Is this really world news, tho?

Yes, at this point the choice is who gets to spy on you.

Ads are indeed getting smarter every day

I was seriously considering buying the game on release but after 8 hours of not having fun paying it I’m glad I had GamePass to try it on first.

She’ll never get my vote, she killed Sotha Sil

You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.

Basic builder units. You commit genocide against an entire civilization but leave one of these fuckers alive and 20 minutes later you’re facing en entire army.

I hated this in GTA (mainly 3 and SA). You’re doing an escort mission and suddenly 6 guys start shooting at you with AKs from nowhere because you pissed them off in an unrelated quest.

I prefer a Morrowind-like approach where enemies don’t scale and you have to take care not to venture too deep into some crazy gang’s territory early on.

But it’s much much harder to make this work properly, and scaling enemies have become an expectation by players at this point.

I played Milon’s Secret Castle on the NES as a kid. The game is pretty much unplayable if you don’t have an infinite amount of time and patience, or a guide. There are hidden doors and items in unexpected places that are required to make progress, some rooms are dead ends that soft lock you, there are hidden exits that you have to find by pushing on a random pillar etc.

Once I accidentally didn’t push the cartridge in all the way and the game started out in a random room and full of glitches. This lead me down a rabbithole of searching for hidden stuff, maybe even beat the game, but most of the time it just failed to start.

Another one was San Andreas. I played it when it came out and I read online about myths like bigfoot, the meeting place of the Epsilon Program, ghosts in the desert, aliens etc. I must have spent hundreds of hours searching for these.

The EU introduced a limitation to how much power electric devices can consume in off or standby mode.

0.5 watt normally, 1 watt if they have a status display and 2-8 watts if they’re connected to a network.

On a yearly basis this saves as much electricity as one of the member states (Romania) used in a year.

My point is that small things add up to huge numbers.

Reddit is nothing without its, users, communities and content. They might not make any money out of you (if we ignore them training AIs or selling your data), but by posting and commenting you’re part of the reason why people whom they directly profit from keep using the site.

We were staying at a small hotel, we just finished lunch when we saw a middle aged couple arguing with the young receptionist.

Their problem was that the all you can eat restaurant had self service and that they ran out of one of the meals. The receptionist tried to explain that this kind of thing happens sometimes but they try their best to refill the trays.

They then asked for the owner, but the receptionist informed them that he’s out of town and not available, but if they want they could write a formal complaint. Hearing this the woman shouted: “then how will we get a refund???”.

Could be someone who’s genuinely trying to understand someone’s viewpoint, but it reveals inconsistencies in the other person’s logic, so they get irritated.

Sisyphus is really great. You should also check out Alice (not to be confused with Alice in Borderlands) on Netflix. It’s also a time travel series but its true strength comes from its characters and all the different story threads coming together (which reminded me of the first season of Heroes).

My dad believes tons of right wing conspiracy theories, it’s like a hobby for him. Sometimes they even contradict each other (e.g. the war in Ukraine isn’t happening vs. Putin is fighting against wokism and the “Jewish plan”), but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

I tried to argue with him, tried understanding, but every time I ask questions that stretch his understanding he gets irritated and says I’m always nitpicking and that I have a closed mind.

So when he brings them up I just nod and change the subject. We’re cool if we talk about anything else.

I hope that stays unpopular.

As far as I’ve experienced you need really good quality headphones in order to enjoy Tidal. Mine is on the high end of mid tier and I couldn’t tell the difference in quality when I asked my wife to test me. I use Youtube Music because it’s pretty much the same as Spotify plus no ads on regular Youtube.

There are believable conspiracy theories, some say companies pay them to remove bad comments about their products, or politicians to push certain ideas.

Imagine a sub about gaming but all negative comments about certain games are removed.

There were documented cases where this kind of manipulation could be observed but I’m not aware that it was ever proven.

Where’s “here”?

In some countries they’ll fail you if you don’t bribe, even if your driving was perfect, in others they’ll just overlook small errors that aren’t too dangerous.

There are places where if you bribe they’ll let you pass even if you can barely drive, in others they’ll call the police on you if you bring it up.

Ask around locally, you should definitely not bribe if you’d be a danger to yourself and others.

I got a notification so I guess tagging works.

I wouldn’t call Bulgarian obscure, I expected a minority language like Mansi or Breton.