Great recommendations. I’d add Planet Boelex, also ambient electronic artist. Most of his albums are available for free in bandcamp (Suunta and Misplaced Ep are excellent).

What on earth are you on about?

Even without a single “nepo baby writer”, many others wouldn’t get a chance for whatever reasons. Writing in general is such a competetive field that you’d be a fool to not use your connections and every possible chance in order to support yourself as a writer. And video game writers might even be first to lose their jobs to AI in the near future, who knows.

As flawed as the original is, it’s one of my all time favourites. To me there’s a perfect harmony between gameplay, graphics (art direction), music and atmosphere. The soundtrack is easily one of the best game OSTs of all time. The story isn’t deep but the characters are interesting and the world has so much potential. On the other hand I love its “cult” status, on the other there was a lot of lost potential for a truly exceptional game franchise.

Catalyst is… not terrible. For me it’s just average and it never reaches that real Mirror’s Edge atmosphere of the original. It’s even worse today because it never got an update for PS4 Pro or PS5, so it looks kinda awful tbh, and I’m usually not too picky with graphics and fps stuff. Finished it once back then and tried replaying it a couple of years ago but dropped after a few hours.

I think you get a hundred free searches, then it’s about 13 EUR per month for unlimited searches. I’d recommend Startpage, it’s free and European.

Gaiman was one of my favourite authors for nearly three decades. It fucking sucks and of course what he did doesn’t change his works, but it’s hard to recommend them anymore. New York magazine published a damning article in January. It’s awful, nightmarish and absolutely vile, what he did to those women, and sometimes even his son was in the same room… The article does a great job at painting this picture of a sad, lonely man traumatised by his heavy scientology past and abusive father.

*abusive practices just say rape, that’s what it was. Neil Gaiman is a serial rapist. Also female employee = a homeless woman he and his wife “hired” (i.e. she didn’t get paid until it was time to get rid of her when it looked like she was going to contact the police) and sexually and emotionally abused over the years.

Austria is just magnificent, but the food… yeah it’s food. Italy on the other hand, magnificent AND has great food.

I’ve already deleted my last account (I used to make a new one every other year or so) so I don’t comment or post anymore, but I use it to find info just about anything - I still add “reddit” at the end of my search (I use Startpage, it’s great). Old habbits die hard. I made my first reddit account in 2011. I don’t feel too bad about it. It is what it is.

In Finland the Police has been demanding full access to fingerprints originally gathered for passports and IDs (of around three million citizens) which means that the police could use them for other than their intended purposes. AND it looks like the police is finally going to have their way in this matter. This is how a police state is build, one step at a time until it’s too late to complain.

The today’s “brave new world” will start turning into Orwellian Big Brother society. It’s already happening. Of course neither option is great but I prefer drugs, orgies and idiots to surveillance, absolute police state and slaves/prisoners.

I can think of a word no one’s brave enough to say…

As a former Kagi user (quit all my US company subscriptions recently in order to support EU) I’ve now used Startpage for a month and it has been great so far.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com

You’re not wrong but AI crap is still AI crap. (I get it, memes are memes etc etc…)

Look at the right hand, it has like two fingers/stubs. Or that “vehicle” in the background. All the details are completely off. I’ve been fooled by AI photos too, but this is not one of them.

Thanks for the reply! I was only aware of the CEO’s X comments regarding Trump’s politics. I JUST moved away from Google and have been quite happy with Proton, especially Mail and Pass.

Honest, stupid question: Why exactly is this such a big deal to so many of you? (I don’t use Mastodon.)

You’d have to be blind to think that’s not AI. The details don’t make any sense and the proportions are just weird.

For real, like some mermaid’s green nipples are described in more detail than the protagonist himself 🙄🙄

Sims 4 was already a PS+ game. Not that I ever played it but still…