loobkoob

And to prove your point even further: my friends and I went go-karting for someone's stag do a couple of weeks ago and it was £50 per person for two fifteen-minute sessions. And that's even more entry level than autocross, I'd argue!

We had to get there early, too, and get registered, get changed into overalls and helmet, etc. We had to go through an idiot-proof safety briefing. We had to wait for the previous group to finish their session. We had a break between our two sessions for drinks and to cool down / recover, and another session ran during that time, so ~twenty minutes there. All in all, our half-hour of driving probably came with around an hour and a half of downtime, which I think lowers the value proposition even more.

(Plus I got heatstroke during it and got increasingly ill as the day went on - and was unable to really eat during our restaurant meal or drink at the bars later in the day - which lowered the value proposition even more for me, ha!)

£100/hour of actual go-karting, versus £1/hour for most AAA games these days. I don't tend to like AAA games that much, for the most part, but even with all their bloat, recycled content, open-world downtime, etc, they still seem like better value per money per time than anything motorsports-related.

Tom Cruise is an odd one for me. The idea I have of Tom Cruise is that he always plays the same character, is just a generic action star, etc. And then whenever I actually watch Tom Cruise in a film, I'm always really impressed by just how good an actor he is. But I still can't shake the idea I have of Tom Cruise.

I have a similar issue with Brad Pitt, where my idea of him is that he's just a generic leading man, despite him almost always putting in a really strong, nuanced and varied performance.

And similarly, from Tool's "Right In Two":

Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over
pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys
Give them thumbs, they make a club
to beat their brother down
How they've survived so misguided is a mystery
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
to lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here

And telling all the poor people how much of a sin their envy and greed is, of course!

I don't hate the idea of midichlorians, honestly. Or rather, I do hate them but I think that's the point - to show that the jedi have kind of lost their way, are judging everything by "midichlorian counts" and tried to standardise and automate the process as much as possible rather than properly considering the human element and doing things on a case-by-case basis. If it's not the point then, well... it should be.

I think there are some decent ideas in the prequel trilogy, I just think the execution was pretty bad.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting "soft answers", but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

To be honest, I think your position is short-sighted, naïve and lacking in pragmatism.

Right now, in most constituencies, your choice is between Labour/Lib Dem and Tory/Reform. And anyone who thinks Labour getting into government wouldn't be an improvement over the Tories hasn't been paying attention for the last decade. Even if Labour had the exact same political stance as the Tories - which they don't - the fact that they're not nearly as likely to be corrupt, self-serving slime balls makes them an improvement by itself.

Labour needs to appeal to moderate, swing voters. There's no steadfast left-wing voter base in the UK; if Labour can't win over the swing voters they won't get elected - it's that simple. That doesn't mean they're sat there asking themselves how they can be more like the Tories, it just means they need to take positions that have broad appeal and don't just go full-socialism. As much as socialism appeals to me, I'd rather see Labour actually get elected. There's zero chance we go from our current government to a socialist government overnight.

And if I think about where I'd like to see our country in ten or fifteen years, Labour winning this election is the most realistic way for us to get there. Spoiling your ballot, not voting at all, or voting for some candidate who's going to get <3% of the vote isn't going to achieve anything other than a short-lived sense of self-satisfaction. The best thing any of us can do is to pick the least bad of the realistic options. I don't like that that's the system, but it's the system we've got and we either have to work within it or have it imposed on us anyway.

I don't think the Labour Party is perfect by any means. They have some ideas I like, and I'm hopeful they'll unveil more policies I like in the next few weeks. And, of course, there are things I dislike about them. They're certainly not my dream party. But I also think it's important not to let perfect be the enemy of good. We have a chance to improve things, and squandering that chance just because things aren't going to be perfect is fucking stupid.

The big difference between the two for me is how much feeling of gameplay expression there is. In Fallout, my options feel like melee, shooting enemies with shotguns, shooting enemies with automatic rifles, shooting enemies with long-range rifles, shooting enemies with lasers, shooting enemies with miniguns, and so on. And the shooting mechanics don't feel strong enough to really differentiate those different weapons as different playstyles for the most part. If I play a game like Titanfall, Battlefield, etc, then changing weapons can feel drastically different - they handle differently, you navigate combat arenas differently, you prioritise targets differently, you use cover differently. But that doesn't really feel like the case with Fallout for me without any of the moment-to-moment decision making that tends to allow for gameplay expression in shooters.

Whereas Skyrim feels like there are a lot more playstyles available. Destruction magic feels very different to conjuration which feels very different to illusion which feels very different to being a stealth archer which feels very different to using a dagger which feels very different to using a huge, two-handed melee weapon. They're not just visually different; how you approach and navigate combat encounters will be significantly different depending on what kind of build you have. It just feels like there's so much more gameplay depth.

I believe the thinking is that three days is (hopefully) enough time for whatever issues to be resolved, or for you to look for other sources of supplies. You're not expected to stockpile enough to live on for months!

I've been separating Chris Brown's music from his personality for a long time. I hated his music long before I know how terrible his personality is.

I don't disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You're paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)

Let me know what you think when you've listened!