you know you’re going to need and can save up for in less than a year—home appliances, phones, laptops, small home improvements etc—and even then leasing or credit card may make more sense if prices continue to rise.

And that is assuming you have money left over after paying for necessities in the first place… It’s not as if you can pay for eg renovation of your bathroom after a year of being able to set aside just 30 or 50€, even if you don’t have an emergency expense taking you back to square 1.

*This essay is from 2021 but things haven’t got better since:
https://evonomics.com/the-truth-about-inflation-why-milton-friedman-was-wrong-again/

Especially with movies, the people who made the thing are already paid by the time it is released. As little as possible. VFX houses are often fucked royally and don’t even break even. Even big-name actors are usally screwed over by Hollywood accounting.

By paying you only feed the leeches who then use their resources to fuck over everyone else.

That’s a very silly morals indeed.

But on the instructions of Judge Chris Hehir they were restricted in the evidence they could bring regarding their motivation for taking part in the protest and mentions of the climate crisis, and told they could not mount a defence of justification.

Kangaroo court.

Nice! Too bad they got caught, though.

No sympathy for cryptobros and trading bots.

Yeah, sorry, no. Even if I had the space, when I get home from work at 1900 the last thing I want to do is more work. It’s not like you can just plop some seeds into soil and do nothing until the harvest is ripe—I know, we had a decent family garden when I was a wee lad. Took a lot of work to keep it going.

If I worked 4 or even 6 hours a day—sure, I could add some homework to my day. But not when working 8 hours+commuting. And many people are working even longer days.

They’re not jets. They’re ducted fans. Different things. “Electric jet” makes as much sense as “electric V8 engine”.

They’re not—as long as the PV cells are a supplementary charging solution, in addition to wall charging, to the batteries. You’ll get a bit more range out while driving, especially when the car is a lightweight low drag design and PV cells may be the only thing needed to keep the constant 90 km/h speed in a sunny day. And when not driving the cells might be enough to get the 10…20 km or so commuting range back over your 8-hour workday.

But putting PV cells on a 3 ton electric SUV or pickup truck is stupid, it won’t do jack all due to the inherent inefficiency of such vehicles.

Not worse than a fusion torch. Or open-cycle nuclear propulsion. Or an antimatter drive.

You know, the Kzinti lesson😉