Khrux

We all know that part, but that’s the comparison many very casual users would use. I would look uncool describing the difference to someone who told me my OC takes a long time to boot, and to a community of nerds, looking uncool to someone may be terrible. I’m sure this doesn’t impact everyone, but I understand the super short boot dream.

I don’t care for a 5 second boot time instead of 8, but I understand the desire to work towards a sub 1 second type of boot, even if it’s still farcical. We are surrounded by other tech like laptops, phones and TVs which go from standby to on in an instant, and as a PC user, where one puts personal stake in their PC being on par or better, chasing minimal times here matters.

I’m sure many people know the feeling of their Linux PC or pride of place mechanical keyboard modded ThinkPad suddenly looking crap to a casual tech user with a different understanding of what quality means. While the MacBook user may never gain the features of your device, you may theoretically beat them at their preferences, because you can technically do anything.

I’m eyeing up an oled monitor upgrade in the next few years. When I get it, I’m gonna use an old raspberry pi to basically make a simple, lightweight dupe of my PC desktop, then use a HDMI switch to have the oled screen have an instant useful boot while the apC actually boots in the background. My desk doesn’t face a part of my apartment otherwise used, so I may get a motion sensor too, so being at my desk turns on the pi’s “always on” display, which has the dual purpose of obscuring the PC boot. I don’t need this in any way, but it’ll feel 𝓈𝓁𝑒𝑒𝓀, and I want that.

I backed it in 2015 and suspected it was a scam then, with most advice online being that you should only buy it if you think you’ll enjoy what’s already out.

I think the saddest thing is that they have a lot of genuine ambition, and we’re trying truly innovative things a decade ago like a persistent world space “from pupil to planet” weather simulations that were incredible, and more. But as time has gone on, the bar has risen and everything that they had that was ahead of the curve has been done.

As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin’s creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.

Eventually I pick up Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.

Perhaps it filled a good ‘get home from work and crash’ need for me, and the experience wasn’t wholly bad by any means, but it’s so bland. I’ve dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.

I tend to hold off calling anything that’s not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin’s creed doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it’s blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.

I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn’t have an ounce of passion in it.

These games aren’t helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.

I would consider myself a Lord of the Rings fan, I’ve read the books maybe 3 times through and read The Silmarillion once.

I forgot the ring makes people invisible.

I did hear a point about general game dev trends which is how optimisation wasn’t really a step in older games like it is now. When confined to the MB scale, or even just the finite scale of a single disc, the process wasn’t one of bloat and then half-arsed optimization but hyper optimised from the get go. I don’t think this shift is entirely the performance budget of modern games, but the multi-platform, limitless upper end, no disc limit design of modern games.

In the film, we see the ring shrink to Isildur’s ring size when he hold it, and it remains that size when Déagol finds it, after thousands of years without a carrier.

If you put it on a chicken, it is also gonna get really small, like chicken fingers small.

I’m not sure if this is a pro or con.

It’s strange to look back at the Legend of Korra and realise it was totally fine, just worse than the original show, when comparing it to literally everything else that’s come from the IP since.

Mushroom circles grow in circles because they drain the nutrients from the ground, and eventually you have a nutrient barren center that grows with the ring of mushrooms around it.

I wonder if this is something similar, although I’ve not heard of mold using up a resource before.

I’m 95% sure it isn’t, I’ve obsessed over that game for years and this makes no sense to me.

Edit: It’s the wizard of Oz

China aren’t strictly speaking allies. They get a lot of oil from Iran and have plenty of deals in place, to the point that many people believe that the Venezuela coup and Iran war are a US ploy to destabilise China specifically.

China basically stay out of geopolitics far more than people assume. They are very unlikely to enter the Iran war on either side, ever.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the word rizz. Not just is it a shortening of charisma, so more sensible than other zoomer words, but I grew up playing D&D, where wisdom is frequently shortened to Wis, and Cha is bad to say and doesn’t rhyme.

It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.

Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.

That’s still incredibly low, I’d have assumed an enormous increase.

Yeah, he looked like he did on the left through the entire 2010s without changing appearance much, from Narnia 3 to Midsommar. This is absolutely styling above just growing up.

Also worth adding it sadly doesn’t really exist anymore, the iconic look here is gone, although game mechanics still begin getting weird.

Also although people have teleported to it, Minecraft is so big that I assumed nobody would ever reach it in survival. I’m not surprised it took 14 years.

He was actually just there in the water for the reference images, and got left in by mistake.

Funnily enough, when I do ask an LLM to rephrase anything I write, it changes any sentence with a semicolon to one with an em dash. I’ve probably always overused the semicolon because of its availability on a keyboard, but it appears a lot in my normal work.

Now I trust the semicolon, it’s an identifier of me.

Thank god I display my status amongst my peers by rejecting mainstream status symbols. Yay for counterculture being part of the system!

I’m in the UK too and the gradual shift to WhatsApp has been a relief considering it used to be WhatsApp, Snapchat, messenger, Instagram, iMessage and twitter about ten years ago, not that anyone did all of them.

It’s a shame it’s meta but it’s so nice that it’s not a huge pile of useless features, just a few.