Happy Birthday!
Sorry to hear about your birthday money, I hope you’ll still get to have nice day in spite of it!

“The planet Arrakis, known as Dune”

My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad’s friend’s computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn’t imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)

On a side note, I don’t think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I’m talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still… good memories :)

Yes, I remember these! Countdown And Tex Murphy: The Martian Memorandum come to mind. I remember being amazed at the sounds suddenly coming out of our internal computer speaker. It even had something close to speech!
The manual also came with some info on making the sound even better using some alligator clips, but that went waaaay over my little head at the time :)

Here you go :)

Thank you so much for that suggestion!
It was right there in the manual, I really am an idiot sometimes. The beeping is softer now. It’s still super shrill and repeating, but at least it doesn’t give me an heart attack :)

I can’t disable it entirely, there’s too much washing going on to just ignore it completely. But this definitely helps!

We have a German brand washing machine that makes an ear piercing beep when the wash is done and repeats doing this every minute for 15 minutes straight. It is the most annoying and attention-seeking appliance in the house.
When it was time to replace the dryer, we intentionally got an Asian model with a lovely little tune that’ll play exactly once. I’ll never get tired of hearing that tune, because that god awful washing machine will always remind me of the alternative.

Thank you!

It’s going to get better! The kids just left for a 5 day beach vacation with grandma.
And now me and my partner are off for our own mini holiday 💕

I would love to meet the person who speaks faster than I can read :)
The thing with reading though, is that you can skim text to find the relevant pieces and go through it in a non-linear way. Even if a video was short and to the point, I’d still have to watch it from start to end.

Speaking as a story-heavy RPG enthusiast, so my focus is more on story-telling and exploration. I don’t think it’s the graphics that’s holding back the exploration potential, but rather the complexity of actually creating huge game worlds. You tend to end up with either a procedural generated world without a lot of cohesion, or one that’s a mile wide but an inch deep in interactivity.
Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a hugely complex and reactive game world, but it’s locations and the way you are allowed to explore them are reduced to three linear chapters. Even if you switched to, say Baldur’s Gate 2 era graphics, it would still not be possible to create a game in a single huge explorable world with the same level of complexity and story telling.

Though I’m definitely with you on scaling down the graphics in exchange for richer and more interactive worlds, I do think there’s a hard limit on how much better those worlds would get.

I crochet little animals for friends and family.
Unasked, most of the time :)

When I was a kid our family went on vacation to the US. Everyone kept asking if I was Dutch, which I thought was German (Deutsch).
So I kept correcting them, saying I was Netherlandish :)

Worrying what other people think of me.
I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s hard not to.

Oh, thanks for the cross-post @[email protected]! :)

And again, congrats on a great first year to everyone of us who contributed in making this instance what it is today.
And of course a special thanks to the admins!

Arriving home with my newborn son. It was the first moment when it really sank in that I’m a parent and we have to take care of this tiny little thing.
It wasn’t a warm feeling but more of a fuuuuuck! What do we do? What do we do?! feeling. The enormity of the responsibility just overwhelmed me.
I somehow got through it and the post-natal care lady that visited a few hours later really helped with grounding the situation.

Anyway, it’s not a crazy situation for most of you. But for me it really felt like a “I can’t believe this is happening!” situation.

“Political ideologies, an introduction” by Andrew Heywood, is available for free online.

It was required reading for my history study in uni about ten years ago. This seems to be a newer edition. It’s quite a read, but it covers a lot of isms in a generally unbiased manner.

I love passion fruit! The inside looks like a bunch of alien eyes, but it tastes so good.
I just wish they had more filling

That last one is making a run for it :)

Not just in Italy. Pipo the clown is a very old Dutch children’s TV character.

I’m a bit too young to have watched it, but I still know the first lines of the theme song by heart. It’s that pervasive.

Yawn. If you pronounce it while sleepy, you actually yawn. And the yawn will sound like the word yawn.

Maybe I’m just sleepy, but I like the word :)