How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

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

Saxhleel: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”

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.

PC. Because:

1. Better controller support—I’m not limited to what MS or Sony deem as “certified” or “authorized” hardware. Most of the really good hardware (VKB, Virpil, Arduino) will never be available for consoles and what little is available is bad at best.
2. Best sims are PC only (DCS, Il-2, E:D, X series, Hunternet etc)
3. Sims support 3rd party auxiliary software (TacView, EDDiscovery, OMH, EDMC etc) for better experience and that’s simply not going to be possible on consoles, ever.
4. For other games, modding experience on PC is simply better. SKSE and ENB is what keeps Skyrim going and makes it still relevant 13 years later. Can’t have this kind of code injection and wrappers on consoles.
5. If I ever get into retrogaming, emulation is the way, especially since actually acquiring retro console games in their original physical format is bound to become a very expensive collector’s hobby if you don’t have your own collection from childhood already or don’t have local second-hand options.

Simply nuking the shit out of everything wouldn’t really make for an interesting story.

It did for the Killing Star. Not nukes, but R-bombs which are probably the most insane WMD-s and unlike strangelet bombs actually feasible even at our current tech level. All you need is a light-sail and a big-ass solar-powered laser.

But, yeah, for dune:

1. Drop an active shield generator on your enemy position
2. Shoot it with a laser
3. Hilarity ensues

Precisely. Headsets for simracing, flight sims or any other immersive entertainment—yay! Headset for an everyday task (recipes while cooking, weather display or whatever) that could as well be solved with putting a phone or a tablet on a stand on your table—why? And it gets worse if there are multiple persons who’d want to use that information display.

Only use case I could imagine is having a huge high res virtual screen for productivity while travelling. But the Apple Vision is way overengineered for just that. For immersive entertainment I’d rather have Varjo for the price.

Aside from certain mice, office keyboards and video conferencing stuff, Logitech is trash. Especially when it comes to flight sim and simracing hardware.

Like Skyrim this one is far more playable in third person, and I really recommend giving that a try.

Haven’t played FO, but hell, no, Skyrim (and Morrowind, and Oblivion) in 3rd person is janky AF. Bethesda games never were meant to be played in 3rd person—I suspect the option is there simply for vanity cam, screenshots and modding.

In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website [REDACTED], not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.

So how is this “hacking” if the information is publicly accessible for all?

Took me about 2 minutes to piss off the pigs🤪

Edit: 60 seconds to make zionists lose their mind🤘

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

You forgot to add the whole bloody EU to Canada and UK, mate.

140 dB under water is not the same as 140 dB in air. For underwater noise reference level is 1 uPa, in air noise level reference is 20 uPa. 140 dB under water would translate to 114 dB in air. Still impressive, a trained opera singer or a typical home hifi system can achieve somewhere around 105…110 dB, but far from a gunshot.

EDIT: in another article it was mentioned that the actual sound level is 108 dB at 1 m which would translate to 82 dB at 1 m in air. 1 m distance is the standard distance to measure the SPL level of an object, eg a loudspeaker. Far less impressive and very, very far from an actual gunshot that is ~140 dB at 1 m distance. Science reporting at its “best”.

Privacy and anonymity are two very different things. Meta et al very much tie your real world ID to your online persona plus track, analyse, store and sell everything you do on their platforms (and possibly what other sites and apps you use).

Your posts on Facebook can be set to “private” (only Meta and you/your friends see them), but they’re never anonymous. Eg if you start saying unwanted stuff if you live under an oppressive government, you will have IRL trouble.

Your post on Fediverse can be public (everyone can see them), but anonymous (no-one can tie your IRL identity to your online persona). Eg you can make an account here and say things about your oppressive government and if you use basic anonymity tools (VPN-s, e-mail aliases etc) you cannot easily be tracked down.

You can also be private and anonymous, eg tipping off journalists about stuff going on under your oppressive government by using anonymous, E2E encrypted message service like Briar. That way no-one can eavesdrop on your comms and only you know your real identity.

The first rule of making money: Have money.

Inflation (when considering the rise of cost of living): 6%
Returns of investment funds my bank offers: 5%
Disposable income to use for investing: 0

Yeah, the math works out just fine on this one.

Better figure out how to turn lead into gold, and quickly!. Alchemy revival, so haaawt this year!

Yeah, Hollywood has become even more risk-averse than in the old days and boring. There used to be a new original Hollywood film coming out every month. Now all you have is reboots, rehashes and sequels. Avatar 2, Barbie and Oppenheimer are an exception. Even though technically Avatar 2 is a sequel and the Manhatten project has been covered very well before—the TV series Manhattan was exceptionally good and in 1989 there was Fat Man and Little Boy which was OK.

Netflix used to be the risk-taking innovator for a while (Okja, Birdbox) but that has died, too.

What I see in this graph is a nosedive in 2020, then things getting normal in 2022 to 2023, and immediately going into nosedive again in the latter half of 2023 with the cost of living crisis.

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if cinemas died out completely. Get much better sound and picture quality at home, anyway.