Leon

It’s not like Bethesda couldn’t afford to hire Nordic voice actors. They just chose not to do so.

The best Swedish accent I’ve heard was the Russian gangster father of Alfie Allen in the first John Wick film. Makes sense given that the actor, Michael Nyqvist was Swedish.

Skyrim’s NPCs sound and act like they’ve been lobotomised.

I wouldn’t say that Oblivion or Skyrim has much better gameplay, honestly. Yeah the weird dice-roll mechanic is gone, not that dice rolls necessarily make for a bad game (see the entire Baldur’s Gate franchise, including the latest installment) but the combat in Oblivion and Skyrim isn’t exactly good. It’s floaty and feels really weird.

Oblivion retains more of Morrowinds roleplay mechanics, too. Skyrim is just a flat, empty game. They leant really far into this garbage faux viking aesthetic, complete with rubbish accents (as a Swede, we don’t sound like that here in the Nordics) and there’s nothing really memorable about it. It plays and feels about as drab as it looks.

Like to-date, there are still aspects of Oblivion and Morrowind I recall fondly. One of my favourite wow-moments in Oblivion was the quest with the woman who tasked you with finding her painter husband. That’s a fun quest. Skyrim has nothing like that.

The entire system needs changing. I live in a country where anyone’s free to start a political party, and a part needs around ~4% to make it into parliament. We have eight parties in our parliament and I still don’t feel adequately represented. I don’t condone it, but I definitely get why people don’t feel like voting over there. That is entirely by design.

I also really don’t get how gerrymandering is a thing that’s legal. Absolutely bonkers. Everyone’s vote should count. Sure we have districts but they don’t have any bearing on the national vote, in that regard it’s purely for division of labour.

I don’t really see it. The U.S. has never been a particularly good example of a functioning democratic system. Hell, gerrymandering is a prime example of that, and it dates back to the 1800s.

It’s cute that anyone thinks that anything short of a coup is going to actually make a difference at this point.

No kidding? It’s almost like the system was built to function this way from top to bottom. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for people to notice.

And the DoSing of Grindr to prove it.

The problem here is that you lose nuance.

Yes, a lot of datacentres use evaporative cooling, meaning that the heat is taken away as the water evaporates. It’s a cheap and effective way of doing things and the water returns to the water cycle and doesn’t really get locked up anywhere. So it’s not really a problem, right?

Well yes, in a vacuum that’s fantastic. However there’s two caveats to this: evaporative cooling works best in arid areas, because the air can hold more water. Thus they build these AI datacentres in naturally arid areas. Smart, they’re using physics to their advantage!

What’s the second problem then? They’re now using up the ground water in those arid areas to cool their datacentres and thus ruining it for the people that live there, leaving them without safe water to drink.

Also I don’t know how many anti-AI people will be all “bUt gOlF CoUrSeS ArE OkAy, We lOvE ThOsE!!” These things exist purely for rich people that don’t contribute anything, so we could get rid of both and the world would be a better place.

Homeopathic burgers.

It’s not enshittified because the Switch was already shit.

I bought a Flint 2 last year. I’m very happy with it.

Yeah, this is my take on it too. I’m a professional developer, primarily C#, heavily in the .NET/MS stack. I really enjoy C# and .NET, but my overall distaste for Microsoft has kind of slithered in to the rest of it so I’m trying to branch out on a personal level.

Found out recently that Azure DevOps can apparently be self-hosted, when one of my coworkers had to maintain our DevOps instance. Absolutely flabbergasted that anyone would pay to use and maintain it themselves.

Yeah, I’ll own that.

The reason people can’t afford a system is because NVidia is screwing with the market in the name of AI. Before that they were doing the same in the name of crypto. They’re one of the big companies manipulating politics in their favour, against the better interest of the general populace. They’re standing alongside the companies that are pushing for mass-surveillance, they’re pushing for people to lose their jobs, and for all the other nefarious ways AI is being applied.

But at least we can ignore our culpability and blame a computer when it decides to bomb a bus of brown school kids on the other side of the planet now, I guess.

Aye, this is premium pricing, not necessarily premium quality. The biggest hassle I have with my PC comes from NVidia and their bullshit.

Don’t pay for this shit. It’s another case of “you’ll own nothing and stop fucking complaining, peasant.”

That’s a really good question, and I don’t really know. Could be many things, like a fake discount where something is listed as previously having been a certain price without having ever been that. Granted I think that’s illegal in the EU.

It could be that the box it’s kept in has been damaged, but the item itself is fine. I’ve saved money that way before.

I also think these toys are generally sold at a decent markup. It’s difficult for me to believe that the Edge for example actually cost ~100€ to produce, but since it’s a relatively niche thing to sell (in the grand scheme of things) I think there’s a markup to ensure staying afloat.

Now, I’d like to think that returned and used stock isn’t put back on the market, but if I said that was the case I wouldn’t believe it. People can do really heinous things.

Right? It’s pretty disappointing, the Edge could definitely fit one or two AAA batteries, and you can definitely engineer something to be waterproof and have replaceable batteries. That’s not new tech exactly. The entire Edge 2 (and I assume most toys like it) is coated in silicone, so I don’t think there’s an elegant way of opening it without breaking the silicone. Not sure if there’s many teardowns of these things.

I used to charge the Edge after using it, but after coming back to it with very low charge sometimes I’ve elected to just charge it beforehand. Granted I don’t use it that often, so I really can’t speak for its longevity. When I do use it more frequently it has enough for a really lengthy session, or two more normal ones.

Right! Thank you for the correction.

No corrosion, also no boiling. I realise my point didn’t really get across well; good silicone is durable, and with simple non-electronic toys, like dildos, you can just toss them in a pot and boil for a while. What you want to avoid is oil-based or silicone-based lubricants because it can lead to material degradation, even if the silicone itself is really high quality.

My cleaning procedure for the edge is essentially to get the lube off, wash it with some anti-bacterial soap, and then dry it off immediately. It’s been about two years now and it’s in solid condition.

I don’t know, sorry. They might be. I thought the Edge would be more flexible than it is. The looks rather thin so if it’s not supposed to bend, then it looks like it might be really flimsy and easy to break.