Tar_Alcaran

Lipo’s can absolutely burn your house down, but only while overcharging. Igniting a battery while you’re walking around with it will at most burn your pants down, not kill you.

You can absolutely make a lipo battery “explode” by overheating it by drawing too much power. But it’s the kind of explosion where it spews hot gas and maybe catches on fire. You’ll definitely get hurt, but that’s about it.

You can do MUCH worse by overcharging it. (note the size of that battery). There will eventually be a fireball if you overcharge it and keep overcharging it when it’s already swollen to a balloon. But you generally don’t charge stuff while it’s in your pocket.

These were actual killing-people-explosions. Lipo batteries don’t do that.

Secret backdoors… And planted plastic explosives.

Akira definitely counts. I’m sure my parents were in the “all cartoons are for kids” camp that everyone was in in the 90s. Similarly, the Guyver.

A little late-80s perspective: when I was growing up, “gay” was an insult we’d call eachother jokingly. Nobody “was gay” because that’s a (light, funny) slur. Hell, it wasn’t till I was 28 I realized it didn’t “have a dating-girls phase” that I never grew out of, I was just bi.

The homophobia is still pretty deeply ingrained even in people who aren’t that old and are really trying. I can only imagine how bad it is for those who aren’t and don’t.

More expensive doesn’t always equal better, especially for things like keyboards, clothes or eyewear, where branding is huge and inflates prices more than quality.

It’s pretty decent at unimportant optimisation tasks with limited options. Like “I’m driving from X to Y, my friend travels by train from Z, what are good places to pick them up?”

Pandora: First Contact, supposed spiritual successor to Sid Meier Alpha Centuari

Seconded. I repressed all memories of this game until now.

the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours

You must have been amazing at it, because it was certainly more like 20 for me, not counting branching missions. (The internet says it’s around 25ish)

it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors

I think you’re wearing some rose tinted goggles about Red Alert (and some solid black ones for the first game). Pathfinding in Tiberium Dawn was so terrible that it was part of the balance of the game: when they tried to fix it for the remaster, they found it horribly unbalanced the game in favor of GDI, so they decided not to fix it. Pathfinding was pretty shit in Tiberian Sun, but it was much worse before.

or the main other RTSs of the time.

Yeah, StarCraft was better but Total annihilation was much worse than Tiberian Sun in places where there was any terrain.

TA is much better now, but it has 25 years of mods going for it.

I’m going to say Battletoads. The game was mostly pretty fun, until you got the jetski section where it was biologically impossible for a human to react in time. The only way to get past this level was to perfectly memorize the sequence of buttons to push.

I can say it wasn’t any easier in the Megadrive/Genesis.

You know, out of all the ways I’ve had herring, I don’t think I’ve ever had it smoked. Which is weird, because we smoke every other fish here…

But the point was that I enjoy a lot of what others consider to be weird fish stuff, but whale blubber is too far for me.

I meant in a “how many are there” way. You’re obviously a lot less likely to hit a Minke whale in your car.

So, disclaimers are needed here.

In Norway, they hunt Minke whale. The Minke whale is classed as “least concern”, which means “doing great” as far as being endangered goes. It’s the same category deer are in in the US, or pigeons everywhere.

So, obviously I tried whale meat, a few ways.

As a steak, it’s kinda like gamey beef in texture, but with a fish-adjacent flavour. Like if you shifted a steak 20% towards tuna without changing the texture.

There’s also whale bacon, which honestly tastes like pork bacon, but with the fat more in splotches than in layer.

There’s also the blubber, which I’ll simply an acquired taste. And that’s given that I’m Dutch and enjoy my pickled herring and even like lutefisk. It’s like if you filled a grapeskin with a nutty-oily, semi solid jelly substance.

Because they have a LOT of money riding on convincing people not to vote blue. Gee, I wonder who benefits from that most.

Correct

What a weird focus on the US democratic party. Every single US government has been doing this exact same thing.

The Netherlands is especially anal about dual Citizenship. When you gain dutch citizenship, you must give up all others, and the when you gain other citizenship, you must give up the Dutch one.

The only way to be a Dutch dual citizen is to be from a place that won’t let you give up citizenship (Turkey is famous for it here), or to be born to parents with different citizenships. (Or to get grandfathered in from before the laws got this strict)

Less than zero

Same here, though I really have an interest in the “weirder” weapons. I love pole arms, but there are very few remaining manuals about those.

Also, “it’s fencing” if you include punches and throws. But it varies hugely by country and even group. And of course by which manuals you’re working from.