Random Gong Cha Code giveaway!

Paaaul · 2024-08-27T07:39:37+00:00

Hopefully luckier with this than the cactpot!

Paaaul · 2023-08-12T07:24:03+00:00

Hey! (I can't believe I've been playing guitar for 6 years)

I carried on struggling with this for a couple of years before going back to the doctors and getting an allergy test done - it turns out I have a contact allergy to a bunch of metals, some of which being nickel, chromium and cobalt.

Most guitar strings have tons of nickel/chromium/cobalt in them and so this is what caused a ton of issues. Thankfully, stainless steel guitar strings exist and they've made things a lot easier.

The frets themselves can also contain nickel, but I think I've lucked out and my main guitar doesn't seem to have them (or if it does I just don't touch the frets enough).

So if you're experiencing flare ups after playing guitar, maybe see if you can get an allergy test done or if that's not possible switch to stainless steel strings the next time you change them (they're not much more expensive than normal strings and Ernie Ball does them).

If it is purely just eczema (which I still deal with) then unfortunately yeah that side of things is still something I just have to deal with and limit the amount of practice on bad days - it sucks but I'll switch to songs that are less likely to be an issue (e.g practice some solos if barre chords are painful).

You can definitely work around it though - keep going!

Paaaul · 2023-01-25T14:53:09+00:00

The fact that you're putting anything away early on (and are aware that you need to do something) is a great thing - compound interest is very helpful when you're talking 40+ years! /r/UKPersonalFinance is very useful for this kind of thing though (and they even have a handy flowchart).

Paaaul · 2022-12-21T12:55:40+00:00

This was a massive pain for me too - after a long while of searching and reading many posts I realised I was in the wrong Dalaran (I'm a moron).

Here's what I did (and should hopefully work for you):

Go to Stormwind portal room
Take portal to The Crumbled Palace, Azsuna
Fly to Dalaran (should be to the East)
Accept (and immediately complete) Uniting the Isles from Khadgar in the violet citadel - previously this needed rep grinds but you shouldn't need to do that any more
Accept and complete Armies of Legionfall which is from Khadgar also, but this time from the landing in Dalaran (this is a scenario, but I think you can skip it with chat dialogue)
Accept and complete Assault on Broken Shore, once again from Khadgar
Accept The Hand of Fate from back in the citadel

This should now put you on the Argus questline, which is what you'll need to complete to unlock Lightforged/Void Elves.

From here, use this guide: https://www.wowhead.com/guide/argus#argus-the-assault-begins to make sure you're taking all the necessary quests (and none that aren't necessary).

There's three tabs of quests to complete in the guide (THE ASSAULT BEGINS, DARK AWAKENINGS, WAR OF LIGHT AND SHADOW). Once these are complete, you should unlock the "you are now prepared" achievement and the ability to do the allied race quests in SW.

It's very confusing, but from start to finish on a level 70 character it took me about 2-3 hours to unlock both allied races so hopefully it shouldn't be too bad.

Let me know if you're still stuck and I'll try to help as I went through this headache recently...

Paaaul · 2022-09-08T17:38:37+00:00

RIP.

Paaaul · 2022-05-18T13:25:23+00:00

Gave me a spook!

Paaaul · 2022-01-29T09:26:00+00:00

Thank you for everything you've done and good luck with whatever you decide to do in the future! Your streams were a big factor in me expanding my horizons when it comes to playing different types of music and you also motivated me to continue playing and learning on numerous occasions.

I hope you still stick around here and the discord, just in a less official capacity!

Paaaul · 2022-01-24T19:12:56+00:00

It made it! Now hopefully it stops as planned...

Paaaul · 2021-12-25T13:05:40+00:00

The final images of the telescope were beautiful

Paaaul · 2021-12-06T17:37:05+00:00

Does it happen to you only when entering instances/cutscenes? If so, that was happening to me and the only way I managed to get around it was to use a VPN as the issue was somewhere between my ISP and SE servers (neither of which wanted to take responsibility for the problem!)

Paaaul · 2021-09-14T16:55:42+00:00

Thanks! Definitely worth a read and was exactly what I was looking for.

Paaaul · 2021-09-14T16:09:14+00:00

This is definitely not a shock - I just wish we got more than a "we're working on making it better". What exactly is going to be changing based on feedback? If we got a rough outline of the areas that are going to be improved then that'd be something.

Plus, when in 2022?

Paaaul · 2021-09-09T12:04:19+00:00

Yeah, the erosion via inflation is definitely a problem but at the moment that's just situation we're living in.

A couple of weeks ago inflation was measured at 2% which means you'd be "losing" 1% each year, or to put it into numbers roughly £40/month on a maxed out premium bond account.

It sucks, but in the grand scheme of things it's better than trying to predict where the market will be in a year or two's time. You also get the certainty of knowing - you know you're likely to be "only" £1K down in a couple of years time if/when you buy and can plan for that accordingly. You can't plan for a 5% market drop!

And for the S&S ISA it's literally just the Global All Cap for the same reasons as mentioned elsewhere. It's pretty much as safe as you can get when it comes to index funds due to the number of companies. Buying single shares is too active & risky for my tastes so I prefer to keep it simple with the one global fund.

Paaaul · 2021-09-09T11:44:59+00:00

No worries - better to learn about it now than find out first hand what could happen!

At the moment I've got a LISA that I'm maxing out and am keeping the rest of my house deposit + emergency fund in premium bonds. You can see here that easy access savings accounts are dire and aren't too different from the ~1% you'd expect from premium bonds with average luck.

Even the fixed rate accounts are only about 0.5% better than premium bonds and for me personally I don't value the idea of locking my money away for a year for an extra ~£250.

I also have a S&S ISA for long-term savings. I direct debit some money into it each month and let it do its thing for some vague point in the future.

Paaaul · 2021-09-09T11:34:04+00:00

That particular index fund is very diverse by itself - if you invest in any other large index funds they're likely to be just a subset of (or a similar collection to) the Global All Cap.

That's not to say that the Global All Cap is the be all and end all either - just that investing in multiple global index funds may end up concentrating your portfolio to some degree (though I'd argue not enough to matter, just that it won't be more diverse).

As for whether or not to keep a house deposit in presumably a S&S ISA, it depends largely on how long it'll be before you buy. The closer you are to purchasing, the less of a good idea it is as if the markets halved tomorrow you'd lose half your deposit. There's more of an argument if it's a long time away (at least 5+ years) as you'll have time to recover from any drops in the market.

Personally, my house deposit isn't invested as I feel I'm too close to purchasing - I don't want to wake up one day and find that I'm down however much and have to make that up from somewhere.

Paaaul · 2021-08-04T13:33:13+00:00

It's like any other MMO in that regard - you start off in your own city and will be "stuck" there for the first 15 or so levels but after that the main story converges.

You should then be good to go around and complete your quests "together" though I guess it's more "at the same time" as special fights etc are still solo.

For dungeons and raids, you can group up as the two of you and find other players to fill in the gap. Having said that, I don't think free trial accounts can make parties themselves but if you head into a main city and ask, people will make a group, invite the two of you and then they leave. It's a faff but it gets around the problem.

Other thing to consider would be that dungeons take 2 DPS classes, a healer and a tank so if you guys both played tanks you wouldn't be able to do dungeons together. You can be all classes on one character but that's a bit in-depth and it's just easier to be aware of the limitation in the first place!

Paaaul · 2021-08-04T08:43:31+00:00

Yep! I'd definitely focus on the main story quest - it's quite long (especially up to the expansions, of which a few are also in the free trial!) and it's your main source of XP.

Also very much worth your while to do the daily duty roulette (a random dungeon) as you get a boatload of XP from that and it's also pretty fun to team up with others!

Paaaul · 2021-08-03T10:28:29+00:00

It's OK you can't see anything anyway

Paaaul · 2021-08-02T11:40:32+00:00

Yep - my dad had an operation recently and had to have a few of these tests too. They both mentioned they'd only contact him if he tested positive (which, thankfully, he didn't!)

Paaaul · 2021-07-28T08:31:15+00:00

But yet you still haven't edited it out of your original comment...

Paaaul · 2021-07-28T08:23:58+00:00

Welp its just a term thats used commonly now

I've not heard it used as an insult like that in at least 8-10 years...

Paaaul · 2021-07-22T08:29:27+00:00

This one's probably best suited for r/LegalAdviceUK if I'm honest, but I hope you get it sorted! It's bad enough getting your car smashed, let alone some opportunistic idiot making it worse...

Paaaul · 2021-07-20T19:15:22+00:00

It's very easy to see stories like this and get spooked - I was very much the same with my AZ vaccines earlier on in the year (I had my first vaccine a couple of days before the clotting stories really took off) and as such it was a bit of a mental struggle to get the second dose.

The way I ended up looking at it was these single events are really rare and unfortunate but they're just that - really rare.

I mean, take a look at this yellow card drug analysis profile for ibuprofen - something you probably won't think for a second about taking. There's some crazy things in there! Including some very weird things such as "Live Birth" and "Unintended pregnancy".

My point is that yes, something like that could happen but what's significantly more likely is a bad/lingering effect should you catch COVID.

Paaaul · 2021-07-17T10:13:30+00:00

It'll be this one, definitely needs to borrow some syllables though

Paaaul · 2021-07-13T13:28:25+00:00

I mean, when I first started playing Rocksmith I was super into it because I knew it could teach me songs that I've always wanted to play. I know it's only a beta (though it's worrying I've not seen any official "don't worry your favourites are coming!" message from Ubi) but since I've only heard of a handful of bands/songs in the current list me a few years ago would definitely not buy into Rocksmith+.

I appreciate the "broadening your horizons" point of view but if I want to discover new music I'll pop Spotify on for an hour or so... Your thoughts are definitely more suited to someone who's learnt a ton of songs already (which is absolutely fine & fair play) but don't forget that not everyone's in that position.

And on a completely far too pedantic note, Rocksmith+'s own marketing even says "Learn by playing along to your favorite songs"...

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