I think people are really clamoring for some competition to The Sims. I feel that way myself.

But a lot of what I've seen of the game so far indeed feels so uncanny and off-putting. The generative AI feature I saw demonstrated in a video I watched, the texture generator, also seems like a huge step down from the Create A Style feature from The Sims 3, which I sorely miss.

I've been blocking a lot of communities in an attempt to avoid that.

I've decided that with this online presence of mine, I'd rather not be regurgitating doom and gloom. No matter how justified it might be.

In order of preference:

1. Immortality
2. Shapeshifting
3. The ability to look at something and immediately know what it is and what it's worth (would make flea market and thrift store visits a lot more efficient)

It's tagged as SEC (Someone Else's Creation), and over on Reddit it's tagged as MOC.

So it's just someone's own interpretation of the 2001 Makuta.

Per Discogs, it's Jimmy Cauty.

I had a fairly rough time at school, so the holidays were the highlight of my childhood.

We'd go to this holiday village once or twice per year, which had this central building that was themed in a very maximalist way, with lots of little nooks and crannies to discover. It felt like an adventure. I'd laze around in the big swimming pool all day, or pretend like I'm a pirate in this big pirate ship prop they had. It still exists, but I'm a bit afraid that it won't live up to my childhood memories of it.

During the summer my family and grandparents would go to this kinda run-down recreational domain around a lake. Swim all morning, then eat something in the shoddy cafeteria. They put red cabbage in all their sandwiches for some reason! I'd give a fortune to experience that again, but alas, my grandparents are long gone and the domain's been turned into an upscale glamping spot (where you can't even swim).

Of the things I have re-experienced as an adult, building some LEGO sets has been great to do again. And I'm also getting to experience things I wanted to do as a kid but never had the opportunity for.

This is by far my favorite search engine when I just want to find something to read. It makes searching fun again!

Some caveats to take in account:

• It doesn't serve the use case of «quickly finding some factoid, business or news article», but for now Google still mostly functions for that.
• English only for now.

I'm from Belgium.

I suppose Technotronic's Pump Up the Jam is now more well-known again as a running joke in Philomene Cunk's show. In a similar vein, there's The Immortals' Techno Syndrome, better known as "Mortal Kombat". But these are both English, of course.

As for songs in our local languages, on the Dutch side Gorki's Mia always ranks highly (but I'm not sure how much you get from it without understanding the lyrics) while Laïs' rendition of 't Smidje has some weird international appeal. On the French side there's several strong hits like the entire discography of Stromae, Plastic Betrand's Ça Plane Pour Moi, or Eurovision-winning Sandra Kim's J'aime La Vie.

This was the second time I ever painted miniatures, following the little knight that came with The Army Painter starter set. Since it was five at once, I chose a fairly simple color scheme.

The article says:

When I listen to my interview audio, I find an additional hint from Griffais: “We intend for it to be positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space, but to be very competitive with a PC you could build yourself from parts.”

Poking around the web, I find I could probably assemble a computer with this performance for $800, not including labor. But it could easily consume half the room under my TV. A compact system with a similar GPU can cost $1,000 without storage, memory, operating system, or a gamepad.

Which makes it reasonable to assume it's gonna be at least within that price range. And that is personally way too much for me.

I don't really use SpaceHey (I was never an active MySpace user in the day either), but for a friend I did end up recreating the MySpace layout maker Pimp-My-Profile to support SpaceHey. I haven't looked at it in a while, but it should work.

You can find it here.

It's definitely a hard concept to get right. Perhaps even for the actual developers, given how they're not really developing a Sims 5 and how we see people sticking faithfully (and with well-articulated reasons beyond mere nostalgia) to older games in the series.

Paradox already cancelled Life By You. I'm not sure how close Paralives is to release. So it's at least impressive that InZOI managed to release something. The only other one I can think of that managed to release is Tiny Life, but that one's way less ambitious.

The bone color choice was a happy little accident. I lacked a dedicated color for it in the paint set I had, so I mixed an old (color-separated) rakarth flesh Citadel paint I found with some matt white and daemonic yellow from my The Army Painter set.

I never really considered basing before (my frame of reference for miniatures has generally been the old 3.5e era D&D pre-painted minis which had neutral black bases), but the third miniature I painted had a sculpted base to paint and that did end up looking really nice. Haven't posted that one because I simply followed a painting guide there.

The bases here came pre-attached (or rather, they're likely just a single mold), otherwise I suppose a tile floor would work well for these. 🤔 I'll have to think about what else could work here.

I've really been enjoying playing Diablo 1 with a gamepad using DevilutionX (which is mentioned in the article), so this is a welcome addition for me.

I hope this succeeds, but personally I'd rather have a less powerful machine at a more affordable price point.

Personally, I try not to swear even when I stub my toe… but it's quite difficult sometimes. When I do swear, I want it to be a deliberate decision.