DdCno1 @ DdCno1 @beehaw.org

Posts

39

Comments

963

Joined

2 yr. ago

This reminds me of how I had vivid dreams of walking through Vice City back in the day, because I was playing this game religiously for years.

The only waste food is food that has become inedible.

Yup. I recall how the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs published new guidelines for digging mass graves in late 2021. One of many pieces of evidence pointing towards genocidal intent. Bucha at the latest should have made Putin's goals in Ukraine more than clear to anyone.

You know there are massive differences between the war that Russia started and the war that Hamas started.

Dictators need the support of their citizens as well. None of them have truly unlimited power.

Every single one of them has to keep people both afraid and happy enough to maintain control. This includes various domestic interest groups (from peasants to members of the military) as well as influential individuals (a small number of key cadres, media figures, intellectuals and generals), in addition to foreign powers. It's a constant and highly dangerous balancing act, because if there is one thing that is exceptionally rare among autocratic regimes, it's a peaceful transition of power. No "president for life" wants to share the fate of Muammar Gaddafi.

You people have been shouting that he’s a dictator

Yes, because he is one. Nobody in their right mind would deny this.

since your owners told you to hate Russians.

This is ridiculous. So people in the free West are slaves now? And no, we don't hate Russians, just Putin, his cronies, his soldiers who murder and rape their way through Ukraine - and his lap dogs who are busy regurgitating primitive "russophobia" propaganda talking points, either for free or in the vain hope that they don't get sent in the meat grinder.

Even graphics are often stagnating or regressing already in some cases. Have you noticed that Ubisoft's facial and movement animations for example have regressed quite dramatically since 2013?

https://youtu.be/VIAR2Sikp9g

https://youtu.be/5MlXtj4JCAI

Yes! I remember experiments with similar projectors and interfaces like this device going back at least as far as the early 2010s. Would be fun to mess with.

Isn't "soft launch" the usual term for this?

Yup, although my impression is that a significant part of it is spread by people who agree with the disinformation they are posting here. Then again, if a user behaves exactly like a paid troll, it doesn't really matter to me whether or not they might actually be doing it for free. The damage is the same.

What's the monetization like?

Interesting. I wasn't logged in, so I didn't know.

Bit late, isn't it? I had already forgotten all about it and I don't think I'm the only one.

Last time I checked, those had been made inaccessible before the recent hacking attacks.

I know the cat is out of the bag

To be fair, the cat was out of the bag over 2000 years ago in both Greek and Roman democracies. Elites influencing elections through various means isn't new. The problem is seeing this as the natural state of things, as was common in the past. This may be subjective, but I am noticing that it's being seen more critically than a decade or two ago, in large part due to Musk's deplorable behavior shedding a light on it.

Summary table:

https://i.imgur.com/WxslSAy.png

tl;dw: It's not worth it in the lowest five categories (60% of titles tested), but there is a significant improvement in the remaining 40% of titles.

I would recommend turning the brightness down to near zero. Combine this with Dark Reader for websites (Firefox) and using a white or grey on black night reader mode in ebook reader apps. At first, the display will appear almost unreadable, but your eyes will quickly adjust.

Happy to help. Forgot to mention: Make sure to check the difficulty options and disable things like automatically placed cables.

Also, keep in mind that any prices in there tend to be widely out of date. If you want to use this to plan your build, use PCPartPicker to pick out the parts you can afford and then find them or the closest equivalents in this game. The sequel is obviously going to be a bit more up to date.

Provided you never let AI help you with this.

There's PC Building Simulator and its sequel. The first one is on sale right now for 5 bucks (at least in my region):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/621060/PC_Building_Simulator/

The sequel is also on sale right now, but it's only on Epic:

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/pc-building-simulator-2

It's not perfect, but it's a whole lot closer to the real deal than most other job simulators. You can genuinely use this to pick up the basics, but there's no substitute building in the real world. The sequel got better reviews (79 on Opencritic vs. 70 for part 1), but I haven't tried it yet.

What I'd recommend once you know which part goes where is getting some scrap parts from somewhere and assembling something functional out of them. I'm talking random parts found by the side of the road to at most 20 bucks in total for everything, case included. That's how I built my first PC as a kid. It was only a 486 with 100 MHz (which came out in 1994) years after the GHz barrier had been breached (~2002ish), but it was mine and I loved it.

The presentation was genuinely astounding. An absolute marvel for the hardware it runs on and it still holds up today, at least visually. Gameplay-wise, not so much, unfortunately.