I didn’t know Pleco had reading material, that’s awesome! I ended up grabbing the Graded Chinese Reader - 500 words to begin with (I’m a beginner haha).

I signed up to SuperChinese a few days ago so I’m just working through level 1 lessons. It’s a bit dry to begin with as I already have some foundational knowledge though. I’m using that alongside Hanly and Du Chinese in my daily routine. However, I feel like Hanly is making me overwhelmed with too many similar characters all at once. So I might slow down or try another method if that doesn’t change.

I created a QR generator website and you have no idea. I get emails from people saying they’ve printed the codes before discovering it goes to the wrong place (sometimes even to my own site!) and if I can fix it. No… check your codes before they go to print!

The funniest one I had caused me to get a huge spike of traffic on Christmas. It was so weird and left me clueless for weeks, until I got an email from somebody wishing to cancel a subscription.

I don’t sell subscriptions or anything at all!

Turns out somebody printed a QR code into a smartwatch instruction booklet that went straight to my site… The ad revenue was insane tho!

CachyOS! I was on Mint before this and had a bunch of issues running games. I think this was in part from going from NVIDIA to AMD (9070 XT).

Decided I had enough and instead of doing a simple Mint reinstall, I gave Cachy a go. I’ve had a little issue here and there but the experience has been beautifully smooth compared to Mint. It’s now set up better than I had it before and I’m over the moon with it haha.

I picked this up the other day and it’s great! The SimPlayers go on their own little adventures, party together, and fill the chat with nonsense. I had this one guy accuse another of being a bot.

It’s really worth trying if you’re into the traditional mmo gameplay (grinding). But without the fuss of dealing with real people and their own schedules that fight against your own. For anybody who wants to try it out, there’s a demo which covers the first area.

4: English (native), Spanish (learned at school and 1-10 is about all I recall), Mandarin, and Japanese.

As somebody who could never get into Dark Souls and Elden Ring and the like, Lies of P was great. The game is linear which some people may dislike but for me it was what I needed to remain focused. First game in a long time that I’ve seen to the end and loved every minute of it.

People say it plays like Bloodborne but I’ve never played that so I can’t say. Other than that the difficulty is so-so. Some bosses I could do on my first or second attempt, but there’s two that come to mind which took many…

There’s also some dlc coming out later this year, with a sequel also in the works. Good time to try it out I’d say.

Welp, this prices me out on principle alone. £75 for physical games in absolutely bonkers. Then they want you to pay extra so that BTOW/TOTK can take advantage of the new hardware. Not to mention their tech demo isn’t exactly free either.

Aside from all that, £395 for the console seemed pretty fair to me. I expected it to be a little higher honestly. Just everything else on the side is asking for too much.

Unfortunately it was due to being “friends only.” Player fleet I guess? I just couldn’t figure out how to filter them out before I got there and kept coming across them.

That range one caught me out once but I figured that one out since it tells you to come closer. I’m going to take that tutorial suggestion though. Cheers!

I keep trying to get into Elite but it never clicks for me. I was flying around earlier trying to dock into a station but everyone was refusing me so I closed the game. I’ll probably look up a new players guide before giving it another attempt later.

Cancelled mine too. Don’t particularly care about the AI. But I don’t need it and trying to justify increasing the price for it didn’t really work on me.

I’ve also gone all-in on Linux now. While I have a Mac, my gaming PC was left on Windows. Now it’s running Linux Mint and while gaming on Linux has a bit further to go, it’s night and day compared to 10 years ago. This time I feel like I can actually stick with it.

it’s been region-locked in countries that don’t have access to PSN, such as Egypt, the Philippines, and North Korea.

I get the other countries but North Korea?! I’ll be surprised if they even have access to Steam!

I have these same issues with mine. Checking the logs shows the requests are coming through but nothing updates, which is annoying. I’m at my wits’ end!

After experiencing several other bugs I’m thinking of calling it quits and giving it time to mature a bit.

People wouldn’t give stadia a chance since they knew of Google’s reputation to kill services. Google, of course, proved them right.

It was a shame really. I liked Stadia and ran a game tracking site for it. But I won’t trust another Google product again.

Final Fantasy XI. It wasn’t necessarily difficult to get the game but creating an account and subscribing was very painful (and still is). In a weird way, it served as a filter for those who probably wouldn’t enjoy the game anyway.

Recently I saw an article on more needs to be done about age verification because it’s easy for children to falsify it (and most do). On the other hand you have adults who falsify it because it’s nobody’s business how old you are.

Current protections that ask you to confirm your age are completely pointless.

Now if you were required to provide ID to access X service, would you? If we’re talking adult content then children will simply look elsewhere, taking them to potentially more dangerous areas of the internet. (Heck, so would adults) Same if you deny them social media.

But if we’re implementing verification regardless then it needs to come from a third party. And it also has to be easy. Like something you do only once.

First: I would allow children access to social media under a child account that has limited access and ability to be audited by a parent. This is important because you don’t want them going somewhere you have no control over. (Which they will)

Secondly: An age verification gateway that can be implemented by developers seeking to use it. Possibly managed by the government body responsible for issuing ID (or a partner). This would be taking a short video of yourself plus uploading ID. (Banks are doing this now)

Thirdly: ease of use. Majority of us have a google or apple account associated with whatever device we have. Let those accounts hook into the 2nd step and share if an account is a child/adult account with any social platforms you log in using it with.

Just a few thoughts that came to mind whilst waiting dinner. Feel free to tear it apart!

Remember when they tried that last time?

Look, I actually liked the Vita but only after I got one second hand after putting it off for years. The overpriced memory cards didn’t exactly advertise the device well.

“An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.”

I pity the guy somewhat. It would be absolute gut wrenching knowing you’ve lost a life changing amount of money. But this reeks of desperation and taking out your anger on somebody else for your own mistake. Now he’s suing the council after failing to bribe them with something that may or may not be recoverable. And if successful, lines his own pockets at the expense of his community’s.

Accept the expensive life lesson for what it is and move on… It sucks but it’s your own flaming fault and nobody owes you a thing.

Sorry, the first book isn’t all world building, it just starts off slower because of that. Several characters are introduced in their own parts of the world and various places in society which makes it feels a bit disjointed. It starts coming together eventually then you’ll know if it’s worth carrying on or not.

The switching of PoVs can be a bit frustrating, especially when you’re starting to attach yourself to one character and then you’re thrown into the shoes of another. The audiobook perhaps makes that worse with the switching of narrator between the male and female leads. It certainly threw me off at the start but I grew to appreciate it.

I assume you mean Stormlight vs Mistborn? If I was recommending between those two, I would go definitely go Mistborn first. Not because I think it’s better, but Stormlight is a little difficult to get going with and plans to span 10 books. Given that not a lot happens in the first part due to the world building happening across multiple characters individually, it takes a while for it to feel like it’s moving somewhere. Mistborn on the other hand paces itself a lot quicker and the foreshadowing throughout is executed wonderfully.