CrushKillDestroySwag [none/use name]

I switched over to this script on my desktop, and I use NewPipe on mobile. The script requires you to disable your ad blocker for YT, and then uses a different method to bypass ads that hopefully google will be less likely to patch.

I wanna say “my” first PC was an intel 486, with a hard drive and a floppy drive, and whatever cheap monitor/mouse/keyboard came with it from the Post Exchange. I was in elementary school so it was all a bit over my head, but my mom had gotten it for work because they were moving all of their records to digital and she didn’t want to get left behind, and I used it to instantly improve my failing “penmanship” grade at school by doing all of my homework in a word processor. I think I had a Genesis at this time so I never played DOS games much beyond the Lemmings and Dragon’s Lair demos.

My first PC was an early Celeron, and I remember upgrading it with a Sound Blaster Extigy, and then later an early Radeon. That PC later got RAM and hard drive upgrades too, I really pushed that hardware for as long as I possibly could before upgrading again, running everything at the lowest settings and just “dealing with” under-thirty framerates for just about everything from Lego Island to the first Harry Potter games. I didn’t really care though because my jam pretty much that entire decade was Starcraft, with Jedi Knight 2 coming in close second.

VLC: I’m here to help.

I quit League of Legends (checks notes) ten years ago and it was a great decision. Since then I’ve tried other competitive online games - Titanfall was my jam for a while, then Overwatch of course, tried to get back into Starcraft/SC2, really like Dragon Ball Fighter Z but I haven’t been able to play for a while - but I always quit as soon as I cross the threshold of getting pissed more than I’m having fun.

My favorite online experiences now are all cooperative with relatively small player bases. I dug the hell out of Final Fantasy XI playing it through last year (though I still have a lot of content left if I ever go back to it again), on DCS I play on a “casual milsim” server that’s mostly frequented by Australian dads where we play against a pretty hardcore computer opponent, and now that I think of it Dungeons and Dragons (and most other TTRPGs) totally has the same vibe of “coop gameplay with a small playerbase”.

For both wine and liquor I find that presentation will impress people way more than price. Get a cool looking decanter and you’re basically set as far as the average wine drinker goes - as for liquor, I have a Crystal Head Vodka bottle that I rinse out and pour whatever I’m drinking into, which is a lot cheaper than buying another Crystal Head lmao.

Starfield for “Most Innovative Gameplay”

I was just talking about urban rents. The fact of the matter is that climate change will not be addressed without significantly reducing the number of cars on the road, EVs or no, and you can’t do that without overhauling urban sprawl.

The fun part is that many societies have had and currently have dirt cheap urban rents, accurately reflecting the efficiency and lower cost of supplying services to people in urban areas. This isn’t even a capitalism/socialism thing, since plenty of capitalist societies have figured out how to make it work via subsidies, public housing, price controls, etc.

Yooo is that a trackball? I made the switch to a trackball because I’m a giant hipster a few months ago, but mine is an index finger one, not a thumb one. Setup looks good - an XPS is definitely on my radar for whenever the Surface I’ve been using for the past seven-ish years dies, it looks so clean.

There’s the TVTropes page someone linked, which has a bunch of stuff everyone believes because they became common audio/visual shorthand in TV and movies.

Here’s a specific one that we are told about history: that we work less than our ancestors did thanks to automation and labor-saving devices. Truth is that the period of history (granted I’m talking specifically about European history) where people did the least amount of work per year was probably the middle ages (the other top contender for “least work required to live” is hunter-gatherer societies), until right before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution sees people go from working for about half the year to working through the entire year, and from having relatively slow schedules to absolutely brutal ones. Kids went from working half days (when they worked at all) to working full time, and the compensation everyone got bought them fewer luxuries than their grandparents had when they were literally peasants.

There’s been some clawing back of our lost free time in the past century - and without modern productivity many of the things we take for granted simply wouldn’t exist - but we’re still pretty deep in the red compared to back then, and of course there are plenty of places in the world where working conditions are still comparable to the worst times of the industrial revolution. I’m not a “Retvrn” guy but I think this bit of context regarding modern work culture compared to the ten thousand years preceding it is something everyone should know, but that our society constantly paints over with misrepresentations of what the past looked like.

I only drink soda and I pour it from my 1950s-style soda fountain.

There’s this constant tension with D&D where it wants to be medieval and it wants to have easily-reproducible magic. Follow the magic through to its logical conclusion and you get essentially modern technology with a mystical/medieval aesthetic, ignore it and you get big blatant plot holes.