As is the case with a lot of my questions, "intended for multiplayer" is as open as you want it to be.

It could be that it's a game primarily known for its multiplayer that also happens to have a campaign (e.g. one of the Call of Duty games) or it could be you playing Mario Party against yourself by trading off between your own controllers (we've all done something like this, right?).

Entirely up to you how you interpret the question.

Let us know what the game was, why you played it solo, and, most importantly, how that went for you. Did you like it? Did it give you a novel gaming experience? Were you able to work around any of its limitations? Would you recommend other people try it?

Fix an annoyance.
Take out a level.
Revamp a system.
Expand a world.
Etc.

Pick a game, any game, and tell us what ONE thing about it you would change, and why. It doesn’t have to be feasible or reasonable or whatnot. You’ve got a magic wand with one charge left.

Also, your goal CAN be to make the game better, but it doesn’t have to be! Maybe you want to make the game more challenging. More chaotic. More hilarious. More broken.

Entirely up to you!

Also, you only get one change per game, but it’s fine to talk about what you would do for more than one game.

Ever since my diagnosis two years ago, I have had this as an ongoing conversation with my family. I always felt like there was very little accurate representation of ADHD in media. The few examples I could always think of were either very loosely coded as ADHD, or extreme stereotypes. I want to crowdsource some examples of ADHD representation in media, both good and bad.

Doug from Up: This is a common one that comes up a lot. I think it’s a really poor example. The only ADHD symptom is the squirrel joke they use a handful of times. It’s also (for my presentation at least) extremely inaccurate. Random things I see will indeed distract me, but Doug can come back from the conversation without a missed step. I think this one is extra harmful because it gives a false sense of how the ADHD brain works.

Dory from Finding Nemo: This is another common one people bring up. Dory’s intrusive and impulsive thoughts are much more accurate to my presentation, so it’s an improvement from Doug. I don’t like that she is often portrayed as stupid or careless. I’m not against a character with those traits, but with so few examples of ADHD in media, I think people may think it comes from the ADHD.

Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All At Once: This example showed up recently on my Internet searches. I want to rewatch it again with the context of ADHD. I feel like it is probably a decent representation, but I can’t say for sure without a rewatch.

Percy Jackson: This is the only one on my list that is explicitly diagnosed with ADHD (and dyslexia and other issues). I will give them kudos for the explicit diagnosis, but I don’t think it’s a good representation. ADHD seems to just mean that he is bad at school. It seems that it has no impact on Percy outside of that. For my particular case, I was quite good in school, so it is inaccurate for me. I would be interested to hear if other people resonate more with it. Dyslexia seems to come up more in the books, so it may be a better representation for that.

Todd from Bojack Horsemen: I saved my personal favorite for last. I first watched Bojack Horsemen before my diagnosis, and ADHD wasn’t really on my mind. After my diagnosis, I realized how good of a portrayal Todd is. As a bonus, it is the only portrayal I have heard of that includes hyper focus (When Todd hyper focuses on writing the rock opera, and then the hyper focus switches to a video game). With the exception of the rock opera, I think I have had the same exact scenario play out in my own life. I had something I wanted to do, was able to focus on it, but was stolen away into a video game hyper focus.

Are there any other examples you have found?

Homeland - 5/10

First paragraph works as both the tldr as well as the beginning of the review.

This show is all over the place. Some parts are really good, some parts are really bad, most parts are just meh. This show lends itself to be picked apart too easily. There are plot holes, convenient coincidences, contrived nonsense, and so often intelligent characters behaving like idiots over and over again which leaves you wanting to yell at the screen. So many eyeroll moments, cheesy stuff, questionable story writing, a lot of times that they tell, not show - it should be show, don't tell of course - and that classic trope that everything would have been solved if they just talked to each other, and another about just doing one single simple thing instead of getting distracted for dumb reasons. It is also pretty unrealistic despite trying to appear grounded. A lot of this show is too reminiscent of Jason Statham movies, if that makes sense. However I was entertained enough by it to keep watching, and it worked fine to pass the time when I was bored. Despite never really getting all that into the show as a whole, the good parts or episodes were worth the wait.

Family drama in this show was not good. It was just kind of something you had to sit through to get to those good parts. Monica Baccarin was fine and Damian Lewis was incredible, but I really just didn't care all that much about their relationship nor their children. It's a show that is being sold as an action spy thriller, but too large a part of it is this sort of more or less regular drama. It reminds me of The Americans where you of course don't watch it for the family stuff with the children, but because they were super cool undercover Soviet spies. This type of show's biggest weakness is this stuff. It just acts as filler and drags things out unnecessarily. And this goes for the main character's family too. The relationship with the sister was alright, but when the main character gets a daughter? Just kind of felt like a waste of time.

Most characters are pretty run-of-the-mill spy show stereotypes. Not great, not terrible. The main character, Carrie, was quite unique with a lot of depth, but she ends up going through way too many unbelievable situations. She and her tiny team, or even she all alone, saves the world half a dozen times. Her character at best decent, and that was only in the first few seasons. But then she goes completely down the drain and off the rails in season 4 and never recovered. I am probably in the minority with this opinion but I can't imagine most people see it this way since it's the star of a show that ran for 8 seasons so I guess take this opinion with a grain of salt.. but she just does not land for me after seasons 1-3.

She is highly unlikable. She is one of the worst mothers I have ever seen in any show or movie. She is very neglectful and abusive mother, she is also a mass murderer who practically never repents or regrets what she has done, she disobeys orders constantly, mostly making things worse, she uses people all the time, and she has such a massive victim complex so 90% of the time she blames someone else for her often fatal fuckups - of which there are a lot. By far the biggest problem with all this is that it is quite clear that the creators of the show want the audience to sympathize with her and are trying to pass her off as the reluctant hero. She was never that good a character, nor do I think actor Claire Danes is very good in the role - just alright. However season 4 and onwards she just in no way works. Just impossible to root for, which is of course a big problem when it's the main character. She's not a cool antihero, it just became a chore to watch her scenes. The best summation is something Saul said to her in season 2: "You're the smartest and the dumbest fuckin' person I've ever known." Characters that are supposed to be intelligent who then do such truly dumb things.. characters are only as smart as their writers. So it's just bad writing.

On a more positive note, there are a few characters I really liked: Astrid, Quinn, Saul, Max. Astrid was not in the show very much but she was great as the German spy counterpart in the BND. She just had a way about her and I felt the relationship she had with Quinn was quite interesting. She was a joy to watch, just like Quinn, played by Rupert Friend whom I recently saw in Hitman: Agent 47 which was an awful movie, so I was kind of nervous when he first appeared here in Homeland. Turns out though that he was just horribly miscast in the former because in this show, he is great! There's no nonsense with him, it's the "competency porn" feeling while watching him. Same goes for Saul and Max. Saul's actor Mandy Patinkin (who also played Inigo Montaya, couldn't believe it when I looked him up lol) steals most scenes he's in. He is great as the older, experienced spy, the mentor for our main character. His voice is both soothing and dramatic to listen to and even though half his face is invisible because of his huge beard, he still has such good expressions and body language that he really draws you in. As for Max, he was a very minor character to begin with but his role became bigger towards the final two seasons and like I said, it was a joy to watch him on screen and great that he was given more screentime.

Not much of a joy however was all the nonsense that they had to implement in order to make the show work - they took the easy route to explain things away instead of actually implementing them well. For example they practically never have surveillance drones or satellites available, nor nightvision or thermal cameras, so they constantly lose track of people that they are following. Nor do they have much more than pistols most of the time. The agency does have these things available, and more, so it's just dumb that they pretend it doesn't exist in this show - some special ops guys had nightvision one time in one of the first seasons but I think season 7 was the first time a thermal camera was used and then we saw it maybe twice more. There are also often no contingency plans. Back-up being nonexistent 90% of the time, handwaved or ignored with a quick line or reason that wouldn't really make sense. Plus, everytime they needed to make something thrilling, they added a time constraint element to do it.

Something I did like was the representation of mental illness. You really see the ugly side of Carrie's bipolar and even though I don't have it, and so can't actually speak to whether or not it's actually a good portrayal, it seemed good. I feel it's important to show regular people what it looks like, and I felt the same way with Max's neurodivergency - that he was quiet and forward added a lot to his character. He could have definitely just been the kind of techy nerd stereotype that is seen everywhere, but I'm glad they didn't go that route.

And another great thing, I think the best even, was Damian Lewis. It was such a shame that he was written out but it does make sense that they couldn't do all that much with his character. I have only seen him in Band of Brothers, but he was one of the highlights in that show too, so it's not surprising that I liked him in this one too. The best scene of the show for me was the one where he is wearing the bomb vest in the bunker next to all the high ranking officers. The up close shot of his trembling and shivering face.. I have no idea how he was able to even do that. He has won awards which is well deserved.

Bingewatching the show over about a month instead of watching it week to week across 8 years probably did not do this show any favours. I think maybe it's easier to see through the formula then. Better shows barely even have formulas, but this one certainly does, and I'm not a fan of it. Every single season has ways that they can't trust anyone anywhere. It's always this small team versus the world. That's not unique to this show but it stands out because it's often the same way they do it - they think they can't trust anyone, there's a mole, they're on their own because reasons, etc. In any case, the show was an alright use of my time but definitely not going to watch it again.

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts about either the show or what I have written here!

I am using Windows 10.

That is perhaps a silly question to ask, but I did not find an answer.

Suppose that I have a playlist with 100 videos on VLC or some other video player. I wish for it to play all the one hundred files in random order, with the exception that any video that was already played (or, possibly, played to completion) will be excluded, and will not be played again. A video not played to completion would resume from where it stopped.

This should be persistent, so the next time I fire up the playlist it starts from where I left it and also remembers the videos that were already played and should be skipped. Ideally, upon completion of the playlist, I should be able to learn that it was complete, so I could get new videos/episodes of whatever shows I am shuffling.

Thanks!

EDIT: I understand I can actually pre-shuffle the playlist to get something very similar to what I am asking. However, I would rather not know what is coming next. Like it used to be when I watched TV back in the day. Thanks! ;)

Hello. I'm currently in the market for an Android tablet, not strictly for my personal usage, but for my family so there's one easily reachable touch screen computer around the house. The problems start with my requirements, which are... not exactly tablet market friendly:

• Available in France (and without overly high shipping costs)
• Long term manufacturer support so it isn't subject to suddenly become e-waste because they decided to stop providing updates after like 1 major Android release
• Ability to install an Android distribution that doesn't rely on Google apps such as LineageOS + microG
• Sufficient specs to use a web browser and play videos without issues.
• I'd like the model to be easy to repair in the same vein as the Fairphone but that's lower priority

The budget is best defined as "probably not enough" (I don't think I can afford to spend much more than ~400€). Given that I suspect from my initial search not yielding much that fitting all the requirements is impossible especially within that budget, do you have pointers on models that provide an acceptable compromise for what I'm looking for, or that somehow do match all the criteria?

Hilariously, the closest candidate so far within budget seems to be... The Google Pixel tablet, which despite being a Google product has a fairly straightforward way to get an unGoogled ROM on it.

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

I like to play games, but lately I've been avoiding certain types because I think they are not good for my health. At least, they don't make me feel well afterward. For me, this is a particular type of game that requires a very high level of skill, concentration, and dexterity.
I noticed this years ago when I would play online multiplayer. After the game, I would feel extremely aggressive and I could tell that my blood pressure must have been much higher than normal.

More recently, I notice this on very difficult games such as Elden Ring, specifically the boss fights. After playing for a while I have the same feeling that I would have if I had just walked away from a near fatal accident or something. Then sometimes that evening I would have trouble sleeping.

I'm sure my physiology is different than other people. I seem to retain adrenaline/cortisol levels longer than most others. And I know that some people find the adrenaline high to be one of the main points of gaming. Still, I wonder if in general it isn't good for people to stress themselves like this when they aren't burning it off with physical activity.

I read about this online a little bit. There seem to have been some studies about it that were mostly inconclusive. Most of the findings are more interested in games being a substitute for more physical activity, so gamers may be more sedentary or overweight than normal.

If you are like me then you are kinda over hearing about AI all the time; I get it, believe me. I've written about jobs on here before: my day job is absolutely infested with AI jargon, most of it pretty meaningless (flashbacks to "The Cloud"), and it's a constant everywhere else too, so yeah it's a lot and it's largely unimpressive. Image gen has gotten pretty ridiculous in the last 6-12 months, and video gen seems to be taking off next, and I've successfully wrangled various chatbots into helping with coding projects, etc.

Probably none of this is news to you, but I just found out that I can get AI to edit video. I've done a lot of short-form editing, and recently picked up some side work that is much lengthier, without realizing that the time I would spend hunkered over going through it would be exponentially more lengthy. Painfully so. Cue signing up for a trial of AutoCut, and hot damn it's like living in the future. I am as we speak watching it delete gaps, cut to speakers, add captions that are mostly correct & even formatted & unbelievably also do the VHS singalong/Tiktok "highlight the word being spoken" thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It's not perfect, it's kinda finicky—I'm having to use a V1 when V2 is supposedly much better, and I'm having to chunk these beastly premiere timelines to get it to do anything at all, but wow—if this is your day job, are you worried? Cause it's a game changer for me but no one is going to replace me because no one else would bother messing with it lol, but on a corporate scale do people know about this stuff yet? I'm thinking our jobs may not be replaced by AI, our jobs will probably just become AI babysitting.