ADHDefy

YouTube. I know it sounds goofy, but often you can search something like “Baldur’s Gate 3 gtx 1060 6gb i7-4790K” (or whatever your specs are) and you will get tons of videos of people running it on their systems. If you happen to have common parts, you will not normally have trouble finding a benchmark for a rig very similar to yours for most games, but even with more niche hardware, you can usually find something helpful, even of it’s just like a similar GPU or another laptop with the same chipset, or whatever your case may be.

Beyond that, Steam’s hardware requirements on the store pages of games and pcgamingwiki are great resources.

I’d also say you can look on protondb–it’s for Linux gamers, so the results may or may not be applicable if you have a Windows system, but in most cases, if there’s a report that something runs well on Linux machine with the same hardware as you, it’s going to be very similar on Windows. The other way isn’t so applicable, though–just because something runs poorly on a Linux rig doesn’t necessarily mean it will also run poorly on Windows, as the problem could be with the compatability layer and not the hardware.

None of these are a perfectly elegant solution, but they are typically reliable enough.

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I suspect this is exactly why Battlebit Remastered blew up the way that it did this year even though it looks like a Roblox game. lol

I think people are starved for a good, clean FPS that isn’t mostly battling menus, cluttered UI, MTX, endless DLC, P2W, battle passes, lootboxes, daily login bonuses, timed events, grindfests, invasive anti-cheat (or an overwhelm of cheaters), constant updates that break the game, etc. I think there’s a lot of us that just want to shoot stuff and have fun with our friends, like the glory days of online FPS. I’d happily fork over $60 today for that kind of experience, but I don’t trust hardly any AAA publishers to keep their promises if they even did offer something like that.

You are right, I’m a pretty big fan of Bloons TD 6 myself. I’ve also played a lot of Osu!Lazer and some of the Netflix indies. It just kind of feels like the overwhelming majority of mobile games are predatory and obnoxious, but there are definitely some really well-done games between the premium options, console ports, and a handful of open source games.

I felt this in my soul. lol This has basically been my state of mind for the least couple of years. I used to game on mobile a fair amount, but these days, I just can’t handle mobile gaming anymore. I can’t deal with F2P games on PC, either, despite having loved some of them in the past (Apex Legends, Warframe, etc.).

Between F2P games, paid games with egregious F2P-style monetization, and soooo many AAA games coming out broken or just bad, I have been playing a lot of retro games, older JRPGs, and indies the last couple of years. I’m just so burnt out on the modern game industry.

It was really good! It expanded on the story in really interesting ways.

Over Halloween weekend, I beat the original Alan Wake for the first time. It was a blast. I got really engaged in the story and couldn’t put it down. I was shocked at how well it held up. The graphics were a tad dated, but they were still pretty good and everything else about the game felt like it could have come out last year. I think I bought the game in like 2014, so finally playing it was a real victory for my backlog. lol

Today shall be remembered as the day the rogue penises finally won.

Right? Can you imagine what they could have been if they just sold the same games as Steam but tried really hard to just be a really good platform? lol

Just beat it a few weeks ago, it was a great time. The set pieces are jaw-dropping at times.

Multiplayer def has a learning curve, but it’s fantastic.

Nexomon Extinction and Siralim Ultimate are great monster collecting games.

Cool, but please just release the Nathan Drake collection on PC 🥲

Did they get Gillian Anderson for this fucking game?! lol

What would we do with this information?

This is a very prudent question. Like, if we could somehow prove that we existed in a simulation, that would be an earth-shattering discovery about our origins… but then what?

What would we do? Some people would probably go nuts living with that information and certain philosophies/religions would have to reckon with that, but there isn’t anything we could do differently, and it wouldn’t alter our lived experience in any way, aside from maybe coloring it in a new light.

Not to say that seeking answers for the pursuit of knowledge itself isn’t worthwhile, but… yeah, what would it even matter to most of us outside of academia/philosophy?

I am not disputing the fact that there is a ton of misinformation about Autism on TikTok (and the internet as a whole), because there absolutely is and it’s dangerous. But it gives me pause that the researcher behind this study developed and promotes a treatment method that is essentially a cousin of ABA. That makes me incredibly skeptical of what his rubric might be for filtering the claims as factual or not.

ABA, for those that don’t know, is based on Skinner’s operant conditioning and was created by the man who developed “gay conversion therapy.” He once said this:

“You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense – they have hair, a nose and a mouth – but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”

If “operant conditioning” makes you think of dog training, you’re right. ABA is dog training for Autistic people. It is conversion therapy. It does not “intervene” in their Autism so much as it forces them to appear more neurotypical, and a study from 2018 suggests that it actually creates PTSD symptoms in the patients–that it is traumatic–which is in-line with many firsthand accounts of people that have been through ABA.

So the guy behind this analysis developed his own practice which is rooted in ABA and centers around operant conditioning. I’m sure a lot of what he finds to be false is probably false and not scientifically-supported, but I would def be skeptical of what he considers to be misinformation in some instances since ABA is technically scientifically-supported for autism intervention, due to it’s effectiveness in making Autistic people appear more neurotypical (without regard for their psychological wellbeing in many cases).

But with that said, I’m just some schmuck on the internet. I highly recommend reading Autistic people’s perspectives on it and seeing what verified smart people have to say.

Here are some pieces I find enlightening:

• https://fortune.com/2022/05/13/autistic-community-reckoning-aba-therapy-rights-autism-insurance-private-equity-ariana-cernius/
• https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/nurturing-self-esteem-in-autistic-children/202209/does-applied-behavior-analysis-aba-cause
• https://whyy.org/segments/how-a-therapy-once-seen-as-a-victory-for-autistic-kids-has-come-under-fire-as-abuse/

It’s too bad they don’t offer a complete list of known patched VPNs. They just give like 5 example ones. It’d be really helpful to know if my service has patched already or not.

Beto O’Rourke was a hacker??

Honestly, I migrated from Mastodon just when Calckey (now Firefish) seemed to be gaining more traction. I looked at available instances, and this was one of the first to pop up that checked most of my boxes, being that it is a generalistic instance (skewed a bit toward video game/nerd culture), was up-to-date and properly utilized HTTPS, and had limits I was cool with (character limits, drive storage, etc.). I later found out that it’s run by a tech YouTuber I admire, so that was a nice bonus.

My only complaint is that there aren’t many custom emojis. lol

Ew. I’m on easymode.im and it’s a lovely Firefish instance, I don’t see any shit like that.

I adore Calckey/Firefish. It’s amazing software, but these are both pretty bad names. lol

I guess Firefish is better, because it sounds like software you’d want to use and not something you have to put up with to file a tax return, but also… why?