I remember ordering some samples from them when they were a newer company, and how cool it was when they added metal as a material option. Sad to see them go. Seems like much more of another company ruined by going public than a failure of their business model. I guess the silver lining is that they simply went under rather than morphing into a worst possible version of what they were trying to squeeze every penny in the pursuit of infinite growth (or maybe they tried that for a while and it failed too, I'll admit I haven't been paying attention to the scene for the last several years).

As someone who voted 3rd party in 2016 and regrets it. While you are technically correct, the last 8 years have shown that there is so much more on the line than what I was protesting against with my 3rd party vote. I didn't like Hillary Clinton's positions on war. And sure, my vote probably wouldn't have mattered all that much as I live in a very red state, but every time the Supreme Court does some bullshit, I feel a bit of regret that I didn't use my vote to support the best candidate who actually had a chance.

Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don't studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.

Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.

This isn't about defending Fromsoft, they're just another company trying to get your money. I'm just saying that's how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).

From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.

Difficulty wise, yeah, it's hard. That's a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it's probably better that they launched a game that is "too hard" and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you'll make things much harder on yourself.

Alternatively, this could be a good opportunity to educate people on how much of a presidency is the cabinet rather than one person. Run ads highlighting the people actually responsible for things in Biden's administration. Make the narrative more about Biden's team and contrast them with Trump's chaotic mess of a cabinet.

No matter which old man gets elected, there is a solid chance the next president dies in office of age-related causes. Showing that we'd be in good hands if/when that happens, and that there are people paying attention to catch things Biden might miss could go a long way towards reassuring people.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a different candidate, and voted for someone other than Biden in the primary in 2020, but I also don't trust the DNC to pick a replacement without making things worse. At least the Biden campaign has been admitting today that the debate went poorly, rather than pretending it was fine.

Not sure how much has changed in this "reloaded" version, but Hitman 3 (or World of Assassination) can already be played on the Index. I haven't played it much, and the VR controls are a bit jank from what I remember, but I would guess this is just a lower powered port that the Quest can handle.

While I would never wish for a trans woman to have to endure that kind of environment, I'd love to see a trans woman take that as a challenge and go win just to make the "you can always tell" crowd lose their minds. Unfortunately it would probably be super dangerous considering how violent people can get when they discover they can't always tell, so it's probably a horrible idea. But a person can dream.

Looking forward to trying it out, since at least the release of HL:Alyx, async reprojection has been so broken on Linux, that the community wisdom has been to disable it for better performance. And I've heard from some that lack of working async reprojection is the main reason that they won't use Linux for VR.

I've exclusively used my Index on Linux, and have been fine not knowing what I've been missing.

Understandably a lot of talk about YouTubers who have changed for the worse, but there have been a few who IMO have changed for the better. Granted, a good number are more towards the burnt-out end of the spectrum, and considering retirement within a few years.

Jacksepticeye for example, used to put on a more energetic "youtubery" persona that appealed to the algorithm, and now he's a lot more down to earth and considerably more pleasant to watch. That's not to say the persona wasn't still him, or that he was entirely fake for all those years, but I find his new content much more enjoyable than his older stuff - even if there is less of it.

Maybe the meme was made by a dog, who smells war criminal on 47, but that's just because 47 assassinates so many war criminals.

Yes, if this is regarding the stimulus checks, then wouldn't it all having been spent be good? Yeah, we spent it, we stimulated the economy during a time when the government decided it needed stimulation. Unless the conversation is about the economy needing more stimulation and that giving stimulus money to consumers works better than tax cuts for the wealthy, because the working class actually put the stimulus into circulation rather than hoarding it.

Does anyone know of Gullikit is still doing the thing where their joysticks have the square active zone as opposed to round like the stock sticks? I bought a set for my LCD SteamDeck a bit over a year ago, and after learning about the square active zone causing issues for some, I haven't bothered to install them.

Yeah, I made a comment or two on the first post months ago and just realized today I have mod privileges as well now. Glad there are apparently enough new mods that I won't feel bad not being able to set aside a bunch of time for it.

My T-Mobile plan still throttles YouTube (and some other video streaming sites) to prevent HD video playback unless I buy a HD video day pass or upgrade my unlimited plan to an even more unlimited plan. I don't mind too much on my phone, since on a small screen 480p is mostly good enough, but I frequently use a VPN on my tablet to bypass the throttle since depending on the content, 480p can look pretty rough on the larger screen.

The trick to that is to replace one bad habit with another (preferably less-bad) habit, that last bad habit was getting kinda boring anyway.

Did you self-install the solar or could the company that did the install (or one of their installers) have added it? Also, I know it sounds crazy, but have you checked Bing maps? It's been years since I did much with OSM, but I do recall one of the easier OSM editing tools using Bing maps due to licensing reasons, and sometimes their aerial/satellite view is more up to date in sone areas than Google.

Ratchet when Clank makes a bad pun.

I think launchers are allowed, they just have to be usable with controller input. Hitman 3 is verified, and still shows a launcher on Deck, but when launched on Deck the launcher shows and accepts gamepad navigation.

One of the companies I frequently have to call for work gives a high volume of calls due to the storm systems moving across the United States. They added it like a year or so ago when California had all that flooding and the east coast had a couple of hurricanes. But it's still on there as an excuse.

You could play for 15 minutes and feel like you were speedrunning carpal tunnel and arthritis.