I've played that before, but have they removed/made players able to reduce frequency of appearance or outright stop the annoying moaning monster from the lab zone yet? I'm a solo player and it was a creepy encounter the first 5 times and then just an annoying interruption, and it was so constant and inescapable that it made me stop playing.

You'll also likely benefit from drying it using an old 100% cotton t-shirt instead of a normal towel, for much the same reason (less friction).

As someone from Europe (Poland to be more specific), I'd recommend to not worry about it. Really. Learn to say "hello", "where's the bathroom", and "thank you", the rest you'll handle in English or use improvised sign language if the person you're talking to doesn't speak it (which at least in Poland gets rarer and rarer with every year). Or google translate, automatic translators work decently well for basic things.

Nobody will mind - honestly, if you were to actually learn Polish most of us would react with "that's really impressive but why bother???" You'll get the same reaction in most other countries except for maybe Spain/Germany/France, they'll be more used to people knowing their languages, but at least in Germany they'll still probably try to talk to you in English.

Of course if you want to learn for fun then go ahead, but there's no need to put too much pressure on yourself, I've been all over Europe knowing only English, Polish and how to read cyrillic script and it was more than enough. English gets you 90% of the way there.

I don't know what specific countries you'll be going through, but focusing on French (if going through France), German (in Germany + a bunch of neighbouring countries + a lot of old people who don't speak English in Western Europe will know it), and some slavic language (probably Polish and/or Russian, Polish will get you through Poland and with effort through Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of Ukraine, Russian is useful because, as with German in Western Europe, a lot of older people in former Soviet republics will speak it, but bear in mind it has some negative connotations) should cover the basics.

If you have any questions feel free to message me!

I dunno about that, recent knitting drama took a while to clear up, and I'm not sure if AI sceptics are as determined a crowd as pissed off knitters.

(Tl;dr on the drama: there was video on SciShow about knitting that many (myself included) felt was not well researched, misrepresented the craft, and had a misogynistic vibe. It took a lot of pressure from the knitting community to get, in order, a bad "apology", a better apology, and the video taken down.)

Well that's going immediately onto the "things that looked promising but what the fuck, so actually don't read ever" list.

I've played this briefly when it launched, but was annoyed that for people playing solo the map outside your bases fully resets every time you save and load, I'd prefer if the areas I cleared of the fog would stay cleared. I get that in a multiplayer setting it's better to reset because then everyone has the same opportunities to get loot/xp, but my map-clearing goblin brain was disappointed.

Unless they've changed it, but last I've heard there were no plans for that.

Other than that it was a lot of fun already at EA launch, probably got even better by now.

Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn't actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the "both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming" take was still a blow.

Ah damn, I have it and enjoyed it a lot - it's fun! The card assets have always been obviously generic, store-bought assets... but at least they were still made by humans. I remember the first AI controversy in that game, I think it was centered around the main menu's background image, where the castle turrets and towers kinda didn't line up.

I don't know how I feel about this, on one hand this is such an incredibly niche product that I can understand wanting to save every scrap of money, but it sets a bad precedent going forward.

Name and shame? Which game?

I got the testicle part :P it's just that "piroshkis" doesn't sound Polish at all, and since we're talking about Poland... Even "pierogis", with its unnecessary "s" would be better.

As a note, as this story is about a Polish radio station the word you'd want to use is "pierogi" or "pierożki", no "s" at the end either.