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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The thing is, this pornography and cats will tell future historians a ton about what people were like in our times. Not all of it will be accurate, but that’s an issue with any primary source. Hell, watch some grainy smut from the '70s or '80s and pay attention to things other than the “action”, like the choice of music, the way the actors are talking, how they are dressed, what the sets look like, what kind of excuses for plots are being used, all of which are clearly products of their time. Amateur stuff is even more illuminating. Before anyone thinks I’m overthinking this: We learned a lot about Ancient Rome from the smut Romans carved into buildings in Pompeii.

    It’s the same with old cat pictures. You can reasonably date many of them by what the background looks like, e.g. what kind of electronics and furniture are present, how people who are also in the photos are dressed, image quality (provided it hasn’t been compressed to hell and back since), etc. These kinds of seemingly inconsequential artifacts of our time will be highly illuminating to future historians (provided they are being preserved), just like the complaint letters ol’ Ea Nasir received thousands of years ago.








  • Let’s be real: I doubt many people are playing the Uncharted games for the gameplay. These titles are doing the bare minimum to meet AAA action-adventure standards with some technical flourishes here and there, but that’s about it. You get by the numbers cover shooting, by the numbers occasional easy stealth, by the numbers climbing, by the numbers (and by that I mean really small numbers) puzzle solving, etc. The appeal lies in the spectacle, the artistry, the technical excellence by the standards of the platforms they are on, experiencing what are essentially slightly interactive Hollywood adventure movies that manage to keep the player hooked with expert pacing and characters that are straddling the line between psychopathy and charm just right.

    One might also argue that it’s more fun watching footage of these games than actually playing them. The best example of this is the car chase sequence in Uncharted 4, which looked amazing when I first watched it years before being able to play it, but once I got to actually experience it first hand, this was the moment when I dropped the difficulty down, because it was remarkably (and surprisingly) frustrating and irritating to play. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an astonishing technical achievement, but not one second of playing it was fun, at least in my opinion.





  • The 1060 is an eight year old mid-range card, lacking almost all of the features that are setting nvidia apart from AMD these days. It has CUDA, but on its own, that’s mostly useful only for non-gaming applications. AMD is lagging behind, but they are not lagging that far behind. AMD has trouble keeping up with 20xx cards and newer, especially when it comes to ray-tracing and upscaling. FSR, while supporting older cards and being manufacturer-agnostic (that’s why even your old Nvidia card is supported), is a crutch that comes with serious visual downgrades, whereas DLSS improves both performance and visuals. This matters in all market segments. Ray-tracing meanwhile is mostly a mid-range and up thing - and while newer AMD cards support it, their performance relative to otherwise equivalent Nvidia cards is lagging far behind.








  • It’s also great without mods. During my first playthrough, a tornado destroyed most of the village, including the school with every child in it. Up until that point, nobody had died. All livestock, all crops, every single house was gone. The only thing that saved the survivors just before the next winter was some fruit I had stored in the dock for future trade. I managed to get them through the following winter and they all lived to die from old age, but the village never recovered from losing the entire next generation. I was only able to stabilize the population; growth ended up being impossible after this disaster.

    I love games that are able to organically create stories like this one.