Hyperreality

It’s not The Wire or The Sopranoes.

It is genuinely fun and bingeable.

Forget who said it, but: “Kill your darlings.”

Photography, painting, writing, jokes. You produce a lot, you cut most of it, you gain practice along the way.

This being said, there are people with inate genius who produce 90% gold.

Ah, yeah. That’ll probably do it. Usually lower spec and/or mobile version graphics/cpu.

Weird. Runs fine on my i7-6700k with an rx580. Probably older than your pc.

AI.

I don’t know if they pay per sale, or if they bought the right to sell the game with a one off lump sum as they have done in the past for at least some games.

If it’s the latter, my buying the game on gog doesn’t send any more money to the original studio.

Gog?

I use it for gmail and related google apps, nothing else.

Honestly works for me. Chrome for emails and stuff. No history, full privacy mode firefox for everything else. That includes youtube and links in emails.

Google thinks all I ever do is check my emails.

Honestly, when it comes to duolingo, you’re probably best off sticking to Spanish or stuff like that.

I tried out a course in my native language, and it really wasn’t great beyond the basics. Loads of mistakes.

And if you’re going to be paying for that, you might as well buy (or pirate) a proper Spanish course.

I’ve encountered them in Belgium, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, and France.

Not everywhere though, and restaurants often have free toilets for customers. Mostly in cities, busy places.

Germany has paying toilets near on the Autobahn, but last time I checked you get a rebate coupon to buy something in the shop or cafe.

Not necessarily opposed to them. Some people are animals and 50 cents keeps out the worst of them and helps keep things clean.

Yeah. It is/was free on epic. As you say, the story seems pretty boring.

I don’t know why, but it felt really dead and empty. Most of the missions are go fetch missions too.

Cyberpunk, (modded) Skyrim, Fallout 4 or New Vegas, I actually enjoyed walking to the destination. Outer Worlds I found myself using fast travel as much as possible because I wasn’t rewarded for taking in the scenery. Not truly open world.

I mean, one of the companions, IRC I simply fast travelled to and from the ship 4 times to advance the quest. Go fetch at point A, go to ship to discuss, go fetch at point B, go to ship to discuss, etc.

Japanese work culture is toxic.

Game industry work culture is toxic.

Combine the two, and it becomes even more toxic.

1. I like looking at women.

2. Having a female character and trying out a variety of cool outfits, dresses and make-up is fun. Especially as most games allow you to do a lot of customisation for female characters. Barbie in Night City, Barbie in Skyrim, Barbie in the post-Apocalypse. I can happily spend far too much time getting their outfit and make-up just right, before I even get down to kicking ass.

3. Female bad-asses are far more interesting than the boring male action hero stereotype.

4. Games are escapist fun. I’m a man. I’m tall, I do weight lifting. Why would I play as a man who looks like me, when I can play as a woman, something I would otherwise not get to experience?

Yeah. In my case linux Mint just didn’t.

Older hardware, lack of (good) drivers, mini-pc so not feasible to install a new network card, I tried, I really did. But I eventually gave up.

Great if it works, but sometimes you’re just SOL.

I’ll be forced to switch to linux when 10 reaches end of life, but I’m genuinely not looking forward to it. I’ve tried it before and given up after hours of hair pulling. Not linux’s fault necessarily. Often driver issues.

That’s the thing a lot of fanboys forget. They often install linux on hardware they handpicked to be compatible on a pc they assembled themselves. Most casual users are upgrading an existing non-self assembled system, which may or may not be compatible, and contain parts that don’t have good driver support. Eg. a cheap realtek card that was never sold to consumers directly, meaning it would only be installed in windows systems.

Honestly, I may just not bother. Go on ebay, buy something newer. Shame though. System runs fine. Happily runs Cyberpunk and stuff like that. TBF because I’m a cheap bastard, I only have 500 euros invested in the thing. Bought it at aldi when it was discounted. Upgraded it with second hand ebay parts. LOL.

I assume the longterm support version of windows 10 costs money.

AFAIK the upgrade to 11 is free.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement

Bad analogy. I’m still ‘going outside’. It’s just a question of how much I pay to mitigate the ‘chance of catching the flu’.

More like cycling to work with or without a helmet. Or wearing a cheap mask during covid.

Perfectly happy to pirate media, but pirated software is a risk I can largely avoid for a very low cost.

Your personal circumstances may differ, so do what you want.

Morality aside, I prefer not to pirate software for safety reasons. Malware is an issue, even if it’s rare.

Sounds like I should finally give Disco Elysium a try. The Final Cut’s on Gog for 10 Euros. Is that a good price / the right version?

Or should I reinstall Skyrim, load it up with mods, and spend another 1000 hours avoiding life?