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I think she is just kinda the default if you have no imagination - softspoken human female that isn’t totally obnoxious.

In terms of female romance options Lae’zel is the only one who it seemed to make sense would be forward enough to try and jump your bones after just 2 or 3 days. Karlach wasn’t even an option for me, she had no romance adjacent dialogue at the tiefling party. I wonder if part of that was just how late she joined up in act 1, I did get her engine “fixed” for the first time but it was one of the last things I did and I can’t remember if it was before or after clearing the goblin camp.

I did really enjoy Shadowheart’s arc though, especially since I generally adopted a policy to not suggest or try to interfere with the companions’ quests. Just left them to their own decisions without trying to sway them, and the fact that Shadowheart chooses to reject Shar and Lae’zel chooses to reject Vlaakith (or at least hear Voss out) made for two of the most powerful moments in act 2 IMO. There is lots to like about all three of them throughout their arcs and that’s part of what makes them so great.

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

I don’t disagree with your stance, but I am curious why you decided on a trainer instead of picking the easier difficulty. Did you try it and still find it too much? I have read about the differences between modes but haven’t actually tried anything other than normal, and even though I’m extremely familiar with PF 1e and D&D 5e I’ve struggled with lots of encounters.

In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I’m friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won’t let you rent one unless you can drive one already.

We have Driver’s Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.

This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

I’ve never driven a manual car. I’ve had people be like “You can’t drive manual?!” and then I would respond “So are you going to teach me?” The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn’t be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you’re buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that’s great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.

I’ve only played D&D for a couple years and don’t have extensive experience with githyanki lore but my impression is they’re not so much bent on genociding other races as they are exterminating the mind-flayers that enslaved, tortured, and fed on them. Everything about the structure of their society and their philosophy on the value of life hinges around that. They became hyper militaristic - only the strongest and most capable are valued. They seem to regard other races as largely weaker or simply unworthy/uninteresting, but aren’t looking to kill or subjugate them, they’re just irrelevant.

I’m only ~near the end of Act 2, but Laezel’s development has been some of my favorite stuff about the second act.

Transistor - really any Supergiant game, but Transistor in particular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc

By trying to present themselves as the center instead of the far-right, they slowly move people’s’ conception of what the “center” is further and further right. It’s been happening for decades.

I’d like for kbin/Lemmy to be a full substitute, but right now only meme subs on lemmy are taking off or getting significant traction. It’s actually sort of annoying and makes me not want to bother. Apps are rough, block tools are inconsistent, see tons of posts twice or more all day (would happen on Reddit too, but pretty rarely, when big news was relevant to several large subreddits). Until the smaller subs I frequented Reddit for in the first place start coming over, kbin/lemmy can’t realistically be a replacement. Just something I check for a few minutes to try to leave app feedback and contribute traffic where I can.

It will take a very good app and a couple more high profile niche subs (like /r/piracy) mostly shifting to the Fediverse to start a real migration.

This is why it’s useful at the account level. It’s also useful at the post level in order to build a sorting algorithm which raises the most engaging/important/interesting submissions to the top. Within a community it is important to help define what that community is - irrelevant and low effort content is suppressed and relevant/high-effort gets boosted. Moderators can enforce this by just removing and pinning too, but that’s almost always too unilateral, and the voting system is generally better because it’s expected that then you get a representation of how people in that community feel about it. It’s a good system.

And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.

I’ve tried Mlem and Memmy, and the biggest features missing as I see it are:

• Once you have logged in, search all currently federated servers. See what their subscriber count is on their local instance, and across all instances. Sort by subscribers, posts/day, or comments/day.

• A tab which shows you your subscribed communities so you can go straight to them (Memmy and kbin both make you go in to your profile to do this, it should be front-and-center)

• Ability to subscribe to a community by looking at its main page

• Ideally kbin communities would show alongside lemmy communities, I think this is a limitation of kbin right now though?

• Swipe posts to upvote/downvote (right), reply/save (left)

• Something which tells you the last time information was pulled from a federated server - sometimes it would be useful to know that I might be seeing a page which is 8 hours out of date vs. one which was updated 30sec ago

• Something which tells you or prevents you from posting to a defederated community since the post will not behave as expected

• Expose options for copying links to comments, links to parent comments

• Ability to see your post history separated by threads/comments/etc., and messages; from a comment, go to the specific thread in question (i.e. direct link to parent or contextual comments in that thread, not just the original post)

• Hide posts you’ve voted on already

• I don’t think any currently existing apps expose moderator tools. I’m not sure how much of this is present on the API side so far but will be hugely important as communities get bigger.

• Content density. On Apollo I can see ~6 posts at once on any given page. On Memmy or Mlem I see ~2.5. Just a much more efficient display of content, tell me what the post title is, what community+server it’s on, how old the post is, how many comments, what the upvote-downvote calculus is. If I want to know the user count or read the blurb on the post I can tap in to it.

Idiots saw the explosion of speculation on crypto and a few people got lucky and got rich. They jumped on the next new buzzword in tech expecting it to have an equivalent speculative boom, which obviously never happened.

This is my current biggest gripe. You have to have a four year degree in random smart home garbage to figure out what works with what. We have a guy like that in our friend group, but I still need four different smart home apps just to control a handful of lights and a couple cameras. The apps have constant problems (Nest app signs me out nearly daily), the aggregator apps like Homekit and Google Home are missing nearly all features for the lights we have aside from on or off and some simple color settings, Nanoleaf app claims to be able to do scheduling and automation but I’ve never gotten it to work. I bought a google home tied-in tablet at the recommendation of said friend to be able to check cameras and control lights from a device that didn’t have to be biometrically locked, and it turned out it couldn’t see the cameras OR the lights. Pending some future theoretical update which still hasn’t rolled out. Insanity. Makes me want to throw it all out.

Considering how expensive the smart home items are, especially the lights, the user experience is horrendous for pretty much everything but flashy tech demos.

I think the only way this ends amicably between the community and Reddit at this point is Huffman is ousted and then they can finally entertain other deals for API access. I’m sure they’re looking at the insane profits AI companies are raking in largely off of data they scraped from sites like Reddit for free and thinking “WTF”. My impression is third party apps got caught kinda in the crossfire on this and weren’t actually their main target, but Huffman has managed to turn it in to some weird kind of ego issue now he’s accusing multiple developers of antagonizing the platform, refusing to work with them, when we have proof from several of them in multiple instances of the direct opposite. Attempts to reach out that go unanswered. An impossibly timeline to implement changes. Trying to throw the Apollo dev under the bus only to double down when confronted with proof he lied to press. Utterly bizarre. He needs to go.

I’ve tried Mlem and Memmy and both seem to have a single fixed “Hot” feed that has not updated since the last time the apps updated. It’s still showing me some startrek post from two days ago, as well as a bunch of posts from beehaw despite it being defederated. Active sorting has this problem of constantly shifting. Going to specific communities and sorting by “Hot” there seems to be the most tolerable way to browse, but only Memmy can even do that. It’s rough but hopefully these things will get pretty good pretty fast. I wish kbin had an app but for now the webUI is actually pretty usable.

Complete silence is impossible. At best only a tiny fraction of power users are the ones invested enough to care about the impact of what Reddit’s doing, and are willing to do anything about it. The 99% of the platform who are lurkers, by and large don’t contribute, and just want the platform back open and for everyone else to stop complaining are what’s being fought over.

If you shut down enough of the platform - which the power users and mods can do by setting to private, restricting posting, or simply not posting when they otherwise would have - then the lurkers go to the site, see nothing to interact with and leave (or at the very least, spend less time on the platform as there is “less” to do). Over a long enough time span that would have started showing up in a big way. But it wasn’t going to happen in two days. If anything, the blackout was so telegraphed and so much news got stirred up that it would make total sense if their traffic was actually not impacted or was even high for those two days (at least in terms of clicks and votes, not posts and comments). The lurkers are still valuable to Reddit though - that’s where their advertising revenue is coming from.

People mass deleting their post history will hurt the platform. Some big subreddits staying private will hurt the platform. Some small subreddits staying private will hurt the platform. All of those things can bleed away users and diminish Reddit’s usefulness and dominance. Really the ideal outcome is we scare them enough that they pull back to a more reasonable position and things can continue as normal. Maybe Huffman gets ousted and they plan a longer timescale and more reasonable pricing.