Gosh, I miss the aesthetics of vector games of this era. My absolute favourite was Armour-Geddon (on the Amiga), which because I'd pirated it I barely had any clue what to do but.. it was still fun, and so beautiful. And fast!
I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.
I loved them too. During that era I got to try some kind of flight simulator on a Silicon Graphics. Smoooth shapes, extremely high resolution, must have been lots of tiny triangles, and nice shading. I remember thinking, this is the future, can’t wait to get this in personal computers!
Nah, instead almost two decades of muddy lores textures on lopoly models.
I guess now we are finally there, with raytracing in games. But I would still like to see the nontextured aesthetic make a comeback.
eh, I was a Smartphone ‘it's gotta have a keyboard!’ hold-out too, but I've long-since embraced the Swype or whatever it's called, style of input. It's fine enough for 90% of my engagement with the internet via a phone. Anything more in depth I'm on a computer with a physical keyboard anyway.
But yes, the N900 was pre-slidey-smartphone peak brilliance.
Likewise; I had an N900, and I loved the idea of a physical keyboard, but now I figure I can pocket a folding keyboard for that.
What I would like is apps to pervasively support a keyboard. For instance, in most Android messaging apps, you can't even press "enter" to send a message, so if you want to use a physical keyboard, you have to type the message and then poke the screen to send.
On the kcal/£ basis, Tesco biscuits (for Americans: cookies) are more than an order of magnitude better, 487 kcal/100g, £0.22/100g, about £0.15 for as many kcal as that McMuffin: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/290329100
On the basis of an actually balanced diet, boiling a pot of water and adding lentils, rice, and value frozen veg on a timer, are likewise. Which is of course why that's a staple diet in parts of the world much poorer than the UK.
For £5.09 you get the hash brown, so it's 500+ cals. It costs 25 mins of paid labour and it also saves N minutes of domestic labour if one were to have similar hot protein+cals at home. High-income people tend not to understand this part, they'll say you can eat beans and rice for nothing.
I have quite a lot of difficulty eating out once you start cooking at home, because think of what you are buying:
- one English muffin (is it called an English muffin in England?)
- one slice of cheese
- one egg
- one slice of ham
- one cup of coffee
- one hashbrown
£5.09 for that? Obviously when you buy from a restaurant you're paying for their labor, rent, electric, and much more so it makes sense - McDonald's franchisees tend to operate on single digit profit margins even at that cost. But mehhh, still. And then the food you end up buying is packed full of preservatives and other additives and artificial ingredients.
Dude you’re not even trying, why buy muffins and eggs when you could grow wheat, grind flour, raise chickens and get eggs for free, slaughter your own pigs and cure the bacon yourself… because labour costs nothing and convenience has no value amirite?
I find it bemusing that so people are simultaneously extremely agitated by high prices but also completely disinterested in doing anything except paying them. With this mindset it's not particularly hard to guess which direction they'll trend in over time, even if the world wasn't going nutters.
I mean these things are not difficult to make. They even freeze extremely well, and then you toss them in the microwave for a couple of minutes while you're getting ready and they're done. And the food you create is not only much cheaper, but also way healthier and also higher quality. When you go to a McDonalds you're getting the cheapest possible find they can source on a global level. The only reason they dropped pink slime [1] is because they were outed using it on television.
Incidentally that was a long time ago and while Wiki is quiet unclear it seems that the USDA chose to reclassify back as simply ground back in 2018. If it's been rebranded and remains legal, that's probably what people are now eating, again, at least in the US - as it's deemed unfit for human consumption in Canada and the EU.
I did not say that. I was responding to a person who engaged in banal snark implying that making food for oneself is a herculean task, but it all depends on what you're making, and things can be extremely stream lined. In the case of what we're talking about (mcmuffin stuff), you can even cook and freeze them in arbitrarily large quantities and it's way cheaper, healthier, and even faster since it's in your freezer instead of having to go out.
I do think that the fast food (or even eating out in general) starts to lack any real selling point for households that are capable of cooking, and so this is probably going to weight the customers, especially regulars, of these sort of places away from households that do cook. I suppose you'd argue time is the selling point, but one can even remain competitive on there with things like pressure cooker meals. There are even one pot rice cooker meals which are also great.
The UK comparison for home cooking vs fast food breakfast should be really be Wetherspoon. Spoons makes a solid stodgy full English breakfast and bottomless coffee for 5-7 quid depending on the size. Classic hangover food, and you can start the morning where the night ended.
Obviously you can beat it with home cooking, but the calorie value for a sit down meal out is compelling: 1300 cals for 7.50 (more if you go for hot chocolate).
Wetherspoons is amazing and a great replacement for McDonalds. They bring the food to your table, with cutlery, on a plate and you get unlimited coffee and tap water. I paid £4.78 for a muffin of sauage+bacon+2 eggs+hash brown and unlimited coffee this morning.
You got to choose very carefully from the menu as lot of things aren't good value.
All of the disposables I've seen have USB ports for charging because they come with more juice than battery power sufficient to vape it all. You will have to recharge multiple times for one disposable. I'm not in the UK, but I have seen something of a shift to separating the battery component from the vape tank such that you can just buy a new disposable tank and reuse the batteries. Maybe something like that might work in the UK grey areas.
I always viewed the current generations of 'cheap Chinese hovebords' etc being a direct descendant of the Segway, and that Kamen and his believers weren't quite as ridiculous as we thought them at the time - they were just ahead of their time and expecting too much from too low a point in the technology curve.
They had the right idea but over-engineered the solution.
They could never cut the price down because of it. The knockoffs used much simpler ways to balance yourself, including just changing the form factor to something more conventional that doesn’t even need balance correction (scooters and e-bikes).
This doesn't suggest much of consequence, other than a vaguely-implied smear?
I've watched Hossenfelder's videos for years and whilst yes - she might perhaps be overly critical of a lot of things - I don't at all accept that she has weird, conspirational leanings.
I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.
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