Low-end food is apparently way cheaper in the UK than in North America:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJDg3lMlmBU

There’s been inflation since that video went up, so the prices aren’t quite that good anymore. There are more recent videos from that channel you can watch to see more current prices though.

Some LED bulbs have glass globes, though they are mostly plastic, especially the cheap ones.

Have you tried Swiss water process decaf?

If not it might be worth a shot.

I think just erasing the politics from Disco Elysium to replace it with alps witch is a stupid idea, but there have just been so so so many games where you play as a depressed middle age man. A dude who, plot twist, is destructive to himself and others, and who we try (and sometimes fail) to help become less destructive over the course of the plot.

Off the top of my head in no particular order:

• God of War
• Max Payne
• Allan Wake
• BioShock Infinite
• The Last of Us 1
• Silent Hill 2
• Red Dead Redemption

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that type of character or plot of course, there are some kickass games in that list, but I can understand wanting something else at this point.

I mean, the players can make imperialist characters if they want to, the same as how you can make an asshole character in a DnD campaign.

I say that its punk because the setting and rules don’t depict this as something that’s good or neutral. The sourcebooks give a description of how the colonial economy operates, and some of the monstrous things that are done to maintain it.

Space 1889 gets its steam from solar thermal generators which power its steampunk space ships (ether vessels).

It gets its punk from it being about colonialism.

Implemented like that it would probably be a step in the correct direction. I’m not trying to say you’re a monster who wants to turn the world into a capitalist hellscape. But let’s use an analogy:

• There’s a country with a public library system that’s been suffering from chronic underfunding and dysfunction. The buildings are falling apart, the catelogs are outdated, and many people don’t even have a library near them.

• Jeff Bezos proposes to eliminate public libraries, says it would be more efficient and effective for the government to give citizens a stipend to buy off of Amazon. Its called universal books.

• Years later someone says “leftists will infight about anything, someone would probably say universal books isn’t left enough.”

• Someone points out who came up with universal books and why they wanted it, then there’s a reply saying “the version of universal books that I support would still fund the public libraries but have the Amazon stipend in addition to that.”

Maybe adding the Amazon stipend to the existing public library system would be great. After all not every library can carry every book, and sometimes its not feasible to put a library in every tiny rural community.

I’m just trying to make the point that its not completely insane to get a little defensive about such an idea in a situation like that.

Kinda reminds me of this old proposal for “modernizing” Amsterdam:

Skyscrapers sticking up with a spaghetti of highways running between them.

It was cooked up by Milton Friedman, one of the grandfathers of American free market libertarianism.

The whole impetus of UBI was to eliminate traditional social services because, it is argued, there’s no way that a government institution could be as efficient or effective as a free market.

And make no mistake, even modern proponents of UBI such as Andrew Yang propose funding it by hollowing out existing social services.

Like, yeah, UBI is better than having literally no social support at all, but the fact that its seen as this ultra-leftist idea, to the point that we apparently can’t even conceive of how it could possibly “not be left enough”, is an indication of how far right mainstream politics has shifted.

That was a real file browser on IRIX

Is this supposed to mean that I secretly liked it or else I wouldn’t have played it as long as I did? Would you rather I stopped after 10 minutes so you can say I didn’t give it a fair chance?

What’s good about it then? I don’t mean that as an insult to you or your taste, I am genuinely asking because I’m the sort of person that likes to think about games. I’ve spent hours listening to GDC talks on game design, hours looking at map viewers for some of my favorite games. When I play a new game I take screenshots and make notes about my thoughts while playing it.

From what I saw playing Skyrim there’s basically nothing there in terms of NPC dialogue, very little in terms of environmental storytelling, world design, and worldbuilding, and usually not very much atmosphere or sound design. And that’s on top of the completely vacuous gameplay. If the game did even a single one of these things well I would have considered it to be good, but for me there’s just nothing there.

I am aware that the Elder Scrolls series in general has interesting lore and metaphysics based on Hindu mythology. But it’s my understanding that the person who came up with most of that no longer works at Bethesda. And while I was playing Skyrim even googling some of the things I encountered (such as “why do the draugr attack you”) failed to elicit feelings of intrigue.

I did like the amount of verticality you experience ascending the main mountain though. That was cool map design IMO.

EDIT:

Skyrim isn’t good because it’s not your idea of a specific kind of rpg game

Most of the games that I listed are pretty vastly different from each other, but they all do at least one thing that’s interesting. Skyrim not being “a specific kind” of RPG has nothing to do with it.

Skyrim released in 2011.

New Vegas released in 2010.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines released in 2004

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura released in 2000

Plainscape: Torment released in 1999

Fallout 1 and 2 released in 97 and 98 respectively.

The concept of a good RPG wasn’t invented in the last few years.

The concept of good gameplay and encounter design wasn’t invented in the last few years either.

Baldur’s Gate 3 supposedly has 1,365,000 words of dialogue while Disco Elysium supposedly has “a little more than a million”.

I’m not talking about how the game feels, this is just raw stats.

EDIT: the Final Cut version of Disco Elysium is supposed to be completely voice acted, but for lines where the narration is mixed into the middle of a character’s line, it’s not. For example: “Yes,” Kim adjusts his glasses “I think that would be prudent”. The “Kim adjusts his glasses” part isn’t voice acted, so that might cut down on the amount of voice acting a bit more.

I played Skyrim a few months ago and felt like my soul was getting sucked out. I just kept asking myself “what am I doing? Why am I playing this?”, and stopped after a few hours.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I encountered a group of bandits that tried to attack me. I went into the cave they seemed to be operating out of and was greeted by a named NPC called “ulfric the blind” or something. He said something like “[name] is that you?”, and I thought “oh I wonder if I’ll be able to fool this guy into thinking I’m someone he knows. I wonder what could have driven this old man to banditry, or if he and his family have been in the game so long he’s now elderly. Or maybe instead of information about his life he’ll inadvertently reveal some secret that can help me. Regardless I’ll probably have to carefully choose what I say if I want to get the most out of this”.

Then the only dialogue choices were “yeah I’m him [end conversation]” and “he’s dead, you’re next [end conversation]”.

Disco Elysium had about the same amount of voice acted dialogue as BG3.

Granted, it gets away with that because it’s a point and click adventure game, but you don’t necessarily have to have a sky high budget to have tons of dialogue and a highly branching storyline. If you don’t have voice acting it’s even cheaper. Fallen London has roughly 4x the amount of dialogue as those games, though it’s basically a live service text adventure.

That was a different technique, using simulated evolution in an FPGA.

An algorithm would create a series of random circuit designs, program the FPGA with them, then evaluate how well each one accomplished a task. It would then take the best design, create a series of random variations on it, and select the best one. Rinse and repeat until the circuit is really good at performing the task.

A dark pattern would be some sort of underhanded but legal tactic to trick or coerce a user into agreeing to something they wouldn’t otherwise.

But most websites aren’t using dark patterns for this, instead they just blatantly and plainly violate the law.

Doesn’t really count if you have to google it first to know what it is

Maybe you have to Google it