I’m lucky in that I never sold any old consoles. I’ve got stuff dating back to the NES and Master System. And all of it still works too, right down to the Dreamcast.

So thankfully I’ll still be able to play games once the console market implodes. I’m definitely not buying a new console if there’s no physical medium available.

And yeah, I’m going to be more actively collecting for those older systems. They can’t steal the stuff you physically own…

Yes, that exactly!

Back in the days of COD on 360, voice chat was a relatively new thing. And everyone wanted to have a go. Since it was novel to talk to people far outside your own country, they did what humans do: teach each other naughty words and slurs. And whether you were from the Netherlands, Greece, the US or wherever, that was fun!

Now, obviously there was verbal abuse. But the thing people don’t really grasp unless they were there is: everyone gave as good as they got. Someone calls you X, Y or Z, well you insult their mom in three different languages back. Especially European lobbies were great fun since you’d get teams of all different nationalities.

And since voice chat was pretty much uncensored, nobody thought anything of it. Like I said, we all gave as good as we got.

With modern games, there’s so much censorship that people take voice chat off game. Barely anyone talks anymore, and certainly not outside their own group. Because one slightly offensive word can get your account banned.

So yeah, I’ll take an uncensored, chatty community over a completely silent one.

I used to be pretty good at the usual stuff like COD, CS, Battlefield… but each game got fucked up in its own unique way. Stuff became just too sweaty and annoying, all the while the sense of community faded. COD back in the 360 days was fun. Now it’s just annoying.

These days, I’m fully single player. It’s just not worth the price of modern games to deal with all the multiplayer bullshit.

I absolutely hate this timeline 🙄

Those are awesome! Definitely would’ve worn a few of those back in the day.

That must’ve been quite a shock for the average metalhead, fluorescent shirts :D

As a guy who loves bright rainbow shit, I certainly would be the weirdo opting for pink over black.

Funny enough the colleague I mentioned supposedly has a fully pastel pink decorated house. Metal on the outside, Barbie on the inside! I sure do love the dichotomy.

I have a colleague who’s into metal. Always wears a band shirt, always in black. As you’d expect. Except on VERY rare days where she runs out of those or if it’s indeed just too hot to wear black.

It’s downright jarring to see her in anything except black. Looks like a completely different person.

I do imagine it’s nice to be a female metal fan. Never have to worry about what to wear or what colors to match 😂

I hear that. My grandfather was descended of German nobility. Nothing major, but he was the son of a prince. To be clear: a complete nobody even when German nobility was still a thing pre-WW1. After the war, they pretty much abolished all that in a revolution.

But basically, if I go back four generations, we owned a ‘castle’ somewhere. Meanwhile, I’m solidly in the peasant class.

People know the ‘I only read Playboy for the articles’ joke but it’s genuinely why the magazine lasted as long as it has. Playboy certainly wasn’t the only one doing nude photography nor was it the most extreme.

But the magazine has had some genuinely great writers over the years. Notable ones like Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Hunter S. Thompson and a whole slew of journalists and columnists who went on to write great stuff.

Playboy tended to give their writers a lot of freedom and published things others wouldn’t. After all, if you’re already controversial, you might as well publish controversial writing.

“Oh you’re looking for a red KitchenAid blender type # 5KSB2073EER? Great! Here’s that 4 CD set of traditional Turkmenistan folk music you wanted.”

I took typing lessons back in the mid ‘90’s, which was VERY uncommon for teens to do. When we got the first online multiplayer games, they only had text chat. I certainly had the fastest, foulest mouth in chat 😂

Never experienced bugs myself with 5, but I know others did. 6 has been a perfectly smooth game for the 11 hours I’ve played it so far 👍

I tend to be lucky that way. And I always play games on proper within-spec hardware with updated drivers and such, which does help.

To clarify: it’s not ‘early access’ as in an unfinished mess.

It’s early access, because the premium edition lets you play four days earlier. The base version of the game releases monday, but if you bought the premium version with the future DLC, you got to play it on friday as an added bonus.

But yes, agreed, ‘early access’ as in selling unfinished games needs to stop. It’s an incentive for devs to take the money and run.

This shit reads like an Onion article. Good god.

It really is infuriating. Especially when you get threatening reminders like ‘be sure to be here exactly on time or we’ll bill you/yell at you’.

I show up for everything at least 20 minutes early at the latest. Meanwhile I’ve had scheduled appointments run 45 minutes late.

Clearly they expect me respect THEIR time, while completely disrespecting mine.

In the Netherlands and a few other countries we have the Nutri-Score

https://www.rivm.nl/en/food-and-nutrition/nutri-score

This ranks a food from A (best) to E (worst) based on how well it fits into the dietary guidelines.

Important thing to note: it’s a ranking that compares foods in that same group. So it’s not ‘vegetables are A, pizza is E’, but rather ‘this Doritos has less salt than this bag of Lay’s’.

Now, this effectively caused companies to make their products blander in order to avoid a worse score. It also happened to save them money - you use fewer ingredients.

End result: chips now appear healthier because they have a better score… while also tasting like cardboard.

And how did that go over with consumers? See article. And you can read numerous complaints about it on social media.

Ironically, this also means that the Nutri-Score sorta works. Why eat chips when they are tasteless? 😂

The article doesn’t mention it, but at least here in Europe, one big issue is that they changed all their products to be tasteless.

Because of the ‘healthy foods’ grading we have here, they took out a lot of what made their chips tasty. Resulting in very bland products. We personally haven’t bought any of those brands for a few years now because of it. Because I don’t want a ‘healthy’ chip - I want a tasty snack.

It’s definitely noticeable in Dutch supermarkets that many people are ditching those brands because of the lack of taste. And the price increases just accelerate that.

Fucking finally. That guy is an utter turd.

Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.

And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.

The industry only has themselves to blame for this.

Dutch cuisine is so boring and bland, it’s no wonder almost everyone prefers anything foreign. Everything traditional we cook tends to lack flavor and texture, it’s filling but not exactly attractive.

We also don’t really have a food culture here. Dutch people don’t like to spend more time eating than they have to. A meal never lasts more than 20-30 minutes tops.

It’s not exactly surprising that there’s no such thing as a Dutch restaurant outside of the Netherlands…