Your kid’s first musical instrument. It’s counterproductive and false economy to buy them a piece of shit guitar or tuba or whatever it may be, in the belief that “if they like it and want to continue with it, I’ll buy them a better one in the future”. You might well turn the kid off the instrument for life if their instrument is harder to play/maintain and worse to listen to than it ought to be.

If you want your kid to be enriched by music and to be creative, buy them a decent mid-range instrument. Make it so that the kid can’t wait to pick it up, don’t make those crucial early days of learning the instrument feel like eating watery gruel for months with an expectation of pizza at some point down the line. A shitty instrument will be an additional barrier the kid will need to deal with every time they use it. Get out of their way, buy them something serviceable. If they lose interest regardless, well at least you know they had a fair shot at it and it wasn’t the crappiness of the instrument that caused them to abandon it. And you can always sell or donate the instrument if they really don’t give a shit about it.

The best instrument you can reasonably afford is significantly more likely to hook your kid than a £50 piece of junk would. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to be well-made, pleasant to play, and easy to tune/maintain/clean/whatever the case may be.

I can’t help but pronounce it like a Slavic surname.

The use of apostrophe’s to denote plural’s need’s to stop. I will dispatch a syphilitic spidermonkey to fuck your face in your sleep if you do that shit when talking to me.

Lose the ‘infinite growth’ promise to shareholders (in fact, lose the whole shareholder thing entirely). That’s the root of all evil right there. It’s the cause of all woes suffered by gamers, devs and even the very sociopathic CEOs who think Epic exclusivity is a sound financial strategy. We all suffer for it, and all to benefit shareholders who, in 2024, still believe the lie that next year’s profits will exceed this year’s. It’s delusional, and even if it weren’t, it would quite literally be cancerous. Cancer is just a board of shareholders in a biological system.

If they had added fast travel, it would have been a really solid game (to me, at least). The excruciatingly-long driving sessions were interminable, and it was this that made me abandon the game in the end, even though I was already about 2/3 of the way through it. The characters, acting and story were really good.

It’s quite repetitive, but no more than any other middling open world game. I happen to enjoy stealthily murdering people with a giant combat knife, so the repetition didn’t bother me. The constant criss-crossing around the map to go to/from objectives bothered me a lot. 90% of the checkpoints in each quest could have been a phone call.

I wonder if there’s a mod that lets you teleport to map markers 🤔 If so, I would play the game again.

Why do all of this dude’s video thumbnails look like the creepy waxen models on Kinder products?

Both child abuse and animal abuse are treated far too leniently by the law. This guy should never be released.

I like how an orgy of indiscriminate mass murder of men, women, children and dogs requires a “mastermind”.

It’s depressing that bleating “free speech” has become a shibboleth, betraying the speaker’s tedious far right contrarianism and a wish to express it without consequence. Racists, Nazis, x-phobes, bigots of all stripes; these are your target audience when your primary objective for your platform is supposedly “free speech”, especially when it’s in opposition to the censorship of your users’ bigotry on other platforms. I wish it weren’t so, but it fucking is, 100% of the time.

It’s like on reddit, when you discover a splinter sub called r/FunSubReborn or something, where they post the same content as r/FunSub, but in this “reborn” sub you can also be an unmitigated cunt in the comments and make racist or phobic remarks without getting banned.

Tedious, tiresome, clueless wankers.

Blowing off steam.

Lovely, warm, childhood trauma steam.

He says that, but has no problem issuing pardons, which is about as king-like as it gets. It circumvents the legal and judicial structure of the entire nation, and he can do so on a whim. It’s true that, unlike Trump, he’s only pardoned people deserving of pardons, but that’s not really the fuckin’ point, is it?

I wish Linux weren’t completely fucking impenetrable for casual users.

(from Perplexity AI)

Photosynthesis? How does that work?

Removed by mod

Congratulations, completing a game and getting it out the door is no mean feat!

Imagine using Chrome in 2024.

Recently re-watched the Prince Andrew BBC interview, and it is just wall-to-wall question dodging:

https://piped.video/watch?v=QtBS8COhhhM

Rather appropriately, allowing Elon Musk’s crew to operate on your brain is proof that you do indeed need brain surgery.