Not that I’m aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.

To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.

I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.

Switches Excel to scroll the sheet with the arrow keys instead of moving from cell to cell.

I’m pretty certain Excel supports scroll lock. It lets you scroll the sheet with the arrow keys instead of moving from cell to cell (also last time I tried you could go to the ribbon menu with the slash key, like in the good ol’ Lotus 123 days). Wouldn’t be surprised if it also works in other spreadsheet programs.

Dragon 32, if I recall correctly.

Mostly try to learn some basic (probably was too young for that), play some games, and try to get the cassette to work. It almost certainly wasn’t the right computer for a kid my age.

Later, if I recall correctly, some model of Atari ST, which again was mostly wasted, though it introduced me to graphics editing, and some 16MHz (with turbo on!) 286 computer with a 65MB hard drive and CGA graphics (later upgraded to EGA and eventually VGA, though that might have been with a later 486), which introduced me to DOS (and extended and expanded memory), WordStar, dBASE 3, Lotus123, LucasArts and Sierra adventures, Wing Commander, a multitude of CRPGs, and eventually Windows 3.x.

I didn’t really get online until I went to the university, back in the glorious days of Yahoo, and the much superior Altavista, surfing on Netscape, before Internet Explorer ruined everything.

There were some great SGI Indigo machines (my first contact with a Unix type OS) and a prehistoric VAX machine with actual dumb terminals (never saw the actual server, sadly) for us to practice with there at the university, though, so that was great (though it didn’t make up for the Pascal).

Judging by the pictures I’ve seen of the US, and google maps street view, more road, or parking lots. Sometimes, but not often, short stretches of sidewalk, often not wide enough to walk on safely, regularly interrupted by lampposts and whatnot.

It’s because the people leaving negative reviews now are the opposite of haters.

We’re the people who still gave a damn, who were willing to put the effort to play the game, who found at least part of it entertaining enough to keep playing despite all the frustrations, who dared hope that the next quest or world or NPC would bring back the feeling of playing the old Bethesda games.

We’re the people who the game finally managed to break despite how much we tried to enjoy it. Who gave up in frustration after the last crash made us lose all the time we’d spent customizing our ship (my case), who lost the will to play after realising we knew what we’d find behind that corner or locked door because we’d already encountered them half a dozen times in exact copies of the same building in half as many planets, who after weeks of trying to find the same sense of wonder we’d found in previous Bethesda games finally gave up after the umpteenth unfulfilling quest bland generic NPC, or cookie cutter location.

And we’re the people who, even after all that, still had enough respect for a company that had once made games we’d loved not to post a negative review… until, instead of acknowledging the game’s faults and trying to fix them, Bethesda started attacking reviewers for their opinions and defending their poor design choices.

Shut up, Todd.

Your game might have been a 6/10 ten or fifteen years ago, but today it’s just outdated in every single aspect.

Not only that, but its characters and quests feel generic and uninspired even when compared to older Bethesda games, and the little background stories that made them great (I still remember that guy falling from the sky just out of Seyda Neen all these years later) are not only entirely absent, but their absence is highlighted by the sheer generic blandness and emptiness of the planets and the cookie cutter repetition of the locations you find randomly scattered on them (often without any consideration for the planet’s nature or environment; I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve facepalmed after finding an outdoors lounging area with sandwiches and whatnot in planets with no breathable atmosphere; and the time Gopher found life in a cookie cutter cave in Earth’s moon without the game acknowledging anything about it just made me feel all kinds of vicarious embarrassment for your game).

And to top that off there’s the bugs (I posted my negative review out of frustration after the last time the game crashed before I could save after spending way too long modifying my ship with that extremely poorly designed ship editor interface — though even that isn’t as bad as outposts; I entirely gave up on those after the first attempt), and Bethesda’s apparent absolute lack of interest in fixing them…

Which gets me to the main reason people are shitting on your game, your company, and you personally now, Todd: the sheer Elon Musk levels of lunacy you and your company have displayed in response to the first wave of negative reviews by telling the reviewers their opinions were wrong, and the fact that said lunacy apparently takes precedence over fixing the damn bugs.

This is no longer about a mediocre poorly written and lazily designed game running like shit on a decades old engine that should’ve been ditched after Morrowind, this is about Bethesda jumping the shark and losing any respect its customers might have once had for a company that used to produce great games. We gave you another chance after the horse armour debacle. We stood by you when your games became formulaic generic fantasy with Oblivion and Skyrim, because the stories were still good. We gave you many chances, because we remembered the good old times and we naively hoped they could come back. And then you showed your true colours (admittedly for the nth time, but hope is hard to break) and outright told us our genuine concerns were, against all evidence (in the year of games like Baldur’s Gate 3!) wrong.

Fuck you, Todd. You ruined it. And it’s quite possible Bethesda will never recover.

Why have grass or dirt when you can have roads…? Grass and dirt sell no cars.

If it only was dihydrogen monoxide… these days they’re putting all kinds of chemicals in water… oxidane, hidrol, hydric acid, oxygen hydride, hydroxylic acid, hydrohydroxic acid (and a bunch of other acids, really), μ-oxidodihydrogen…

Not if the American automotive industry has anything to say about it. The whole country has been built around making walking impossible or too dangerous to attempt, just to maximise car sales at the expense of citizens’ freedoms.

You’d need more than two parties for that.

By any civilized standard democrat politicians are far right extremists (a few token exceptions are closer to right or even center-right on some points, but they have little effect on the whole). Republicans are outright deranged lunatics, mixed with a worryingly increasing percentage of fascists.

Removed by mod

I don’t suck as much at programming as I suck at everything else.

Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.

If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that’d be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.

Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can’t criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they’re just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.

Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn’t recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.

I’m not sure Townscaper can be called a game either, but it certainly is an excellent relaxing and enjoyable way to waste one’s time.

The question is how long that mindset will survive once Gaben leaves. Or dies.

We need to upload him into a GabenOS of sorts. To preserve the Valve mindset, and also for science.

Some neurotoxin and mass murder would be a small price to pay.

It’s the same engine Morrowind was on.

Horoscopes. Fortune cookies. Political speeches.