ForbiddenRoot

I thought you were kidding, but then I looked it up on the net and it seems this is really a thing. WTF Microsoft!?

Vasco quite frequently blocks the door everywhere for me, but at least I have been able to push my way through so far. He’s like my Golden Retriever in that respect so I am used to it from real life.

I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.

The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.

Why is everyone so anxious nowadays?

For me it’s financial, though as a middle-aged person I am nowadays also plagued with metaphysical questions.

About the financial part, I’m actually very well-off but the world has become such a complex place (or it always was and I am only realizing it now at my age) and I have little to no control over most aspects of it. I don’t want to lose what I have worked towards because of geo-politics, climate change impact, global recession, or such things. It’s not an existential crisis for me but there is some amount of anxiety and dread that I previously did not have.

French just blows my fucking mind.

In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D

Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?

Un peu, mais je prefere les baguettes

(and also I just realized I totally don’t know how to make acute / grave accents on my keyboard, if that’s possible at all with an en-US layout)

To eliminate this confusion I propose the days of the month should start from 13.

I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.

The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.

Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P

Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people”

Perhaps its an overgeneralization, but I like the concept behind it and at least it keeps me from gossiping / talking about people behind their backs. I am mostly an average mind though, by this definition.

And it’s US only. Great idea to encourage the site to have an even more US-centric point of view on everything.

I personally know a few former colleagues of mine from our Sri Lanka subsidiary who have left the country over the last year or so. Some to Australia and few to the UK. They all were having a harrowing time before they left, especially one who nearly ran out of some life-saving medication for his kid. We managed to get a few months of supply over to him from India. But that near-miss really shook him up and he left Sri Lanka as quickly as he could.

There are still some senior folks there who are in denial over the situation. Most of these have generational wealth and are largely insulated from on the ground realities that the middle and lower income people have been facing. They kept reporting back incorrect information on the situation at the peak of the crisis and kept saying that the media is over-hyping the situation, because they were concerned that we might shut down our office there (which we had no plans to and in fact we gave increased allowances to our staff to help them with the crazy inflation).

I wear them only if I have a cold or a cough myself now, or if I am traveling on a plane. I still carry a mask with me at all times though.

I don’t want to get sucked into an ecosystem where my choice of what product to buy is so limited.

This isn’t actually the case in my experience, because non-Apple products work just fine with the iPhone unless it’s some Android-specific accessory. No one wants to ignore the iPhone market so they make sure that their product is well-supported on iPhones. For instance, I use a bunch of headphones from various manufacturers, apart from AirPods, and they all work great too.

The actual issue is that if you want to move from iPhone to Android later you may have issues getting some Apple devices you have to work with Android, e.g. I don’t think the Apple Watch works at all with Android.

why do you use iPhone?

In my case, because I had a bad experience with Android phones in their early years. Each model I used had one or the other issues, either battery life, camera issues, screen issues or something else. Around the Samsung S3 days I finally moved to iPhone and “everything just worked”.

I am sure things are better now in the Android world hardware-wise (and software-wise Android has always been able to do more), but over the years I have become firmly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem with the Apple Watch, Airpods, Macbooks, Apple TV etc so it doesn’t make sense for me to switch again because there isn’t a compelling reason for me to do so.

No worries, we’re good. Cheers :)

So you’re not only being petty, you’re also plainly wrong

Relax, you are reading too deeply into things. This is a light and good-humored thread, please don’t spoil it by making personal attacks. There’s Reddit for that kind of behavior, it will fit right in.

Sometimes, in jest of course, if someone asks me for some permission using “Can I […]?” I reply “I am sure you CAN but you MAY not” :)

My first experience with the internet was using a Unix shell account that I used to dial into using “Telix for DOS”. For browsing I had Lynx, for mail PINE, and for IRC it was some client called “irc” and so on. This was in the early 90s, maybe 1991 or 92.

Everything was text only, dial-up with 9600 baud, and it was glorious because before that all we had was BBSes (which were even more glorious in some ways actually).