nudge

Yes Civ IV and Beyond the Sword expansion is necessary!

No, it's been first announced 10 years ago and is still being updated, last update was released in June this year and it's still in active development (fully playable though!) It's seriously class, I've never seen or played anything like this before. The level of detail is unbelievable; you literally start as a band of hominids and have to research pretty much everything from scratch, even things like gathering wild berries or developing a language. I'm currently in year 58000 BC (i.e. almost 150000 years have passed from where I started), and I just invented the plough and the pulley and learned to do irrigation... It truly feels like an anthropological study of humanity dressed as a game; I wish we had something like that in history classes haha. It's overwhelming, but in a good sense. Seriously, I can't recommend it highly enough! Here's a link to the mod page: https://www.moddb.com/mods/caveman2cosmos

Update on others injured in the accident: Thankfully it seems to be better than first feared!

Undergoing surgery tomorrow; posted an update on her Twitter:

The droid wars incoming.

Yes "only" back pain apparently, so that's definitely a good sign! She's also very young, so a full recovery is much more likely either way. Gute Besserung!

Nothing official yet, only that she is conscious and has been hospitalised for further examination. Same about the other driver (Tsuboi) involved in the crash that sent her flying, and a marshall and two photographers all appear to have survived the accident. There might be serious injuries (in fact I'd be surprised if there aren't), but the fact that all five are alive and conscious is a good sign for sure... Big props for the car engineers; to keep the driver alive in a huge crash like that is a big feat. The roll hoop seem intact and the whole cockpit looks better than one would expect, and it's not really design to survive an impact like that... EDIT: spinal fracture officially confirmed just as I was typing this. this is awful hope she makes a full recovery. This and Wickens' crash are easily the worst in recent years.

Another angle, even worse. Look at that speed before she hits the barrier mid air

My god what a horrible crash in the main race. It's Sophia Floersch going airborne and landing into the barriers/photographers hut. This is awful Early reports say she's ok but at least two people critically injured. @Tommy

Goal of the year material

It did provide a huge amount of new data; over 2600+ exoplanets found during its time of operation I believe... Kepler's follow up mission called TESS has already been launched though, it will explore and analyse an area almost 400 times larger than the one covered by Keppler, and will identify primary targets for James Webb Space Telescope which will hopefully launch in two years. I wish stuff like this was given more attention by media...

Rollercoaster Tycoon was class! As for SimCity, I generally love city building and simulation, but never got into it for some reason... It was all about Civ, Age of Empires, Pharaoh, Caesar (and the rest of Sierra series) and Tropico for me. Funnily enough I didn't even have a PC until I started uni, used to play at a friend's and later at my boyfriend's where I learnt to enjoy watching other people play ... Good times.

seriously? I'm not much of a gamer but I quite enjoy it every once in a while (mostly city/empire building and strategy) and Civilization is definitely one of the best games ever for me... Spent hours on Civ II years ago haha.

So I have a short break from work and haven't got any plans, and thought I'll play some Civ IV. To make things interesting, I decided to download a mod that I've heard a lot about in the past but never got around to actually trying it out. Well... Damn, my mind is blown; the scope of the mod is absolutely insane! It's called Caveman2Cosmos and the name says it all - it covers over 200000 years of history where you start as a prehistoric tribe of wandering homo-sapiens and strive to develop it into an intergalactic empire throughout the eras of history. It has over 1000+ technologies, an unknown number of new units, buildings, religions, nations, civics, traits and completely new game feature called "properties" which brings crime, diseases, tourism, education into play. It's going to take me forever, but it's amazing... Just look at those technology trees for each era (and that's not a recent pic so the mod has even more of them now): Prehistoric 200 000 BCE - 6000 BCE Ancient 6000 BCE - 2000 BCE Classical 2000 BCE - 600 CE Medieval 600 CE - 1300 CE Renaissance 1300 CE - 1700 CE Industrial 1700 CE - 1900 CE Modern 1900 CE - 1990 CE Information 1990 CE - 2050 CE Nanotech 2050 CE - 2150 CE Transhuman 2150 CE - 2300 CE Galactic 2300 CE - 3000 CE Cosmic 3000 CE - 4000 CE Transcendent 4000 CE - 6000 CE

So the results of the qualifying race see Ticktum in P1 for the main race tomorrow, with Eriksson and Ilott behind him. Mick managed to climb to P6. Let's see what the race brings tomorrow; it's always good for some drama. At any case, it looks like Motopark look good on the track with Prema being slightly disappointing. The best part of the quali race was how they sent the safety car because there was a dog on track

This is my biggest issue too; there are so many things I'm eager to see happening, so many books to read, so many things to experience...I do think that we'll see first humans on Mars sometime around 2030s-2040s though, so that gives me hope! It's just a drop in the ocean of knowledge though. I read somewhere that we might be one of the last generations that dies of old age; talk about bad time to be born, haha!

Not a great qualifying for Mick... Two costly mistakes in second session today and a combined P9 for the qualifying race tomorrow... Expect a lot of accidents so it's unpredictable anyway. Credit to Ticktum; he did what he had to do and has a deserved pole.

He's got pole in Qualifying 1 which had three red flags and many of the drivers failed to show good times after getting stuck in traffic. Callum Ilott P2. Mick Schumacher P3. @Tommy: Sophia Flörsch at P15; well ahead her teammates!

What do you think it could be? I know it's all speculation and wild guesses, but I'm really intrigued to hear your thoughts on it. As in, how surreal are we talking about here?

WTF The narrator was doing well until like 8th minute when he suddenly claimed that magnetic anomalies can't be explained by any natural cause (wtf?...natural tectonic forces, mineral deposits, Earth crust, composition of rocks, etc. are responsible for numerous magnetic anomalies all over the world) and then BAM! - he moved directly to alien spaceships, sunken civilizations, Atlantis, UFOs and then the best part, apparently the distance between Mars and Earth is 52 miles There's a lot of interesting and curious stuff about Antarctica, but none of it needs far fetched (to put it nicely) conspiracy theories to be explained... If you want something about Antarctica that haven't been resolved yet and that has left scientists puzzled, take a look at this: https://interestingengineering.com/abnormal-particles-flying-up-from-antarctica-leave-scientists-puzzled Now that's truly fascinating and could change physics as we know it.

Yes - and can't imagine what it might hide underneath... even more so I wonder what we might find in Antarctica if we ever get to drill it properly, considering it's 5km thick in some places Lake Vostok is particularly fascinating; its waters could have been isolated for tens of millions of years and it's possible that we might find unusual life forms there (if any).

Very exciting discovery that would not only explain the sudden climate change some 10000 years ago, but could also explain the origins of the Great Flood myth that is prevalent in so many cultures and religions all over the world! Imagine living through a cataclysmic event like this though... and the possibility of one of such asteroids hitting the Earth again

Just finished watching the first episode of Dynasties, a BBC docu featuring David Attenborough (I posted the trailer some time ago!). It's amazing... The first episode focuses on chimpanzees, a particular troop of them in Senegal, to be precise. The camera work and the level of details is fantastic, it's so beautifully shot and goes in-depth with the social dynamics, politics and power struggles. Highly recommended!!! And damn, chimps are brutal.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2172141/chinas-brightest-children-are-being-recruited-develop-ai-killer?ch=10&share=ca5b1d6e Ta da! Not surprising at all, is it?...