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Not sure if here, the Politics thread, or the "What Are You Reading" thread is most the appropriate place for this.

That is archeotech. The Mechanicus will have words with you for not immediately surrendering it to a tech priest.

Found myself with ample and somewhat unexpected free time in the past three weeks, so I figured I'd get this one done and over with too: Funny how this was, purely in terms of getting all the achievements, the least hair pulling out of any of the FromSoftware game catalogue that I have so far 100%'ed (meaning the three Dark Souls entries, Sekiro and now Elden Ring) but it bordered on being the most miserable experience I have had playing their games yet. Not surprising, given that I generally detest open world games. At least it plays better than Dark Souls 2. Well, arguably, it plays better (in terms of how your character controls and how responsive the controls are) than all the other games except Sekiro. Cannot talk about Bloodborne as that is still somewhat out of reach. Not sure what I can say about the game that hasn't been said yet. I find myself agreeing with Joseph Anderson's initial assessment. In some ways, Elden Ring contains the highest highs in the series (it might be worth the price of admission just for exploring Síofra River for the first time, assuming one does it the moment you find it) - but it also so utterly falls off a cliff at a certain point that one's experience ends up being worse than Dark Souls 1's latter half - and that is even before factoring in the amount of FromSoftware style bullsh*t that creeps up towards the end of the game. It makes the fandumb even dumber for defending it. I have yet to complete Shadow of the Erdtree, but I'm not sure I want to do that just now. I'll get to it eventually.

Since it does not seem to make my PC reboot itself - - I turned on Diablo1. Using a modded version that gives fast walk in town at least. Put-put-putted around, killed stuff, sold stuff, spent any money I made on mana potions (sorcerer, I always play a sorcerer), poured all pts into Magic. Found lots of fireball and holy books. Cleared the Poisoned Well. Got to lvl 3, put-put-putted around, killed stuff, etc. Found gear with +10 STR, cool. Found gear with +4 VIT, cool. Full of confidence, I hit a barrel. 10/10, would get killed by exploding barrel, again.

Here's one of the funny moments that I had playing Elden Ring. Prerequisite knowledge: Elden Ring loot icons come in different colors (that used to be different sizes in the other games). White for regular items, purple for rare items, and gold for legendary items. Imagine the following situation: you have just stepped onto a lift, and it is bringing you ever downwards. Down, down, down you go. Further. And further. There is seemingly no end to the ride on the platform. Finally, after what seems an eternity, you reach the ground, and you walk out, spotting ruins. Small parts of the area are faintly illuminated by fireflies casting their silvery light into the darkness of these underground ruins. You take note that they do not try to escape when you approach them, and decide to take a few of them with you for further examination. Not that you have any use for them now, but perhaps they will come in handy, their silver glow being similar to items you have found before. Strange looking new enemies creep about. Carefully you approach one that is standing about alone, to test the mettle of your newly discovered foes. You attack. Your opponent is decidedly unimpressed by your attack, as your combat abilities and equipment are seemingly not up to the task of breaking the clay hide of these shambling people, or whatever they are or used to be. You are clearly not prepared to explore the area, but still, they are slow, and you are not. It takes a while to dispatch them, but they are not an insurmountable challenge. You decide to press on, and explore the ruins. In the distance, you can see a human figure atop a broken pillar, clearly clutching something intricate in his hands (out of character note: the corpse has a purple glowing loot icon). Ever so slowly you make your way to your freshly discovered point of interest. It gets dicey for a while, as you notice that these new enemies can also cast spells. Luckily for you though, the projectiles of their spells are as slow as they are, and only the enemies equipped with bows are a slight problem, as they rain arrows down on you from elevated positions difficult to rush to. You persevere, and finally reach the pillar. You see that the humanoid figure you spotted is an old, desiccated corpse. Carefully you make note of your surroundings and find that there is no way to reach the top of this pillar from where you are, but you can see the crumbled walls surrounding the ruins could perhaps be used to reach the elevated platform above the broken column. It would be easy to jump down from there. Tracing your path along the walls you reach the other end of the area you are in. Carefully you climb in top of the partly crumbled walls, going higher and higher. It is a long way down now, a stumble now would surely kill you. There is a broken walkway atop a series of columns, and after a series of carefully executed jumps and a lot of sweat and anxiety, you finally cross the entire area and reach the platform above the corpse. You drop down, and immediately pick up the item the corpse is clutching. Carefully you inspect it. It is an intricate backpack. Slowly, with bated breath, you open it. You wonder what it is you have discovered. A lost incantation? A new sorcery? Some ancient secrets allowing you to concoct potions to ensnare the senses and befuddle your enemies? A new weapon, perhaps? Oh, isn't anticipation just the greatest of feelings? You find three of the fireflies that are buzzing around everywhere and that respawn whenever you rest at the nearby bonfire site of grace. They're classified as rare crafting material, giving them a purple loot glow, and you've just wasted your precious time doing a FromSoftware jumping puzzle for nothing.

I get the criticism, this is not the first time I have heard it before about these types of shows Lost and From is not for everyone because one thing that wont change is you will never know whats really happening until its confirmed in the last season But since you have watched season 3, heres my theory

If it only were scummy influencers and not legit content creators aswell getting cought up in **** like this

The difference is that the Uighurs have no recourse, indiginous people in the west do, because we are democratic nations and we are (at times) trying to better ourselves and right our past mistakes. Even the US have been fixing some things the past years, surprisingly, such as bail reforms. Movements such as Black Lives Matters would have been all incarcerated in China and killed. Atleast if things would've rolled that way, nvidias prices would've made some sense. I wasn't only refering to sending out spies, I'm talking about spying on the general population and invasion of privacy.

From what I can tell from Swedish court hearings, it's not only based on their chips, but also on the fact that China is a hostile nation. Having them build up even parts of a 5G network when there is a good chance that they would be literal enemies would be a security concern per definition, and would be a disruption of services that no nation would want to have. Huawei is subject to CCPs intelligence services laws. As for wether or not China is hostile? I don't know what goes on in your guys countries, but almost every year here in Sweden we've had Chinese spies been arrested for spying against Swedish companies. That our western governments are spying on us is indisputable, but atleast we can use democratic processes in the EU and for a few more weeks the US, to curtail or even stop those things. The Uighur situation is pretty well known, I'm surprised it has flown past you completely. The mistreatment of indiginous people in western countries historically and today, doesn't mean we can't **** on the CCP for doing those things actively in the present. Me and others have continually criticized governments and companies for decades for doing this kind of business, it's not a new thing. China isn't the leader in computer sciences, and while computing would've been more expensive I don't think it would have been much less fast at this stage. And that the economic gaps we have today beeing smaller is a huge thing, it is not a good thing anywhere or at any time.

Economics is the main factor for sure. I do have some sympathy in that (the economic) regard as China has a pretty terrible record of running massive loss leaders to force competitors out of markets then jacking up prices once the competition is limited, especially in 'strategic' areas which telecommunications certainly is. (I had a Huawei wireless modem up until a few months ago which was absolutely fine. And also wasn't controlled by a fricking phone app unlike the new TPlink one I got sent as a mandatory replacement. Seriously, what's the point of controlling a wireless modem via a phone app that connects via the same wireless? Took an hour to set up because it didn't perform as the manual said it should; the old one took five minutes tops. If the old huawei wireless went down I could control it/ troubleshoot via network cable and its IP which saved a lot of hassles given skodafone's and our electricity supply's unreliability. With the new one if wireless is down you... use the wireless from your covid vaccine microchip to connect temporarily? Nope, hard reset and go through the 1 hour set up process again. Guess it's great for TPlink/ google since they can sell your collected data and provides yet another avenue for TLA snooping though)

On the one hand, yeah, honey is a scam run by PayPal, no less, on the other hand, anything that scams scummy influencers and scummy shops out of their money can't be so bad. Then again, that scammed money is going straight to PayPal, so that's bad, but on the other hand, it's money that would otherwise go to scummy influences and scummy shops, but... error, maximum loops reached. Aborting. That's a tough one.

Yeah, you can't really label a security concern 'valid' just because your side repeatedly states it. It's not like a meter ticks up 1% every time and once you get to 100 assertions it becomes proven. Adage #1 always applies to such things: "That which is asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence" Easily the most important thing to remember on social media at least. (Ironically, the sort of evidence they should be providing is indisputably there for the US forcing backdoors onto the computer chips and network infrastructure that they sell to everyone else. You know, the 'essential security' of IME/ PSP that is so essential it's absent from US government computers and- coincidentally no doubt- the CIA had a hacking tool specifically tailored towards. Oh yeah, and it was essential (apart from US government computers) right up until the Russians leaked that hacking tool. That is of course quite apart from the CIA/ NSA operatives who got busted soldering chips onto Cisco network equipment. Why does it quite literally seem that every accusation is an admission? Occam's suggests the reason for the targeting of tiktok/ telegram and huawei etc is the absence of western backdoors and other control, not the presence of 'unfriendly' ones)

Again they can do it, in an unfair arena, but they can still do it. How are they valid, because China is the evil enemy? There was no shred of proof shown to corroborate that claim. To me it just seem like they had the better and cheaper product that the west couldn't compete with. Same as what is happening with the car industry nowadays. Every country is fighting to keep their industry alive and thriving, there is no playing fair in that game.

I picked up the RTX 3060 as a replacement for my old 1050 Ti. So fingers crossed. Really odd that they paired a lower card with more VRAM than the 3080. But I think they only did this because they wanted to upgrade from the 6GB of the RTX 2060 prior -- but only had the option of adding another 6GB VRAM due to memory bus / controller limitations. Btw, Indy runs fine with fewer than 12 gigs. It has the same "issue" as Wolfenstein (also id Tech): It has a texture pool setting. That's basically a cache as opposed to a direct detail setting. In other words, just because you cannot max out the setting, doesn't mean all textures are gonna look like turd. Naturally, you cannot max this cache out on low VRAM cards. Germany's PC Games Hardware tested this with Wolfenstein Youngblood way back already -- if the setting was too high, the fps took a huge nose dive. But usually, all benchmarks are run with maxed out settings (industry wide)....

They literally can't do business because their IP has been stolen and is being used by Chinese companies. One is preventing doing business over valid security concerns, the other is stealing and blackmail to stop them from doing business for profit. No, mr Sarex, I expect them to die.

I'm not convinced yet I like UE5 as an engine, from a player/customer point of view. But oh well what do I know. Edit: I'm sure I'd be able to run both Obs games, but yeah, 3080 is a little steep-feeling. They could've at least mentioned what that was targeting - eg, 1080/60/RT+DLSS on, or whatever. And never mind RT stuff - I'm still of the opinion that TAA is one of the worst things to happen re: overall simple graphic clarity. Sometimes DLSS/Quality with sharpening looks better in some ways than native, because of TAA - depends on game tho. Sometimes it's not too bad, other times it horrid. I don't mean pixel-hunting comparison type better, I just mean ... a clean sense of clarity, better contrast "pop", less smeary/soft lens sensation.

I have some very exciting news I am about to finish Underrail and after all this debate and discussion around W4 I have realized how much I miss the entire Witcher universe I have decided to replay the whole Witcher series, I only played these iconic games once and I didnt mod them This time I will use extensive mods I am looking forward to revisiting the world of Geralt

https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/enforcement-and-protection/dispute-settlement/wto-dispute-settlement/wto-disputes-cases-involving-eu/wtds611-china-enforcement-intellectual-property-rights_en Summary of the case Since August 2020, Chinese courts have been issuing decisions – known as “anti-suit injunctions” – to exert pressure on EU companies with high-tech patents and to prevent them from rightfully protecting their technologies. Chinese courts also use the threat of heavy fines to deter European companies from going to foreign courts. This has left European high-tech companies at a significant disadvantage when fighting for their rights. Chinese manufacturers request these anti-suit injunctions to benefit from cheaper or even free access to European technology. The European Union has filed on 18 February 2022 a dispute settlement case against China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for restricting EU companies from going to a foreign court to protect and use their patents. As for Tiktok, China is an enemy of the wests interests and values, the owners of the company are Chinese and as such the company must have CCP members on their board, which gives them direct access to private individuals data and atleast in the EU getting your data deleted is through our privacy laws would be pointless. I doubt anyone seriously argues that Facebook and Google doesn't collect data, but alteast the US isn't an enemy nation, for a few more weeks atleast.

Casablanca (1942). I hadn't watched this for like, twelve years, and it was just once at like 1 in the morning with my mom near Christmas on some TV broadcast. I thought it was great back then, and now, re-watching it...it helps me realize how much dumb writing and direction I sit through in movies that don't get anywhere even close to 1942's Casablanca. This is a movie where I don't really care that much about the subject material, the locale, or even particularly the characters or themes, but I sit through it and I have a great time regardless. And my goodness, the whole movie goes by so fast, and it's really hard not to wish that similarly excellent movies could be consistently made every year - even better if they're about things or people you're a little more predisposed to care about. It's kind of the anti-Citizen Kane for me, which I find to be borderline unwatchable despite the two of them being released within a year of each and both being hailed as all-time dramatic cinema. A man after my own heart.

Sekiro Late-game spoilers End-game and ending spoilers Skin mods. Raiden did not feel right, but looked nice. Arisen - Subtitle I Forgot Magical invisible gloves. Got the "Charisma" card after repeatedly choosing "Attack". I guess, being aggressive is charismatic. A whole 1 option. Lunacid Sounds easy enough. Just need to comb several floors of the dungeons. The save point is on the right. The fire was slightly damaging the horse heads.

Watched From a few weeks ago... is the same silly stuff as Lost. It started great, but then they just kept slapping mystery upon mystery and it became ridiculous and annoying. In the latest season I started to zone out of it and not sure if I will even bother with the 4th season once it arrives. People need to learn when to end something... not everything has to go on forever.

I just had to replace my motherboard. As I am in changing situation regarding work, I am not going to get a good PC for a while, so in a way all these games (and the performance discussion) is probably something I'll be experiencing when it has become abandonware...