Bees are way weirder than we give them credit for!

Perhaps you may or may not enjoy ~~Space Asshole~~ Red Faction: Guerilla. It's a 2009 game that got a solid enough PC port that may run on weaker systems. There's a remastered version but if you're aiming for low-spec the original might be a better bet.

Anyway, it's an open world set on Mars and you go around wreaking havoc and blowing up buildings with ahead-of-its-time physics/destruction mechanics. The combat is more like a shooter and you play with lots of explosives. It's not a huge map by standards today but is a big enough playground to keep one occupied.

I test drove Heliboard the past week and I quite liked it, especially the customization options. I've been trying to escape Gboard for years but viable options with swipe typing support are few and far between.

Unfortunately, the lack of Japanese input makes it a total non-starter for my use case so I had to go crawling back.

It's a fairly common type of cat toy...

The weirdness was so perfect and that personality and flavor is completely lacking in Skyrim. There was so much more variety in items and the unique stuff was great. This really enriched the storytelling and made for a lot of memorable moments. One of my favorites is when you're just walking through the world and an NPC just falls out of the sky, hits the ground, and dies. Then you loot his corpse, get his unique item of super jumping, and probably 99% of players immediately try it out, launch into the stratosphere, and splat like a tomato in exactly the same fashion. Or there were the unique boots that massively increased your running speed, but made you blind. Crafty players could leverage magic resistance to reduce the blinding effect and basically zoom around at superhuman speed with sunglasses on. Magic actually felt magical, compared to Skyrim where it amounts to little past being a source of damage. The system was designed to allow you freedom and find ways to surpass human abilities, and I think the world of the newer games is conversely designed to limit you as much as possible. No spellcrafting, extremely limited enchantments, few summoning options, no levitation, and the scaling system actually disincentivizes leveling. All the gear is essentially the same. It's a tragedy.

Now if you N'wahs will excuse me I have some clouds to yell at.

Yes, how generous of WB to allow it to be released slightly before binning the whole thing for a tax writeoff. How dare we not properly consume and obey!

The low quality parts thing can't be overstated. The original DS was really the last "Nintendium" quality hardware in my book. The DS Lite had a ton of issues people tend to forget about. Extremely flaky shoulder buttons, yellowed screens, and cracked hinges were not a question of if, but when. Mine lasted about 6 months before the R button stopped working reliably. The first generation 3DS was a step back in the right direction, and mine is still going strong, but the circle pad longevity is dubious and the bottom screen plastic scratches if you look at it wrong. Then came the New 3DS, which looked good on paper but the New 3DS LL was a huge disappointment. The backplate cracks around the screws, the hinge has tons of flop in it, and within a year the paint and coating was flaking off of the top shell leaving a ~2cm patch of bare metal. Then came the Switch, with the lowest quality sticks I've ever seen. Even my Switch Pro Controller drifts like crazy.

Knowing Nintendo the Switch 2 will already be obsolete at launch and power users will get better performance emulating the damn thing on modern hardware instead. Fool me twice, I, uh, won't get fooled again, or something.

If you're not already a native I think you've earned the status of honorary Wisconsinite Cheesehead for your dedication.

Those are travertine terraces, minerals deposited by hydrothermal processes. it says they're in Yellowstone so I would guess it's around Mammoth Hot Springs.

At least it's nice to see them sticking with George Carlin's nomenclature.

Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite."

I hope the additional usefulness of bandages brings a very welcome uptick in support players looking for resupply points. Most classes can only carry a few and they'll run out even faster now. At least, I hope so. I was having a hard time successfully playing as anything other than medic, and found myself frequently completely empty without a single ammo box for miles.

I'm in central Japan and this summer has been by far the worst in the 9 years I've been here. Energy prices are also through the roof right now since TEPCO chose to slander and FUD nuclear energy instead of admitting that their chain of penny-pinching, engineer-ignoring poor decisions was ultimately responsible for the Fukushima meltdown. I suspect a lot of people, particularly the elderly, are going to be squeezed past the breaking point as electric bills are doubling and tripling and air conditioning becomes an unaffordable luxury.