House of Leaves feels like reading some sort of forbidden text.

Yeah V and VI (even even IV I think) are still perfectly fine and playable, so I’m happy to wait pretty much indefinitely lol.

I literally had one on Friday! Long story short: mine was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.

I had a wisdom tooth removed a couple of years ago and that sucked but it was bearable - it hurt for about two weeks, but Tylenol made it manageable. So I was expecting something along the same lines here. The actual procedure itself was fine - the scraping out of the inside of the tooth is a weird sensation, but not painful 'cause they freeze you up. Then afterwards, once the freezing wore off it hurt for about three hours and I was expecting it to suck for a while. But I had a Tylenol and a nap, and when I woke up it wasn’t hurting at all and it’s been fine ever since.

Other people have told me that they had pain for a week or so, so your mileage may vary, but yeah for me it was literally just a few hours of discomfort and then back to normal. Nowhere near as big a deal as I thought it was going to be.

It’s there now!

I think they’ve created this weird feedback loop for themselves too, where people are hesitant to start a new Netflix show because they don’t want to watch one season, get invested and then get left on a cliffhanger (as is the case here), which is causing them to cancel things early because not enough people are watching immediately and so on.

TBH if they’d just show a bit more trust and invest in the talent they hire, and give new shows a couple of seasons to find their feet and establish themselves it’d help them tremendously in the long term I think, but they don’t seem to be big on long term thinking.

Yeah this is me with Civ VII too. Normally I’ll pick up a new Civ game on day one, but since the new one has Denuvo and it’s nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I guess I’ll just be picking it up in a Christmas sale in like 5 years or something.

This is one of the greatest scams that conservatives get away with IMO, not just in the US but it happens in the UK and other places too. Conservatives get in, go hog wild cutting taxes, selling off public assets and throwing huge contracts to their friends, and then as soon as the other side gets back in they find that they have to now balance the books, the conservatives start complaining and saying they’re the fiscally responsible ones.

It’s literally happening right now in the UK - we just got rid of the Tories finally after about 15 years, and the new Labour government immediately found a £20 billion hole in the economy which they now have to make harsh cuts to sort out, and they’re the ones getting criticized for it by the media.

Done! I told them this is the first Civ game in a long time that I have no interest in picking up at launch, because of Denuvo and that the price is wildly unreasonable. Nearly $170 Canadian for the full edition!

I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.

I think that game is the third best Alien movie lol

I thought the new one, Romulus, did a pretty good job of keeping the retro look going. I actually didn’t like the movie itself very much, but props & costumes did a good job lol.

I think in the UK we have a similar thing but they’re called Refreshers.

Yeah as someone living in Canada that seems wild to me. I can’t imagine they still do that in places with snow, that would be madness.

Also Smarties! These are Smarties everywhere else in the world apart from the US as far as I can tell.

This is a bit beside the point but I really wish Tarantino would drop his whole “10 movies and done” rule. I feel like it’s making him procrastinate too much about his final one and he’s already chucked out at least one promising-sounding project that was almost ready to go from the sounds of it.

Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother-and-sister members of the White Rose resistance movement within nazi Germany, who were executed for producing a series of anti-nazi propaganda leaflets at the ages of 24 and 21 respectively. I always have a soft spot for people who use art and language to combat fascism, and Sophie in particular had a real way with words:

The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

And her final words before being executed:

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

NB: I should note that there’s a bit of conflict about this, as the nazi executioners were not meticulous record keepers. But it seems that it was either this or “Your heads will also roll”, but either way she apparently said both and either one is great IMO.

• Might not play on Deck
• Denuvo on launch day
• $180-ish Canadian for the full version with all the add-ons.

This is gonna be the first Civ as far back as I can remember that I probably won’t bother picking up on launch day TBH, which is sad.

Here ya go! it’s a Japanese fork of FF that’s more focused on privacy. I prefer Librewolf personally but it’s good to have options I guess.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

My favourites are the ones that just have a Github with absolutely no explanation of what the software does at all. It’ll just be like “After two years, blurplr has been refactored to use the updated flerb library instead of flerbp, which is deprecated” and then just a link to a tarball.

Yeah it’s been kind of legally proven that Mullvad keeps no logs too, they were raided by police last year and they came away with nothing.

From the article:

However, Swedish police left empty-handed. It looks like Mullvad’s own lawyers stepped in and pointed out that the company maintains a strict no-logging policy on customer data. This means the VPN service will abstain from collecting a subscriber’s IP address, web traffic, and connection timestamps, in an effort to protect user privacy. (It’s also why Mullvad VPN is among our most highly ranked VPN services.)

“We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law,” Mullvad said. “After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.”