Everything The Zuck touches becomes high-risk to users…

This would have been a useful upgrade during Uni…

Dammit… Wellp! Guess I’m learning how to grow my own tobacco!

Worked aces, yes! Had to have a system breakdown after doing Overtime for a month* straight just to understand that it’s unsustainable - weekends included, 9AM to 11PM. Needed the money for Christmas.

Yep, I get the control bit, which is why I love my smartwatch - best feature on it is the remote:)) Plus I prefer local storage for all things music, so I just let Poweramp do its thing shuffling my personal library.

As far as gaming goes, it’s always been one of my biggest pleasures in life, alongside music, movies and books. I’m a sucker for stories, and the more involved they are, the better. My brain relaxes when I flood it with information it enjoys, I always feel refreshed after a New Vegas session for instance.

Computers have been a major stress during work hours, though, yes. I don’t want to see a spreadsheet, or a command prompt (unless it’s necessary to get me playing), or anything of the sort, ever again.

And books are worth it. I get your point about eyes staring at a flat surface, but I honestly found some books more immersive than a lot of the games I’ve played so far! Brilliant for disconnecting from reality for a while, read the first three volumes of Foundation in 48 hours, didn’t even realise a day had passed.

Well aware of that, but no game has ever had issues with it so far, so…

And I even run it without any OC, because it handles everything I throw at it juust fine.

Edit: plus, to be honest… if things keep going the way they’re going, I can see a clear cut-off point for me around gaming… Very few new games I’d actually want to play, and I own every game I’ve ever enjoyed playing.

Edit 2: as an example, I can run Cyberpunk 2077 with everything cranked up to 11 and my system’s actually chillin’.

Not American, but I can tell you that it’s the same in Romania. I was raised from the start to believe that I had no value as a being unless I generated something. And it started well before Capitalism hit our country, these things were passed down generation to generation - I’m not just talking out of my ass on this one, I’d say roughly 80% of Millenials I’ve met in 34 years of existence in this country have shared at least the gist of my experience.

Grandma always told me “if your leg isn’t broken, you’re going to school,” and this happened while I was running fevers of 39°C and my face was leaking from every hole.

Nope! Relaxing, for me, is listening to music (wihout distractions, because I like studying the details), watching movies (in ways in which David Lynch would accept), playing a game, reading a book, etc. I’m honestly not all that attached to my phone in general, never caught my attention in any significant way (don’t do Social Media in general, don’t chat that much with people over text, mostly use it for calls, music, and some background noise when cooking, cleaning, etc.)

Trying to actually relax has been the hardest thing I’ve tried doing in my life. Took me 9 months of willingly doing “nothing” (i.e. chillin’) before I stopped waking up with anxiety caused by an absence of stress.

I see more gore when I try shaving with a razor nowadays, to be honest:))

Sorry, yeah, forgot the deets. 9700k, none of the cores were overworked, 60% seemed to be average usage across them.

And, yeah, checked in NPC-heavy areas, where the stuttering, lag, and frame times were the worst, and I didn’t have it set to “Ridiculous” - using a combination of High for textures and Med for effects (like shadows and lighting), running it at 1080p on the 3060 and 1440p on the 4080 Super (bumped it up to native, basically). Exclusively on SSD, 32 Gigs of RAM.

Edit: no upscaling because the input lag was horrid.

It’s not just that, Vice City was set in Miami, I’d argue it had similar vibes/aesthetics (accounting for the difference in time and setting), and it felt significantly more cohesive and well-designed in terms of aesthetics.

Agreed, it was a major step forward in terms of mechanical complexity, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything I saw was made out of plastic, y’know? Cars included.

Oh, I always remove the default upvote:))

And thoroughly agreed, currently playing Dune Awakening. It’s been about two weeks since launch. I fell through the map twice (by doing nothing other than using what the game gave me - grappling-hooked to a container in a lab, catapulted me straight through the wall), and keep getting ganked by solo mobs who pin me to walls, because I’m unable to move or dodge. A single enemy. Blocking my movement completely. Not to mention NPCs being displayed as blank templates which load in when you’re barely 2m away from them, twitchy directionals, and many other points of minor annoyance, which just add up…

And I’m not dumping on Dune, it’s a good game! But it’s VERY rough around the edges…

Seriously, even GTA III had a MUCH better defined atmosphere and feel than SA!

And the Riddick games were, indeed, gorgeous! In a grim as hell way, but gorgeous!

Honestly, this wouldn’t have been an issue, ever, if we wouldn’t have switched to “release fast, fuck quality, crunch ya’ plebs!” It’s yet another solution for a self-generated problem.

Didn’t go into so much detail with most people of faith I’ve met, but I know for a fact mum read both the Old and New Testaments and decided she didn’t* (still getting used to it…) want to have anything to do with the Church’s interpretations, because they focused on essentially anything other than empathy and being human.

On the other hand, grandma wasn’t that big on the Bible, but went to church weekly (for as long as she could). She was also domineering, aggressive, two-faced, and manipulative. Also loved to visit the village witch (no, I’m not joking), which was… kinda’ contradictory if one asks me, but nobody did, so that’s that…

From my purely anecdotal experience, the people who actually want to follow Jesus’s teachings don’t go to church. Says a lot.

The first F.E.A.R. had excellent dynamic lighting, I’d argue it had the epitome of relevant dynamic lighting. It didn’t need to set your GPU on fire for it, it didn’t have to sacrifice two thirds of its framerate for it, it had it all figured out. It did need work on textures, but even those looked at least believable due to the lighting system. We really didn’t need more than that.

RT is nothing but eye candy and a pointless resource hog meant to sell us GPUs with redundant compute capacities, which don’t even guarantee that the game’ll run any better! And it’s not just RT, it’s 4k textures, it’s upscaling, it’s Ambient Occlusion, all of these things hog resources without any major visual improvement.

Upgraded from a 3060 to a 4080 Super to play STALKER 2 at more than 25 frames per second. Got the GPU, same basic settings, increased the resolution a bit, +10 FPS… Totes worth the money…

Edit: not blaming GSC for it, they’re just victims of the AAA disease.

Edit 2: to be clear, my CPU’s an i7, so I doubt it had much to do with the STALKER bottleneck, considering it barely reached 60% usage, while my GPU was panting…

Edit 3: while re-reading this, it hit me that I sound like the Luddite Boss, so I need to clarify this for myself more than anyone else: I am not against technological advancement, I want tech in my eyeballs (literally), I am against “advancements” which exist solely as marketing accolades.

Jeesus, I would have immediately exited the call/room/building without saying a thing.