I’m feeling the need to do a social media detox, including Beehaw. Pro-AI techbros are getting me down.

Shockingly, keeping Instagram active. My feed there is nothing but frogs, greyhounds, and art from local artists, and detoxing from stuff that is improving my mood rather than making it worse seems unnecessary.

The first time I played My Time at Portia, I had the same issue, and it felt like it took ages and ages to do the bridge. It was much easier on subsequent playthroughs. Basically what I did was build about 6 furnaces to get the crafting going early on, and always had at least 2 of each subsequent crafting station (more as space and resources allowed, although there were a few that just one was sufficient for. Making sure you get a crafting commission every day really helps as well, because that’s your main source of income, which makes it easier to afford more land, inventory upgrades, etc. Fishing is also ridiculously lucrative once you get good at it.

What my Portia daily routine normally looks like is something like this:

• Wake up, check mail (if any).

• Grab resources that have crafted overnight (if any).

• Go to town hall and pick a commission, looking for something that I have most or all of the materials to craft. The plan is to get it made and delivered that day if possible, so if there’s a choice of something that doesn’t pay well but can be done immediately or something that pays better but will take 2-3 days to make happen, I pick the low paying one.

• Check map to see if any locals have quests that day. If they do, go and get the quests.

• Go home and craft the commission item, plus any items required by other quests picked up that day. If any crafting stations have finished production, set them going again.

• Deliver crafted item to recipient(s).

• Gather resources for the rest of the day. I usually pick one activity and stick to it, say mining, fishing, hunting (the sound of dying colourful llamas makes me sad, but I want their pelts), etc.

• Check crafting stations when stamina has run out. Set more crafting going if needed.

• Go to bed.

The other thing is that the big “main” quests for building those major projects aren’t necessarily meant to be done quickly, as they’re the bigger story events that gate your progress through the game. Once I stopped trying to get them done as quickly as possible, and let myself get sidetracked on other stuff, I enjoyed the game a lot more. I spent quite a lot of time just spending whole days on, say, just mining, or harvesting wood, or fishing, while ignoring the bridge entirely. (I actually think I spent about two weeks fishing once. I got really, really into it. It then took me another week to sell them all.) By the time I thought “oh yeah, I should do that bridge thing”, I had more than enough of all the resources needed, and then it felt really quick to do. I ignored quite a lot of main quests for a really long time, including one that narratively I should have done much quicker. Let’s just say that

Speaking purely from my own experience, the mistake I made with My Time at Portia the first time I played it was I was too focused on being goal-oriented by following the main quest. But the game’s not really about that. I had a much better time when I slowed down, focused less on the main quest, and more on crafting stuff for the locals (so many stone stools) and selling them preposterous amounts of fish.

I don’t think so. My Time at Portia has a day-night cycle and I love that game.

The weird thing about Stardew Valley is I cannot understand why I don’t like it. I’ve tried to like it. I’ve poured many hours into games in the same genre, but I haven’t even managed to get 2 hours into Stardew Valley and I do not understand why. I can’t point at anything in particular that doesn’t work for me, and it’s exactly the kind of game I love to play, so I’m honestly perplexed as to why I don’t like it.

Ridiculous. Nigel Farage is part of a great entertainment machine. He is not someone who can govern this country. Reform is a giant ego trip, not a serious programme of alternative change. Nigel Farage provides amusement and diversion. What he does not provide is authority and good governance. In this country, whoever we vote for in the end, the British people choose authoritative, sensible managers, whether from the left or the right. What they don’t do, is go in for the performative politics that Nigel has made such a successful financial career out of.

~Michael Gove, Times Radio on Monday 17th June, who previously helped Boris Johnson to become prime minister and then served in his cabiet.

It is definitely worth checking all three of these to make sure your tactical vote is used in the best way possible:

• GetVoting.org

• StopTheTories.vote

• Electoral Calculus (Not a tactical voting site, but gives you more insight into your constituency, which can help you be sure the two above are giving the best advice.)

If you’re really not happy with the party the tactical voting sites recommend for your constituency, Compass are also offering the Win As One vote swapping tool, where you can be paired up with someone who also can’t vote the way they would like to. By swapping votes, both people can do what they have to for a tactical victory while still having their first choice counted.

I honestly don’t get why so many people are so reckless and impatient on the roads. I’ve seen some people being really fucking stupid around cyclists and motorcyclists. One incident haunts me, because I know someone would have been severely injured, maybe killed, if I hadn’t been quick enough to get out of the way of an impatient person overtaking in a stupid place.

And it’s just like… why? Just leave home a few minutes earlier!

I did not know the exact wording of this guidance, but this is basically the strategy I use. I’ve always figured that because I prepare for my journeys, I am never in such a rush that I need to put someone else’s life at risk in order to pass them quicker - it’s not like it’s going to make a difference to my day if I arrive at my destination 2 minutes later, but it’ll make a huge difference to someone else’s day if I rush past a cyclist when it’s not safe.

I know right? I suspect Keir Starmer would be much more popular if he was as weirdly hot as Keirbot.

Now there’s a sentence I never thought I would say/type.

Starmer bots appear to be highly effective. I hear Labour are considering a rollout across the country.

I literally responded to that link with an out loud “oooooooooh!”, my standard “yes I want it” sound. Spiritual successor to Freelancer with Lovecraftian elements? Ticks all the right boxes.

Agreed! I think a lot of games benefit from trying to do one thing really well, rather than multiple things badly, and Freelancer is unapologetic about focusing on doing the in-ship stuff well. Games that try to do both the in-ship and not-in-ship elements end up either with both being done badly, or one just feeling like it serves little purpose in the game.

I still have a soft spot for Freelancer, despite all the years that have gone by (and aside from some minor UI issues, plays perfectly on a modern PC), and it still looks remarkably nice for its age, too. The story is pretty linear, and the characters not hugely memorable (despite some voice acting from George Takei, John Rhys-Davies, and Jennifer Hale), but it’s just fun to play. It can be challenging if you want to venture into areas less travelled, but because progress through the game is largely dependent on the money you earn (in-game), if you just want a chill evening, you can just trade goods.

And like… this is a game I’ve been playing on and off for 20 years, and occasionally I still find something new. I played it a couple of months ago, committing to docking with every planet and station… and discovered a new trade route that was both shorter and more profitable than the one I had been using. It probably only cut 10 minutes off my three stage trade run around the entire map, but it was still kind of exciting to go “oooh, I never realised this was an option!” All because I visited a station I don’t usually visit.

Look, I’ve been searching all morning, and I simply cannot find a violin tiny enough for Sunak’s horribly deprived childhood.

Which is obviously ridiculous because there is nothing more authoritarian than gravity.

Here’s hoping for the abolition of gravity in a few decades, then.

Yep. Talk of “the nation’s credit card” being “maxed out” has caused so much damage to the country.

I’ve played Sims 2 and 3, and generally enjoyed them. I think I would have played both a lot more if they hadn’t been prone to such severe performance issues. Especially 3. I was in a better position financially back then, upgrading my PC every 2 years, and somehow even a brand new PC built around gaming performance could not run Sims 3 without severe lagging and stuttering. I tried various mods intended to improve performance, but never really made any headway on the issue. Gave up, haven’t tried Sims 4 because the quantity of DLC is huge and expensive.

where does that weirdness come from?

Kids are weird, largely because they repeat things they hear without any understanding of the meanings and significance behind the words. So in the cases of past lives, they’re repeating stuff they’ve heard on TV, films, documentaries, etc, and describing images they’ve seen on posters and adverts and book covers. And they talk about it like it’s real because at that age, kids can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction, so it’s all equally real and it all gets blended together in their minds. Then adults read something into it that isn’t really there.

Consider me highly sceptical.

How Aija once dramatically declared to her parents, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the world!” and curtsied.

“It’s a little disturbing to hear that from a 2-year-old, especially in the middle of a pandemic,” Marie says with a slight laugh.

Tucker nods. “You kind of wonder where she even picked up the expression.”

Because, yeah, there were absolutely no individuals on TV or radio who sarcastically remarked during the pandemic “ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the world!” Just because the parents didn’t remember hearing it, doesn’t mean the child didn’t hear it and emulate it. Childrens’ brains are wired to pay attention to their surroundings in ways that adults aren’t, because that’s how they learn. It seems massively more likely that the children in these cases are echoing things they have heard and absorbed that their parents simply paid no attention to.

Unless the parents can categorically prove that, for example, they never watched a film or documentary about the Holocaust while their child was nearby and able to hear it, that seems a far more likely explanation than reincarnation. For that matter, I’d be more inclined to believe that the child was remembering details from a documentary the parents watched when the child was still a baby, and thus considered unable to absorb anything at all, than believe the child was remembering a past life.

The fact that they can never be pinned down to a specific historic individual is also suspect. The article gives a generic “Presumably there were a lot of Ninas in concentration camps”, but okay, has anyone checked how many there were, and what ages they were, and what other details might match up with the child’s story? A bit of research would prove it one way or another, and the reluctance to follow through on that research makes it hard for me to take the claims seriously.