That’s a shame to hear, but I respect the need to prioritise yourself. Take care, and enjoy Christmas.

Unfortunately, in the absence of good information to the contrary, my default assumption is now that most major games under production are contaminated, until there is clear consensus otherwise.

You’re not listening to your users, and insisting on adding unwanted AI features to Firefox. You’ve seen the backlash, had days to course correct, but appear to be pressing ahead regardless.

Good luck getting donations from alienated former users. I’m busy evaluating other browsers this morning.

The statement indicates that this will be on by default. User consent is not requested or respected, and users have to actively opt-out of it.

That’s fundamentally at odds with their claims to respect user trust, and the tone is one of “it’s happening whether you want it or not”. Where’s the trust?

This cartoon gets more and more relevant with every passing day

I also realised on the drive home that, out of my “big four” early musical influences (Republica, Garbage, The Offspring, and Green Day), I’ve now seen all four of them at least once in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

This is the very reason I despised the idea of the Solo movie so much.

I’m not necessarily opposed to a good prequel (and quite enjoyed Rogue One), but New Hope Han is precisely the sort of shady, enigmatic character that really benefits from not having his story spelled out for you.

Thank you for this. I’m usually pretty functional, but have my limitations when stretched for an extended period. I always appreciate when someone can take something that I have some subconscious understanding of, and articulate it so well.

Sometimes I need that explicit reminder of why it matters.

That was what got to me more than anything else. They’re charging ridiculous money for the game, so damn right I expect Gearbox to do the work; That’s literally what we pay them money for.

I’m in no rush to play, so I’ll just wait for the price to fall to what the game is worth to me.

Now, if it was only third party integrations that broke, I’d be annoyed but at least a little understanding. When a change of email address results in breaking integration between two essential components of their own software stack, that guarantees some degree of muttered swearing on my part.

I was hoping for “not actively hostile or harmful”, even if they couldn’t undo decades of damage to the UK. That would have at least been a small step forward. Instead, we have a Labour party wilfully and gleefully choosing to hurt people.

No wonder their support has absolutely collapsed.

I’ve just had the terrifying realisation that they have created a machine designed to generate an endless stream of terrible ideas. They have created Wheatley.

Some unions are part of a Labour link scheme, where your union contributions partially fund the Labour Party. You can withdraw from this, to fund only campaigning by the union, rather than particular parties. In the case of Unison, there’s a form that you need to request, fill in, and return.

It’s also worth checking whether you’re a member or contributor through your union.

Agreed on availability. Sub 30-minute charges are fine, as long as you can pull into services, plug straight in, and leave the car to it. Likewise for hotels, and venue/event parking.

The problems come when you can’t just park and charge away from home, and have to wait, or go looking for chargers.

I reread some of Transmetropolitan last year. What stood out to me was that, even in that world of depraved presidents, the fact that one of the candidates was cutting deals with neo-nazis for votes nearly destroyed his entire campaign when it was revealed. Even Transmet fell short of the reality.

The same with the Andromeda galaxy map, full of star systems with basically nothing to do. They’d have been better off having fewer visitable systems with more focussed stuff to do, and saying “you can’t get to many systems yet because of the scourge”. Save the rest for the end game or sequel.

They didn’t really learn the lesson from this in Andromeda, either. The constant trekking back and forth across planets started to wear out its welcome a bit by the end of the game. Mechanically, it was great. There was just a bit too much of it, on a constant drip feed.

I’m intrigued by the custom wildcard dice system that I think Fantasy Flight used in some of their games. It took the ideas of “failure, with opportunities”, or “success, but with complications” and made them core game mechanics. I never played or ran those games, but always liked the idea.