That’s great! Since most of the people I play with are scattered geographically we play with the app and I actually learned via the app before getting a chance to play it on the table. It’s definitely a game where a lot of thought has been put into the tutorials

It depends on the game, character etc. I mean I suppose it adds to the escapism slightly?

I play all sorts of different games though, some where you’re not given the choice (Life Is Strange for example) and I don’t feel like it’s that big a deal

I finished Consider Phlebas on my commute - I still don’t rank it quite as highly as the others but it came to life more at the end. My favourite bit was when Horza was trapped on the cannibal cult island. Completely irrelevant to the plot but some excellent wtf storytelling!

I only noticed this comment now, I’ve been reading the Culture series too - I enjoyed the world building in Consider Phlebas a lot but after a while I just wanted it to finish. So I skipped on and read a few others in the series then came back to finish it.

The Player Of Games was brilliant, enjoy!

I’ve been reading The Culture series by Iain M Banks. I gave up on the first book a while back, which I’ve heard is quite common, but I plan to go back and finish it.

I’ve just read The Player Of Games and Excession and both are exceptional.

I had no idea of this - I just googled it and it’s almost exactly like something out of the book.

I really enjoyed Yellowface, it’s a great read and a bit of a black comedy in places!

In my experience in my specific part of England that holds true - Aldi definitely seems a lot cleaner

Yeah it’s a real shame because from what I saw of the Artemis app it looked good as well. I hope the dev is ok.

Kbin definitely needs a decent app. The web app does the job but it can be a bit irritating as you say

So because I play a lot of games and read a lot of eBooks then I would say getting my first tablet was pretty great, even though it was a midrange one that was just thrown in to the deal when I was upgrading my phone and I probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise

It was a Samsung A8 from 2019, had about an 8" screen and I used it mainly as a kindle and games device. The games I play are mainly strategy or board games, but there were certainly some games that you wouldn’t necessarily think would cause a problem (Wingspan?) that would lag or crash. Since I review games it helped to have a second device to check things on, and a bigger screen is better.

Last year I upgraded it to a Samsung S8 which is a flagship. It’s a 10 or 11 inch screen which felt more unwieldy though I’m used to it now. It can run more things. It’s a really nice device. The screen isn’t actually OLED but feels like it, the quality is amazing. It actually came with a stylus which was a neat touch. The screen is good enough that yes I have found myself watching more TV on it.

However, when people say ‘productivity’, I don’t know really know what they mean by that tbh. I’ve got a work laptop for work. I’ve got my own laptop for other stuff. Do people mean drawing and things on tablets but that?

The worst thing to do would be an inorganic botch job on here to fill a gap when there’s no need, you can read that content elsewhere.

Anyway, it’s not an automatic guarantee of engagement or interaction. It’s purely a hack move.

I’m happy to use Reddit if I feel I can’t find anything to read on Kbin. You are allowed to use both you know?

I mean yeah I vape, that makes sense because it wasn’t the nicotine itself which was killing my lungs.

Apparently nicotine itself is as bad for you as caffeine, the worst thing about it is it’s insanely addictive without giving much of a high or anything in return…

That’s a very black and white way of putting it. As long as you’re an adult who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and you’re not spending hours obsessed with it I don’t think it’s unhealthy. The way you phrase ‘avoid it completely’ makes it sound like you’re going out of your way to avoid it already.

(I think the problems are coming through with the generation being ‘brought up on porn’, and thinking real sex is like it is in the videos online but that’s a different story really.)

Can cigarettes be used in a healthy way? Eh, only in very specific scenarios

Gonna have to bite and ask what very specific scenarios smoking could be healthy?

I’ve only heard of Mary Seacole out of the black Britons from history we’re expected to know of.

I actually googled the musician and he has a relatively interesting story but it’s also not at all surprising people don’t know who he is today - he had one piece which was very popular called the Feast of Hiawatha which according to Google was played regularly until 1939 and then doesn’t seem to have been revived. Seems he was much better regarded as a conductor.

Anyhow, historically this country’s establishment has made it hard for black people to get famous until the 20th century, something that this academic surely knows. She’s either naive or deliberately skewing her results for headlines by asking for names from a time when her top rankings include a Roman Governor!

See I got the impression when watching it was kind of like she was told to ‘just play it like you’re a female 10th doctor, yeah, that’ll do’. Which was really a shame because she could have owned her own character you know?

I actually thought her best episode was the one with the Daleks and the time loop in the warehouse (Eve of the Daleks I think). Her run got overshadowed by the whole timeless child thing which was more fanwank than anyone needed or asked for. Not that Moffat or Davies had individual episodes which were just as bad for continuity stuff but it felt like a lot of the 13th Doctor stories were arc obsessed. Maybe Flux didn’t help.

I mean that shows the self-awareness that he knew that that was part of the humour really!

Summer Lightning was one of my favourites. You can’t go wrong with that one.

I do quite enjoy Wodehouse for Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings although one unemployed summer spent a lot of time binge reading them and they become quite repetitive!

They’re doing a separate crusade against disposable vapes. If they’re going after smoking I’d imagine they’d be trying to encourage people to vape to quit.

It’s all hypothetical because it’s highly unlikely he’ll still be in power to put this plan in to action come the next general election

My sister still lives there and from what she says it’s not too difficult. Some VPNs work, others are on the ‘no longer work’ list and at big events they mysteriously stop working.

She’s not technically minded, she’ll just be using an app.