There is a local service/app in my city called Yuze. It has only a small selection of restaurants. The service the app has is pretty basic: you order food and it gets brought to you by a handful of (employed!) riders. No in-app tip BS, no hidden service charges - it’s great! Haven’t used Lieferando (takeaway.com’s name in Germany) in forever. Downsides: the food selection is limited and the restaurants tend to be on the more pricier side.

It’s like falling asleep while two friends are talking on the other end of the room.

Na, no rose colored glasses needed! The first Golden Sun is one of my favorite top down “classic” jrpg. I replayed it a couple of years ago on my old Ds (the one where you can play your Game Boy Advance games) and it aged really great!

Knowledge Fight! Pretty much the only I regularly listen to. It’s two friends listening to Alex Jones. The premise is that one of them knows nothing about the insane stuff Alex Jones spouts and the other one has researched it and kinda shows it to Jordan (the one who knows nothing about Alex). They are hundreds of episodes and the show is still as funny and informative as day one.

No Mans Sky still to this day sells pretty good. Sure, they don’t sell a million copies every week but Hello Games is pretty small and they can comfortably keep pumping out content even if they only sell, say, 15k per month. And given how NMS is still talked about so frequently, how they launched for the Switch recently (my second copy btw) and how well received the VR was, I think that number is pretty reasonable.

Yeah, I saw Kindergarten Cop too!

After the WiiU? Nah man, the Wii was already way behind the rest and from then on out they stayed a generation worth of graphical development behind.

I honestly don’t mind that at all but I am also not the target audience for the latest and greatest in graphics. I love a great indie roguelike just as much as “complete editions” of triple A games from a couple of years ago.

The two (also slightly different names) I see on my Spotify have a “Viral songs on tiktok” playlist in their profile. So it’s probably a way to spread/spam songs around?

It’s not like Borderlands, where there is a infinite amount of new but also more ore less the same weapons with differing numbers! You can upgrade (called tinkering) any weapon with money. It costs more with each upgrade and only upgrade it five levels above your own, so you can’t just grind money and get overpowered. But yeah, you can finish this game with one gun you like!

I am close to finishing The Outer Worlds. The game has a somewhat mixed reception when it comes up in discussions online and I think it’s mostly because the developer Obsidian made New Vegas and Outer Worlds apparently is the worse game. So, I never played New Vegas and therefore can’t compare the two. I do enjoy my time with Outer Worlds very much!

• it’s basically the same formula as Fallout 4 but in a humorous space setting with better gunplay. Or, alternatively Borderlands with a ton more talking and decisions and worse gunplay. In any case a lot of shooting and looting.
• different builds are possible but not as significant different as in Borderlands. But since it’s not a massively big game it didn’t matter that much to me. After a couple of changes I kinda kept investing mostly in my handgun, my companions and personality skills to pass more skillchecks.
• what I like: the stories the game tells! Be it the main quest line or quests for factions or your companions. All have a nice sense of humor to them without getting too silly. For example there is a dude in a wurst factory and you get sent there to end whatever he is doing there (hint: it’s more than producing wurst from spacepigs). And there are a number of ways you can approach this: guns blazing, trying to sabotage the factory or sneak in and just kill the guy.
• also: great soundtrack and overall sound design! The jingle that plays when you level up is just great!
• also: while not a massive big game there are a lot of different places to go and explore. From abandoned settlements in some sort of desert to a big city where only rich people live and everything in between.
• meh: so many drinks, lotions and food items that give you different boosts. Problem is that there are so many different items it’s hard to keep track which one does what. I abandoned pretty much all of them and only kept Adreno (restores energy).
• meh: fast travel can be annoying because most of the time you have to fast travel back to your ship and then from there select another planet/spacestation and then land your ship and then again fast travel to wherever you need to go to. So it’s potentially three (not very long, though) loading screens if you need to go someplace different.
• decisions do matter in quests but the general direction of the story is set.

I say: if you like stuff like Fallout, Borderlands and generally combat heavy action rpgs, this game may be right up your alley. And since it’s kinda old at this point it’s also pretty cheap most of the time.

Yes! Truly a unique movie. The paparazzo fly eating literal shit will stick with me for the rest of my life!

I played Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells combined at least 150h and only a bit of BOI. I know that in RL the shtick is that with every new run another one of your family is the character. And in Dead Cells you just use a new body every run. The stories in those games aren’t very elaborate and the games would just be as good as they are without story.

Hades is different in that the story parts of the game are an important part of the experience (you go around and get to know a lot of different characters and find different ways to upgrade stuff) and that the main character Zagreus doesn’t really die - he is also a god. When you lose all hp you just get transported back to Hades and almost everyone there has new tings to say and the relationships develop over time.

I don’t know how to explain it better but the main idea of a roguelite is clearly there the execution is way more elaborate and story heavy than RL, DC or BOI. Slay the Spire is on my imaginary backlog of games in need to play before I die.

Hades! Whenever you die, you get reborn in the “house” of your father Hades. Dying and being reborn is an integral part of this game and is what keeps the story going. You also get to upgrade and unlock weapons that way. Highly recommend this game if you like fastpaced and smartly designed action games!

To me personally: Google and their Pixel phones! I am now on my 3rd Pixel phone (3a, 4, 7) and each and every one of those phones where just really good phones! Great build quality, features that worked and great cameras; I had other phones that I liked a lot (most notably the Oneplus 3 and to a certain degree the Oneplus 1) but none of them felt so well rounded as my current Pixel 7. I have to use a midrange Samsung for work and it is just awful compared to the also midrange Pixel 3a I had! One lags constantly, installs the same bloat everytime I update it, takes average to bad photos and is missing stuff I have come to appreciate on my phone. My old 3a was working until just recently and until the end it just felt smooth to use it.

I guess Apple should be mentioned too. Not a fan personally but their hardware is really well made and a lot of people love ios.

I checked Hexbear a couple of times in the last weeks and although they brand themselfs as some lefty/communist/socialist community, I always thought it felt more like some edgelords being against for the sake of being against. Also the tone is pretty rude and made me think of certain Subreddits I usually avoided back when I was on Reddit.

I don’t know you or your general taste in music but if you ever want something a bit more modern yet als doing the ‘start slow until you made a wall of sound out of it’ thing, I highly recommend you check out the band Motorpsycho! Pretty much every album they made in the 90s and early 2000s have always at least one great song which will build and build and build up to a great crescendo. Their other stuff is absolutely great too! Their song Vortex Surfer got played for 24 hours on new years eve (I think it was 99 to 2000) on a Norwegian radio station.

Swimming. My brother in law is from India and he never learned how to swim due to him growing up in a place with only one extremely dirty river and no other lakes or swimming pools near his family. Apparently no one in his family can swim. He kinda can swim now but it still looks funny. A bit like I must have looked from the outside when I learned to swim - as a six years old. I always found this very odd because the dude is smart, hard working and has a degree but it took years and him becoming a dad to realize that swimming is something pretty much everyone can.

We have one of those. It’s called “Sparschäler” over here in Germany. I have no idea how to translate it but maybe “a thing that peels and saves as much of the veggie in the process” or savingspeeler?? Whatever, my point is: those little teeth are something else! I got them stuck in the skin of my fingers/hand so often, I got another one without the teeth. The one without teeth isn’t as effective (especially when I peel carrots) and cuts more off the vegetables I peel. Feels smoother, though!

Yeah, except for mashed potatoes the skin stays on.

I mean, if you phrase it that way, sure. Just a dude in his spare room. But then again, aside from the fact that he makes probably 20 000 dollar a month alone from his Patreon, almost everyone who is interested in video games knows this man’s name for way over a decade. More like two decades, actually. And while he certainly hasn’t anywhere near the same visibility as he had at Gamespot or Giantbomb, way more of the people who do follow him, actually pay him money directly. Reach alone isn’t what’s important these days. And yet, Jeff still has the potential to influence a lot of people who do not directly give him money. He also has a podcast, he streams and has 170k follower on Twitter. And if he has a very contrarian take on something, it will get noticed. Maybe not as much as 15 years ago but still noticed.

A bit of a ramble, sorry! I guess it triggered some memories of me listening to Giantbomb with him, Ryan, Vinnie, Alex and Brad while going to work or cleaning the house. Bombcast was pretty much the first podcast I regularly listened to.