Duranis

They are looking great. If it was me I would be tempted to keep the base colour of the tendrils as the shade colour but then work in some flesh tones to give it a more Giger'ish "body parts" rather than "plant matter" feel. Would also give a good contrast to the dark colour on the nids. Still looks ace as it is though.

I could be wrong but I don't think anything will be running at 500w 24/7 so it may not be as expensive as you think. When I looked at this for my home pc a few years back running with a 700w PSU it varied between about 30w when idle up to a max of about 500w when under stress testing loads. Obviously server hardware and usage will be different but I would suggest getting a power monitor (can be got from amazon for under £20) and checking what the actual usage is first over the course of a few days.

One day I will be the other side of the screen and be able to use one of the many characters I have planned.... one day.....

Nice paint job. Honestly I have never been keen on heroforge mini's before, they always looked too cartoonish to me. This one though looks pretty good.

Back at work after being off with Covid. Still testing positive but apparently its non-transmissible now because its been longer than 10 days. Out of the 5 of us at home only 1 of us didn't catch it. Weird mix of symptoms. My youngest (5) was really rough for a couple of days then completely bounced back and was totally fine. My middle kid (16) felt a bit crud and tired on and off but no real symptoms. My Mrs had 3 or 4 really rough days, bad headaches, feeling sick, super tired and oddly enough really bad tooth ache. I mostly just felt really, really tired and weirdly also had bad tooth ache?! Still feel really tired now despite sleeping way more than I normally do. Chest is a little messed up but really glad it didn't hit me too bad. I have lung issues anyway so was pretty concerned about this. While I was off 12 members of staff also went down with it and about 1/6th of the pupils also called out with it. School now back to no whole school assemblies and supposed to all be wearing masks again.

That looks great. The cloak came out really nicely and the orange is really popping as well. I find orange to be one of them difficult colours to do well. It's so easy when shading/highlighting for it to slip into red or yellow.

That is reassuring and hopefully it continues that way. This is pretty much the only figure I'm watching now as it seems to be the only reliable one and an indicator of where we are actually at.

Really enjoying it too. I was a bit sceptical with the first couple of teasers I saw but it is really great. Even the Mrs who isn't into it and is a bit disparaging of "cartoons" was laughing at parts. Been watching it with both my boys who are loving it. Funny enough haven't had chance to watch ep 4-6 yet as I have been busy putting content together for a campaign I'm running for my youngest son and his college mates. Edit: Did you notice that Matt cameo on the cloakroom attendant in that episode?

Lets hope it ends up more like Wheel of Time and less like Sword of Truth. Also please don't give them ideas about The Belgariad. It is my all time favourite fantasy series and I absolutely do not trust anyone to do a proper adaption of it for TV. However going slightly out of the pure fantasy genre and into Horror a little bit, a series based on Brian Lumley's Necroscope series could be awesome if we are talking popular 80's novel's.

How far in have you got? Have to say I felt like this as well to begin with. I watched about 3 episodes the first time and while it was good I had the same feeling that I was missing something. Second time I stuck with it and it does get better. I think maybe there is a lot of world building needed to really get comfortable with what is actually going on in the story. It kind of just chucks you straight into it and it takes a little while to know who the different factions and people are that are involved and not have to keep questioning what and why. I felt the same way about the Foundation TV show. The first few episodes seemed super convoluted and complex until I got to know the world and characters better.

Watched Matrix 4... I've seen worse films but honestly it just feels like a low budget knock off version/parody of the matrix. Storyline is meh, CGI and visuals are pretty terrible for a lot of it, fight scenes are pretty poor and the writing is fairly sub standard as well. If you have ever watched a late night B Movie film on the Sci-Fi channel, one of those low budget copies of a more well known film, that's what Matrix 4 is.

I have no idea who this person is but it scares me that I no longer consider this kind of view point to be "a small minority".

Could be people that couldn't have vaccines previously due to an existing condition that is no longer a factor, could also just be cold hard cash was offered. Was talking about this with my Mrs this morning. Although Covid has been a complete nightmare, it has jumped some medical tech forward by a massive degree. I see a near future where lateral flow tests for cold, flu and a bunch of other viral infections are the norm. Also mRNA technology is going to be huge for treating/preventing everything from the Flu to things like Cancer, Ebola and many genetic diseases.

I'm not over 50 yet (40) but started taking Vitamin D and later a general multivit that was high in Vitamin D. I have found I do feel better when I have been taking them for awhile. Not sure if it is an actual real effect, a placebo or psychosomatic but it does make me generally feel a little better so I'm not going to question it too closely.

Yep same story here, so far all is well.

True, however some of the best minds in the world are working on ways to mitigate the dangers and improve both prevention and treatment. This is going to take time though and taking whatever measure we can to protect people while this happens seems like the sensible thing to do in my opinion. Looking only at the deaths caused directly by covid doesn't exactly fill me with hope. Over 1,000 people died in the uk in the first week of this year and it doesn't look like that is going down. The data is currently incomplete past 16th Jan but on that day 255 people died directly from Covid. Again this is people dying directly from covid, not dying from any old cause that just happened to have had covid in the last 28 days. I wish people would stop trying to compare it to flu. If you took every case of someone dying from Flu in the last 5 years Covid would have it beat in less than 2 months. And that's only counting cases where covid was a listed on the death certificate. One day with improved vaccines, better treatments and hopefully less dangerous mutations it will get there. Until that point though it is a mistake to compare it to flu in any way shape or form.

This is more or less what I did. I had the broken update set to install overnight so not sure how long that took to reboot. It had still been crashing when I checked in the morning so installed the optional update. Restart didn't take any longer than normal for this and so far everything is running fine.

Its reassuring that they are reporting a fall but the fall they are reporting is nowhere near what is being shown elsewhere. To me this is showing the exact opposite, the rapid fall is due mostly to other factors and is very little to do with an actual drop in the number of people infected. Unless I'm completely misreading things? If the ONS study is showing a drop that isn't even half of what is shown elsewhere then surely there is something very wrong with at least one of these numbers? Especially as the ONS numbers up until the changes to testing and other malarky were generally a pretty close match?

So I have one user that is for some reason not getting the suggested contacts pop up when creating an email in O365 outlook via a browser. I have looked through all the settings and couldn't see anything obvious to switch it on or off, everything I found online was about Office and desktop based version of Outlook. Can anyone point me in the right direct? It is working just fine for everybody else here.

I took up lockpicking a couple of years ago as a bit of a passing hobby. I haven't spent a lot of time practicing but it is a real eye opener for just how simple many locks are to get through. Combination locks, cheap unshielded padlocks and electronic locks especially can normally be opened in seconds with really low skill attacks. when I removed the projectors here the mounts where all locked in with padlocks that nobody had the keys for anymore. I managed to rack each of them open in less than a minute, if I didn't care about being non-destructive I could have bolt cut them off in even less time. The biggest strongest Abus or Squire closed shackle padlock you can fit is probably the best bet in terms of entry resistance. Generally these brands are pretty well built, are difficult to cut and have decent anti pick security.

I have had this same discussion with my partner a few times. I will quite often call out misinformation or racism that I see on the likes of Facebook. My partner says it isn't going to change anyone's mind and just makes me look argumentative. I'm under no delusion that anything I say is going to sway the opinions of people posting these things. They aren't debating in good faith and as you say they don't need to have facts, they just need to keep spewing stuff out until the other side gets tired of trying to debunk it all. However it might make someone reading it stop and question things for a moment. My normal response is that does my partner want our kids to grow up in a world where this kind of nonsense is normalised and unchallenged?

That was actually a pretty good video. It's all well and good mocking these people (I have done so myself) but the majority of them have come to these "crazy" ideas due to conditions outside of their control. One small thing leads into another and with how social media and "customised" search results and content selection is done now soon all they are seeing is all of the conspiracy theories. Even the most mentally healthy of people would probably start to question their reality a little if 90% of their facebook, reddit, insta or whatever feeds were conspiracy theories. It's even worse for people when this is their main contact with the outside world or they have a pre-existing mental health condition that makes these kind of things a lot more difficult to ignore. Add in the effect of feeling like you "belong to something special, that knows something most people don't" and it is a very easy trap for many people to fall into and can be very hard to get out of.

But the number of confirmed cases is falling rapidly, we are over the spike now and it's all going to be plain sailing from now on..... Ignore the fact that the number of hospitalisations and deaths have both stayed the same and increased in the same period of time... Ignore that there have been over a million less tests in the last 7 days, that surely would have no effect on the number of "confirmed" cases....

NO!!!!! Surely not!!!!

From the graph I'm looking at coronavirus.data.gov.uk there definitely does not appear to have been any kind of surge over the holiday period, in fact there is a drop over Christmas. In fact the number of tests done has risen proportionality to the number of positive cases reported. As would be expected, more people are getting ill, more people are taking a PCR, more positive tests confirmed. The number of tests done (and number of positive cases reported) has only started dropping at the same time as the changes to testing requirements have been made. Also side note. Are we really supposed to be reporting negative LFT's?!? The guidance we had been given was that it only needs to be reported if positive.