majestic

We took a cab from our hotel to El Dahar in Hurgada. I have just two words to describe the experience: never again. I mean, that traffic jam is at least slow, the cabbie wedged himself between two other cars and oncoming traffic. On a two lane road. At 150kph.

No, I'm just an idiot whose brain went into "This is different, something's wrong!" mode and made me freak out for no reason. I plugged the XBox Elite back in and tried to play Shadows of Mordor, and it controls exactly the same way, just with less precision and with damaged buttons - the game just controls like a drunk donkey as there's apparently only one way to move when not holding down the sprint button: slowly (might as well use digital controls for all the good analog does when there's two modes, no momentum and slow momentum, good job game). I also tried NieR: Automata for good measure, and they sticks are behaving exactly the same way. Well, not exactly the same, as the GuliKit King Kong 2 Pro feels a good deal better to play with. Crisis averted. *sigh*

It is indeed. Currently not sure if it's working properly as I've tried two games and one of them reacts really strangely to the left stick input (walking). The other works normally. Might just be the game, it's been a while since I've played it. Will have to plug in my old Xbox Elite at some point to see what's what, if I can wrestle the controller from my nephew somhow.

Got my parcel. Wrote an e-mail to UPS yesterday evening, got my code today after two separate callcenter agents with curiously Indian looking names told me they forwarded it to the party 'responsible' for my package. Either way, it worked. As I am, at times, merciful, UPS may consider me placated. For the moment.

But what about left-wing extremism ?

You assume intent where there is none. This is not deliberate, just a byproduct.

That looks like fun too.

Meanwhile, I just checked stores for availability and prices, and the 7900 XT - the one without the extra X - costs about as much as a RTX 4080. Good job, retailers. edit: removed Amazon link, the shop was hacked.

The small roundabouts look confusing when viewed from above, but I checked a YouTube video, that doesn't look so bad. Plus it's not that large. I'd probably try to drive on the right hand side and crash my way through, but that's something else... Try this thing in heavy traffic when you don't know which lane to take:

It was not as clear cut for Death and Rebirth, I think. Death(True)², perhaps - as that is a pure recap - but the original Death and Rebirth was a recap and documentary style re-arrangement of the series and added the first parts of End of Evangelion in the run, as far as I remember from what I read about them. So there was at least a point to watch it in the theater, and it could also serve as a refresher before going into The End of Evangelion. The VE recap, on the other hand, is utterly pointless. It doesn't even re-arrange anything, it's just the regular run of the series cut down to feature film length. They never go away, and they keep on standing out like a sore thumb against the otherwise really, really great visuals of the series.

I guess that'll ever be the Enigma.

I idly browsed through Violet Evergarden: Recollections, a creation no one asked for and certainly no one needed. It is a condensed recap-film for the first season, and at 95 minutes of runtime, clocks in at less than a third of the original series it is based on. A series which, while perhaps a bit slow at some points, did not contain any scenes that could be reasonably cut or trimmed down without hurting character development, storylines and themes. An OVA was made after the series that bridges the gap between the fourth and the fifth episode so neatly that, if it was part of the series timeline, would never feel out of place - except for running a couple of minutes longer than the series episodes - just proves that if anything, more could be added without any detriment to series, not taken away. It cuts out Erica's outburst in the second episode - actually, it just drops almost the entire second episode, including Violet's ill-fated letter for the woman who wanted to play hard to get, which means Erica's screen time is drastically reduced - @Bartimaeus could potentially give it a chance, if it weren't for the fact that most of the missing runtime comes from the episodes between the second and the seventh episode that establish Violet as a woman doing her best to help others with her job and finding her place in the world, before she's thrown into crisis. It basically removes what made the series special, and for what? Existing fans are not going to like this, and which new fans would it bring? What is the point? The series spends more time establishing Violet and her interactions than the recap has overall runtime before setting events for her emotional downward spiral in motion. It works so well precisely because of that, and some of the scenes also no longer work because the reactions of the others make no sense because the events and contrasts necessary to understand them are not shown. What a waste of everyone's time.

I sure hope it's going to have Aqua in the OST.

Tried to pick up my parcel from an UPS Access Station™. Now, as it turns out, the station where my parcel was dropped off isn't an UPS Access Station™, but one that serves many parcel services, which generally would be fine, but invalidates UPS' information that I need to bring my tracking number and my ID. Basically, press "UPS" on screen, then scan collection code. What collection code? The display tries to be helpful, telling me I received the collection code via e-mail or text message. Except, of course, I did not. Sigh.

Probably, but there's something wrong with the cookie or the board software's check for it, because some of the posters affected definitely had the social media cookies accepted before the posting broke. Private windows force cookie acceptance every time, but you're right, of course. Rejecting and accepting the cookies through the cookie setup on the bottom of the page should fix the problem too.

Open an InPrivate window in Edge, accept all cookies (or just the social media one) and then post from there. Downside: you need to log in and accept the cookies every time you open the window. Upside: should fix the issues, for the time being, and allows for social media tracking...

Games without defined ending parameters / victory conditions are death.

Not this time around, but it's based on the same folk song as some parts of How Much Is The Fish, but it is much more likely that this was picked up by Azdeus linking the English version of this song (by the same group) a page or two back. Unless, of course, you listened to How Much Is The Fish on repeat. In that case... hah. I knew you like Scooter and just pretend not to.

If that is the actual 'secret' everyone is talking about, that was clear right after the intro. Currently watched 26 of 60 minutes of the first episode, by the way. Best guess at this point:

I liked the original Scooby-Doo cartoon, although the reason is perhaps a little strange: Daphne's German dub voice actress was just music to my ears. The cartoon itself is fine, I guess.

This is the most hilarious bug I've run into in a while. It sure is a top contender for one of he best, but at least I managed to reproduce it now thank to @Azdeus's testing. Steps to reproduce: Be from Commie-EU-Yurop so the cookie settings pop up. Switch to Incognito/In Private/Private browsing to make sure you have a clean slate. Go to https://forums.obsidian.net Reject the social media cookie (you can reject all others if you want, but this is the one that is causing the issue). Log in Try to post with quotes and multiple lines. ??? Profit (or facepalm if you're the poor sod who has to fix this )! So, while I am not 100% certain that this is caused directly by rejecting the social media cookie - or rather, not accepting it - it is an easy way to reproduce the issues of our posters. It also neatly explains why it is only posters fom the EU that seem to be affected. There was an issue with the social media cookie settings not sticking in the past too, as @Gorgon and @HoonDing can attest to, for which there als are posts in this thread and a solution was sought. There is one really, really, REALLY fun thing you can and should do. Once you got the steps down to reproduce it, reject all the cookies, open up Chrome's dev console by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + I, and try to post from Chrome. You will find this will actually cause posting to behave normally, until a page refresh (going to some other page, or pressing F5). After a page refresh, it will keep eating lines and quotes until you close the development console again. Either way, the moment the scripts seem to realize that the dev console is open (or thinks it is, when you actually close it), it switches to a debug mode where the problem does not happen. If you keep the console open and refresh, the posts get mangled again, but other than some minor warnings about deprecated jQuery functions and content policy header settings there is no error to be seen. Fix for the posters affected is to accept the cookies. Perhaps clear out the browser cache for the forum. At least until it is fixed. Or alternatively, use Chrome and press CTRL + SHIFT + I every time you load a page, but that's certainly really annoying. Edit: tagging in @SChin Edit 2: Same behaviour in Edge, not much of a surprise, same basis as Chrome. Does not seem to work in Firefox from @Azdeus's testing. Can't check now, perhaps later.

My copy of Corel Draw 4 had 45 disks... that was a 'fun' installation.

What a misnomer that was for the 3.5" disks anyway. They weren't floppy at all. Heh, our computer came with some version of DOS on 5.25" floppies. I also got 5.0 on 5,25" floppies, and Red Baron 2. My mother was not really happy that we had a war game, and my limited knowledge of history made it all the more frustrating, because no matter how well I played and how many medals I was awarded, I just could not get the Central Powers to win the damned war.

Those things are as old as I am. I started kind of early with having a PC, but not that early. Basically with the TVGA card, more or less - was one of the first upgrades, along with adding a 387SX to our 386SX based system. We once switched cases which was quite an undertaking at the time, or at least it seemed like that to me. With no mainboard manual, we had to draw up diagrams and tag the cables with numbers - not like the mainboards at the time were built to make sure users don't accidentially plug the cables where they're not supposed to go, never mind all the jumper settings and whatnot. Upgrades were also kind of strange and sometimes did not do what I expected them to do. We once added another 4 MB RAM to the system because I could not get Strike Commander to run, but imagine my confusion when more memory did not fix the issue of not having enough conventional memory free for Strike Commander. The great irony of the time, adding really expensive memory modules did not help (how could they, with that being based on a hardware limitation that little 9-year-old me was not aware of), but replacing the old mouse with a newer one fixed that. Why? Because the silly mouse driver that came with the newer mice took a third of the memory of the old one. Like from 17 KB down to 6. That was enough to push memory usage down to meet SC's insane 595 KB requirement. Then came the great waiting, because on my old system, the game needed like 15 minutes to start, and almost as long to prepare takeoff for the first mission. It did not run all that great and was all but unplayable. You know, generally, when old timers say that they had to walk backwards up a mountain each day to get to school they're just being ridiculous, but in some cases that isn't far from the truth. Had that one for a long while. Later upgraded to a system with a P-120, which was quite a leap in performance. Also pretty necessary because Windows 95 did not run with the ancient 386SX CPUs.