Shurimal

Elder Scroll series. Skyrim for the modding and eyecandy potential, Oblivion for the madness that is spellcrafting (also Shivering Isles is the best ES DLC), Morrowind for the true alien fantasy.

Thief II is the quintessential first-person sneaker.
Independence War II still has one of the best flight models and a great story.

X3: Terran Conflict is the best first-person strategy game.

Half-Life 1 and 2.

Il-2: Great Battles is the best WWII combat flight sim.
DCS is the best jet combat sim.

Elite: Dangerous is the only space sim with actual 1:1 scale galaxy, including many real-life stars and is the best life-in-space simulator with flight model as good as I-War 2 and decent enough on-foot parts (even though there is some jank and glitches).

They’re not jets. They’re ducted fans. Different things. “Electric jet” makes as much sense as “electric V8 engine”.

E2E encryption is the public protection measure.

I don’t really know how the different economic classes are defined. It seems like everyone who isn’t either wealthy or homeless likes to believe that they’re middle or upper-middle class.

And that’s by design. “Middle class” is pretty much a propaganda term. In reality there’s only two classes: working class and owner class.

Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”

StarWars Anarchists: Fuck 'em all! Power to the people!✊🏴

Pretty much any Batman movie. It’s subtle, because it’s not chaotic evil, but lawful evil—the status quo, established hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that plague the city remain in place. In fact, enforcing and protecting status quo is the whole raison d’entre of Batman, who is an extremely priviledged rich individual benefitting and profiting from the status quo. And thus has no desire to enact real societal change, unlike eg Baine.

I’d argue James Bond is also the same. Yes, Bond villains are evil—irrationally and comically so—but like Batman, Bond represents, enforces and protects the same hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that give rise to these villains.

Then there is Star Wars and all this light vs dark side. But if you stop and think about it, Sith and Jedi are just two sides of the same medal. Jedi mind trick that coerces someone to do something against their will is extremely evil by its very concept. Especially in how trivialized its use is in the movies. Also, there is nothing civilized about lightsabers. These are horribly dangerous to the wielder and their opponent alike, will easily cut through hull plating by accident (a bad thing when a cm of material is all that’s standing between you and hard vacuum). And would in reality not make a clean cauterized cut, but explosively flash boil the target with the end result like being blown from a cannon.

Lawful, systemic evil is the most devilish kind of evil; it’s so subtle it goes unnoticed and is even celebrated as good, no doubt in no small part due to the vast propaganda machine lawful evil loves to build up around itself.

Plot twist: the princess has a bad dragon.

Twist to the plot twist: the knight knew it and is specifically there to, ahem, slay the bad dragon.

Another audio professional here. For line level analog audio (it’s different for guitar pickups and turntable cartridges) it doesn’t matter much at all unless we’re talking long cable runs (several tens of meters and more) or some badly designed equipment that can’t handle high capacitance cables (eg I’ve had crappy amps going into oscillations with certain speaker cables). What matters is shielding (in noisy EM environments) and reliable connectors.

Digital audio is a different kettle of fish, but it’s amazing what you can get away with when runs are a few meters or less. Consumer-grade equipment almost never has 75 ohm connectors for coax S/PDIF and no consumer S/PDIF cable is really 75 ohms. RCA connectors cannot be 75 ohms due to their geometry and BNC is a rare beast (I really had to go out of my way to set up proper 75 ohm cabling for digital audio in my home, and still am not sure the BNC connectors I use are actually 75 ohms).

I should also mention to all non-audio pros that you can’t measure a cable’s or a connector’s characteristic impedance with a simple multimeter. 50, 75 and 110 ohm cables/connectors will all show milliohms on a multimeter and are all fine for audio frequencies. Characteristic impedance only plays role at high frequencies—MHz, not kHz range and when we need to impedance match the whole transmission line to avoid signal reflections.

I would be more worried about channel crosstalk when using a multi-core cable where conductors are not individually shielded as is the case with USB cables, but even 30 dB separation is probably fine for casual music listening.

Unless it’s locally hosted, doesn’t scan every single file on my storage and doesn’t send everything I do with it to the manufacturer’s server.

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

Independence War and Independence War 2 remake by Aerovery Labs, or maybe Eagle Dynamics would be dapper.

Heh, I always find someone pushing 30 km/h with one’s own muscles, not caring about weather going through rain, cold and heatwaves while carrying what they need to carry far more hardcore (won’t use the word “masculine” because people of any gender do this) than someone sitting in a heated seat in climate-controlled box that moves forward without any effort from the user and not even requiring significant driving skills in the age of automatic transmission, traction control and all the other electronic assists (ABS is fine and recommended)🙃

There are some, but I’m not willing to install a random ROM from who-knows-where breaking who-knows-what functionality on my only phone.

They are. Pixels are also good for longevity and alternate ROM-s.

The problem is budget phones—people who can’t afford to pay 600€ for a phone are left with devices that are obsolete in 2 years and no custom ROM-s even when the bootloader can be unlocked. The ROM community mostly consists of enthusiasts who are generally not interested in budget devices.

Case in point: my Poco X4 Pro. Excellent hardware (5G, 120Hz OLED, headphone out and SD card slot, IR blaster), cost me only 300€, but no LineageOS, CalyxOS or /e/ OS support unlike the older X3 Pro because it was not as popular among the enthusiasts.

Second-hand market is also very situational, eg in my country Pixel phones are not popular and thus the second-hand market is filled with mostly Samsung and some iPhones.

Who needs more than 20HP anyway?

20 hursepurses is maybe pushing it, but 30 to 50 kW would actually be plenty if we kept our cars lightweight and aerodynamically efficient instead of insisting on 3-ton ugly boxes with the frontal area of a house.

Hell, for a single-person lightweight (<40 kg empty weight) electrical vehicle that is expected to go no faster than 30 km/h (often legally limited to 25km/h here in EU) and requires no license to operate, 250 to 300 W is more than enough.

Lotus had it right.

Maybe I’ll give it a retry at some point in the future. If I can recall my forgotten Epic login credentials, that is. Too busy with the thargoid war for the next few years, though.

Control. Liked it despite being in 3rd person view up until the mezzanine fight an hour or two in, then realized that the enemies are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges, the PC is a low DPS squishy and fighting from a cover or any other tactical approach I’m used to doesn’t work.

EDIT: There was also a spellcrafting mod for Skyrim where the endboss was immunebto all magic and would teleport away as soon as you got too close while summoning a bazillion powerful minions. At level 50…60 it was litwrally impossible to figjt the bastard. After many tries I just console killed the bugger and was done with it.

Education is free in most of the world. And people sell their brains all the time. It’s called “a job”.

No-one. Training a neural network, natural or artificial, is not “stealing”. Or no artist would be able to study the works of other artists to become a better artist themself.