If you think your car maintenance is a nightmare I've found out my brother, in trying to keep a cheap 100+ year old car on the road, is having to deal with a "porous block".
Where the metal in the car is now so old that fluids will just magically vanish or worse, mix together.
I was so used to walking and taking the tube/bus everywhere in London it bemused me when I'd encounter the "on their way to six figures" class my age who only ever used uber.
Probably arrived at the same time going between destinations but they'd rather spend £30 than £3 with a mild walk & queue.
Look forward to seeing those additional words! Hope there's not too many sleepless nights trying to figure out how to make the flavour text description of each faction's tier 3 farm building pop distinctly.
On similar lines I enjoy that Outkast's "Hey Ya" has fun with the fact people probably aren't paying attention to it being a sad song with the line "y'all don't want to hear me you just want to dance".
I stayed away from hybrids as my notion was they were expensive to fix and heavy (thus terrible mpg).
But a guy at work has had his since new in 2015, drives the 20 or so miles to work on electric and charges from any old plug. 217k miles and still going strong with minimal maintenance! Tempting!
Have always bought used cars, so not sure when car makers shifted from selling cars with greedy prices to selling terrible greedy rental schemes disguised as buying.
Looking at hybrids/evs and it's awash with "x amount a month for 3 years, limited to y amount of miles, then £30k lump sum needed".
A screenshot of video game Esoteric Ebb displaying a successful skill check.
Esoteric Ebb out here with the important skill checks.
In race to the bottom advertising news Google will now suggest generated pictures to attach to your advertising campaign.
We have a sister company that does cleaning drones (basically a hovering pressure washer to get up high) and this is what they suggest we run ads with.
Start a semi-viral thread in advance of increasing absurdity about there being cheetahs and such at said birthday whilst you sit upon a throne, then have it escalate into the event actually happening. I hear that works.
I don't know how to explain the vibe of web comics 20 years ago to someone young today. Yeah you'd come for the main image but what you were really waiting for was to hover your cursor over it and indulge in that little quip of alt-text.
My sticker folder contains depths.
For the past 6 months I've been building and flying lightshow drones. If anyone's curious about it in general, want any at an event or to buy their own fleet I don't mind answering questions!
Suddenly my old Fiat Panda Dance's interior looks quite tame.
My two failed first years I didn't earn enough in my twenties to pay it down, and that £8k of debt has now ballooned into £17k in my mid thirties. Pretty galling I have more to pay back than wealthier friends! Also, a paycut for my thirties & forties doing equivalent work to my peers.
Can you say it truly held up well if you didn't claim to be special forces and then maintain that lie for two decades.
To me it was a fantastic evolution of British games journalism irreverency to web and online video formats. It's how I imagine PC Zone would've had an online presence if Future hadn't put it down behind the sheds.
I still think the memes around loss.jpg and the resultant abstract pattern is funny. Putting a serious arc in a very silly games comic is tonally wild! But having gone through two back to back losses now, I understand it more.
A weird invisible grief and not sure how to communicate it outwardly.
Losing our second so soon after the first, and to an ectopic, has been such a deep blow.
There's so much to say and I don't know how to say it. The only people in my social circles I know who've had losses eventually had successes, yet it feels isolating to be left with just the experience of loss.
I went to Vegas for a work trip last year and I'm still reconciling how lied to I feel by decades of media. Like expecting London but ending up in Blackpool.
I remember driving a 1 series bmw in the 2010s and it absolutely threw me off how little warning signs there were till no control on the rear axle for spinning out. Complacent of me!
I'm glad for borrowing my brother's beetles when I was 18, because it made me appreciate how precarious 70mph is.
Brendy has been a consistently funny and poignant voice in video game spaces for over a decade. It's exciting to see them involved in starting their own website (with other esteemed alumni) to really flex all that makes games writing great.
If you can, go support a cool thing at the ground level!
I love those little cultural differences and translation barriers. Like several languages not having a direct translation for "brother/sister" without including if they are older or younger.
I slightly miss when it wasn't as slick, for things like the Yakuza games having "Morning Glory Orphanage".
Someone I vaguely knew from school has gone on to have a successful historical career on Youtube/Nebula. They focus mainly on London & British history but with a particular mind towards poc, women & queer history. Could be up your street! nebula.tv/jdraper
youtube.com/@jdraper
I'm a proponent for it, but one time I was thankful for it at the extreme other end was the 2015 election where UKIP walked away with only 1 seat despite winning 13% of the vote.
It's so weird how a title filter tag for the camera perspective in adult films online has bled out into wider online video titling and memes, with many having no clue what the tag meant originally.
Been watching (for the 1st time) Hell's Kitchen on Prime and it's wild how much about the early seasons in the 00's feel archaic now.
It also comes with the bonus of looking up contestants 20-25 years after the show and seeing how many police mugshots there are since then (roughly 1-3 per season!).
I've been lucky so far that I've been able to stay on Adalimumab for Crohn's, but the NHS have swapped the brand making it 3 times now and I have to brace to adjust. Will this one cause a burning sensation on inject, am I going to react badly to this one etc.
One of my friends was at school with the lead actor of Eragon. (Allegedly) The guy blew all his movie money on drugs and built a bad reputation for being tardy on set, and has had to spend a lot of his adult acting life undoing that.
If 130ish people is 3 years banned from driving but not a lifetime I could reasonably drive into 1 person a week so long as I included week long rests inbetween.
Concept artistry has a real ebb and flow that helps nail down the feel of a game, it should be one of the earliest ports of call for fresh creativity in a project.
For 15 years my laptop's homescreen has been a piece of Bioshock concept art, it's sad that future games will generate nothing similar.