First two books of ASoI&F were pretty good, I thought. Then the rest were just him writing himself in circles, ever more slowly. Then the TV adaptation came out, to initially great acclaim, and then ended with a damp fart.

Yes, there were more problems with the end of the show than just his plot, or lack of it, but I can’t see that the ending will be redeemed without substantial changes, and his skills as a writer don’t really extend to “writing towards the desired ending”.

I think if we do ever get a conclusion to the book series, it will be written by someone else; I believe he’s left instructions to destroy all his notes and work-in-progress when he dies?

It does just fine for claiming the free games and then otherwise ignoring the Epic store, which is perfection. Think I’ve installed about one out of fifty or so I have available, but the important thing is that Tim doesn’t receive a penny.

Fine Young Cannibals?

Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.

Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn’t be bothered moving it - load times were good, but “fog doors” appear over doorways and cave entrances while they’re being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.

It isn’t a problem; mote has misunderstood the law.

https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives

“Illegal without good reason.” You are most definitely allowed to buy kitchen knives to take home with you; trying to take them into a football game will be frowned upon, though.

Police are usually fairly sensible about it. I’ve got friends that do medieval reenactment that have been stopped with cars full of longswords and crossbows. Show them your event tickets and some of your other gear, you’ll be waved on your way.

A three-inch blade is allowed provided it doesn’t lock in place; as long as it just folds away (like a swiss army knife) then it’s fine. Three-inch butterfly knife will get you in a lot of bother, though.

One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.

Some people dual-boot to play games with anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux, so a recent “AAA multiplayer” release might skew the numbers for a bit as people boot Windows instead.

Linux installations are slightly higher in the US than in Europe, and much much higher than in China. The “use of Linux online” has a bit of a sinusoidal pattern every day depending on who’s awake. But a big Chinese release - Fallen Feathers, for example - will suppress the Linux percentage for a while as well.

Steam do publish the number of concurrent users as well, it should be possible to multiply through to get roughly the “absolute numbers” you want. I think they publish the numbers of players online for multiplayer games too, and since those are the games that Linux will be locked out of, it might be possible to point fingers at the specific games causing the problems?

I do miss the two-player mode of Lemmings on the Amiga. Amiga could support a mouse in every port, so you could both use a mouse while battling each other. One player needing to use a joystick on ‘every other platform’ (which for Lemmings, was every other platform in existence at the time) was vastly inferior.

Basically every other computer either only supported one mouse, or all mice moved the same pointer.

Not saying that this is a generally useful feature, and networking has improved to the point where split-screen games are rare, and in an era where most games have console ports then mouse-control multiplayer games are unusual, but you know. Niche usages.

If you’ve unlocked the “rare achievements showcase” on your profile, presumably using the desktop app, then it appears on your profile on the mobile app, too.

Behold! Not even getting all that far in They Bleed Pixels is my finest achievement, with only 1.1% of other players managing the same. What you need to do is focus on games that are old and unreasonably bastard hard, and rare medals can be yours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin

The three wheels and the fibreglass construction meant that it was light enough to count as a tricycle, so that you could drive one on a motorcycle license rather than a full driving license. Plus they sip quite gently at the petrol by the standards of the 1970s. You still saw a few on the roads when I was growing up in the 80s, but it’s been a long time.

The thought of doing 85 mph in one of them is enough to make me fill my trousers, though. Couldn’t pay me enough.

Don’t take your bad day out on me, sunshine ;-)

I’d probably recommend mint cake for the hiking, it’s traditional, but that’s because it’s calorie dense. And tasty.

Would probably recommend anyone on a diet to stay on the left-hand side, you’ll feel full faster. Obviously, poor people on a diet, bottom left. Bit more disposable income, top left.

If you’re poor, eat stuff near the bottom. It will cost less for your daily requirements.

If you’re going hiking, eat stuff on the right. You won’t have to carry so much to meet your daily requirements.

Your daily calorie requirements vary based on how active and how big you are. The chart for men and women based on height is basically the same line; the average woman’s requirements are lower since they’re smaller on average, but we’re made out of the same stuff and need the same food.

As a diabetic, I would like this chart, but instead showing carbohydrates v. dietary fibre for common foods, so that I’d know what’s best to eat without spiking my blood sugar.

Suspends disbelief a little that the food is still rotting in centuries-old dungeons. Maybe should have some completely dried-out fungus in the vague shape of the food, that collapses into dust when your presence moves the air that’s sat motionless for decades.

Not that the DnD economy makes any sense anyway, of course. Bret Devereaux, in amongst his other excellent writings, did an excellent explanation of why “gold currency” wasn’t a thing in historical times; he’s written specifically about BG3’s armour problems as well.

Was in the Steam sale recently - bought it, completed it. It’s pretty good - revisits a lot of MI1 and 2 with the hindsight that comes with age. There’s a lot to like, but it’s also fairly blatantly unfinished, some of the puzzles seem like placeholders for the much bigger puzzles that ought to be there, if you see what I mean?

It’s not quite as good as any of the original trilogy, but it’s not far off. Massively better than 4, obviously. I quite enjoyed the Telltale ones, tho - the episodic structure forced them to keep the puzzles tight, and they had some really good moments.

Can’t comment on the Lemur Pro, but the Pulse has an excellent screen. Was wanting more pixels than a 1080p screen but 4K incurs ridiculous cost and tends to be available on “laptops that don’t fit on your lap”. 2880x1800 @ 120 Hz means your fonts look really crisp and updates are smooth.

When my Tuxedo Pulse arrived, I turned it on once to marvel at the fact that it started up straight into Linux. Then restarted it to install Arch btw and never looked back. Fantastic laptop, tho.

I’ve found that the real problem is having a television to plug them in to. Still got my old NES and SNES from when I was a kid. But no modern TV has the RF input to connect them to, they’re all digital only. Emulation is much easier.

Not arguing that you can get slightly better performance for a slightly lower price, but that’s a substantially larger machine. The Steam Machine is little bigger than its controller in any dimension and easy to hide on a shelf; that Q300L is definitely a small desktop. It has niceties like HDMI CEC, so that it can wake your TV when you start it up from its controller. And it’s whisper-quiet.

$70 extra for a really living-room ready games machine does not seem at all unreasonable to me, plus it turns up ready-assembled. If I had to replace my gaming desktop, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. Replacing my gaming desktop would cost about twice what I originally paid for the damned thing as well, but that’s a different matter.

Assuming that these have fairly impressive 100 MB/s sustained write speed, then it’s going to take about 93 hours to write the whole contents of the disk - basically four days. That’s a long time to replace a failed drive in a RAID array; you’d need to consider multiple disks of redundancy just in case another one fails while you’re resilvering the first.