Darren

Back in 2007 when I bought my first MacBook it came with a massive 1Gb RAM, so I asked the lad in the store about upgrading to 2Gb. He pointed me in the direction of a site where I could get it for a damn sight cheaper.

Yeah, Apple have been playing that game for a loooong time.

SAULT, and Pepa

Back in 2010, Richard Herring’s Edinburgh show was Hitler Moustache, and it was very funny.

I can’t imagine Jones was being particularly funny though.

chinese burger meal

Being English, I’m stubbornly monolingual (aside from some leftover schoolboy French), so when I was invited to a Sikh wedding I was genuinely amazed by all the guests just flowing between English and Punjabi as if they were the same language.

I use Castopod for when I’ve uploaded my radio show. At the moment it’s hosted on my site that’s on Hetzner. It only costs me a tenner a month, so I’m wondering whether it’s worth trying to work out how to host it all locally so I can have far more storage and it not cost me anything.

Depends on the orgy, init.

My partner uses Mastodon, but not Lemmy.

I’m a few months down that path already. Went from a 13 mini to a Pixel 9 running Graphene back in March and have been shifting most of my desktop computing over to Linux.

Honestly, Graphene is pretty nice. One hell of a learning curve, but now I’m beginning to figure out what I can do that isn’t possible with iOS, I can’t see that I’ll ever want to go back.

As someone who is actively moving away from Apple stuff, the hardest thing for me to give up has been Pages. The iPad version is fine, but the Mac version is the GOAT as far as I’m concerned.

But it sucks balls for making anything that needs to be opened on any other editor.

For how good and useful Excel is, it’s overbalanced by how utterly fucking dog shit Word is.

Word is when you have a crap and can’t seem to wipe yourself fully clean. Word is making a morning coffee and finding the milk has gone bad. If it weren’t for the US deciding they’d rather invade the Netherlands than let a single Yank stand trial in the Hague, the entire executive suite of Microsoft would be up on war crimes charges because of Word.

As with so many things, the barrier to entry has been lowered so far that literally anyone can have a go. And that’s good. But it does mean that the vast, vast majority of art is now being experienced by an audience of maybe 20 people.

You can spend hours crafting a beautifully soundscaped podcast that truly gets to the heart of what you need to talk about. And ten people will listen to it.

But I suppose it was ever thus. Someone would spend a year painstakingly working on a painting, getting all the details just so. And then it would sit in their studio because they had nowhere to display it, or no one to buy it.

Speaking as someone who’s been into Nirvana and RatM since the early '90s, there’s more anger and protest in ‘We Live Here’ than in the entirety of Nirvana’s catalogue.

Bob Vylan - We Live Here

Sure, Nirvana were angry, but mostly in a depressed, teenage way, lashing out at an unfair world. They were angry on a personal level, mostly. Bob Vylan are angry on a social level, in the way RatM were. They’re demanding the world look at the inequality they see, rallying us to take it on board and do something about it.

If that isn’t protest, then I don’t know what it is you’re looking for.

Having just finished the first Death Stranding, I agree with you re: Kojima.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is great; I ended up enjoying the delivery aspect more and more as it went on. But man, the story is…tough. The broad strokes of it are interesting, but I feel like the inertia of it got lost in the attempt to make it a multiple-hour open world.

As a whole, the game is undeniably an incredible piece of work. While you’re immersed in it it’s wonderful. But when you stop to think about it for even a few seconds, it flakes away.

And, like I said, while you’re playing, you’re really into it, you get to the end game, you ‘defeat’ the final boss. Then there’s the best part of 90 minutes worth of exposition to explain the parts of the story that weren’t explained DURING THE STORY. Never before have I played a game that had to put so much effort into explaining itself.

But somehow it all works. The experience of playing it is excellent. Or maybe Kojima just has his own reality distortion field.

NMS came out on macOS around the same time I got my M2 Air. Being a huge 65daysofstatic fan, I played it for a bit when it first came out, but I didn’t have my own PC, so it was on my wife’s, meaning I couldn’t play that much.

Anyway, I was stoked to finally be able to play it on my own computer and put hours and hours into it. But the thing I could never really shake is just how lonely it feels. I get that that’s part of the point, but after a while it begins to feel really quite oppressive.

Having never owned an Xbox, I never really played any Halo besides when I had a go with my brothers. But I have to say, the co-op multiplayer on Halo 2 (I think it was) was incredible.

Going into a room, he’d go left, I’d go right, and together we’d clear it out before moving to the next. It was great.

How dare you. Kurt died, what, ten years ago? Fifteen.

VERY RECENTLY

It does freeze, but I guess not that badly, and they hibernate anyway.

There are native British lizards. Though they are very small, and possibly only in the south.

I usually see a few sunbathing on rocks near where I work, just outside Southampton.

Also, slow worms are lizards. Legless lizards. Not snakes.

Laura Shigihara - Everything’s Alright from To The Moon.

That game made me weep like a baby, so even now, some ten years after playing it for the first time, that song still stirs up those feelings.

And for much the same reason, Daniel Lanois - That’s The Way It Is from Red Dead 2.

If you’ve played it long enough to hear that song, you understand.