I just recently started it for the first time.

If you’re into this sort of game, it’s really good. I haven’t exactly played a ton of similar games to compare it to, but it’s pretty hard for me to imagine a game that would do what it does better. I think if it had launched in the state it’s currently in it would have absolutely blown peoples minds when it launched a decade ago.

Also since it is, at its core, a decade old game, it runs really well on my computer which is mostly made up of 10+ year old components (and on linux! I did have a little audio stuttering issue that was fixed by just adding a launch option in steam, pretty sure that was just a quirk of my particular hardware)

The story is a little weird, not bad, just maybe not what I would have chosen if I was the writer, and the story is secondary to the building and exploration in this kind of game anyway.

I could nitpick some things about the UI if I really wanted to, and the usual issues with procedurally generated content where you have a big universe to explore but it feels kind of empty (which is also kind of the point) and some of the planets start feeling kind of the same after a while.

How picky are you about graphics quality and what games do you intend to run?

I have a bit of a franken-PC I’ve cobbled together mostly from spare parts from my wife’s upgrades to her own rig and some other bits I’ve gotten good deals on here and there. It’s got an old AMD FX-6300 CPU, and a 2060 I snagged from a friend for cheap. And as of a few months ago I hopped from windows to mint.

And I’m happily running most of what’s out there. It definitely struggles with newer AAA games, I’m not a graphics snob but I do sometimes need to turn down the graphics settings lower than I’d like, some games have atrociously long loading times, etc. and I’m sure there’s a couple resource-hungry games I just straight-up wouldn’t be able to run

But for my standards and the games I play, I find it to be a totally acceptable gaming rig.

So if I were in your shoes I’d totally go for it. It’s not always about having the most optimized powerhouse rig, it’s about playing games.

No, but it is important if you’re trying to record video of police brutality and such which is where my concerns lie about how these laws could be twisted

I think the same concerns still apply, if you can’t post that video anywhere it doesn’t do much good for you to record it.

I don’t know what the existing laws in the UK look like,

In general though, in the US, it’s usually legal to film things that are happening in public places, that’s part of what’s (supposed) to protect us from stuff like filming ICE agents.

Now of course, I’m not saying that it’s not important to do something to protect people from creeps recording them and posting them online without their consent

But I also feel like this is the kind of law that needs to be crafted very carefully to make sure that it’s not going to infringe on legitimate reasons people may have to record people in public. I could absolutely see Republicans here twisting a law like this that was made with good intentions to go after people for posting videos of ice arrests online.

Even the UK has started flexing authoritarian lately

It’s wild to me that people think this is a new thing for the UK

Maybe it’s the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I remember seeing memes about there being CCTV Camera everywhere there going back probably about 20 years

It’s not exactly a secret that they don’t have the same sort of rights to free speech as the US

A whole house of their parliament is specifically reserved for essentially nepo-babies

Their gun and knife laws are restrictive enough that I’m pretty sure even the most ardent anti-gun nut could probably find something that they think is at least a little excessive if they really looked into it.

Every few years I hear about them trying some new way to restrict who can access what on the Internet.

I haven’t heard it much in a while, maybe because of brexit, but for a while it sure as hell seemed to be like a lot of people from the UK were talking about people from countries like Poland in much the same way Americans talk about Mexicans.

It’s not exactly an accident that books like 1984 and v for vendetta were written by British authors and set there. Or that punk became so big there.

Look, I’m in the US, I don’t have a whole lot of room to be throwing stones here. A lot of my criticism applies to stuff going on here too. But it certainly doesn’t surprise me that the UK is skewing pretty fashy these days. That writing has been on the wall for a long time.

Not sure if it was possibly edited, but OP did specify remake or sequel

The big Lebowski kind of has a sequel in The Jesus Rolls

It’s a popular theory that a lot of Tarantino movies take place in the same universe, and other of his movies are movies that exist in that universe, like Kill Bill may be the pilot that Mia Wallace starred in. I don’t believe any of that is outright confirmed, but again kind of a sequel if you buy into that theory.

There was a Napoleon dynamite cartoon series made at one point if you want to count that

Forest Gump was based on a book, and there was a sequel book made- Gump & Co, and I never read it myself but I’ve been told that the sequel book is actually more of a sequel to the movie than to the original book

By most measures, I’m a pretty stereotypically “manly” guy, and you can say pretty much the same thing about most of my male friends.

I’ve never really felt as though a woman being present in any way impeded anything we were doing. If anything it improved things in a “the more the merrier” kind of way. As long as they’re ok with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, having to pee outside, etc. anyone is welcome to participate in our bullshit.

But I do feel like we can get in the way of women bonding and venting it the ways they need and want to. The old “it’s not about the nail” kind of thing.

And of course, there’s a whole lot of guys who are just dangerous toxic assholes who probably shouldn’t be allowed to be around women in general, but trying to figure out which ones can and can’t be trusted is a tall order and it’s a lot easier to just say “women only.”

So I don’t really see much point in men-only spaces, but I do see it for women-only spaces.

There’s some exceptions, sure, like men who have certain kinds of trauma that involve women may need some safe places to work that out. And it’s not that women can’t also be dangerous, toxic assholes, but in terms of numbers, severity, and actual risk, things are kind of on a different level than with men, so it’s easier to deal with that on a case-by-case basis.

I mean they’re cool, but they’re not that cool.

They’re only rad-ish.

I’m also dipping my toes into 40k lore

It kind of depends on what factions you care about, and what kinds of stories you like to read, this is pretty much where I’m at.

The horus heresy - I’m still working my way through this, there’s a ton of books and stories, not all of them are necessarily worth it and some of them kind of rehash some of the same events from different perspectives. Read the first 3 or 4, then you can kind of skip around until the end, there’s a few suggested reading lists floating around online to help you decide what you want to read. The heresy takes place 10k years before the main 40k universe, so it gets you a solid primer on why the universe ended up the way it is.

Pretty much all of the eisenhorn stories are pretty good, and get you a bit away from the giant battles with space Marines and such so you can get more of a feel for what else is going on around the imperium.

Pretty much anything written by Dan Abnett is pretty good, he’s pretty widely accepted to be one of the better and more consistent 40k writers. There’s some valid criticism of him, I won’t pretend he’s the world’s best writer, but pretty much everything he’s done is readable and enjoyable.

If you like orks (I like orks) Brutal Kunnin’ and Da Big Dakka are both fun reads, and Mike Brooks seems to get orks and other xenos pretty well.

That’s about where I’m at personally. Not too sure where I’ll go from here, I got a ton of the heresy left to get through still, and besides that I’ll honestly probably just grab whatever happens to catch my eye at a book store or library

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Look, I know a lot of you Lemmy armchair animal behaviorists have a lot of opinions about crates, so enlighten me, assuming that, like most people who aren’t wealthy, we couldn’t afford to put our lives on hold to stay home for probably months to work him through these issues, what could we have done?

Allow him to destroy everything in our house and probably injure or kill himself before too long?

And the basement, while not exactly finished, wasn’t a totally unfinished space either, and this was a fairly large house, I know people with small rancher houses comparable in square footage to that basement. It wasn’t some small dank dungeon.

One summer we adopted Scrappy

A friend of a friends daughter had him at college but could not longer keep him.

He was a really nice dog, some mystery combination of lab and who-know-what

But she had him in a house with a few roommates who all had different schedules, and this dog had never really been left alone, plus he was in a new environment with new people.

First few days we had him there was always someone home with him. He was great, meshed right into our family.

Then we tried to leave him alone and we discovered this dog had massive separation anxiety. We weren’t gone for very long, maybe an hour, he destroyed a beanbag chair, and a bunch of blinds.

We tried crating him, he mangled the crate.

We tried locking him in the basement with some toys and such and this dog busted through the drywall to get out and cause havoc upstairs.

We got him over the summer, summer break was winding down and we knew we wouldn’t have the time to work with him on this. It broke our hearts but we had to give him back.

Last we heard, he was actually in training to be some sort of service dog, he was still pretty young and was a very smart well-behaved dog as long as someone was with him, and I feel like a situation like that where he could always be with his human was a great fit for him. I hope it worked out for him.

I’m wondering what exactly counts as a site for these purposes

I’ve been out of scouting for a long time now so I really don’t know how they’re working it

But I feel like different patrol areas at a lot of BSA summer camp sites probably offer more privacy and separation than there is at 2 adjacent sites at some non-bsa campgrounds.

I know at the summer camp my troop usually went to, you usually couldn’t really see or necessarily even hear what was going on in another patrol’s area, even though they were technically all part of the same site.

But at one state park we camped at a few times, we could pretty much see and hear everything that was going on in the adjacent group sites.

A big part of the problem with girl scouts, in my opinion, is that a lot of the time the troops are kind of temporary.

Usually group of girls and their parents (usually moms, who may or may not have any scouting experience of their own) start up a troop, more-or-less from scratch when the girls are brownie or daisy-aged, and then that’s pretty much it, they don’t really do any ongoing recruitment, it stays just those same girls until they all either quit or age out of the program and then the troop dissolves.

Meanwhile, the (boy scout) troop I came up through is going to be celebrating its 100 year anniversary in a year or two. They have a garage full of troop gear, money in the bank, and decades of institutional knowledge of how to be a scout and how to run a scout program. We had one or two kids whose or father and I think even grandfather had earned their eagle from the same troop, the current scoutmaster was in the troop a couple years before me and his kids are in it now, the one before him was already scoutmaster when I started before his kid was old enough to join and stayed on for a few years after his son aged out, and every year we got a new batch of kids joining, some years more than others sure, but there was always new blood coming in

So there’s a lot more continuity and something like generational wealth going on with the BSA. Girl scouts generally need to hit the cookies and fundraising hard because they’re often kind of starting from 0 (not that there isn’t some valid criticism about how the cookie sales work and how the money is distributed and used, but I don’t know enough about that to really go into it)

And as far as recruitment, boy scouts made it really easy to find a troop, there’s a website you can go on and find all of the ones near you, so if your kid just suddenly wanted to join, or if you moved and needed to find a new one it was dead simple to look that up. At least at the time when I was in, girl scouts didn’t really have anything similar, unless you were already in the know about when and where the existing troops met you were kind of SOL if you wanted to join one. I remember one of our leaders talking about some sort of community event they were trying to put together, they had some representatives from a couple other local organizations and other scout troops and such coming, and they wanted to see if any of the local girl scout troops would want to take part, but he just couldn’t get in touch with any of them, couldn’t find contact info, when he reached out to their local council they basically stonewalled him

And unfortunately just by the nature of it usually being the moms who are the involved parents with girl scouts as opposed to usually the dads, with boy scouts there’s often a bit less outdoorsy knowledge to build on (some of my best hiking/camping/fishing buddies are women, but until I was the one who started inviting them out, a lot of them had never done much that kind of thing, and unfortunately that’s not a terribly uncommon situation, whereas guys tend to be more likely to grow up doing that sort of thing with their dads)

All that said, I’ve known a decent amount of girl scouts, and while a lot of them got stuck with shitty programs, there were a handful that actually probably went harder than we did in boy scouts. The odds aren’t exactly in your favor of ending up in one of those girl scout troops, but with the right parents, kids, and resources they actually can put on a really good outdoor program (and their campgrounds are usually really nice as well) they just don’t have the systems in place to make sure that all of their troops are able to do that to the same extent boy scouts can.

It can be used as a heat source sure

But the thing that makes steel steel is that it contains carbon

Dig iron ore up from the ground, and it’s not going to have much if any carbon in it.

And unless you have some crazy particles accelerator/fusion reactor nonsense going on, nothing you do with just hydrogen is going to get carbon into that steel, because there’s no carbon in hydrogen either.

Coal, however, is mostly carbon, so using as the heat source naturally tends to add carbon into your iron to make steel.

There’s other ways of doing it, but at the end of the day most of them kind of rely on coal in one way or another at some point in the process because it’s a really convenient source of carbon.

The next best alternative is probably cutting down a bunch of trees to process into charcoal

Would be really damn cool to be able to suck CO₂ out of the air and use that carbon somehow, but to the best of my knowledge no one has figured out any efficient way to do that at scale.

I tend to reply “Thank, I grew it myself”