Oh man. Currently rocking an AMD AM4-socket CPU with 64 GB of DDR4 - I did have 32GB but when one of my sticks failed, it was actually cheaper to upgrade to 64 than it was to replace an 8.

Haven't upgraded anything in my desktop in over 5 years. An entry-level AM5 setup would cost about three times as much as my entire computer did, and would be a much less powerful machine. Completely stupid. Just hoping all my components keep holding up until the whole bubble explodes.

You'd potentially end up with some slightly nonsense results, like having districts that are divided by a river. Doesn't make sense to allocate public services that way - are you going to maintain the roads that aren't connected to the rest of your district by road?

I think that this is seeking a technical solution to a human problem. Life doesn't really work that way. Still leaves the potential for shenanigans that could no longer be argued with, because it's "fair". Having the election districts be drawn up by a truly independent body would be better, no?

Dunno about that. If I can just steal the e-notes summary:

Count Dracula, as described by Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's novel, is a tall, old man dressed entirely in black, with a long white moustache. He has an aquiline face, a high-bridged nose, arched nostrils, a domed forehead, bushy eyebrows, and a cruel-looking mouth with sharp white teeth. His ears are pointed, and his skin is extremely pale. Additionally, his hands are coarse, broad with squat fingers, and there's hair growing out of his palms.

Oscar Wilde was a good-looking guy; also, straight-nosed, clean shaven, full lips. Not noticeably tall, and alas, never got that old, either.

It has the best gameplay in the trilogy, and the companion quests are excellent, but it completely shits on the lore established in ME1 and the change in direction of the story set up ME3 to fail. It's a great game, but in the wrong place.

One of those games where I absolutely love the concept, and the atmosphere is great, but the implementation is kind of a disaster. Has so much good dialogue and moody technogothic art that they forgot to add a game. Also a bit disrespectful of your time; it's very easy to mess up early and keep playing it for hours when it's become unwinnable - do better the next time.

Am pretty sure the manual describes a whole pile of stuff that never actually got implemented, much like XCOM: Apocalypse. It won't help you much - maybe find a walkthrough instead of you actually want to see it all. It's one of the games that I'd love to see a remake of - there were a lot of games in the early 90s where their huge ambition exceeded what was feasible at the time.

Compared to Arena, which is infinitely large, then Daggerfall is only 0% as big. But despite being however many hundred thousand square kilometres it is, it seems empty, since it's all just meaningless procgen. Morrowind feels much bigger, because it's actually full of stuff.

You're right about it being legendary - Ubisoft certainly seem to have been inspired by the enormous map filled with really repetitive quests. But there are more important things than size.

Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they'll take it.

GOG doesn't have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is "can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it's easier for us to integrate?". Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.

Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I'll grab whatever's free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.

The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply "just as good" isn't enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I'm not really clear what "much better than Steam" looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.

If you've a fishing shop near you that'll sell you a tub of mealworms, then you could make a new best friend..?

It's how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.

But yeah, if you've got a computer that's old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.

I think the detailed description of this vulnerability described it as non-persistent in UEFI, but that you could install something that runs before secure boot that would be persistent. I think that's splitting hairs, though - if you've been compromised by someone that has the skills to pull this exploit off, then they can probably chain something else into it now that they've got basically bare-metal access.

You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target's local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.

What you going to be making the guns from, if you're not importing Canadian iron and steel any more?