Panflute

After watching some F1 content on YouTube I immediately get recommended these awful clickbait videos like 'Horner's SECRET message to Toto Wolff'. What a dreadful little world.

There's already a male-male married couple in F1 in the form of Stroll and his engineer.

I do wonder where the sudden tidal-wave of 'D-Ric is over' content in F1 media and on Youtube is coming from. Like, he was struggling before Monaco, but now everyone seems to have collectively decided that he's done.

Maybe it's just me, but there's something absolutely hilarious about him roasting Hamilton and then trying to spin it into a sympathetic observation with 'because that's so important to Lewis'.

Ended up getting a Switch + Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and the extra tracks. Fun little machine.

By which I mean walls*. Good morning, me.

When I play F1 2021 on PC I'll often hit the curbs if I even take a glance at my lap time.

Been delving for what little gold there's left in Dutch hiphop.

Mostly been playing pvp in ESO. Performance is mostly ass but the open world gameplay is quite unique and addictive.

Mario Kart 8 getting new tracks may just convince me to get a Switch.

7 points. I had the Williams one wrong as I knew it was around 20 but not which way. Missed the Belgian GP so had no idea how many laps were competed. Couldn't pick between Max and Valtteri for the sprint race question because I only remember 2 races and I seemed to recall them winning one each.

The last one. Kevin Magnussen received interest from Formula E for 2021, but says it wasn’t a series for him. If that was the only option, he would rather find something other to do than racing. “Driving an electric car is better than a kick in the balls, but barely just.”

I got the F1 2021 game and some other random things.

Been playing Forza Horizon 4 (can't be bothered with 5 yet) and in many ways it's kind of a mix between Test Drive Unlimited and the older NFS games. But I notice one glaring issue with open world driving games, namely in that there's no real exciting track design, and with there being so many different 'tracks' (i.e. checkpoints littered across the open world), there's also no such thing as track memorization. In the old NFS games I would spend hours on end trying to beat my own times but there's no real point to it in more modern driving games. Other than that I've been doing PVP in Elder Scrolls Online. The server performance is horrid as always but there's no game like it. Open world pvp with so many different builds means that no fight is ever the same.

I do wonder, why is Lewis seemingly so often absent from these things? iirc he wasn't in the previous Secret Santa video either.

It's gonna be interesting how they'll handle Season 4 of Drive to Survive when the World Champion refuses to cooperate with its creators. That S3 episode about Alexander Albon and Sergio Pérez was already super awkward as Max was barely mentioned at all.

The power of such documentaries and even Youtube videos is that they allow for people to present a case without being checked along the way by people with knowledge on the subject. They're free to cherry-pick information, omit inconvenient details, twist truths and even outright lie, and you wouldn't know about it unless you researched the topic yourself. With such documentaries it's often fun to completely buy into the idea as you are watching them and then dismissing it all once the credits roll. I don't think the 'Hitler to South America' story is completely implausible (just highly unlikely), but even with bonkers shit like Flat Earth, the people who push that idea will typically present their ideas with such confidence and inject it with pseudo-scientific 'facts' that they seem coherent at surface level. It's only when you more closely inspect some of the claims they make (I heard one of them say that moonlight makes things colder) that you realize how full of shit they are.

The SNES F-Zero was only really fun as a proof of concept, but the game has aged terribly. F-Zero X was where it truly started for me, but F-Zero GX was the pinnacle. One of the best games of its generation. That said, I remember waiting for a new F-Zero game back in the Wii days, so I'm certainly not having my hopes up.

Yeah, I noticed that as well. Reminded me of when the media tried to sanitize George W. Bush by sharing quirky photos of him and emphasizing how much he opposed Trump.

I usually buy a new FIFA game every 4 years or so, so this is the first one I got since 18. After still seeing some of the same bugs in the game, and witnessing shit players score 30 yard screamers in every game (both for my side and the opposing team), I deleted it. Sadly can't get a refund, but lesson learned.

Played Life is Strange: True Colors and its Wavelengths DLC. The story had some 'eh' moments, but overall I think it was very well done, and engaging throughout. The game itself also looks super gorgeous. That record store in particular just feels so damn real it's uncanny. While some moments of Wavelengths made me raise my eyebrows (the political kowtowing was too much at times even by this series' standards), the gameplay is so innovative and unique. I mean, it's still an 'interactive movie' style game at the end of the day, but the concept of running a radio station/record store made it feel like nothing I've ever played. Also, the soundtrack and sound design is obscenely good. No one does it better. That said, Wavelenghts might not be as interesting if you have never played the older games. There's a bit of fan service there. Overall, I'm glad that they put this series in the hands of Deck Nine, instead of Dontnod (the developer that came up with the series). I already thought Before the Storm (LiS1 prequel developed by Deck Nine) was better than the game it was a prequel to, and Dontnod's Life is Strange 2 really was a swing and a miss and easily the worst game in the series.

EDIT: wrong thread

I'm interested.

There's currently 2 characters you can recruit, but they stated that they'll add more in the future. They have set personalities and you can improve your rapport with them by doing stuff they like while questing with them. For example, one of them hates goblins, so she will appreciate you more if you kill goblins. You can improve their combat abilities just by adventuring with them, and you can assign them to be a healer, a tank or a damage dealer. They can't exactly replace a good player, but they still make stuff like solo'ing group dungeons easier. Their personalities/looks are set, but you can still craft them a custom outfit or assign them a costume that you own. You can also choose which mount they use.

Server issues mostly manifest themselves in endgame content, so PVP (Cyrodiil particularly) and trials. If you just want to quest, you won't experience many issues aside from the occasional downtime. They added NPC Companions with the most recent chapter, so solo play has become more viable than ever.