tiredofsametab

There were unpatched issues in the first one (it's been so long now I don't remember them all but there was one in a DLC where you're supposed to be able to give an item to a robot NPC but it was just broken in addition to several others).

Looking at the price and thinking of that, it was a "pass until decent sale" for me.

I do like the setting generally (at least based on the first one). It might be neat to have someone else take over the IP and go somewhere with it.

Cons are 36%, right? Colourblind people problems.

Fuck Pitchford and Take2 -- sell the IP to someone who will do something cool and bring back Eddings.

I had sea cucumber for the first time the other night (along with 鮟肝 (ankimo - monkfish liver). Sea cucumber flavor was fine but texture wasn't my favorite (I also don't like crunching on cartelige). Ankimo was smooth and delicious. Shiokara is also great. Shirako (your fish jizz) is great battered and fried, but I've never had the guts to try it raw.

This is very true. It's very different to what came with things like mass-market smartphones and everything that followed. I knew plenty of people who just had a dial-up connection they used for mail or looking at recipes or stocks well into my 20s.

Can you define when "the internet" starts for you? I'll go over my own anecdotal experience and what I can remember being the rough progression and milestones.

So, when I was growing up, we could dial into other computer systems with a basic, text-based bulletin board system and send and read messages. A bit later, Compuserve came along where we lived and there were various areas and activities. We didn't have HTTP yet, but you could connect with other people, check stocks, etc. I think there was some rudimentary shopping, but I might be mis-remembering. There may have been trolls around but I was rather young and don't remember much.

Somewhere in here, we get things like Archie, Veronica, etc. that could find different things on the pre-web internet. NNTP newsgroups came to be (you can think of these as sort of proto-forums, I guess, but that's not an exact thing). These were generally fairly unfiltered and could be wild. Trolls, of course, existed here and I think it's where we get the terms flaming and flame war (which no one seems to use anymore). You could find porn and such with a bunch of message each containing chunks of data you had to stitch together. Downloading a single picture and assembling it could take minutes to hours depending upon what you were working with (rural, slow dial-up in my case).

IRC also comes to be somewhere in here. You would connect to real-time chatrooms. I used this to communicate with coworkers up until ~2013 as we had a work IRC server.

Starting in the early (IIRC) 1990s, we had things like AOL, Prodigy, and other services that kinda built on the Compuserve premise (and indeed AOL would buy Compuserve). AOL would also at least popularize instant messages. Remember at this point, we had no phones to text on still. There were certainly trolls and lots of child predators (and cops trying to catch them, eventually). AOL eventually started adding access to the early web which is mostly how I got there, Universities and such had much better internet and other internal and external systems (when I got into Uni a bit before 2000 we still learnt Archie, Veronica, and the earliest search engines with Yahoo being the best at the time IIRC).

The early web was mostly people posting static pages for other people to load and look at. Amazon would get started as a bookstore in '95 (I think) and there were some other businesses, but a lot of people were a bit scared to try to buy anything online without seeing and handling the product first and over insecure connections. This would change rather rapidly. There were some early forums which could be pretty free-for-all but some were quite moderated. Pages would slowly get comments and guest books.

Commercial interests increased and increased, but we still got things like the iCQ messenger, Friendster, Myspace, etc. as well. Moderation and legal policies evolved. Fan sites were pretty awesome and, as forums evolved, many people could talk about their interests. Myspace blew up into a phenomenon and we start to get web 2.0. You probably grew up with this and as we transitioned into web3. Enshittification really took off in the early 2010s and began getting worse and worse.

People waste their money on all kinds of dumb shit. Posters, pictures, plastic toys that will just end up in some landfill, etc. This is mine and I almost certainly spend a lot less on it (again, $20-$25 a year in USD depending on the exchange rate). I almost never eat out. I have real investments. This is entertainment.

Edit: to clarify, dumb here means not necessary. Support art and artists, but don't by plastic stuff that's going to end up in a landfill

Ah but I have won... just not enough to do more than pay for about a year's worth of tickets. It's not an investment strategy; it's entertainment. If I ever get rich (and I don't expect to), nice bonus.

This could be interesting for another reason. Alienation of affection laws (i.e. breaking up a marriage) are a thing here. In the past, some have gotten out of the fines/penalties because this was clearly a transaction and not love. Not being able to legally pay anymore makes that interesting.

I seem to remember sex as being strictly defined as p-in-v penetrative action very narrowly thus allowing other acts to not count for those purposes. Soaplands aren't technically that and host clubs don't do any action on the clock or directly for cash.

Edit: clarity.

Japanese, though I've kinda plateaued and put it on a backburner for now, and Norwegian. Norwegian so far is fairly simple (I've previously studied German and am a native English speaker so it's decently related to both), though I'm only around A2 (a bit more in reading, a bit worse at speaking).

Once my current Norwegian material runs out on Babbel, I might see what their Japanese course is actually like, but I doubt they have anything for where I'm at.

A lot of old industrial and some industrial-metal definitely does. War by :Wumpscut: comes to mind.