Weapon degradation seems to be a serious and genuine complaint that a lot of people have with BotW and TotK but for some reason it never seemed to bother me as it has others. I totally understand the criticism but frankly I always had a full stock of good quality weapons - particularly with the Fuse function in TotK - and never ran low or out of decent weapons on hand.

I think they were implemented to try to force gamers to think about other options to take down enemies rather than brute-forcing every battle which appeals to me, but it seems to have angered a significant proportion of people. From my perspective, it helps to engender the puzzler aspect of Zelda games in a novel way - viewing battles as a puzzle to be solved for maximum efficiency rather than how well you can strike and dodge.

That depends - am I only physically attracted to them? The answer is no, whether or not they’re trans. Am I also attracted to their personality? Then yes, whether or not they’re trans.

It helps that I’m bi.

We were taught a similar trick in physics - point your right-hand thumb in the direction that current (or electrons, same same) is travelling and the curling of your fingers shows the direction of the resultant magnetic field that the current creates.

Agreed, but rather than take it to the tip (and therefore have to pay fees to dump anyway) just don’t put your name on the box. Be the anonymous hero that the council needs, but very much does not deserve.

So glad to hear their fundraising outstripped the fines! If council won’t reward them (as they so obviously should have), I’m glad that the people rallied to do so.

You’re totally right, but I wish we lived in a world where leaving your name on that box would lead to a reward rather than a punishment. I can’t understand a council wanting to not only fail to incentivise, but actively disincentivise works of public good, except that it gave them an opportunity to extract more revenue. It’s a really, really sad state of affairs.

I had a little chuckle-up myself

Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!

That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!

Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.

Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.

And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.

If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.

As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.

I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.

I always used to use a 3PA that had no ads or recommendations, just my own curated sub list, and I honestly loved that. There were definitely echo chambers but things worked well for me as long as I stayed conscious to that. Then when the APIpocalypse happened I browsed reddit on the web and in their official app for the first time in almost ten years and just noped right the fuck off.

At one point in my feed it went:

• Ad
• Suggested Subreddit
• Ad
• Suggested Post
• Post from subscribed feed
• Ad
• Suggested Post

Like, only 1/6 items were things I had actually asked to see. It was atrocious. Default reddit is absolutely cancer now, and I really struggle to empathise with people who are still using it vanilla without any extensions or domain changes.

I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.

I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?

Welp, looks like it’s gonna be yet another Ubisoft cash-grab. Yay.

That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.

…does the chicken’s power level need to be over 9000 in order to be safe to eat?

Yeah, I’d almost say it’s an essential purchase. I buy a fair few online titles and I’ve found my 128Gb SD to be a bit lacking. I’m considering upgrading to a 256Gb or 512Gb but they’re still too expensive at high transfer rates.

If you have to choose between capacity and transfer rate for an SD card for a Switch, go for transfer. I had an old slow card and that was abhorrent for load times and stuttering on games that were stored there.