paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anything less than 1 liters is completely unacceptable⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I just want to point out for a lot of people complaining abojt how often you refill your soap dispenser: consider how much soap you’re actually using.

  Most of the world lives in a consumerist, capitalist society. Overconsumption is encouraged by pretty much everything around us. When you see an ad for a product, or even just look at the pictures on the packaging, the people shown using it often use way too much.

  Laundry detergent for example. You only need a tiny bit, and studies gave repeatedly shown that thr pods of liquid are waaaaay too much detergent for a load, to the point where it is actually harmful to the washing machine.

  Motor oil is another one. If you look on the bottle it probably days to change your oil every 3,000 miles, but if you read your car’s manual it likely says to change it every 10,000 miles, or more.

  Toothpaste is another. You should use a pea-sized amou t of toothpaste to brush your teeth, but all of the pictures and artwork and graphics show a toothbrush oveflowing with 5-10 times that amount.

  For soap dispenser that you pump, you absolutely do not need to use a full pump of soap to wash your hands. Each dispenser and soap brand is a little different, but with attention and practice you can get a feel for how much soap you actually need to wash your hands. The added benefit is that it saves the time it takes to rinse off all tbe unnecessary soap.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech hobbyists, How are you avoiding the crazy prices for computers and newer tech?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I have just focused on enjoying what I have for now, mostly.

  I built desktops for my wife and myself back in 2013 and 2014. Back then I fresh out of college and we were poor, but I had experience building PC’s in high school. So I was able to use those skills to find deals and be efficient so it was a great investment in dollars per hours of entertainment. And over the years I slowly upgraded them- mostly the storage, adding SSD’s as boot drives and bigger HDD’s for storage. I started using integrated graphics for my own, then bought a used 270X a couple of years later.

  Something in mine broke in 2019. Either the CPU or motherboard, but at that point both were ancient and it wasn’t worth trying to buy parts to try to troubleshoot, so I built myself a new PC. In 2020, I started building my wife a similar one, accelerating my purchases when I started to see reports of factories shutting down from sone mysterious flu-like illness that was hitting China and Taiwan hard. I couldn’t afford high-end stuff, so we both had an RX580. I have a 2600x, and my wife has a 3600, so basically the same thing. We were really lucky to get such relatively decent hardware before the crypto boom and pandemic led to GPU prices skyrocketing. Those rx580’s were each less than $200, and for 1080p are still a WAY better FPS/$ than anything new on the market today.

  I have been keeping an eye on the market and waiting, hoping for GPU’s to come back down to more reasonable levels. I probably would have bought a 9070XT, or maybe even a 9070, if I could have found one at MSRP. Despite AMD’s promises those MSRP’s were completely divorced fron reality: there was simply not enough supply to support those prices. So i’m still rocking those RX580’s.

  When I built my wife’s PC in 2020, her old one still worked and I still had a bunch of good parts from mine which broke in 2019. I waa interested in learning about Linux so I cobbled those parts to make a machine with an AMD 8 Core Bulldozer CPU, my RX270X (my wife had an NVIDIA GTX660 which maybe had slightly better performance on paper, but NVIDIA drivers gave me issues with Linux so I switched), and 16GB of DDR3. I installed Cinnamon Mint and fell in love. It was so much more customizeable, so much more stable, so much better performance than Windows was on the same hardware. Felt like breathing new life into old hardware, and i was able to stream games from my new Windows desktop in my office to this Linux machine in my basement. Linux works a lot better with my Behringer audio interface, and this allowed me to have a workflow where I record in my basement where my musical equipment is, then do the rest of the production on my Windows machine because my DAW is not Linux a compatible and my office is more comfortable to be in.

  Separate from that, I wanted to dabble with pi-hole so I picked up an OrangePi Zero 2 for $35. At this point Raspberry Pi’s were ridiculously overpriced (as they still are) for what they are, but at least knock offs like tbe OrangePi were still cheap at the time. I always intended to do more with it, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

  So at that point I could game in my office and my basement. My living room was annoying. At times my wife had her PC there, and it was a pain. Wires were messy. She somehow broke a ton of wireless mice/keyboards. The noise from her fans was annoying. The scaling was bad. So I moved her desktop to our office (and built a custom megadesk for both of us out of wood) and bought an NVIDIA Shield Pro for our living room. It was way better than the built-in Roku for streaming video, and I was able to stream there from either of our desktops for gaming. Being always-on, low power, with a bit of storage from a USB drive meant it was kind of a rudimentary NAS too. With SyncThing I was able to use the Shield to do stuff like backup the memes from our phones and keep an organized collection of our desktop and mobile wallpapers. I also got into emulation, and basically turned the Shield into a personal Cloud Save solution for my emulators across devices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yet another one for the oopsie pile⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a similar experience. A couple nights ago, winding down for bed and getting high. I open up Nebula for something to listen to as I fall asleep, but my subscription feed was all full of either miserable (I feel obligated to learn about the atrocities of history, but for my mental health limit that content) or academic. I had exhausted most of the happier, lighter content like Tale Foundry, Razbuten, Austen McConnel, etc.

  I never heard of Geller until i subscribed to Nebula a few years ago, so I would occasionally go back and just binge watch his content when I waa in the mood for something chill and easy to watch. So a couple nights ago I searched for him and the only results were a handful of videos where he appeared on other people’s channels.

  At first I figured it was just Nebula’s search being weird and only looking st video titles and not the channel names, because he probably doesn’t have any videos with his own name in the title. So I scroll through the list of channels I subscribed to and… He’s gone. So I assumed he just ended his relationship with Nebula for business reasons. So I go to the internet to see what is up, wondering if maybe Nebula had done something terrible like sell out to private equity.

  I’m sad. I’m disappointed. I’m tired.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yet another one for the oopsie pile⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Suspended for one semester, couldn’t have been that serious

  This thinking is precisely the problem. The seriousness of the offense is unknown and completely unrelated to the consequences.

  Universities have created these strange sort of pseudo a societies with their own perverse versions of what a justice system should be. The goal of the university is simple: profit. They want wealthy parents to believe their children will be safe going to school there. The incentive is to silence and squash and manage the “reputation” that the school has first, and everything else is tertiary. It is very possible, likely even, that it was a very serious offense that was swept under the rug with a slap on the wrist. Geller even said in his own statement that he felt like the consequence was too mild. Geller did not face the criminal justice system: he faced some school administrators for what should habe been a criminal offense.

  The problem is that in the US, the actual criminal justice system really is an organized crime syndicate with its roots in finding runaway slaves, who exist today to protect capital and not people. When people cannot trust the government to administer criminal justice fairly, vigilante justice rises to take its place. And vigilante justice is terrible. Remember the time Reddit managed to “find” the Boston marathon bomber for example. Vigilante justice often becomes a popularity contest, or a measure of social influence. A lot of people right now blindly repeating the phrase “believe women” are conveniently forgetting about how many innocent black men have been lynched for that.

  The lack of trust in the criminal justice system ALSO precludes any opportunities for societal forgiveness or growth. Norway, for example, has a system focused on rehabilitating criminals to become safe members of society. The US system is built around perpetuating slavery, providing a sense of vengeance for victims, and trying to pretend that the threat of a terrible life in the prison system acts as a deterrent to crime. The vigilante justice system, even one as mild as “cancel culture”, is similar. It de-humanizes perceived offenders and leaves no room for forgiveness or rehabilitation. Cancel culture also is not universal: there have been plenty of celebrities that have been "canceled"who still have successful careers making money off people who dont participate in that culture. Jacob Geller still has his YouTube channel, which is likely his biggest source of income, where he has not posted anything at all regarding this. JK Rowling is still a billionaire.

  A lot of people ARE angry about Trump. The problem is that rapist won the popular vote in the last election, meaning more than 40 million people decided they didn’t care. There are probably a lot more people who are not angry at Geller than there are at Trump.

  This just plain sucks. I’ve been a Nebula subscriber for years and I enjoyed Geller’s content a lot. I will miss it. I’ve considered “what will it take for me to be comfortable watching him again?”. I don’t have any solid answers, but I have some ideas.

  One is turning himself into the police and admitting to it as a crime. Not sure what the statute of limitations is, and as I said above this would not be all that productive. Him being subject to slavery, sexual assault, and likely antisemitic violence in prison for a few years doesn’t really make the world a better place.

  A statement from the victim could help. She does not owe him or me or anyone else anything here though.

  Community service? Significant commitment to women’s charities? Maybe. Charities are a whole other issue: they are often sources of tax evasion, corruption, and reputation-washing.

  Maybe the answer is that he just needs to find new, less public work and I need to find a new, less problematic content creator.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon plays an RPG⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In Pokemon, a lot of stuff exists to throw against you, the single player, which are you not expected to really use yourself. The single-player game is NOT expected to be balanced or fair. Heck, in most of the games there are only 2 NPC’s with a full party: one of which will.be a fisher with 6 Magikarp, the other is the champion and final.boss of the game.

  This is why there are a ton of pokemon that suck. They are not intended for you to use and GameFreak just made a mistake: they are intended to allow GameFreak to throw easy encounters at you.

  Poison used to tick down your Pokemon’s health with every step outside of battle. Persistent status effects are there to wear down the player’s resources across a routewith several trainer battles and probably wild encounters, nkt to wear down the player over the course of a single battle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I may have trust issues⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are an organic meme, not an advertisment being pushed by some big marketing firm to virally promote an upcoming movie, right?

  Why would I deceive you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What was the actual reason for the crusade against NSFW games?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of the ultra wealth you may have noticed have a christofascist lean

  I think THIS is OP’s question. It is perfectly believable that a small number of insane and delusional people might truly think that these things are bad.

  But I think the bigger question is: why do the ultra-wealthy believe this,or at least support it? What is the end game? Porn is popular and profitable: why is there no billionaire who has made their money off of smut rising to defend their industry?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question - Retro Handhelds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I purchased the Powkiddy RGB10Max back in 2021. I think it was something like $100 or $150 and came with a 128GB microsd card. That included and operating system plus tens of thousands of games.

  Based on some recommendations online, I made my own SD card using RetroOz as the operating system instead. It is better, but i’m not sure if was a big enough improvement that it was worth the effort.

  People also recommended that I find my own Roms elsewhere, but that really wasn’t necessary. Sure, some of them are Romhacks (modified versions of existing games that are obviously wrong, like Sonic64). But for thr most part they are just legitimate games for these old systems that you could have bought cartridges for in a store back in the 80’s and 90’s. The problem is the same problem we face today on tbe Switch eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam: a lot of this is cheap junk.

  Mine came with, as far as I can tell, the complete North American libraries for the Atari 2600, Master System, Genesis, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and N64. It also came with smaller selections of games for PSP, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameGear and Nintendo DS. Plus a smattering of arcade games, and games for other systems i’m less familiar with (Intellivision, Colecovision, TurboGrafx, Wonderswan, SG-1000, PC-9800, MXS, etc).

  By upgrading tk a 256gb card I was also able to add my own PS1 collection that I ripped from discs. I pirated a full collection of the Nintendo DS library, plus more games for Dreamcast, PSP, and Saturn. I added Phillips CDi and Atari Jaguar games too. I also used a second SD card to Ru LineageOS, a version of Android, which I used for Steam Link. This allowed me to stream from my desktop for pretty much any Steam game, plus non-steam games like emulators for PS2, PS3, WiiU, Switch, etc.

  The whole experience was… Okay. The analog sticks were tiny. It only has 1 speaker. The shoulder buttons sucked. The screen was only 480p. Sleep mode didn’t really work, and it takes like 4 minutes to turn the system on. Eventually the Wi-Fi and one of thr USB ports stopped working.

  I am sure things have improved since then. I got a Steam Deck and have barely touched my RGB10 since. I don’t regret the purchase though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many games in certain genres all so samey in the places they really should not be?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal

  I think this has a lot to do with it. A lot of these platforms have defaukts or even jusy tendencies baked into the development process. It takes an experienced developer to dive in the “feel”.

  For making the first Spyro game, Insomniac hired a NASA engineer who had experiencing making flight control systems in order to dial in the feel of controlling Spyro. That’s the kind of thing that costs a lot of money, but made the game one of the most successful 3D platformers of all time.

  Another thing to look at is assets. Models, textures, fonts, UI design, sound design. It’s easy to go cheap here: free asset libraries or cheap ones available for purchase. Some of these assets might be fine on their own, but when combined together they’re just…slightly… Off. Because they weren’t designed to be cohesive in a space together. Making one model that looks good takes talent and time. Making thousands of models that look good together takes planning, coordination, and direction.

  And these are a lot of things that are easy for a small team to overlook, or at least de-prioritize. Smaller teams are usually driven by game designers who have specific designs in mind. They want to tweak numbers or implement systems. They design the game first, and then slap on whatever art assets they can to make it appealing enough to their audience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A reminder⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Assuming we continue under neobliberalism, eventually those billionaires will become trillionares too.

  Or a simple currency re-structure could turn those billionaires back into millionaires overnight without changing their relative wealth at all.

  Focusing in the word “billionaire” was, in my opinion, a messaging mistake. I always preferred 1% because it scales, though 0.1% or 0.01% might be better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Drop your unpopular opinions here because c/unpopularopinions is filled with popular opinions⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything is 95% shit

  This right here is a piece of wisdom that I think a lot of people would benefit from. It applies to almost everything.

  “Genre” as a concept is incredibly limited. It’s used by marketers to help sell things. Convince people media is more similar to stuff they like than it actually is. Its also used by academics and content creators because their very existence is depending on inventing rigid categories and definitions where none truly exist. Genre can be useful when its descriptive, but I think it can be harmful when prescriptive.

  I read an interview a long time ago… I think it was with Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, but I could be wrong. The interviewer set up the context that a lot of people take the position that grunge killedor replaced metal, but some AIC fans argue that AIC is a metal band. He said something along the lines of “we use a lot of metal-isms in our music, but when we are writing we aren’t really thinking about whether something is metal or not”.

  I really embraced it when I started making music myself, and with band members. There have been occasions where I purposefully say to myself “I want to write a power metal song” or “I want to write a simple singer-songwriter folk song”, but those tend to sound almost like parodies. They’re popular with people who only listen to music casually. The more interesting artistic exploration happens without those assumptions and expectations. The most interesting pieces of media tend to defy genre boundaries.

  Even “anime”… What counts? Stuff like Castlevania and Arcane get called anime, but they weren’t made in Japan. A lot of animation is outsourced to Korea or other countries now… Does that still count? A lot of Adventure Time was animated by a Korean studio… Is that anime? Is any japanese-made stop-motion or claymation anime? What about projects that blend animation with live Action?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Anon the asshole?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The modern western version of “gifts” is really about pushing over-consumption. If marketers cannot convince you to buy something yourself, they can try to convince someone else to buy it for you.

  I’ve always felt that gifts should be tokens. Symbols of good will, reminders of the relationship. Consumable gifts are great, especially when shared with the giver. Alcohol is great for this, but there’s plenty more you can do. Small, inexpensive art prints or figurines.

  I don’t want someone else to buy me something I woukd want to research myself. My parents gave me a “snow thrower” for Christmas a couple years ago. Its a relatively cheap, Ryobi 40v thing- I do not own anything else that uses that battery ecosystem. My step-dad loves his, and I am it is great for their 2-car driveway, but my driveway can probably fit like 10 cars in it, and I would have rather saved up for something nicer myself. Now i’m in this weird limbo where I feel socially obligated to use it for several years at least before I replace it with something I actually want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Few adult men are killed by adult women.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah so these “communities” are just based on what an individual gets sorted into aor out of according to u/Grail

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Few adult men are killed by adult women.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Men” as a “political community” is entirely a fabrication. Reality does not conform to the social constructs you are trying to impose upon it. This may come as a shock to you, but most men do not actually know each other.

  In the last US presidential election, 45% of women voted for Trump even after all of the misogynist shit he’s done, and 45% of men literally voted for a woman to be president (not including non-voters of course). A slight statistical trend, but certainly not enough to be able to predict who an individual woukd vote for based on gender alone.

  Gender is a spectrum (or more correctly, a collection of a lot of traits, most of which are their own individual spectrums). That is not something I can selectively believe is true whenever I want to support my trans/nonbinary/gender fluid friends ans just conveniently ignore whenever it makes me feel good.

  Racists absolutely love to cite statistics about violent crime in predominantly black communities. Do we say “good black people need to do a better job of holding the bad ones accountable?” Absolutely not, because that’s prejudiced ans ridiculous.

  If one trans woman sexually assaults a cis woman in a public restroom and JK Rowling starts howling about it… What do we do? Do we demonize all trans women, or even all trans people entirely? Do we start doing genital checks in toilets? Do we start to become afraid of trans people as a “political community”? What if it were more than one case? How many cases does it take for it to become a problem? The answer is: the question itself is fundamentally transphobic and invalid.

  I think most progressives get it: its unreasonable to generalize individuals by their identies and pre-judge based on things they cannot control. However, there always seem to be some people who have a problem with that and want to hate others as a sort of “revenge”. Right now it’s in fashion to hate on men. In the past it’s been white people, which I find particularly funny because “whiteness” itself is an incredibly recent concept and many “white” people in the US today would not have even been considered “white” 100 years ago. I’ve heard the occasional hate against straight and cis people.

  Age is another one I see. People love to hate on Boomers, but most of the evil people destroying the world aren’t Boomers. Trump, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, Bernie, McConnell, Peloso, Graham… All Silent Generation. JD Vance is a millennial. Elon Musk is Gen X (though it’s even less relevant outside the US). Plenty of boomers are cool as fuck and have spent their lives fighting oppression to make the world a better place, while plenty of people from every “generation” have been shitty. The simple fact is that such generalizations are meaningless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NileRed - Turning air into alcohol⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think he writes his voiceover in a tone similar to how he would write a report for academic or professional publication, with the technical jargon reduced for his audience. Kind of reminds me of How Its Made.

  The segments where he is talking live to the camera sound more natural and casual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Few adult men are killed by adult women.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Spider-man is a vigilante who constantly fucks up and makes the system worse. He is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a work of fiction. Relying on the individual wills of physically and politically powerful men, even well-intentioned ones, is how we get to authoritarianism and fascism. The answer is not in individuals, but in systems.

  In reality, the closst thing we have to Spiderman IRL is the NYPD, and we’ve already seen how ACAB.

  The men with the most physical and political power are the ones abusing that power. The problem is the concentration of power, not men.

  What happens when the “bad” men have more physical and political power than the “good” ones do in a system that allows those individuals to exercise that power unilaterally?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Few adult men are killed by adult women.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What counts as “solved”? What are the goalposts, and who gets to judge those?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me_irl⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, old incomplete games like that usually sold terribly. They are now either forgotten or worse: remembered for being terrible. Stuff like Superman64.

  There used to be more pressure on developers to make good games first. Testing and QA departments have shrunk, or st the very least failed to scale with the increased scope of modern games. They instead rely on consumers to report the bugs.

  So at the same time they keep raising prices, they are also pushing more of the work onto the consumers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come Rugby never caught on in the states? I played in college and it's basically like football without pads. Isn't it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that one of reasons gridiron football got so popular in the first place is because of its unique pacing.

  A play starts, a few specific actions take place over the course of like, 5-15 seconds usually, then play stops while they set up. This might sound terrible to some people, but this means that there’s space in-between plays for people to talk. Could be talking about what just happened, or trying to predict what will happen next, or about how this fits within the greater context of the game or season. Or it could be talking about the beer or the nachos or whatever else. It makes the games more of a social event.

  With the rise of television, this means advertising space and color commentary. Advertising = money, which fuels the entire industry.

  This is also why baseball is “America’s favorite past time”. Golf is up there too, and I would even argue that oval track racing in NASCAR kind of follows this trend, because most of the interesting action tends to take place around pit stops (or at least it did when I used to watch it). Its not 100%- basketball and hockey are still popular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is your favourite gaming console you have played?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I agree with this 100%

  I grew up with consoles. The PS1, N64, GBC, GameCube, PS2, GBA. As an adult I played the PS3 a lot and I ownd a Wii for parties, and went through a DS and 3DS for Pokémon. I was a late owner of a PS4, Switch, and eventually a PS5. I dabbled in PC gaming, both on a desktop with M+KB , with a controller, eventually streaming to my living room for couch gaming.

  The Steam Deck blows it all out of the water. It can do everything, anywhere, usually more ergonomically than the original. The only real drawback is the resolution, but that’s a perfectly fine trade-off most of the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.

  Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn’t hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn’t have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking “yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time”, which was really unsatisfying.

  Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock’s soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.

  Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.

  Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC’s don’t really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren’t people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you’re shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.

  The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every “arena room” area feels the same. The guns aren’t that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn’t all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn’t used often and there wasn’t usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.

  So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.

  So I’d say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn’t live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OnlyFans 'agents' control and threaten creators while taking half their earnings, BBC finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  OnlyFans has “strict onboarding processes, payment controls and ongoing account moderation”, the company spokesperson says. If concerns about an account are raised, OnlyFans will immediately restrict the account, investigate, and take action to ensure the creator is in control of their account, they added.

  But when a female BBC reporter set up an account with a verified photo, she was able to use a male colleague’s bank account details to receive test payments.

  OnlyFans told the BBC that: “In the UK, where a creator requests a payout from their OnlyFans accounts, our third-party payment providers undertake confirmation of payee checks when processing that payment. Where this check is not successful the payment will be rejected.”

  That’s kind of vague, but it seems like the BBC is just expecting some sort of magical, privacy-invading, AI facial scanning technology to happen. I would not expect a photo to be involved with any payment processing at all. If I sell something on eBay do I need a photo ID to get my money? If I sell anything anywhere else, or start my own business with my own website, or my friends and family just want to send me money, do I need to have a photo and facial recognition every time?

  And OnlyFans points to their 3rd party payment processors. OnlyFans isn’t in the business of processing payments- that is outsourced like almost every other business does too. And there are perfectly legitimate reasons why a model might want those payments to go to someone else. There are legitimate agents and agencies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OnlyFans 'agents' control and threaten creators while taking half their earnings, BBC finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So… What’s the solution? The article seems to keep implying that this is OF’s problem to solve but doesn’t propose any solutions. OF’s spokesperson pointed out that these contracts are between models and “agents” so OF does not even necessarily know about them, let alone habe control over them.

  And things like fraud, extortion, and assault are already illegal and happen in other industries.

  Maybe some education and resources for models to avoid and escape these situations?

  Maybe a licensing and approval system for such agents? That would probably be better done by the public rather than private sector.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I don't know about that one⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, though I eentftom not dreaming at all (or not remembering them) to dreaming occasionally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I don't know about that one⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I smoked weed and went progressively harder for the last few years.I really enjoyed it a lot: my joints felt better, sleep was easier, I found more joy in movies, TV shows, music, food, and sex. Exercise was easier and I lost weight.

  Starting last fall I noticed my memory was getting bad, and at times my mind woukd just shut down. So at first I cut back, then stopped it entirely. Been completely off for 3 months nkw, which should be more than enough time for all the THC to be out of my system and my canmabanoid receptors to be reset. I never used it until my 30’s so there should.be pretty much no risk of long-term issues.

  Since then, I’m proud to report that those same problems just got even worse AND I’ve lost all of the benefits! Yay!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Feeling superior⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  See interesting article link to research paper Sample size is <100 students at one college

  Like, on a certain level I get it. I just get frustrated that so much of my time gets wasted on looking into this stuff. And I have so many conversations with other people I know who ONLY read the pop-science article and not the actual paper, or they read the paper but just skip to the juicy bits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Third Shift, a Game Boy styled horror game that combines first, second, and third person perspectives where you play the newest employee in a Museum on night shift, released on Steam⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The go-to example I always think of for 2nd person is Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the boss battle against the Tyhrranoid Mother. You cycle through phases of the boss, and one shifts the camera’s perspective to the targeting system of the boss, while you still control Ratchet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Driving game poll⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m interested, but I think the Dev woukd need to find a way to incentivize “normal” driving.

  I think back to my youth playing Driver on the PS1, and it was a lot of fun just… Driving around. Exploring the world. Even dealing with traffic was fun when I was only a kid who could nkt drive myself.

  I tried tk do similar in GTA3, and I even had a wheel and pedlas I would use for it. Unfortunately GTA3 is incredibly unlrealistic. The physics are cartoonish, the AI behavior is dumb, the pedestrians are dumb, the cops are dumb. The game incenvitcizes chaos.

  The question is: how do we make things likr speed limits and stop signs and pedestrian crossings fun?

  My instinct is to model off the real world to an extent. Could involve delivering things that are fragile and cannot handle a bunch of G’s. Could be fines or a karma system of some kind for rolling stops. Could be that a realistic damage modeling system makes dents and scratches look terrible and lead to rust, and repairs are just as expensive as they are in real life. Maybe a LOT of the car is consumable or wearable. Not just gas and tires, but all the fluids too, and brake pads. Maybe taking a turn too hard damages the suspension. Crashing into something means you not only need to repair your car, but also whatever you hit.

  The more I list this out, the more this seems like a punishing and tedious slog. It seems really hard to design a game that incentivizes something like this, at least with most of the current mechanics in games today. Maybe a multiplayer social component would help? Like a virtual parking lot and drag strip for people to meet up on the weekends and check each other’s virtual rides out? I would not be interested in that, but my uncle might be.

  Maybe it could be heavily story-based. I would go noir-style, where as you drive around either you see things or your driver character provides some narration. Something like “that abandoned building over there used to be an ice cream parlor. That’s where I had my first kiss. I wonder what ever happened to Suzie? I drove a '69 Cobra that night. Lovely car” and then the Cobra is available in the shop. Maybe there is a mystery about stuff going on in the world. Maybe it is a post-apocalyptic world and you’re scavenging, mostly alone and unchallenged, in the ruins of a city, slowly learning what led to this. I think about how Detroit’s population went from ~1.8 million to 0.6 million in ~50 years and what it would have been like to stay there and experience that.

  Maybe a parody of Crazy Taxi called Sane Uber where the main priority is ride comfort?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game franchises you like, but wish were anothet genre of video game?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Similarly, what about wishing for another linear and stoey-focused 3D Zelda?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  OK boomer