It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.

Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,

If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.

As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.

Cold turkey on caffeine - takes about a week and a half to get over the addiction and you’ll be sleepy and have headaches for most of it.

After that you’ll be perkier than before and will probably even sleep better (depends on how late your last caffeine intake of the day was before as it mainly works by you feeling sleepy earlier and naturally going to sleep earlier).

You can still take something caffeinated once in a while and you will really notice the effect of it once your body isn’t hooked on the stuff (just don’t to it too often or your body will go back).

You see it turns out that when you’re addicted to caffeine you actually require regular caffeine intakes merely to be at your normal baseline level, and will be below it without the caffeine, whilst for those who are NOT addicted to caffeine taking it actually umps them up above baseline (I once read of a study about it but don’t have the link anymore).

If you actually like the taste of coffee and the coffee habit as I do, switch to decaf. If you have hot water at work, buy instant decaf and make from that yourself.

If can’t be added getting over the caffeine addiction, do you can use instant coffee instead of instant decaf.

* Finger wagging intensifies *

Is this also like the “promise” of “recognition” of the Brits, French and Canadians which requires Hamas to disarm?

No doubt the various “unwavering supporters of Israel” in governments in the West admire that nation for the way they deal with those pesky journalists telling everybody else what’s really going on and wish they could do the same.

They know, that’s why they’ve waited this long and even now it’s only a promise that they’ll do it next month and only if Hamas disarms.

The Return On Investment of Corruption has always been massive in the US.

Sure mate, banking in Britain is the Greatest In The World, you being a Briton rushing to claim Britain’s banking sectors is the most competitive “compared to pretty much any other country” is not at all driven by “love of the Fatherland”.

Oh, and by the way, check the law on overdraft fees a decade and a half ago before you call others liars.

En zeker, het is absoluut gelovelijk dat je in Nederlands en Zuid-Afrika gewoont en bankiered heben.

Way back in the early days of the Net, when we were all young, naive, had a full head of hair and pretty much every dynamic website out there was susceptible to SQL injections, I used to browse without an ad blocker, but with all the abuse in the form of pop-ups, pop-unders, page covering overlays, animated shit and even malicious payloads, I had to start blocking ads.

Never went back since.

So you don’t actually have any personal experience of banking anywhere else than Britain and your “even bankings is great in Great Britain” statements are nothing more than nationalistic bollocks.

Cheers for confirming my earlier impression.

I lived in the UK and worked in the Finance Industry there, as well as in a couple of other countries in Europe, and the idea that the UK banking sector is “very competitive […] compared to pretty much any other country” or there not being frequent dodgy behaviours from banks/payment processors is hilariously.

Just look at how a physical payment with one’s debit card (which goes directly to the bank account) can trigger oversized “uncovered overdraft fees” rather than just deny the payment if there are not enough funds in the account for that card like in countries like Portugal and The Netherlands: I literally dumped the first bank I had in the UK when I moved there from The Netherlands exactly because they charged me £30 overdraft fees on a payment ON A DEBIT CARD because my current account which was directly linked to it had £5 less than the amount I was trying to pay (plenty of money on the savings account though), rather than the payment attempt being rejected, even though when I first got that account I explicitly enquired about it I was told payments attempts on that card without enough funds would be rejected.

UK banking is riddled with insane fees for every little possible thing imaginable (especially user mistakes), from presential payments where the account doesn’t have enough funds (where instead of the payment being denied they charge you money) to things like getting a paper bank statement from the bank and those fees are invariably many times more than the actual cost for the bank of it - “competition” between banks in the UK is purelly slimy “introductory rates” that change after a year or two for highly visibly stuff whilst everything that’s standard with the account anywhere else costs extra in the UK and every customer mistake results in a punitive charge.

Even in my homeland of Portugal, where banking is pretty much a cartel where all the big institutions regularly buy politicians from both main parties with non-executive board memberships and gold-plated consulting gigs (in all fairness, in the UK it’s the same), banking is nowhere as slimy and abusive as in Britain.

I get the impression you never had a bank account anywhere else if you think banking in the UK is “very competitive” and that the frequency of “dodgy behaviours” is low there, because comparativelly with where I lived and banked elsewhere in Europe, retail banking in the UK is a totally disgraceful leech-filled swamp.

Or maybe it’s me having “lived a blessed life” in terms of my banking because I’ve only ever lived and banked in Europe.

As for the rest, Europe doesn’t have a unified payment processing system but pretty much each country in it has one, whilst in the UK there is no such thing at all and instead mainly Visa is used. As for they’re “working on it”, in my personal experience in Britain it means nothing at all because all the cunts in leadership positions in both Government and Finance over there are liars who regularly get away with it: going with “it ain’t happenning until it actually happens” when it comes to the promises of those people is the most successful posture over there if you’re not an insider by far.

Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.

These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.

The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.

Also in this day and age getting a VPN and having it always on for general privacy enhancement, especially against snoopy governments (something which just keeps on getting worse), is also a good idea, plus it also lets you work around geographically restricted sites, so it ends up useful in multiple ways.

I think it’s the same psychological effect for all of this, including the mindless adulation of specifical political figures (though there tribalism also participates by defining the subset of political celebrities being adulated).

It’s the acceptable expression of submissiveness in the modern era.

I have actually been in direct contact with some political celebrities in my country (as a member of a political party) and minor acting celebrities in the UK (as I took several short acting courses for fun when living there) and even with my awareness of such irrational behaviour the natural impulse when I first met them to “look up to” well known people like that and being noticed by and leaving a good impression, is huge.

It’s a really stupid impulse.

Surely nobody who is not doing anything online which is or will ever be until the day they die deemed morally objectionable by those with access to those databases or those with power over anything on their lives who can be provided directly or indirectly with data from those databases, have nothing to fear from this.

I’m in Europe and following the news of the MasterCard and Visa censorship I activelly went looking for how else could I pay for things online without using their networks, and as it turns out there are plenty of solutions supported by both Steam and GOG which I was just ignoring before because they just looked as lots of “weirdly named” unrecognized payment options.

I’m now using those in my purchases and so far they actually look more convenient than the Visa/MasterCard (for example, with iDEA which is Dutch, I can literally pay from my mobile phone banking app by just taking a picture of a QR-Code on my screen). The problem in Europe is just there being lots of local solutions and no EU-wide one yet, though I’m lucky because I have bank accounts in different countries (having lived in several countries in Europe) so I have access to many options.

Keep in mind that outside Britain, the rest of Europe have long had their own debit card withdrawal and payment networks and not relied on Visa/MasterCard (to me Britain was, frankly, weird in that it relies on mainly VISA Debit and had no local payment solution, probably explained by lack of political will in the UK for that: most such payment networks in Europe were born out of political pressure on banks to come up with a standard and sometimes were even started as state-owned companies) so a lot of these local online payment options are extensions of those existing networks, which is probably why trying come up with an single integrated cross-border payment processor has been slow going.

That said, thanks to it having been mandated at the EU level, bank transfers are nowadays fully cross-border integrated and you can transfer money between accounts anywhere in EU with the same ease and for the same cost you can for local accounts (the banks really resisted that, by the way, as it took away most of their “international transfers” profits) so we’re probably not far from a single EU-wide payment processor (or at least EU-wide account support on existing solutions).

Yeah, The Guardian was a massive Israel cheerleader - in a similar way to the New York Times - until a few months ago, though like it’s typical of the British Press, they tended to do it (and still do, to a level) via using differently charged language for different sides, selective reporting and the “good old” selective use of the passive when it comes to the actions of each side (for example Israelis “are killed” whilst Palestinians merely “die”).

Still, good that even they have changed their stand in the last few months, though that doesn’t excuse the pro-Genocide propagandist slant they had for over a year.

Yeah, well, the continued reacting to Trump’s tariff threats like an easy and willing bitch - unlike Mexico - probably ain’t exactly making the Mexicans think that Canada is a reliable enough partner in the face of US pressure.

There really is no point in partnering to resist American Economic Warfare with a country whose government in practice when Trump shouts “Jump!” asks “How high?”.

Same think applies to any partnership with the EU, though the EU too has far to many easy and willing bitches to America in the Commission (who, no doubt, have a ton of blackmail material on many if not most of them).

Performative moral liberalism, same as most Democrats in the US.

This is a guy sending weapons to Israel to mass murder Palestinians: he clearly doesn’t as a principle care about oppressed minorities.

I think what muddles the water on the “Leftwing” character of Lemmy is that there are two kinds here: those whose personal Principles (mainly around the importance reducing the suffering and increasing the happiness of others, rather than just themselves) which lead them to support leftwing policies and those support Political forces or ideologies which are deemed Leftwing, and hence see themselves as Leftwing.

IMHO it’s last group that explains in Lemmy things like authoritarian leftwingers (i.e. tankies) and people who think they’re leftwingers because they tribalistically support certain mainstream political parties who claim to be Left but are at best moral liberal and even that second to their very rightwing broader stand on general Equality and quality of life for the many (such as the US Democrats, UK Labour, German SPD and so on).

My impression is that Lemmy has a much higher proportion of Principled Left-wingers than the wider society.

This is probably why if you’re not in an instance that blocks the tankie instances, in between the tankies, the principled types and the mainstream “leftwing” party tribalists it almost feels like there are 3 kinds of “Left” in Lemmy.