The mods of a certain pair of tankie instances a few months ago were talking about taking over all other instances of Lemmy while the userbases became increasingly hostile towards users who disagreed with the idea that Stalin/Lenin did nothing wrong and that China is a perfect country who can do no wrong and has never done anything bad.

People have the right to not be harassed and take action to prevent said harassment.

Lemmy moves in mysterious ways. It is not our place to question the actions of a higher being such at this. 😄

A wise person once said, “It’s not possible to make a billion dollars in a year. It is, however, possible to steal a billion dollars in a year.” You have to be stealing value from somebody along the production chain to be accumulating that kind of wealth.

For me, it’s more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It’s a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money’s worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

And this right here is why the "Ghost Gun" thing is largely just a scare like the Halloween drug thing that happens every year. Because it's generally cheaper and easier to go one state over to the state with lax gun laws and buy a gun there for the price of an Ender 3 instead of going through all the effort of buying a printer and learning how to use it. Same reason why the Mexican cartels smuggle guns out of the US and into Mexico, and not the other way around. Guns are cheap and plentiful in the US, and they're not hard to get.

There's some "teh gubernment is cummin fer muh gunz!1!" chuds out there 3d printing guns, but there's plenty of those people with guns they bought legally as well. The biggest large scale ghost gun manufacturing I've heard about is the Burmese resistance fighters who have been printing en masse a design to fight back against a genocidal military coup in Myanmar because the international community has largely ignored what's going on there and they can't get guns any other way, which is exactly the sort of situation that design was created for.

Nah, if it were the US, that playground would be a parking lot.

I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they've definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven't even bothered with the store for the free games.

It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would've failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn't even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn't even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they've rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I've praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.

Plenty to criticise, but I'm getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.

What is this “passing lane” of which you speak? All I’ve ever seen in America is the fast lane and the slow lane(s).

And only end up being farther back than if they had just stayed put, as everybody else had the same thought, making the new lane the slower one.

It’s worth noting that though those are the “recommended” settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I’ve played, including other AAA releases from this year. It’s my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA’s recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I’ve ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.

I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it’s all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.

Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.

The fact that it literally can’t run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?

And don’t even get me started on how I keep feeling like I’m playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I’ve heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield…

I mean, be the change you want to see in the world…

Sheer spite is a perfectly valid reason to continue to get out of bed in the morning.

Nobody on their deathbed has ever said, “I wish I spent more time in the office.”

A battle you don’t have to fight is a battle won. But if you do have to hurt somebody, hurt them bad enough that they won’t get back up. Otherwise, they’re very likely to come right back at you.

Well, art is political by its very nature. It is inherently filled with the views and beliefs of the artist, and it’s important to point out the dangerous ones so people are aware and to prevent a potential slippery slope to radicalization. Or to prevent moments like that time Smash Mouth unknowingly retweeted art from a famous lolicon artist.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the ways to deal with a shitty person is to take their propaganda and meme the shit out of it.

I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.

…I ain’t one to yuck on somebody else’s yum, but that’s definitely a Valentines Day style heart she’s holding…

I think they mean that because of the unique process that 3d printers use to create something, stuff that can be made easily on a 3d printer can’t be replicated through other manufacturing techniques, and vice versa. For example, I designed an earring that is 1 solid object, but made up of 3 separate moving pieces; like links of a chain that have no split in them. This would be an impossible task for any other kind of manufacturing process. It would be like making acar engine all at once, rather than having to make the individual parts and then assemble them afterward. You can have gaps and cavities in a print that you could never have in a cast or injection molded piece. But this method means that you also have to worry about things that you wouldn’t using more traditional manufacturing techniques.

I saw a series of studies once for HRT (not a surgery, but relevant to transgender research and major bodily changes) that said that 90% of patients reported either an improvement or at least no change in their quality of life after HRT compared to before. Of the 10% who reported a worse quality of life or stopped treatment, the majority of causes were due to external factors such as harassment/hate crimes or being disowned by friends and family. The least commonly reported cause was post HRT regret, and the vast majority of that 10% said that they would be restarting HRT as soon as they safely could.

Not only is that a huge success rate, but it also says something about the percentage of people who would respond to such a survey, as going “stealth” as it’s referred to, can be a major component of transgender people’s safety considerations. If people don’t know your trans, you can’t be assaulted for it. And considering the sexual assault rate for trans women in the US is 80%, they have reason to worry about that sort of thing. Also, a quick Google search tells me that the average response rate for medical surveys is 76% for in-person surveys, 65% for postal, and online surveys are 46% for website based and 51% for email surveys. So that 59% isn’t too far outside the range as long as it isn’t in-person surveys.

As I always say, we fought a war over this. The whole world was involved.

Steam doesn’t let you actually rate a game; only recommend it or not. So, a game may be a 7/10, but if people can’t recommend it for something like its monetary practices or frequent bugs/crashes, then it can end up on that list. That low rating doesn’t necessarily mean people think it’s the worst game on Steam, but rather that only about 10% of players think it’s worth playing. Though, it’s also worth mentioning that it has something like a 1.2 rating on Metacritic. It’s generally considered a worse game than its predecessor in many aspects (including the readability of its characters, apparently. I guess they made some changes to the original characters’ models that made them less identifiable?), and the reasoning behind shutting down the first one for this new free to play model was canceled. It’s also been having issues with player attrition leading up to the Steam release, so the complaints don’t seem unwarranted, but this probably wouldn’t be happening if these players had some other outlet for their grievances.