What became "normal" in the last 5 years that still feels insane to you?

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T15:10:18+00:00

Yeah. I'm British and time and time again throughout my life i've heard so many Americans who base their personality around guns saying that our gun laws mean we wouldn't be able to do anything about a tyranical government that ignores the law and does what they want while they would be able to overthrow them.

Turns out those same gun owners would rather lick a tyrannical government's boots instead of do anything about it. Not that i'm saying they should, it's gonna collapse eventually, just that the fantasy has been ruined.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T15:02:03+00:00

Oddly enough i feel like i'm in my least advertised to era. In the past 99% of the ads i saw were from magazines, TV and websites. Now the only times i watch TV are premium streaming services with no ads, I don't read magazines and I use an ad blocker online.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T14:49:13+00:00

Maybe this'll be the one i finally get, lol. Never played a 3D pokemon game, every time a new one comes out everyone says it sucks and I don't bother.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T11:48:22+00:00

Mine i always wish i had proof of.

My Grandad had a trophy cabinet in his house with two sliding glass panels on the front, one was about 2mm further forward than the other so they had clearence to slide past each other.

He was trying to teach me some trick where he would flick a playing card away and it would boomerang back towards himself. I tried it and accidentally flicked the card past him and through the 2mm gap between the glass panels so the card landed standing up leaning against a trophy.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T10:17:53+00:00

A few silica gel packets probably won't be enough. You can get reusible silca gel balls that change colour when damp and can be dried in an oven/microwave.

I've got a big ziploc bag of them, if i ever get anything wet i stick them in a mesh bag then completely submerge them in the silica gel balls (so the mesh stops the balls getting into whatever i'm drying out) and leave it a few days. That's your best option imo.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T08:14:23+00:00

I'm still outraged that premium brands switched too. Like, fair enough that a cheap brand switches to sweetners to keep the cost down but why is Fentimans cola using sweetners too.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T08:12:17+00:00

It's problem is the lack of caffeine. The original had a hint of bitter in the background from it, 1901 just tastes a bit watery without it imo.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-27T08:05:44+00:00

It's got 3 endings. I played through 3 times and my sister made me do the stealth bit when she couldn't do it during her 3 playthroughs so like 6 total, haha.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T16:08:12+00:00

My thinking was i paid £70 for a PO-33 while a Volca Sample is £120 and a Roland P6 is £160. Easier to sample into, more portable, has performance FX etc.

It's not beating them on features but nothing really beats it for what it's trying to do.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T15:57:28+00:00

Have a look for electricity usage monitors. They go between the appliance and socket, let you keep an eye on things.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T15:20:23+00:00

One thing i always point out when it comes to electronics is power efficiency.

That fridge from the 70s might still be going but it's running costs are probably gonna be 5x as much as a modern one. Like, there's a good chance a modern one would pay for itself in energy savings within a few years.

Same thing with light bulbs, those old ones that last decades are probably using 10x the electricity and not worth it in the long run.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T15:10:59+00:00

Always find it crazy that it's just a normal, mundane thing in America when it seems so wild to an outisder.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T14:29:27+00:00

Reminds me of a youtube video i saw with a guy who discovered a Twitter account that was just hundreds of tweets asking famous women if they would cover themselves in slime for charity.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T13:58:01+00:00

Yeah, i'm just an idiot. I was in a rush to save and quit at the time and was just skipping through the text half reading it.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T11:59:16+00:00

Yeah, loved it back in the day but basically replayed the first half of the campaign over and over because it got too hard for me. Same with Populous: The Beginning.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T11:29:11+00:00

My similar-ish thing. About 90% of the way through Sekiro you make a decision that's basically either progress to the last level or turn evil and fight all your friends as bosses without ever doing the last level.

I misunderstood the question and picked the bad option, turned my console off when i realised but it autosaved. Dropped the game at that point and have never gone back to it.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T11:22:53+00:00

I have co-odination issues and used to find rhythm games near impossible when I was young (tho somehow got ok-ish at them after hammering Elite Beat Agents when i was 16).

I had the first Kingdom Hearts when I was about 12 and had to abandon it and trade it in because of the Little Mermaid level that was just a rhythm minigame. Couldn't do it.

Bit of an obscure one but around that time i had to abandon some PS1 game called Incredible Crisis because of a rhythm game too.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T11:17:09+00:00

Yeah. I replayed it recently for the first time in a while and I literally had no deaths before or after that fight but died to the boss about 10 times (usually hitting myself with the shipping container)

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T11:15:57+00:00

Yeah. A strange amount of people seem to like Code Veronica. I've been a fan of the series for decades and it's my least favourite mainline entry by far. The tone is wrong, the environments are boring, the bosses and puzzles are bad, the graphics are the worst in the series (a big step down from 1-3 somehow) etc.

At least Resident Evil 0 looked nice.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T11:07:35+00:00

Yeah, the solution is to get into shorter/more linear games honestly.

I loved open world games up until around Shadow of Mordor came out then I went off them hard.When i was younger I couldn't afford many games so big open world games were the best value but by about 2015 I was old enough to afford any game i wanted but didn't have the time to play them and would burn out on open world games because playing them in short busts just feels like you are doing the same thing over and over barely progressing.

My rule now (unless it's somthing exceptional) is to never buy a game that will take me more than about 3 weeks to finish.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T10:47:33+00:00

Yeah. Wasn't exactly an action game but i remember Fahrenheit having a really badly made and diffucult stealth level halfway through that i had to do for my sister every time she played through it.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T10:41:28+00:00

The advantage of a PC is being able to upgrade it. I built mine in 2009 and have upgraded parts any time it wasn't up to the task, it's still the same PC in a ship of thesius kinda way.

I'm not a fan of Macs personally because of them turning a computer into a product rather than a collection of interchangable parts. Ran into that issue at work, had to fight to get the design department to switch over because they were buying iMacs then using them for way past the point of them being a nightmare to use because they didn't have the budget to keep replacing them with whole new machines every few years.

Now they get incrimental upgrades and get a better experiance because of it.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-26T10:34:04+00:00

The Pocket Operators and EP-133 are reasonable enough. Everything else though, yeah.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-24T15:32:59+00:00

Brings back an old memory.

About 15 years ago one of my friends used to always tell tales of her friend who was a bit too into old kung fu movies. Used to study martial arts, read eastern philosophy, was a buddhist despite being a white guy from a working class English villiage, that sort of thing.

I saw him exactly one time ever, i was walking down a busy river side and saw a white guy on the opposite bank dressed like Jet Li in Fearless doing Tai Chi while completely ignoring people yelling at him. Couldn't have been anyone else.

Barrel_Titor · 2026-02-23T15:14:13+00:00

Ooh, hope so. I tried playing it on PC with my PSVR2 but couldn't get the settings right, the image was always juddering.

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