ForbiddenRoot

I thought you were kidding, but then I looked it up on the net and it seems this is really a thing. WTF Microsoft!?

Vasco quite frequently blocks the door everywhere for me, but at least I have been able to push my way through so far. He’s like my Golden Retriever in that respect so I am used to it from real life.

I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.

The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.

Why is everyone so anxious nowadays?

For me it’s financial, though as a middle-aged person I am nowadays also plagued with metaphysical questions.

About the financial part, I’m actually very well-off but the world has become such a complex place (or it always was and I am only realizing it now at my age) and I have little to no control over most aspects of it. I don’t want to lose what I have worked towards because of geo-politics, climate change impact, global recession, or such things. It’s not an existential crisis for me but there is some amount of anxiety and dread that I previously did not have.

French just blows my fucking mind.

In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D

Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?

Un peu, mais je prefere les baguettes

(and also I just realized I totally don’t know how to make acute / grave accents on my keyboard, if that’s possible at all with an en-US layout)

To eliminate this confusion I propose the days of the month should start from 13.

I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.

The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.

Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P

Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.

I guess every country has their set of weirdos from each end of the political spectrum, and it makes the local / national news, at least on a slow news day.

But as someone from the other end of the world, I can honestly say I do not care that US Conservatives are no longer going to be eating “Frosted Flakes” (which sound like something no one beyond the age of 5 should eat anyways, and probably not any age actually).

“World News” indeed