Every single day, when I am out walking my dog, a jogger comes by smelling of like a shit-ton of soap/perfume/deodorant/body spray - I nearly gag. These guys (and sometimes girls) are so terrified they might smell sweaty when doing something, you know, sweaty, like jogging a couple of miles...it boggles my mind.
Who taught people we have to smell like artificial bouquets of flowers all the time, even when exercising, ffs?
Hear the AI generated narrator, tune that out immediately. Rubbish.
Just a rambling comment in general vis a vis Starfield. The loading screens mentioned in the article made me think of this.
I am a wierdo who really liked and played alot of FO4 (4 replays). My introduction to Bethesda games was FO3 and FONV just before FO4 released. After FO4, I tried Skyrim - which was ok, I was never blown away by it and have never replayed it. I have tried to play Oblivion but it was so ancient and janky I gave up. I played FO76 for about a year and generally enjoyed it to a point, but always wished the development effort had been applied towards a full-on single-player (or coop!) FO5 game.
I was looking forward to Starfield (I loved Mass Effect, replayed twice). But, I have not bought Starfield, nor am I likely to in the next year. I am going to wait for patches, mods that fix what Bethesda doesn't, and a banging sale on Steam.
In the meantime, I am playing a game I never thought I would play because I never thought it sounded like a game I would enjoy - ELDEN RING. I am not a very good twitch-muscle player (ridiculously bad, in fact), and I play exclusive M+KB games as I never had a console growing up and don't know how to use a control well. Am I enjoying ELDEN RING? Yes...I am with reservations, I still do not like "boss fights" (in any game really, when a boss fight boils down to a box you can't escape with a giant thing in it that insta-kills you, I just roll my eyes in disappointment). But, I am enjoying *everything *in between (glorious seamless no-loading-screens self-directed exploration and problem/puzzle solving) and hate-playing through the bosses.
In fact, the overall seamlessness (ie, lack of loading screens) of ER has spoiled me (it has them, but only during fast travel/respawn). Unvarnished in-your-face loading screens for doing something like stepping into a cave mouth or opening a door will take a full point (out of 5) off a my private evaluation of a game from now on.
We swap between two movies each year.
Even years it is A LION IN WINTER, an amazing film with insanely quotable dialogue. (EDIT: Why? On "star power" alone, this movie is outrageously cast.)
Odd years it is A CHRISTMAS STORY, which is equally quotable (perhaps more so). (EDIT: Why? Because so many things in this film ring true to my own childhood - having to have last-minute dinner at a Chinese restaurant because of a disaster, for example, or begging for a b-b-gun...)
I don't mean to polish my knob, but I am doing a vegetarian menu this year that blows those insipid recipes out of the water. I guess I should start a foodie website and rake in that sweet-sweet ad revenue from click-bait.
(Totally being sarcastic)
Here's the menu:
Isn't it like this Bethesda's go-to move now? I mean, it always seems like Bethesda releases a thing that people are really excited for, then people are all like "It sucks!" but then 2 or 3 years later people are still playing it and enjoying it and saying "OK, it's not THAT bad..."
Soap: a bar of unscented oatmeal-based soap
For deodorant: I have had very good experience with "Thai stone" style salt-based deodorants. These work simply by making your skin inhospitable to odor-causing bacteria while not causing you irritations. You need to apply it liberally (after slightly wetting the stone, I just count out 8 strokes under each arm), but a single stone will last you ... a very long time ... and it does really work for a whole day. It has no scent, per se, so you will just smell like you smell without the sulfurous bad smells caused by BO bacteria.
Or so I gather...
(Preface - I've not yet picked up Starfield, though I have hundreds [far too many] hours in other Bethesda games; Cyberpunk 2.0, though, has thoroughly captured my attention.)
I hear what you're saying, but the YouTube commenter apparently loves Elden Ring, which I found to be an awful game and painful to play. Man, I love complex, deeply explorable games, but I played Elden Ring for 8 hours and never felt like I was making an inch of pleasurable progress. The commenter complains about games being a chore, but what about games like Elden Ring that aren't chores, but are literal punishment?
I guess I had trouble accepting the commenter's point of view after he rah-rah'd for Elden Ring...
I have been, up until very recently, a "Thanksgiving Traditionalist", in that I loudly proclaimed that one should muck around with the traditional basics.
But last year, I changed my tune. We had a dinner based around Stanley Tucci's timpano instead of turkey (yes, the famous timpano from the movie BIG NIGHT). That was a big success.
This year, because I have some very dear friends who are vegetarians and who kind of slink away when anyone discusses Thanksgiving traditional dishes, I wanted to make dinner with their needs/desires squarely in mind, so I am doing a completely vegetarian menu. I generally despise "meat analogues", so no, we're not having tofurkey. So, here's the menu:
I am probably forgetting something. Guests are bring desserts and wine (one is a L3 sommelier, never disappoints).
I waited until CP 2.0 to play it. I can wait for SF 2.0 to play it. I am not a unicorn in this regard.
When looking for my last vehicle, I still needed a midsize very-light-duty truck for my business (film production), I drove the Chevy midsize truck (Colorado?) first on my checklist of trucks to drive. It was a piece of garbage (and this made me sad because I was [trying to be] open to finding an excellent US-made midsize truck). The sales guy was super-enthusiastic, of course, to the point of pushy obnoxiousness. When he asked me "HOW GREAT IS THIS TRUCK???!!!??" I was like "I wouldn't complain if someone gave one to me, but I have other trucks to test."
After test driving four other competitors, I ended up with Honda Ridgeline (which beat out my second favorite from Toyota), that I have now had for 4+ years and absolutely love it - it is a great midsize+ truck. It's kind of a unicorn in Texas (so many Fords and Dodges), but I saw a ton of them in Arizona and other Western states. Great vehicle, and it has CarPlay. Sadly, it's in the shop at the moment (I, uh, backed into a bollard, cough) and my rental is a brand-new Dodge Charger which drives like a lead brick on wheels compared to the Ridgeline. Interior finish isn't bad though...and the UI, while not CarPlay, is polished).