Limo

Oh yes.

Nice. Like ... nice. Not great, but pleasant to listen to. As background music for doing datascience to. Will be doing a lot of that in the coming months, so I expect to be listening to this a lot. But I totally get why @beerwolf wouldn't like it. It's on the very syrupy side of sickly sweet.

It's not actually the difficulty that bothers me so much as the complexity of it all. Which stats to focus on? How do these map to weapons you can use? What is a good weapon? Where to get things you need? Which monsters can you skip? Where to go next? I am but a simple man. I'd like to be told what to do. Also, when you manage to fight your way through Stormveil castle and all the stuff in Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula only to be killed with two hits by the f-in *guards* of the magic academy thing: that is just too much. At level 40 I expect to be thrashed by bosses, not their f-ing minions.

Yes mom ? no, seriously, thanks. I’ll wait until it’s on sale or sth

Hey, thanks for the link. Will watch. Also thanks for the button-mashing bad times warning. The only stats to level up being health and damage sounds great, actually. It's one of the things I don't like about Elden Ring - the complexities with builds, weapons to use etc. (there are also things I *do* like about Elden Ring, btw - the character design is *fantastic* and in principle I like the fights a lot, it's just that many of them being insanely brutal when you don't expect them to be is annoying. I'd prefer a progression that's a bit more linear)

So I've been playing Elden Ring on again and off again for about 50 hours, working my way through Stormveil Castle and some other boss type creatures and ... I'm sick of it. Not so much of the difficulty but of the slog of having to figure out where to go, getting your ass kicked because it's not where you have to go OR because you suck (but no way of knowing which of the two it is) and of having to keep up your concentration as you wander aimlessly from one area to the next because some of those irrelevant minor characters may in fact accidentally kill you. Now I find all of you guys talking about Sekiro, which is maybe even harder but also, it seems, more focused (open world, it turns out, is not for me once the novelty wears off). It also has ninjas, which I like. What do you guys think: should I give it a try if I'm bad at gaming in general and more of a button masher than a skilled and patient grinding type? Or should I stick to something simpler??

And here she is (on the right, thing on the left is a Eureka Mignon grinder) Spent some time dialing it in this afternoon (so I’m now all jumpy from the caffeine) It really is an upgrade. Much thicker smoother brews. ?

So … in the end my wife and I had another conversation in which it was decided that I shouldn’t have to resort to buying toys (however cool) to have good coffee for breakfast. She is very nice like that. A Profitec Go single boiler machine (don’t care, milk is for babies) with a temperature control and pressure control is on its way and should be here before the weekend. I’d still like a manual machine at some point, though, but just for fun.

Nice ... I read on and found this gem: There is no way my wife will ok having this in our kitchen, even without her having to use it.

So how do you do it? Just dump the chamber in boiling water or something?

Hadn’t thought of that one in a long while. Is it still absurdly expensive? … lemme check … oh yes. €360. I’m all for stupid purchases, but this is too much. Also, it doesn’t look quite as murderous as the similar Bacchi machine.

Shoo, young brat. Middle aged men be wanting to get all spendy here in this thread.

Probably a better score than the books, though. Which are awful. Which I know because I finished them.

Never heard of the frozen ball technique. More chocolaty sounds nice. But still ... 100 degree C metal object that is liable to explode or start a fire when you forget to turn it off: nope. It's kind of like a classic car in that respect: looks really cool, might very well be extremely pleasant to drive if you learn how, but at the end of the day it's still a death trap. Like a 2CV, I will admire the La Pavoni from afar ?

Ooh yes. I feel slightly better about not getting one now that I’ve learned that the outside of the reservoir gets dangerously hot (not good for me as I’m clumsy), but in an ideal world, yes, I’d love to have one. Cafelat Robot as second best. Flair 58 I’ve looked at, @Berk, but for that kind of money you can almost get a La Pavoni, so, no. Still interested in your opinion of the Neo, however. Is it as fiddly as I think it is? @GORDO got me thinking, btw, that an Aeropress might be useful to bring to work. The “coffee” there is awful. Hmmm …

Yup. They seem a bit more fiddly because you have to heat the brewing chamber in some, probably convoluted, way. Too bad, because the lever on the Flair looks easier to use. Have you used one? I take it you’ve seen this?

Where is “here”? In NL they go for between €32 and 38. Never tried one, though, as I either use a Moka Pot or a simple home espresso setup (see post above - though since posting that the wife and I had a good talk so now I’m thinking of buying a Cafelat Robot for myself instead - and not with our household money)

Wait … how are you finding it hard to get one? Over here in the Netherlands there’s a whole bunch of web sites selling them.

For no good reason at all I’ve started to look around for an upgrade to our Quickmill 820. I mean, it’s easy to use and very robust but the espresso you make with it is only 85% or so Italy and that’s if you’re lucky. 75%, with the exact same coffee (very good, thank you) and grinder settings (grinder also a-ok) is not rare - and somewhat annoying (FWP). Anyone have any recommendations for a machine in the, say, €800 to €1200 range?

And by a few hundred years of Russian culture, I'd imagine. Things like "Ukrainian isn't a language, it's a speech defect" and "civilized people in Ukraine are Russian anyway" have been staples of Russian culture for centuries (in part because the origins of the "nation" we now call Russia do indeed lie in Kyiv). When the war started, I read Bulgakov's (himself born in Kyiv) "The White Guard" and everything the culturally Russian protogonists say about Ukrainians (ie the peasant population of what was otherwise known as "Little Russia") in that book was coming verbatim out of the mouths of Putin and his cronies as well. So yeah, the brainwashing has been going on for centuries.

Why does this remind me of the Library of Babel?

Yeah, this. I always wondered how they got away with “lending out” ebooks like that. I’m against overbearing copyright as much as the next guy (maybe even against copyright period) but labeling yourself an archive doesn’t give you the right to start passing around copies of each and every file that comes your way. They can’t not have seen this coming.

While nothing will top that ^ Congo in general is known for stylishness. Google “Congo sapeurs” for pics like this one:

Have we done DOMi & JD Beck yet? Here goes: