The Last of Us II. I went in expecting the same act structure as the first and was surprised. If you’ve played it then you know what I’m talking about. Despite mainly taking place over just a few days it really feels so drawn out and a relentless struggle, which felt so perfect for the world of the game.

The flag patriotism and intense praise of military action was a lot for me. I remember going to a mall, and seeing what would typically be reserved as disabled parking was instead veteran parking?? And then the cinema in the mall loudly advertising its discount for veterans as well. We do have a general discount in my country too, but it’s not so… intense. Like no one else has to know it’s happening because it’s more of a state benefit than it is a form of patriotism.

Neighbourhoods in general are what I found the strangest when I stayed in the States. Flags everywhere as you say, but also just the intense size, and the lack of walkability (the kurb drops felt massive compared to my country). Beyond that I remember walking for around 20 minutes through a suburb and counting upwards of 10 different company logos on rubbish bins. This neighbourhood seemingly had 10 different bin days rather than one centralised service.

We need to know! Using GitHub at the moment and this is driving me fucking wild.

Jumping on this to second it and also be shamelessly elitist. Factorio is the automation game. Nothing tops it. You may think other games look more beautiful, exciting, or engaging, but they are not. Factorio is also one of the cheaper automation games out there with one of the best developers in the industry. Definitely give it a go!

Laser tag is actually the best option.

I had a lot of fun with Aces & Adventures too, which similarly is based around poker hands but is very different to Balatro.

Is that really the case? Because you can still see all the songs and a basic set of chords without an account/payment.

Ultimate Guitar Tabs. After spending years getting a community to contribute to one of the best music resources on the web, they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.

I interpreted this as a criticism of the sort of people who make posts for the ‘brain crack’ of maybe learning to code one day in place of putting the actual work in to learn.

Typically when creating API interfaces you’d be better off marking the inputs as unknown, and then using something like Zod to validate the types

I love how Gemini is so sorry that it can’t help you kill children

Absolutely, for many it’s nice to be under one name even if there is no legal need. I do think though that in a world where taking the male family name is not a default and anything can happen, double barrelling becomes problematic as a solution. You can only double barrel so many times! We need a new tradition that is equal for everyone and scales well. My favourite is what I once witnessed at a fantastic wedding. Before cutting their cake, the happy couple literally did a coin flip to choose who would take the other’s name. It was easily the most exciting part of the day.

At a press level, sure, and the same for the average user. Legally speaking these numbers do have significance, though. Amazon Web Services (at least at one time) offer a guarantee of 99.99% uptime for their infrastructure. That 0.001% covers things like once a year outages that make the news. A 10000th of a year is actually a tangible amount of time and not even Amazon is confident enough to ignore it.

I don’t really know why your cables would be falling so fast, but to be fair part of the design of USB C is that, inverting the design of USB A, the connector is on the cable side, in the hope that the cable should be the part that deteriorates first. That way fewer devices get trashed for having dodgy sockets.

Huge fan of Plate Up!. It ruined Overcooked for me. Also been doing a Factorio playthrough on my Steam Deck and it’s made it really accessible for me.

Not exactly at the same level, but a short story related to this topic that I love is Understand by Ted Chiang.

Yeah same here, I’ve only had mine a few months but I’m having a blast with it and don’t see why that has to change just because there’s something a bit nicer out there.

Absolutely love that this is a Newsround article

100%, the comments have been infuriating to read. This is the obvious interpretation.

I’ve just started playing Factorio. Played a bunch before but never with the deck. It feels like it should be completely viable honestly but the official controls and the top community controls confuse me. I’m taking the time to craft my own ‘perfect’ control scheme and loving it.