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.

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I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next.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…

Yup, it’s the same old song of fascists and cultists.

“Are you lonely, sad, angry, or just generally dissatisfied with your life? Have you tried blaming your problems on a minority with less power in society than yourself? Act now, and I’ll throw in a second minority, free!*”

*Just pay shipping and handling.

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

I was confused as well because the industry standard (Maya) natively supports Linux. Until I looked up Solidworks and realized we’re talking about 2 different 3d modeling/design fields.

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.

Yeah, there’s been a number on both surgery and HRT, as well as plenty of studies on the effects of supporting trans people - especially trans kids.

I even remember a series of studies that found that HRT had a 90% success rate among patients. 90% of people in the study said that there had been either an improvement or at least no change in the quality of their life after they started compared to before, and of the 10% who didn’t, many of them cited outside factors as being the cause of their issues. Stuff like unsupportive family and harassment/hate crimes were some of the most common factors, and post HRT regret being the least common factor. The majority of that 10% said they would be starting HRT again as soon as they were in a position where they safely could.

Yeah, anytime you see somebody making the “think of the children!” argument, look at what the possible end goal could be with that removed. Protecting kids is a favorite smokescreen because kids can’t speak up for themselves in these cases.

The worst part is that Boston is ranked like #3 for public transportation in the US (yes, even including the fires). The average commute time on a route is like 30 minutes faster than the national average for public transportation, and somewhere around 50% of Boston’s workers use the T to commute every day.

This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.

If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.

There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.

It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.

Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.

You could always buy a second copy to gift to a friend. Then you’d be able to play together on top of giving them another sale!

It is, but with a few caveats that can make it outright impossible, largely down to financial issues.

From a legal standpoint, it’s only slightly more annoying than moving from one town to another. You don’t have to go through any sort of immigration process or anything, you just inform the state you’re leaving and the state you’re moving to of the change in address, and then get tax/identification stuff done like registering your car in the new state and getting an in-state driver’s license.

Financially, the housing market is a mess in the US right now for a number of reasons, from the number of new houses being built not keeping up with population growth for like 60 years and many empty houses being in unlivable condition due to lack of maintenance, to many homes being owned by investment companies (and wealthy Chinese apparently) as basically a high yield savings account or bought up by companies and people turning them into rental property. And that’s before you get into the logistics of moving your life to a new home.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.”

Seems appropriate considering these were found in Lovecraft country. How long until we start seeing the fish-faced people?