Shorty

Hey yeah, I'm a big fan of bouldering actually! Lucky to live in Sheffield, home of the world's oldest bouldering-only gym The Climbing Works (and for a long time, Europe's largest) started by Percy Bishton who set some of the olympic routes last year. If you watch Bouldering Bobat on YouTube, they were there for the CWIF a couple of months ago setting fun problems and they bumped into a pro Alex Megos while they were there. We also have about 4 other awesome climbing gyms - a couple of them being absolutely enormous. Not to mention we are right next to the Peak District national park which has loads of bouldering and lead climbing locations, so it's really popular here. It's not too unusual to bump shoulders with Team GB climbers and other pros. Not sure if the above pic will work but it's me on a pretty steep overhang a couple of years ago. I first got into it about 2018-2019 I think, and was going quite regularly. I was just about getting to the point of climbing font 5-5+/V1-V2 pretty comfortably when covid hit which reaaaally set me back as all the gyms were closed for over a year and I stopped all strength training and put on weight! I'm only just about getting back to that point now. It is such a great way to make exercise interesting. I can go for hours and get exhausted but never feel bored or fed-up like I do with almost all other exercise, because there's so much room for consistent growth and improvement, so much problem solving to be done. It's also one of those things I kick myself constantly for not trying earlier. People suggested it to me over ten years ago, and I think about where I would've been if I started then and how much better I would've been at that age and regret not trying it sooner!

Initial feedback for this game sounds great. Can't wait to play it! Launch price is a bit too high for me... but lets see how long I hold off I loved TMNT II: The Arcade Game on the NES when I was a kid, even if I never did beat it...

When I finished my degree in 2009 it had basically killed my entire love of reading. In the gap since then I barely read anything (although - since it's been mentioned repeatedly some time ago in this thread, I did enjoy the His Dark Materials trilogy in that window, for the first time, through the medium of the very excellent BBC audiobook). I decided to force myself to change that by buying a Kobo with a light so I can read it when my better half has fallen asleep and my insomnia has taken hold. With that and a generous voucher at Christmas, my interest in reading has finally been rekindled. Or rekobo'd, I guess (heh heh) Before I get to the Kobo books, the only physical book I can remember even trying in that last decade or so was The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemesin - first in the "Broken Earth" trilogy. It was very highly regarded and although I thought it was good, maybe I just wasn't in the right place at the time? Mostly I found it a bit difficult to follow, and by the end of it I wasn't entirely sure what had happened. A couple of years later and I'm not sure I could tell you much of the plot at all.... I might need to give it another shot soon. Anyway, onto the Kobo. I've been going mostly for Sci-Fi... I started off needing something which comes up when you google things like "something nice to read". As in, I needed something with a real sense of feel-good comfort reading. That search lead me to the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, starting with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. And it was the perfect thing to get me back into reading, easy, lovable characters, a good mix of exploring fun new ideas about species and gender with characters that are easy to care about, and a good dose of humour and adventure. The following books in the series follow new characters and I jumped straight in with the second, and bought the third and fourth for the future. Going forward there are some places where the characters' integrity dip a bit below believable levels, but it's still enjoyable. It was generally just a shame not to be continuing with the first story. Continuing on the sci-fi theme, I went for a book by one of the only authors I have bothered with in the last decade - Andy Weir, reading his newest entry, Project Hail Mary. Despite a very generic stupid name, it was a good gripping book that I enjoyed nearly as much as The Martian. I love the direction it took, even if the narrator was very occasionally intolerable. Then I decided I wanted to scratch an itch of a genre I've always loved, time travel. For that I went with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. A really gripping read with a great main character and a fun twist on the time loop trope. I loved this enough that I got another book by the same author, Touch - straight away. Which I'm also enjoying, but not quite as much as it spends waaaay too much time describing settings. Took my book on holiday and decided to pause the Sci-Fi trend with something veeeery different and my style at all, but it caught my eye on a kobo store sale. Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. It's a kind of comedy/slice of life/introspection about reality and day to day issues. I almost thought I'd made a huge mistake as one of the opening jokes was about getting a usb port in the wrong way round but I forced my way past that and had a really good time with it. I didn't laugh out loud a lot of times, but I was certianly engaged with the long character list. Another one that I knocked out in a single day during that holiday was Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. This was... pretty good fairly standard action fare with just barely enough turns in the story to keep you from guessing how it's all going to end. It was very by the numbers with really overly dramatic storytelling at time, I was surprised how well it was reviewed, but I was certainly interested enough to keep flipping pages til it was done. The next books I've bought and am ready to read are The Complete Witcher - purely because the entire set was 99p, All Systems Red - a seemingly short book which is the first in the Murderbot Diaries series, and purely because it's a book that I added to a wishlist 13 years ago just before giving up on reading for-nearly-ever, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

That's right, it's the return of the N-E Quiz! This has been popular ever since its first appearance back on C-E. The concept is simple, try to answer one of ten questions, win a point. However things are a little different this time. To try and keep things going past one or two rounds, it's going to be organised staff side. So to make things clear, don't bother PM'ing me to ask if you can do the questions next! The staff here will take it in turns to ask the questions. The benefit of this? Prizes! We'll be offering some supercool forum-esque prizes. If you don't care about custom titles or maybe even something cooler than that, then maybe this won't be for you, but compete anyway, for bragging rights and fun! Now the boring bit. You have to read this though. If you break any rule here, you'll be disqualified from the round and banned from the thread until the next round!

More importantly, you both broke rules 1 and 2 immediately....

I am surprised nobody had said 7 12 years before it was released. While we're necromancing threads though, I did really enjoy the Resi 4 HD Remaster recently in ultrawide 4k. A labour of love that took the dev 7 years or something. Quality work and it was great to go back to it. I was surprised to find it practically unplayable with M&K though, thankfully plays very nicely with an Xbox controller though.

Tbh there is a fundamental flaw in mega threads, they probably contributed greatly to the decline in activity here (though the biggest cause was Facebook/twitter) Google loves when you have pages with URLs and titles of relevant topics, full of unique information, which forum users conveniently provide. It's the reason N-E used to do better on the forums even than it did on the main site. It's why we were constantly fighting spam bots (silver linings etc) and why we had the interest of advertisers. Ngl I do get nostalgic occasionally remembering a time when we had so many threads that you could refresh the page and multiple threads would disappear to page 2. Or when we had to have so many sub-boards because we had so many topics (I started my responsibilities here as a mod for the "Creative" board where people mostly posted photoshop creations and signature/avatar designs) This thread is now about being old and sad.

Seems to have borrowed a lot from the Quest 2, which is a good thing really. I have a third party quest head strap with a dial to adjust like that one, and it's really handy for quickly swapping with friends and for adjusting it to be nice and comfy. Inside out camera based tracking is great too. No sensors means you're so much more likely to pick up and play, and at least on the Quest, it just works so well, never worrying about tracking or blocking the sensor. And it's handy to be able to quickly see your environment when you need to, too.

X:COM 2 at £4 is an absolute no brainer if you haven't played it. Brilliant game with brilliant addon content included.

So how is the Index? Part of me is weighing up the idea of going bigger and better in VR, against maybe just seeing it as a party device and accepting that I should mostly stick with the Quest's own games, crazy golf and Superhot, it makes things simpler! As someone who grew up battling things like sound driver and graphics card driver selections during installation, and installing and reinstalling PC games (very slowly) a million times and eventually giving up on them, it is funny how remniscent this is of that. But I don't think I ever had to download third party launchers or anything quite as obscure as having a debug window in focus while trying to play a game!

Half way through watching The Matrix Resurrections I thought I was going to disagree with everyone, I loved what they were doing. Then suddenly it took this crazy spiral out of control, seemed to lose all direction and focus, and a truly terrible ending. I can't think of another movie that flipped my opinion of it so much half way through.

Always the same, you wait and wait and it seems like it's going to take forever, then suddenly you've got a date and it's a mad rush. You will make life easier if you start packing/clearing things out asap!

Yeah I'm pretty sure we went over this years ago when we first started using the software. I think back then I delved into it and tried to solve it. You can see the error is in the ckeditor.js javascript file - ckeditor being the name of the WYSIWYG text editor you use to submit posts. So it's not something we've done, but a bug in ckeditor or between Invision and ckeditor. Since I didn't get very far back then I'm just going to trust that I tried everything I could I'm hopeful that just upgrading Invision will fix that with it, but haven't got time for that at the moment.

I had done that bit already, apparently I'm on Chapter 3. I've had to give up again for now though. Every time I try and get into VR, I end up being hampered by some degree of setup quality that is bringing me down. I usually try to fix it for a while then give up and stop playing VR again for months. This time though, it's not just me being fussy. Once I'm connected to Oculus via PC Link or Air Link, all hand movements are jittery. It's so unpleasant to see that it's ruining the whole experience. I've tried loads of settings tweaks, including signing my soul over to Mark Zuckerberg to make a developer account so I could disable the Guardian, but still getting that judder... I find it unlikely that it's the cable (although it's not the official obscenely priced one) because the effect is exactly the same on Air Link. And I definitely wasn't having this issue when I first used PC Link. Edit: ok so… (damn this is still such unstable tech overall) I managed to fix the stutter in pc link hilariously with a fix I found on Reddit that involves opening the debug console on your pc and making sure the window is in focus while you play. Amazingly that worked. And I hugely improved Skyrim by switching from using Steam VR to OpenComposite which made it way better. Not tried Alyx again yet, fixing VR issues is exhausting!

Ah, I didn't realise forum banner images were hosted on the main site server. Even if it wasn't for the https warning, that image isn't there anymore. I can sort that later. Edit: sorted

Yeah I've read that idea too. Funnily enough I just bought a circular rug for this room for the office chair to protect the floor so I have that ready to go. I've become more aware on recent uses of the VR that the best thing to do is try and stay centred (while appreciating that you have a good amount of "arm-waving" room) As far as Alyx... it's been quite a while so I'm not sure I could describe exactly where I was up to. I'd just done a dark bit with lots of explosive barrels and Barnacles but that describes most of Half Life doesn't it...

I've just recently moved my PC up into my attic room, so now for the first time since I got VR (years ago), I have a really good dedicated space for VR. Lots of room to move around, and no light fittings above my head to accidentally punch. I'm going to be using a Quest with PC Link over USB 3, as anything else has just proven too unstable due to the wifi situation in my house (which is good for most things, except wanting to be near the router and have room for VR). The only other wireless option I might try is connecting a 5ghz router directly connected to my PC, but that can wait. I'm starting up by getting the "Ultimate VR Modlist" for Skyrim using Wabbajack, then I'm going to get a bit further on Half Life Alyx finally.

I've definitely been around long enough that I rememer being N64-Europe. Unfortunately my memory's a bit foggy overall, so I don't remember much in between. If there are any dots people can join I'd love to read them. There are a lot of names I haven't forgotten though, and I wonder where those people ended up. I used to enjoy making signatures and wallpapers and sharing them on the old "Creative" board. Back then we would regularly have best signature and avatar competitions - I eventually became a mod of that board. I honestly don't remember how I went from that position to taking on the responsibility of rebuilding and hosting the site, but it happened somewhere along the way. It's kind of a dream of mine to give the site another design, but inspiration's never quite hit right. I did actually recently replatform the site though, which opens up a lot of possibilities. I could now quite easily rapidly develop new sections and functionality for the site. Ashley and I had a good idea for what to start with, so keep an eye out for that Happy to see the old faces of those who still pop in, and the enthusiasm of those old and new that still love Nintendo and gaming in general.

I mean, sort of. I think Bleach took the "lets just constantly scale everyone up" thing to an extreme, it's only one step removed from DBZ in that regard. Basically in Bleach when a fight starts, person A will appear to be significantly stronger than person B. Person B will then reveal that they were much stronger all along and win the fight. Literally every single fight in the second half of the story followed this pattern. That said, one thing Bleach really had going for it before it hit filler-hell, was just straight up dripping with style. So if they bring that back, and trim all the excess, it could be one gorgeous production at least.

The problem is probably that I googled how to keep it quiet. That means it knew what I was trying to do and evolved.

^ you can rename Alexa, though. I have thermostat and a few hue lights, and 2x Google Homes that I got super cheap. I'm not really interested in anything with cameras, and home security hooked up to wifi just feels like it's got a glaring weak point. To be honest, I really hate the smart assistants most of the time. Google constantly wants to give me tips and it's just embarassing. "Ok google set a timer for 5 minutes" "Sure, that's done. By the way, if you want me to help organise your day, just s--" "Ok google. Shut. The. Fuck. Up" ...is a pretty common phrase you might hear in my house these days. It didn't use to say all this shit, or at least it did, years ago, and I googled how to shut it up and did it, but it's started doing it again. They also just don't seem to be getting any smarter. I remember years ago when Siri first appeared, spending a long time asking it anything I could think of, discovering the limits of it's abilities. We just assumed that over the years they would add more and more phrases, more ability to understand context clues. But Siri, Google Home, Alexa... it's like they shipped the minimum viable product and then just moved onto something else. "I'm sorry, I can't help with that yet" is a pretty common response from all three. I actually want to move to Apple Homepods because at least they have quality audio, and I'd only be using one assistant (I have an iPhone) - but for some reason Spotify apparently doesn't work smoothly on them still. A pretty good summary of that state of affairs.

Done!

I'd like to think updating Invision would fix that. I just need time to set up a testing environment then we'll give that a shot.

I've re-enabled tapatalk. Tbh I didn't think anyone used it and the annoyance of the banner for every user that doesn't, seemed to outweigh it's use for the couple that do. However, if it's causing more trouble than it's worth, I've reinstated it

I wouldn't worry too much about the "profile progress box", it's not really a mistake per se, and it's literally just one click for a user to dismiss it forever I did see the banner image disappear briefly but that seemed to fix itself, maybe try a hard refresh? (ctrl+f5 / cmd+shift+r)