21/24 😎 but mostly because I’m a Tolkien nerd. All the ones I got wrong were old kings of Gondor, clearly shows which part of the universe I don’t care about.

Nah, honestly anything better than the bottom-of-the-barrel acrylics is going to add up quickly when you buy enough of it to make something like a sweater. If you want to use natural fibers (wool, cotton, I’ll take bamboo too) that’s a large jump in price, even if you’re not getting anything too fancy. And I feel like if I’m going to spend months hand-knitting a sweater, I don’t want to end up with something that’s all plastic and will degrade in a year.

I do also have some fancy hand-dyed yarns that were properly expensive and these ones are indeed 100% on me :P But they’re not really what I’m talking about here.

Crocheting/knitting is cheap to try out but once you really get into it (and start worrying about yarn quality and so on), the money pit opens. Ask me how I know.

Ah yes, I love the smell of burning bridges in the evening. Fuck. And I was getting excited about Divinity! Well, guess that means more money to spend on other things.

Yup, Nintendo in particular has a bad habit of just sitting on a bunch of old games, keeping them unavailable on modern system despite the fact that there’s clearly a market for it. And occasionally they’ll reach into their great big bag of classics, pull something out and say “we’ve done the bare minimum so you can run this on our current gen system (Switch), that will be 50 dollars for a 20 year old game”.

Until I played Morrowind, I had no idea that planning your commute to work can actually be fun. “Wait, so if I take the StriderBus to there I can transfer onto the MageMetro and then it’s a straight shot over the hill to my destination? Amazing!”

I’ve played that before, but have they removed/made players able to reduce frequency of appearance or outright stop the annoying moaning monster from the lab zone yet? I’m a solo player and it was a creepy encounter the first 5 times and then just an annoying interruption, and it was so constant and inescapable that it made me stop playing.

Same, except that once it gets too big we take it out to my parents’ house in the mountains and plant it there. So far one has died and one is surviving and happily growing.

You’ll also likely benefit from drying it using an old 100% cotton t-shirt instead of a normal towel, for much the same reason (less friction).

It’s a reference to a meme that was particularly popular on Tumblr at some point, it’s called Apollo’s Gift of Prophecy Dodgeball, you can google that to see some examples. Basically when someone makes an obvious and ridiculous joke that (much) later turns out to be true, they were struck by the dodgeball of prophecy.

After watching a mad scientist/chemistry youtuber NileRed trying to cook, I think that those skill sets are completely separate and may, in fact, be mutually exclusive to some degree.

As someone from Europe (Poland to be more specific), I’d recommend to not worry about it. Really. Learn to say “hello”, “where’s the bathroom”, and “thank you”, the rest you’ll handle in English or use improvised sign language if the person you’re talking to doesn’t speak it (which at least in Poland gets rarer and rarer with every year). Or google translate, automatic translators work decently well for basic things.

Nobody will mind - honestly, if you were to actually learn Polish most of us would react with “that’s really impressive but why bother???” You’ll get the same reaction in most other countries except for maybe Spain/Germany/France, they’ll be more used to people knowing their languages, but at least in Germany they’ll still probably try to talk to you in English.

Of course if you want to learn for fun then go ahead, but there’s no need to put too much pressure on yourself, I’ve been all over Europe knowing only English, Polish and how to read cyrillic script and it was more than enough. English gets you 90% of the way there.

I don’t know what specific countries you’ll be going through, but focusing on French (if going through France), German (in Germany + a bunch of neighbouring countries + a lot of old people who don’t speak English in Western Europe will know it), and some slavic language (probably Polish and/or Russian, Polish will get you through Poland and with effort through Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Ukraine, Russian is useful because, as with German in Western Europe, a lot of older people in former Soviet republics will speak it, but bear in mind it has some negative connotations) should cover the basics.

If you have any questions feel free to message me!

I use mine on a sofa (for gaming, even!), but I get around the issue a bit by having a pad under the laptop. It’s literally just a hard plastic board with a beanbag attached underneath, I think I got it from IKEA. It isolates the laptop a bit from dust and improves airflow + lets it heat up without burning my knees + the one I have is just large enough that I can also use my wireless mouse on it when I push my laptop to the left.

I dunno about that, recent knitting drama took a while to clear up, and I’m not sure if AI sceptics are as determined a crowd as pissed off knitters.

(Tl;dr on the drama: there was video on SciShow about knitting that many (myself included) felt was not well researched, misrepresented the craft, and had a misogynistic vibe. It took a lot of pressure from the knitting community to get, in order, a bad “apology”, a better apology, and the video taken down.)

I’ve only played EA for less than 10 hours, but it was fun. It’s kind of a top-down Terraria. I put it down because I wanted to wait for some features from the next patch, which came out and delivered those features but then also promised some even more exciting features in the next patch and so on. Launch may be a good time to get back in since they didn’t announce an exciting post-launch roadmap yet.

It’s more of a top-down Terraria than a pixel shooter, with procedurally generated world, village building (with npcs that can do jobs there), gear upgrades and boss fights. That comparison might make it a bit less ridiculous.

Fair warning: lots of roguelikes on this list. Just seems like the devs of these games really like 2d non-demanding visuals. And I don’t know how low do you need to go, so check these individually.

Don’t even need a sale for Moonring, which is a retro turn-based RPG, completely free. Runs on a potato.

Original Monster Train should work decently well, it’s 90% off.

Shogun Showdown is really cool, 50% off. Necesse is a very fun Terraria-like, coming out of EA in like a week and on sale now.

Look into Reus 2, very fun, but it’s got some more visual effects so may be a bit too much. Same with Astral Ascent, one of my fave action roguelikes but, well, it’s action. Needs a decent framerate. Same with Dead Cells, Cult of the Lamb and Chronicon - great games, 2d, but may require a basic dedicated video card or a beefy integrated one.

Spellcaster University is not a forever game but it’ll be fun for a while.

Cook Serve Delicious series is really good. You can start with 1, they are each a bit different.

Cross Code if you want an RPG. Citizen Sleeper or Road Warden if you want an RPG that’s borderline a visual novel. Slay the Princess if you straight up want a visual novel.

Library of Ruina and Lobotomy Corporation if you’re a masochist who likes a good story.

Then there’s eternal classics like Stardew Valley, Balatro, Terraria,FTL, Into the Breach, Slay the Spire or Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

And on the incredibly niche side of things, I recommend Intergalactic Fishing and Rings of Saturn.

Hopefully something from this list catches your fancy!

Well that’s going immediately onto the “things that looked promising but what the fuck, so actually don’t read ever” list.

In this case:

• this comic artstyle is very characteristic of AI, down to the line weight, facial expression (these soulless eyes and smile), and how the character is positioned;
• the bus has no door;
• the picture has a yellow-ish tint, which has been plaguing certain AI image generators ever since the AI Ghibli trend. They likely overtrained their slop machines on Studio Ghibli works and various other “cozy” artstyles/pictures.

I’ve played this briefly when it launched, but was annoyed that for people playing solo the map outside your bases fully resets every time you save and load, I’d prefer if the areas I cleared of the fog would stay cleared. I get that in a multiplayer setting it’s better to reset because then everyone has the same opportunities to get loot/xp, but my map-clearing goblin brain was disappointed.

Unless they’ve changed it, but last I’ve heard there were no plans for that.

Other than that it was a lot of fun already at EA launch, probably got even better by now.