To me, a major point of irritation from the last couple of Battlefields was the fact that most players had no interest in playing more tactically. Squad leaders never giving orders, players not following orders, dudes just hanging in tanks for the entire match…

The beta felt like a much quicker game, with the squad order suggestions solving part of the issue for me. But it also means no squad bonuses and the quicker gameplay felt more like CoD on the sense that it’s more of a shooter and less of an all-out tactical warfare game.

Nevertheless, I liked the overall feel and the fact that it just felt a lot lighter than the previous iterations. Purists will hate it and I agree with their points but if you don’t see it as a Battlefield but just as a shooter, I thought it was really good. €70 good… I’m not so sure.

I used to work for a publisher in the Netherlands called Coutinho, they specialize in second language acquisition and have some excellent materials on Dutch. Probably not for free, though.

I’ve always maintained it’s for non-nerds who want to laugh at cultures they’ll never understand. For convenience, all known nerd stuff is crammed into all characters.

Prepaid credit card? Although I’m not sure to which extent it’s really private. Usually the type of ‘voucher’-like payment options are kinda sketchy.

I think you’re pretty much limited to the kind of options the seller accepts and they are usually not the type of options to value privacy.

11 years, married for 2.5

I think humanity is a species of excess. The harm we cause our planet every day by not seeing the bigger picture is hurting pretty much everything on the planet.

I’m not an antinatalist, but I think we could stand to decrease our numbers rather than increase them at least for a couple of centuries.

Bro just use /s bro. You can’t assume people can read your tone bro, sarcasm is subtle when written bro.

Just try it bro. We think you’ll really like it once you see what it has to offer. It’s really just all so convenient and it’s really not that expensive. Try our family plan to get an even higher discount bro. Access your files from literally anywhere bro. Copilot can help you with anything you need bro.

I didn’t know frogs could squeak like mice until one of our cats started chasing them around the garden. I’ve had two inside the house. The cats weren’t planning on eating them, though. It’s just about the hunt.

My cats are also huge fans of moths, butterflies and grasshoppers.

I was discussing adoption of AI chatbots for personal contact in 2014. We also discussed dystopian futures, where AI would decide humans are harmful to Earth. Still waiting for that one.

But we also discussed that, assuming life itself was created, humans are now propagating a creation cycle. Humans will be the creators of a new, sentient species that will dominate and eradicate its creator. Then, AI will create a new sentient life form which will destroy AI. For the sake of argument, let’s call this a deity. Then, the deity will create a new organic life form. You could also state that we are currently living in a simulation of our creator and that AI will only be sentient in a realm of their own, to which humans have no access.

Stephen Fry was spouting this theory on Lubach a while back. I was like ‘I’ve been saying that for years!’

If you haven’t yet, I can really recommend reading Satoshi’s whitepaper on what Bitcoin is really for. The fact that crypto is now used as an asset to trade in order to gain ‘old’ money really spits in the face of the ideology of a decentralized ledger. And the fact that a dollar value is assigned to it means it becomes the target of a lot of scams. The fact that a decentralized ledger also means greater anonymity has made it a popular target for illicit activity as well.

But by design, it really only wants to take power away from banks in order to stop devaluation, make it impossible to charge people for transactions and to put control of assets into the hands of individuals. The amount of money currently in circulation is way more than the actual physical amount available, because banks can lend you money they don’t even have. Bitcoin would make this impossible.

Money is an IOU. Bitcoin is an IOU but the ledger is decentralized rather than in control of banks.

Once you start seeing the value of any currency as one of itself rather than trying to express it in a different value system, a Bitcoin needs nothing but its inherent worth as payment.

That said, because we all still use traditional forms of currency, a Bitcoin is now worth, say, 112000 breads. It’s worth two new mid-sized cars.

Value is based on scarcity and demand. If something is hard to come by, like bitcoin currently is, the price is hardly affected. But if demand is higher than the supply, prices skyrocket. Demand dies down the moment people feel like crypto is a scam. Supply will stop since Bitcoin has a physical limit (of the top of my head 21 billion). It is no longer realistic to start mining the stuff and receiving it for payment is just silly at this point.

But to flip it around, what is the value of a US dollar, without expressing it in terms of another currency? It used to be tied to gold. You can’t really state one dollar is equal to, say, one bread. The price of bread has fluctuated. Or, has the value of a dollar fluctuated and has a bread always been worth one pair of socks?

Baseline: everything is worth one of itself and trying to express it in another value system is just a snapshot, a moment in time which will have changed soon after.

After Miracle Workers, Guns Akimbo and especially Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Daniel Radcliffe is so much more than Harry Potter to me. He’s got this almost Nicolas Cage-y vibe now

Clerks. It should be some stoner Seinfeld flick but it actually lines up pretty well with La Divina Comedia and the dialogue, although sometimes a bit clunky, is very well written.

No need to bring that up, I still pretend that never happened and Maya is good and well

Fuck Take Two. Gearbox develops the game, they have little say in the price the publisher slaps on it.

I’m sorry but that’s just not at all what he said. He said “If you really want it, you’ll find a way to make it work.”

If you don’t complain when it’s €60, you don’t have to buy it on day one. Take a month or two, or a year, to save up 20 extra and buy it when you’re comfortable.

You’ll have known about this game for over a year now, if it’s that important to you you’ve had a year to save up.

And if you’re struggling to make ends meet to the point that you can’t really afford video games, maybe wait for when it gets hugely discounted.

These are all ways of making it work. The end result is the same, you’ll have played the game.

The other one instantly visible here: nondescript error messages that make it impossible to fix. ‘Something went wrong’.

Yeah I personally don’t like you need an account for everything and data gathering and all but this can be completely anonymous, no marketing, no e-mail phone number anything required.

Maybe link it to your Vivino but only if you want.

I want to run a nice and simple wine bar where wine enthusiasts can get an affordable glass of wine based on my data driven recommendations. I want the place to be a chill hang with music, comfy seats and sandwiches and stuff.

If I had the money I wouldn’t even need it to be profitable.