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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I have a PC I built that was absolutely top of the line 9½ years ago, that still plays most games in high to max settings. It’s a little powerhouse for its age, I often use it for rendering video and it still smokes everybody I know 's devices.

    Windows 11 is too powerful for my PC according to Microsoft and I’ve been so pleased about that. If it wasn’t for the fact that I have no issues with my current windows 10 setup, I’d put in some time to jump to Linux. I’m just too lazy to give it the weekend it would take to learn, set up and move my content over properly.






  • I occasionally get pulled into the YouTube shorts and hate howuch time I lose to them. Worse was that although I barely use Instagram beyond keeping in contact with friends who only use it, I happened to watch the reels for a little yesterday and they were really entertaining.

    A lot of amateur video creators don’t have the experience to keep their work engaging for long periods of time, half the internet feels like SNL sketches that make their best punchline in the first 20 seconds and then milk the same joke for the next 3 minutes. The way short form content cuts through the crap is actually quite nice. It obviously has a whole bunch of its own issues but that’s mostly due to chasing the algorithms favour, not the short form nature of the content.



  • One of the issues here is that there is likely considerable overlap between people who are competent enough to circumvent the block with a VPN or the like, and people who’d be seeking out AI deepfake porn, just because the latter likely appeals to socially outcast (and unfortunately therefore often more tech savvy) people.

    I’m in the UK and glad this has been blocked but I also absolutely don’t trust the weird internet puritanism of the UK government, for at least the time I’ve been following politics as a you g teenager, there have been many attempts to block various aspects of porn on the internet, normally from a point of protecting children but the whole thing has always reeked of the government testing public outcry on blocking parts of the internet to later re-attempt to censor on their interests.



  • I’ve had a (probably wrong) take on the ridiculous direction modern GPUs have gone, that isn’t just because of crypto mining, ridiculous profit margins and machine learning. From when I got into the hobby until the release of the PS5 and whatever Xbox competed with it, if you built a PC at a similar budget to a console, it would consistently outperform it. The PC I built 8 years ago has started showing its age but in its prime was about 1½ times the cost of a console for triple the power, now 1½ the cost of a console more or less gets you a console.

    Part of that is the horrendous inflation of PC parts, particularly the GPUs, but also that the hobby has shifted away from being competitive against consoles to having no chance of being cost competitive. When they stopped being in competing fields, the cost of PC parts just exploded.



  • I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

    A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

    I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.





  • I can’t really check my overall playtime but once again I’m being sucked in by Minecraft.

    As a teenager it was my default game and if I could see my playtime I recon it’s 5 times higher than my next biggest game which was Skyrim at about 500 hours across both editions. When I was a teen, I’d adored how I could just get lost in this peaceful, lonely world.

    For the last 6 years, I’ve been trying to play more innovative indie games that I can broaden my love for the medium, but every now and again I yearn for the mines. It’s basically the only game I can enjoy after day of work too.


  • I really doubt Hasbro are looking to sell it unless they’re planning to shut their doors too. To my knowledge they have two profitable IPs, Magic the gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is also a strong brand but people don’t need the brand to enjoy the game. If the designers aren’t appeased, they’ll just leave and make their own D&D clone. It’s happened before and it’s currently happening now.

    Also the repeated use of only referring to the game as DND in the article is very odd, nobody calls it that maybe DnD is ok but not in a professional setting where either Dungeons and Dragons or maybe D&D is the standard. It sets off my hearsay alarm massively.