Working through another playthrough of Valheim with my wife and a couple friends. Ashlands dropped somewhat recently and we've made it a habit to do a fresh server/playthrough when new content drops and we just very very recently got to where we're ready to go to the southern tip of the world and fight in some Viking purgatory hell action.

I preferred 1 to 2. In 2 the enemies start to get rather spongey with their life and that sucked a lot of the enjoyment out of it for me. From a character choice perspective, I also greatly preferred Lilith as the Siren.

Thank you!

If you can stand a bit more, the show does become a lot more than what those first few episodes imply.

Maybe I can help!

I know St Ives uses crushed up walnut shells and apricot pits for theirs.

The one from the 50's, good as it was for the time, is now overshadowed in the popular consciousness by Carpenter's. Ironically, it seems like the former did quite well at the box office whereas the latter bombed and only over time has it grown in popularity.

Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It's a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn't done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There's going to be platform exclusive features that don't have parity that wouldn't be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.

Well, there existed phones that were kind of what smartphones became. Blackberries and Palms get a lot of the attention as they were what executives used, but there were also PocketPC devices that were usually white label manufactured HTC devices that were branded after carriers or some other company like HP. They generally were much larger screened devices with a few buttons at the bottom. They were resistive touchscreens so using your fingers was pretty meh for responsiveness, and the UI was just not designed in a way that was pleasant to navigate. Picture a shrunk down desktop interface. I'd say the UI was the biggest shakeup that they did in the product category, followed by steadily raising the bar for hardware in a space that often would have cheap plastic components. Don't get me wrong, I think too much glass and aluminum is actually poorer than something like kevlar especially for dents and dings, but it doesn't look nearly as sexy.

It's interesting you mention Apple because while I have every expectation that you're correct at the moment, the iPod absolutely benefited from piracy. iTunes allowed you to add your own songs to your library to sync with the device, and iTunes could also be argued to have been on a similar model to Steam because you'd pay to 'own' the songs and there was no subscription giving you access to songs.

I don't care about right jeans making me look old because I just can't wait until baggy pants become more acceptable to wear again. Much more comfortable!

Geeze, seriously? He also got massive mileage out of denigrating Monica Lewinsky.