Why isn’t it Hank?

If it’s the best soap you’ve ever used, that would negate the claim that soap is soap.

Disagree, the difference is that there is stuff in it that isn’t soap… in the case of that powder soap being superior, it is the added borax that acts as a great detergent, but probably not something you want to use on your skin regularly. And sure, there can be different ratios of water to fats in soap or different fats (lard, tallow, olive oil, beeswax, etc) that do not saponify fully (no soap should be 100% saponified or it would be possible that there is still lye in it that was not used up in the chemical reaction) and give the product different qualities, but the soap in it is still just soap. Or it could be sodium hydroxide lye vs potassium hydroxide lye to make solid vs liquid soap, respectively.

My comments are not really meant to be about hobbies but BS products marketed from massive corporations that are just adding more to our mountain sized landfills.

Soap is soap. I make my own soap from only 3 ingredients: lard (that I process from bacon grease, instead of throwing it out, and no it doesn’t smell like bacon once it’s been processed into pure lard), lye, and water; no fragarance or colors, and it’s one of the best soaps I have ever used (except for an old homemade powder soap that had borax in it, that stuff works miracles for cutting away the grease, dirt, and oil on my hands after working on the car. I wish I had the recipe). I make a years supply in one batch.

BUT enjoy what you like, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying stuff. Mixing up fancy potions in a bowl with a brush sounds fun, but in wet shaving spaces online, people seem to lose their minds acting like this is what you NEED to do just to shave hair off your face

Cost and quality

I just dry shave with a saftey razor and it’s still a closer and more comfortable shave than all this hyper-marketed plastic garbage with multiple shit quality blades. The razor was already perfected long ago, but quarterly growth demands landfills filled with trash.

PS: there’s no reason for a saftey razor to be an expensive upfront cost unless you’re buying a huge bulk of blades upfront. Any cheap stainless steel handle will do, for practically the same cost as you’ll end up spending after the first time replacing this price-gouged plastic. A stainless steel saftey razor is priced at $10-$20 and will outlive you.

PPS: it drives me up the WALL every time I see a Gillette “Labs” (🙄🙄🙄) commercial, as if there’s supposed to be some team of scientists and engineers in a laboratory experimenting with new ways to shape a piece of plastic. Who are they fooling??? They’re just a marketing company with a razor department.

PPPS: all the “wet shaving” creams and lotions and balms and oils and lathering brushes and special towels and aftershave and who knows what are ALSO just marketing insanity. If you have an issue with razor burn, just apply a small amount of 100% aloe vera, which is soothing and naturally antibacterial (razor burn is just your immune system going to town on all the bacteria introduced to your skin by your likely dirty razor), after shaving. You can use a patch of denim from an old pair of jeans to sharpen a saftey razor if it feels rough on your skin.

That would help, but I doubt it would be as effective as a real air fryer that is actively blowing air while heating it, instead of just circulating it. An air fryer gets really loud because it is moving so much more air.

I was like you once and believed a convection oven and air fryer are the same thing and produce the same results. But I was wrong!

There is a subtle but crucial difference between an air fryer and a convection oven. A convection oven only circulates air around inside the oven, keeping the steam trapped with the food, while an air fryer actually removes all of the steam away from the food, allowing it to get much crispier much faster than is possible with a convection oven.

You are kind of right though, because now that air fryers have become popular, they’ve started marketting small toaster-oven-style convection ovens as “air fryers”, even though they legitimately are not air fryers and do not cook the food the same way that an air fryer does.

Gunplay seems very bulletspongy

It is S.T.A.L.K.E.R… you compare it to fallout, is fallout not bulletspongy? This isn’t a PvP game, it is an open world RPG… There is various levels of armor, some of it is pretty strong, and there is also extensive differences between types of bullets and weapons. Without armor, you’re going to be dead in a couple quick shots. With armor, you will bleed to death without bandage or medkit. Some of the bullets will specifically be good for high armor penetration, some more effective for soft targets. If it is like the past S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles, head shots are a 1 hit kill with any bullet, unless protected by armor. If you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is bulletspongy, clearly you’ve never had to try to run by the military base machine gun tower outside the cordon… Or the number of times an NPC gets a good headshot and BOOM game over, time to load from save, in an instant… You can get very far in SoC with the silenced pistol only by going for stealth and headshots to insta-drop enemies. So satisfying.

weapons seem very static and weightless

?? Attachment options, ammunition options, jams and equipment damage, upgrade-tree for every individual weapon… You can set up one AK-74 for sniping and another for close-up bullet spraying.

general atmosphere is dull

AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player

Have you ever played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title? SoC had literally revolutionary AI, where NPCs behaved in ways never before seen in video games prior, such as intelligently grouping, splitting up and flanking, scouring an area in a human-like-way instead of just walking to wherever you were and then giving up when you aren’t there, taking cover, reinforcing and covering each other, and applying grenades in actually useful ways. I mean yes, it was still a 2007 game, it definitely wasn’t perfect, and there was loads of wonkiness and weird NPC behavior that you could exploit, but at the time it was mind-blowing. Clear Skies took this idea even further and applied it faction-wide to the entire map, and suddenly you were dropped into a highly dynamic full scale war with shifting fronts and struggles over strategic objectives. Amazing AI is one thing that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles are known for.

You can hear in the video ~1:24, an AI yells “Cover me, I’ll hide”. I’m guessing they included in this clip to hint and signal that this game will have the same kind of focus on great AI mechanics. In some of the indoor clips, you can see that the AI are actually taking cover during the fire fight instead of moving around. Even if they took the NPC AI code from Call of Pripyat and just directly shoved it into this game, it would 1) be nothing like what you just described and 2) be head and shoulders above NPC AI in even recent titles… I’d love to see some significant improvements and iteration still, though.

It just makes it look like this game was made for the sake of having a sequel

Hurray! Exactly what everyone was asking for! We just want more original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., yes, correct.

You can not like the atmosphere and environments, that’s fine, if so this game really is not for you at all. You can’t say it doesn’t look immersive, unless you’re just trolling.

наслаждайтесь троллингом

It just looks like a generic 2015 game or something. Gunplay seems very bulletspongy, weapons seem very static and weightless, general atmosphere is dull, AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player.

What is really ironic is that ^ describes fallout perfectly, EXCEPT for dull atmosphere…

Believe me, I have nothing but patience and slack to give them. I see how my tone could be read as more demanding than nostalgic in that message. I’ve waited like 14 years for this game, that I thought would never be made when the original studio dissolved, I wouldn’t even be phased by an additional delay.

Even where this game may have faults, I have faith that there will be incredible work done by the modding community delivering more than I can ask for, such as there was for SoC/CoP

So what kinds of gameplay differences would you have liked to see, that would not be “weak” and “mediocre” to you? What would you have them deliver?

One of the things that gets me excited about this game is the fact that the gameplay and visuals feel and look true to SoC. Which is exactly what most have been asking for, a “modern” S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, and wow does it appear the have nailed it.

I noticed this, too. “FUCK HIM UP WITH A GRENADE!”, “Cover me, I’ll hide”; I need a Ukrainian language setting for these voicelines. I need that panic “Oh shit!” feeling of not really knowing what the AI were shouting about like I had in SoC, and then getting surprised when they had flanked and crept up around me. That was pretty core to my experience, while the accents built a lot of immersion and feel in the world.

Omg absolutely, what a workhorse. I ended up slapping on a custom vBIOS, aggressive overclock, and swapped the AIB’s air cooler for a little closed loop 120mm water cooler. I ran it until it died in 2020, and if it was still functional today, I’d still be using it. RIP what a loss. The 6GB of VRAM were starting to get tight and DX12 was starting to age it, though, but it was still totally holding up for what I use a GPU for.

Now I am on a 6900XT with the navi21 XTXH chip in it. I bet I’ll skip at least as many generations with this as I did with the 980Ti. It’s so fast and efficient. In some games, the fans don’t even spin, and it just passively cools with the heatsink.

I play on a CRT in either 1600x1200@85Hz or 1024x768@120Hz capping it at 170fps in 85Hz or 360fps in 120Hz, and it holds those solid and stable in the games that I play. I’m not interested in 4k gaming or anything silly like that (but I’m sure others would say that I’m the silly one lol). The biggest factor that was holding me to the 980Ti was the flawless onboard DAC and native analog output. In order to use the 6900XT, I dropped a bunch of money on a DAC with a VMM2322 for it

Wait for real??? You make an NVIDIA account now? I haven’t had an NVIDIA card since my 980Ti… Is this account insanity true for the proprietary Linux driver too?