Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.
Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.
I grew one during lockdown, decided I liked it and kept it. I suspect I am not an anomaly in this.
For digital copies, they could bury this into the EULA and make it a requirement that you agree to it before you make your purchase (IIRC some storefronts do this already).
However for physical copies I suppose there could be a case made if the duration of support was not disclosed at the time of purchase (or it was not printed somewhere on the outside of the packaging).
I don’t have enough superlatives for it. I’m > 300 hours in between three characters, and I’m still finding new stuff to do. Even at full price, worth every penny. Also an amazing co-op experience - played through the whole campaign with a friend, we both agreed it’s probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, period.
It’s also the first game of this genre that I’ve played, off the back of this I also picked up BG1 & 2, and Neverwinter Nights, which I’m excited to try out to see what I missed out on back in the day.
That is exactly what I did with my dumb washing machine (and dishwasher).
Each has a ZigBee energy monitoring smart plug which is connected to a local Home Assistant instance. Spent an hour or two writing automations based on the power draw reported by the plugs and now I get push notifications that report whenever either machine finishes its cycle (including how long it took).
A few thousand years later, Ed decides to create 20 18 superhuman clones of himself, and things start to get pretty grimdark.
Worf is in the opening scene because he’s trying to sue Picard over that barrel.
Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.
I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.
The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.
The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?
The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.
The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.
Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.
It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.
Kevin and Toby as O’Brien and Barclay fixing the transporter again.
Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.
A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.
Sony-Ericsson W350i. Had it for about a year before I got my first Android device, an HTC Hero.
BeamNG. Logged hundreds of hours just mindlessly driving around crashing into stuff and fucking around with vehicle customisations.
I think you’ll find the holodeck is the cause of (and occasionally the solution to) most Trek problems.
Doesn’t need to be a “green energy paradise”, just a reasonably well connected first world country.
Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I’m using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.
That’s the kicker. EVs don’t have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.
Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.
Also the recent SNW crossover where she >!is thirsting over young Spock!<.
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I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.