Spyke

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world

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Japan Runs on Vending Machines. It’s About to Break Millions of Them.

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In Europe, we changed to the Euro not that long ago. I was a student and I used to use a shared laundry machine. It was the day before returning to school. I was barely alone in the dorms. Let's do a laundry !

The machines were updated to get euros. There was another machine just to change the coins, especially since the washing machines only took one kind of coin (20 cents).

I put one fresh euro in the exchange machine, expecting to get 5 coins of 20 cents.

Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. ... Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. ... Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. Tching. ...

What ?! The machine was buggy and would not stop. I grabbed a hoodie to put the coins in it. Soon, it was not enough. After what seems to be an eternity I was there with around 50€ and kilos of coins.

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Peer review can be fun

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I bet it's a form with multiple entries, each entry is not different enough of the other ones:

How is the subject of this paper ?
What about the style ?
You checked to reject it, why should it be rejected ?
What's the overall comment ?

Then it's all concatenated into one blob of review.

hmmm

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Hmmm

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Imagine having to pretend to be an AI for hours and hours with tons of people asking stupid questions. I too would be nuts after a while.

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patience

The novelty was the story in FPS. Before Half Life, all you have to do is to shoot every moving sprite and grab keys to open doors. The story was a splash screen between the levels.

Nowadays it doesn't look special to have a story. When I first played Half Life, my mind was blown away.

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What's your favourite era for video games?

LAN parties. I remember the first time I could connect two PC together. It was Doom, with a serial-to-serial cable. We were two players on the same fucking map. It was awesome!

Then coax cable networks with friends. We used to have two or three different networks during a LAN party since you could not disconnect the coax cable to add a player without stopping the current games. The players arrived later would plug a new network just for them, and launch a game waiting the first players to finish theirs.

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Just going through the motions

As a French, it's not in our culture these "imaginary friends". Kids don't have them (at least I don't know anyone that used to have one), we don't speak about it, we don't have stories and fairy tales about them....
I think it's an American thing. The new movie "IF" is uncanny for me - It's like the girl is batshit insane and I was waiting for a twist with here being in a psychiatric hospital or something.