Borderlands is a straight up dopamine injection for my brain. You shoot someone, damage numbers go up, brain gets all happy. It’s dumb, but I fucking love it. I also love the writing, the characters, the level designs… it’s exactly the type of gaming comfort food that I enjoy.
Moar Borderlands!
The Greeks are insane for going along with this. Revolutions have started over less. Clearly their politicians no longer have the best interests of the Greek people in mind.
Well, you certainly haven’t been rushing it so far, considering Fallout 4 released back in 2015…
Thankfully i haven’t had any bad experiences like with that chair. Even as kids, we were always very specific with the gifts we wanted. Parents likewise. Mom will straight up just send me 10 items she wants for mother’s day or her birthday. That suits me just fine.
Buying things that fit someone else’s interest is tricky at best. I have very specific hobbies and interests. Usually, if it’s ‘cheap enough for you give as a gift’, it’s certainly cheap enough that I’d have bought it for myself if I wanted or needed it. It’s also difficult for people outside of that interest to judge what is a good value or what an item might cost. I.e. to me, a 50 dollar dildo sounds expensive. It’s a piece of rubber after all, how much can it cost? Most casual people wouldn’t know that a thing like a 250 dollar dildo even exists. So while they think they’re doing you a favor by buying something they consider ‘expensive’, it might not be what you want or need.
Gift cards are just silly. It locks you into a specific store and some cards even expire or are otherwise really inconvenient to use. COMPANIES really love them though - because people just don’t always use them or let them expire. That’s free money for a store, and a wasted gift…
Ironically, personally I do like to give physical gifts. But I only do it when the person has no gift expectation and only with items that I’m personally familiar with. For example, interns at our company always get a really nice pen when they depart. I like to tailor the specific pen to the intern, based on their writing habits, favorite color, etc. Usually I give people Lamy Safari fountain pens or rollerballs, in their favorite color. It’s a way for me to introduce them to a hobby that I like, while also being a meaningful gift. After all, everyone can use a good pen, right? You might not buy one for yourself, but you’ll certainly enjoy using it.
Seriously though, it’s pretty much the best gift you can give if you simply don’t want to pick the wrong thing. Which is much, much more likely to do if the recipient doesn’t outright tell you exactly what they want.
If someone wants to buy me a physical gift, I always give them exact suggestions: buy x, version Y. Shop at this store, pay no more than Z for it. That way it’s pretty much impossible for them to fuck it up. Can’t get it done? Give me cash instead.
If it’s acceptable to give a gift card, it’s acceptable to give money as far as I’m concerned. It’s the universal gift card without the restrictions.
This certainly sounds iffy.
I’ll say this: if this sort of thing poses an actual potential risk to passengers and crew, the people involved need to be given the harshest possible sentences. Take them out back and feed them into a woodchipper slowly if they wilfully endanger lives.
Have fun & stay safe! Those always look like great events. Sadly, never been to one myself, though we do have a huge one every year in Amsterdam.
Going to see two movies in the cinema; The Watchers saturday afternoon, sunday is Interstellar (classic movie). I’ve got an unlimited movie pass and usually see about three movies per week. This one’s a slow one; not many new releases.
Apart from that, I’m going to squeeze in a bit of photography. Need to test out a new tilt-shift lens that I got this week.
All in all, going to be a fun weekend.
Guess I should stock up while I can huh?
I’ve been a RPI fan since the beginning and have used their boards for all sorts of projects and tinkering. But it’s hard not to feel like it’s losing sight of what made it attractive in the first place: low power and low priced computing. It had its charm in buying a Pi Zero and just chucking emulators on it and handing them out to folks who might want to have a go.
But with the more expensive, more powerful hardware you just can’t really use them for things like that anymore. Just too expensive and too much oomph for the use case.
We’ll see if the company finds its way. But this usually isn’t a good sign…
I really miss webrings. You’d discover the most absurd niche shit people were into. Especially since everyone seemed to have their own Geocities page or something similar. Nobody has one these days, as we all just use social media and big sites.
It really sucks. You just don’t get that these days now everyone is inside their own little bubble on the net.
Couple years ago, I visited a historic grand prix that featured classic F1 cars. They also had open pits, so you could walk up and ask questions and literally stand next to the cars.
I was standing next to a 70’s F1 car when they performed an engine test. I was wearing thick, professional earplugs and the biggest Peltors you’ve ever seen. When they fired that thing up, I lasted all of five seconds before I walked out. At that point, it was no longer sound but sheer pressure. You could feel it in your chest.
As for how the mechanics do it? Easy, they’re all deaf as a post. Even the best earpro can’t prevent that kind of hearing damage, especially if that’s your chosen career. If you’re worried about good earpro not being enough, best advice is to put distance between you and the object/career path involved.
Basically… fuck this guy in his new blowhole.
Gotta make sure that grass is cut exactly to regulation length.
This fucking dingbat. Even if he was just a random citizen, he should know by now that you need to bring ID. And it’s always good to check if you have it when going to your polling station.
Here in the Netherlands, we’re VERY strict on ID. No ID, no vote. I’ve been witness to a fair few elections as a reporter, and it always gets drilled into the people who run the polling stations: even if the King himself walks in, you ask him for his ID and tell him to bugger off if he doesn’t have it. I’ve seen city mayors turned away at polling stations in their own council buildings for failing to produce ID. And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary.
Well we are proud of Dutch manufacturing in general. We like to make good products, even if they might be bad for you: for decades, we had the best weed in terms of THC content. And the Netherlands is also a highly regarded global producer of XTC pills and amphetamines. There’s only so many tulips you can export…
So yes, loose tobacco is one of our fine export products. We Dutch also loved it; it was really popular to use in joints (see: Dutch weed) and rolling your own cigarettes tended to be cheaper than buying packs (we Dutch are notoriously cheap). These days people prefer a vape, or pure joint. And with smoking in general on the decline, loose tobacco is a rare sight here these days.
Well, Europe is a big place. The percentage of smokers differs from country to country, as well as the anti-smoking legislation and when that was introduced.
In the Netherlands, you cannot smoke in the workplace, restaurants, cinema, on public transport, near a hospital, etc. Sale of tobacco products is illegal to anyone under 18 and we’ve banned things like flavoured vapes.
Because of all these measures, ‘only’ 19 percent of the Dutch population 15 and older smokes, with people lower on the socio-economic ladder smoking more frequently. That’s below the European average of 19.7 percent.
Now, compare that to other countries like France (22 percent), Spain (23 percent) and Bulgaria (28 percent).
Now, those countries have anti-smoking legislation as well. But because they had statistically higher numbers of smokers, it takes longer to see the overall effect.
So depending on where you are in Europe, your perception of smoking habits could vary wildly.
Childhood asthma, unfortunately. I was born in 1982 and basically everyone smoked everywhere here in the Netherlands. If you had a birthday, you couldn’t see across the room due to the smoke.
Because of it I had childhood asthma, which cleared up immediately when my parents stopped smoking. In the early 90’s, things got a lot better with smoke-free environments. We eventually got full on smoking bans, thank god. As far as I can tell, it didn’t do any permanent damage.
I still absolutely HATE smokers and smoking. It is and was an antisocial thing and children should never have been exposed to it like we were.
Absolutely. Thankfully we actually have it in the Netherlands, with some restrictions. I.e you do need to be clearly ‘suffering’ for a doctor to agree to it.
Personally though, I think there shouldn’t be any restrictions on this beyond making sure it’s a well articulated wish and not someone just having a bad day.
If say, a healthy 30 year old wants off this ride, they should be allowed to die with dignity at a time and place of their choosing. Nobody asked to be born, so we should at least give them the freedom to choose how they depart this realm.
In my opinion, nobody should disagree with that - it’s not your place to force someone to live if they don’t want to.
The early days of web shopping sure were interesting. I was a very early adopter compared to most people.
The very first thing I ever bought online was a flashlight back in 1999. Which was such a novelty at the time that I actually visited the two guys who ran that shop from a literal broom closet in order to collect it. I was like their third customer ever. These days they have 75 employees and around 7 million euros of revenue.
Collecting a web order seems silly now, but at that time it basically avoided a two week wait. Back in 1998-2005, if you bought something online in the Netherlands, you usually had to transfer the money by bank. Which took a few days. After that, they would send the product, which again took a few days.
In 2005 we got a new online payment method that let you transfer the money immediately, much like paying at a register. That made it way more convenient for everyone and you saw massive increases in spending year over year.
Yeah, that’s certainly one odd aspect. Also, there’s a ton of other methods to handle labour shortages. Like activating underused groups, such as women. Or offering retraining so people can switch to different jobs. And higher pay for sectors with shortages doesn’t hurt either, considering the already very low pay in Greece.
Running your existing workforce ragged is NOT the way to deal with this.
But hey, maybe we’re missing some cultural or political piece of the puzzle as to why they went this route.