Blackmist

Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan's house for Christmas.

My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don't know if they're still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they'd be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.

They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went "what now?" and the older one just went "oh, nothing. It's gone." A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.

He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn't because he was going through that acting tough phase.

He's an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.

The problem is that everybody sitting around that table thinks they're skilled enough.

I stopped playing WoW because it didn't value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won't help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.

And then there's the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.

We really do not value quiet enough.

And the people here who's idea of a utopia is all of us living in Mega City One are the worst of them.

I used to play WoW with a guy in London, and literally every time he opened his mic to speak, it was a cacophony of sirens and cars and helicopters. I don't know how people in cities can even here themselves think. Like, great, you can order from 20 different Chinese takeaways but at what cost?

This is my unsurprised face as 40%+ of them continue to vote republican, just like their parents always have.

Trump is a problem for the GOP. He has them over a barrel.

They can't get rid of him because they'll lose the crazy vote, and for sure, the crazy vote is about the only thing keeping them in the game right now.

And he gets to order them all about. And the GOP are a bunch of rich white me, and rich white men do not like that kind of thing. They like being the ones ordering people about. It's the natural order of things god damn it.

Their only real way of getting rid is either an assassination, or at least looking the other way when somebody else tries it. That way they get to keep the crazy vote. "Do it for Him" they'll cry. And they will. Either that or wait for the inevitable cardiac arrest to take him. But a man who dies on the toilet is going to get a lot less sympathy than if he's shot by an Obama loving abortionist.

Trump is 100% going to blame this loser when he fucks the election up, and the following insurrection attempt.

It might do now. They've done a lot of improvements.

Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we'd have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn't crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.

I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.

All that for an "up to" 40% performance increase.

I don't care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn't worth it.

Next you'll be telling me the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is truthful in only one of those words.

It's quite common for political parties to include things in their name that they're not the slightest bit interested in.

The Libertarian Party is, as far as I can tell, a bunch of conservatives who want to pay even less tax.

Rookie mistake. You VNC to the office in one window and porn locally.

The dollar ain't buying what it used to either.

Also, remember that our prices include VAT, so we slap 20% on it right there. That £700 is £583 excluding the VAT.

That's still 10% more than in the US doing a direct currency conversion, but it's not quite as bad as it first looks.

Still a lot of money for a games console though, especially a mid gen refresh. Paying at the start of a gen for 8 years gaming ain't too bad when you look at it per year. PS5 Pro will be over 4 years, and on that alone is piss-poor value.