Yeah IMO it’s far better for games like Cities Skylines to use as much RAM as they can - especially once mods start coming out! I’ve had times where my heavily modded version of CS1 wanted 16+ gb of memory because loading assets from RAM is way faster than loading from SSD/HDD!

Personally I feel that way about Morrowind - mechanically it’s like a stripped down, worse version of Daggerfall while also being an inferior implementation of a fully 3d game than Oblivion.

Iirc the USA did investigate making them during the cold war but concluded that the (very real) benefits - such as the ability to recall a missile after launching - weren’t worth cooking US citizens and allies with radiation from an unshielded nuclear reactor flying at mach 3 just above the surface; they planned to fly as low as 150m!

Their initial plans basically were to build a nuclear-ramjet “missile” that could fly for several days straight carrying dozens of nuclear warheads, autonomously dropping them on “enemies”. The big problem was that it’d have to fly over the USA and/or western Europe in order to reach the USSR.

Read up on Project Pluto if you wanna know more!

Actually I’m not from the Americas (though one of my ancestors did decide to leave Florida in the 1830s or 40s cos he had very dark coloured skin).

And I disagree that there’s a need to “pick a side” - both “sides” will stomp on smaller countries no matter what because that’s what authoritarian imperialistic powers do.

Wasn’t Google Photos super racist a few years back?

Treating minorities better than the USA isn’t exactly a high bar.

My country also treats minorities better than the USA, it’s easy to get into uni, celebrates diversity, has an alright social welfare system and socialised healthcare, does the occasional infrastructure project etc.

Thanks for teaching me that I’m actually living in a socialist paradise rather than a poor, neoliberal capitalist, physically isolated island where private corporations are free to wreck the environment for profit!

I’ve legitimately got no idea how they can fix their countries (or if they can even be fixed) as I’m more focused on my own country. I do not want my country to copy either the USA or China, and I resent the close relationship my government maintains with both of those oppressive states.

The USA pressured our government into performing illegal searches/arrests to favour their corporations, and the CCP has repeatedly been caught infiltrating our parliament. Those big authoritarian countries just bully smaller states to get what they want, and we need to stop pretending that it’s morally justified and normal. It’s not okay.

Yeah and? I don’t want to live in an oppressive shithole, doesn’t matter to me if they became oppressive because they were copying China, the USA, Nigeria, the UK or whatever - they’d still be oppressive!

I honestly didn’t think that saying “I don’t like authoritarian capitalism” would be such a controversial statement…

Kodi with a debrid service works great for me, the one I use has had maybe 2-3 days worth of downtime in the 3 and a half years that I’ve been using it!

Yes, exactly. Most people don’t want their governments to copy imperialistic authoritarian capitalist shitholes like China, the USA, or Russia.

The American government being awful doesn’t mean that everybody else should copy them and be as awful as they can.

Can you prove that China isn’t an oppressive authoritarian capitalist state?

A Chinese corporation openly tested those spy balloons over my country a decade ago (allegedly just for monitoring livestock), why is it so unbelievable that they’d use a more polished version on their biggest geopolitical rival?

Eh the authoritarian capitalists who love the CCP generally seem to embrace the fact that China is authoritarian - they see it as a good thing!

Got a bunch of Athom bulbs (and smart plugs) along with a custom-built LED strip that’s attatched to the back of my TV!

Kinda hard to control the brightness and colour temperature on traditional lightbulbs!

Can’t control colour temperature and brightness, and it’s a pain in the ass getting traditional bulbs to automatically turn on with your morning alarm!

That said I personally wouldn’t buy proprietary smart lighting - all my lights are running the FOSS WLED firmware, controlled through self-hosted HomeAssistant and HyperHDR.

Back during WW2 we made some shitty tanks by welding a bit of corrugated iron and some bren guns to tractors cos that was the best we could produce in-country!

A lot of the game world in Oblivion and pretty much all of it in Daggerfall were procedurally generated by Bethesda yet I personally consider them to be the best games that Bethesda has ever produced!

I last played Fallout 3 about a year ago and it’s pretty clear playing Starfield that there have, in fact, been a lot of advancements in that time.

Yeah I’m already running about half a dozen UI mods on Starfield and it makes the game a hell of a lot better!

Ooh awesome, been a big fan of Ghost Master since I was a kid, it’s a charming wee game!

Yeah I reckon we need less authoritarian capitalism, not more of it in slightly different flavours!

Maybe overseas, but round here 1tb ssds start at around $60-70 and you’ll be lucky to get a 2tb one for less than $150…

Actually both are bad, the 2012 animated Mass Effect show is obviously number 1

I watched the first few episodes and it didn’t really catch my attention, honestly it mostly just felt like a slightly above-average generic fantasy anime.

I’ve got a few smart home devices (lights, plugs, weed vape, TV backlight) and literally none of it is proprietary and it all works even if my internet connection is down!

Just move to NZ, according to the Sony website it’s only $120 over here!

Nope, the Nazis actually replaced him with an evil genetically engineered clone back in 2014. The REAL Trump is going to return in 2033 backed by an army of angels who will come bearing gifts of clean coal and frozen peaches.

Can confirm, accidentally threw my Poco down the concrete staircase (and ~1.5m drop) outside my flat and it somehow didn’t even scratch the screen!

Man HP just doesn’t know how to make hinges anymore - I’ve had the hinge on two different consumer-grade HP laptops crap out within a few months/years over the past decade!

Framework definitely seems the way to go if you want a long-lived laptop - as long as you live in one of the few countries that they sell to!

HP’s consumer side definitely declined rapidly in quality over the last 10-15 years - had an HP that needed repairs after a few months back in '14 whereas I’ve got a Pavilion from '04 or so that’s still going!

Didn’t Apple get hit with a class action lawsuit over their 2011 Macbook Pros frying themselves?

AFAIK that unfortunately requires using Google Messages (or moving overseas)

The world will have to make do with a few fewer nazis, I guess. What a shame.

Because SMS doesn’t support group chats and MMS is expensive garbage (50c/300kb is fucked)

Oh ya I’ll just tell my grandparents to drive 10-12 hours to get to the other side of the island every time they want to talk to me or see my face

Good luck sending photos or holding a video call with the scant 1100 bits provided by an SMS message…

Unfortunately FB Messenger is the defacto way to communicate in some countries - if I refused to use it I’d fail uni as I wouldn’t be able to communicate with group members, I wouldn’t be able to contact most of my family, and the number of friends I can talk to would drop to about 5 (of which most have recently had children and are thus a bit preoccupied)

You’d be shocked at the work modders are willing to put in for free when working on a game that they love - and Half Life is a series that a lot of people absolutely adore!