Thank you for your detailed reply! I personally view LMG videos as purely entertaining, they shouldn’t trash other people for data quality or accuracy, since they are rather weak in that field as well. Rather they should focus on entertainment for entertainment’s sake, where they are - at least in my opinion - stronger than a lot of the rest.

Which meaningless drama did I miss here?

Definitely by master lock smh

I can understand your sentiment in general, but the “grey color palette”, isn’t accurate. There are so many biomes in this game that you probably just caught one specific which heavily leaned towards grey. But I have played in lush forests and some of the currently trending viking-elf-aesthetics, which have definitely not been grey.

The game is really boring and grindy, though. I bought it on a whim, expecting Dark Souls with guns, like the marketing suggested. But it’s more like Gears of War meets Diablo or Destiny. This is a really bland third person shooter, with some interesting enemies and bosses but so much loot-based grind and so many resources to trade with different vendors. While the story is really one dimensional and tired.

I wouldn’t recommend this game if you are looking for a souls like as the marketing suggests, but only if Destiny-but-Gears-instead-of-Halo is your thing and you have a complete party of friends ready to join. Then this game has its moments.

I bought it on a whim and am totally surprised by what it is: The marketing looked very soulslike-centric and I expected something like The Surge, but I’d describe it more like a Gears of War/Destiny-mix. Yes, it is sometimes challenging, but Gears of War was as well back in the day, didn’t make it a soulslike. And the semi persistent checkpoints are just that: checkpoints. The skills and “RPG”-lite elements are very reminiscent of Destiny 2 to me. If you like both these games it’s kinda okay, but otherwise it’s nothing to get excited about. Without buddies the coop is really weird, especially if you play story missions, because randos can progress dialogue you might want to hear - but the story isn’t great and really convoluted, so the harm done is minimal. Buy it, if you want to play a challenging Gears of War with your buddies and tolerate Destiny‘s tediousness with resources and upgrades and RPG-lite elements.

They will fail so hard! On hand I am totally here to see that, on the other hand, I’m sad we won’t get a good new Splinter Cell.

Total tangent, but we kid ourselves if we think the fediverse is somehow censorship-immune in comparison to Reddit or Twitter.

There are more moderators and administrators across all instances which can federate/defederate at will and can delete posts and propagate this deletion through the network. At the same time governments don’t need to negotiate with a large company, but only need to hint they could destroy one person’s livelihood to remove undesirable content from the network. And to avoid the Streisand effect instead of requesting to delete one specific piece of subversive content (which could backfire), just insinuate some illegal material (CSAM being the most obvious, but anything goes, really) has been found to force shut down or takeover of the whole instance.

The same goes for big companies instead of governments: if a large corporation has launched their own Mastodon clone, the first thing they’d reasonably fund are smearpieces by “journalists” and/or “scientists” hinting at harm to befall server owners by continuing to host Mastodon instances.

I personally hate, what crypto has become (if I wanted to destroy crypto, I’d have invented crypto bros as a psy op), but the fediverse isn’t really federated enough to be resistant to influence by corporations and governments and something blockchain adjacent could have been the solution. For example: if the server admin and their hoster is totally unable to decrypt whatever is stored on their own server and the network as a whole is distributing all the content probabilistically across every federated server, the network would only get stronger and more censorship resistant with each new instance. If the government is forcing you for any reason to take down your server your content is not gone but stored with all the other nodes. If you are able to retrieve your key, you could even move to a new instance and authenticate as your old instance (don’t forget: you are not “sending” BTC from one wallet to another, you are only telling as much nodes as sensible that BTC on the chain belongs to a new key now; the same would go for content. Take down one node with a “wallet” doesn’t change which wallet the BTC on the chain belongs to. I propose the same, just with content). If federation between instances would work in a comparable way as it is now, this would additionally increase the probability to root out bad faith actors trying to flood the whole network with illegal content, since their content would be stored on much less nodes in a pseudo-predictable way: as soon as each major instance would defederate, their content would not be stored on their nodes and unfederated third-party-nodes.

I remember them from Chrome, which was kind of a thing in Europe back in the day.

I cannot understand this either: we have an everything app, it’s called our homescreen, why would you use that to launch another one?

I don’t think Hogwarts Legacy was designed for PC primarily and it’s full of cursor control on console.

Yeah, I see your point: I want the best camera on the go, therefore I buy Pro, but then complain about weight. Human nature I suppose 😂

I wouldn’t worry too much either way. We won’t get back the plastic pop off backs of yesteryear. While “removable batteries” get the most clicks the rules aren’t really regulating phone design, but try to reduce e-waste and force OEMs to plan for recycling batteries. The part about removability is a soft “should”, while there are hard “must” quotas for circular battery usage and recycling. Apple will probably need to stop their practices of DRMing batteries (which they already partially did in the EU, as far as I know, I switched the battery in my old 12M, before gifting it and iOS didn’t raise any warnings about the battery). But implementation of non-binding EU rules into national law is susceptible to interpretation and OEMs will lobby heavily. IP68 rating is here to stay, so is adhesive, I can imagine you don’t need special tools, but still need to release some screws and adhesive before swapping the battery in the end.

The 14P (~200g, if I remember correctly, feels even heavier) is one of the heaviest phones I ever owned, especially compared to my 12 before it, but even compared to my Xs, which already felt heavy at the time. In the past I always agreed with statements of „just make the phone thicker“ for more battery, or to hide the bump. But with the 14P I cannot agree: just make the bump smaller an reduce weight.

Destiny 2’s migration from battle.net to Steam on the other hand …

I play only one game from Acti-Blizz regularly which is CoD, since most of my friends play in religiously (time for new friends?). And it is treated so badly by Activision, I hope MS fixes this. I know all the highbrow arguments against consolidation. But I don’t care for Diablo or WoW (sorry) and the one game I play can only win from MS acquisition (impossible to treat it any worse). So I personally want this to go through already.

Yeah, about that …

To be honest: while the M1/2 Macs are great, macOS and the platform at large feel like being on hold for years now.

I’m hosting on DigitalOcean and buy the URL somewhere else (GoDaddy in my case). If DO becomes to expensive under load I’ll move to AWS. Have done this with a few other projects the same way: start out and tinker, finding a good setup on DO and move to AWS for price efficiency.

It is the same for eBooks imo. There are some sources of DRM free eBooks, but they don’t tend to have the popular books. I’m always buying on kindle, because it is so laughably easy to circumvent their DRM as long as one has a kindle serial number attached to their account.

haha, I have the same experience tbh, but I still get the obvious “I don’t want to update my drivers or fiddle with settings and controls, I just want something that works”, responses. I don’t even recognize these topics as “pain” anymore, but this probably just shows how high my tolerance has become in the last decades.