Dark Arc

I think one of the computers in my basement is an ASRock board, and it’s the flimsiest board I’ve ever had. Like the USB ports are really flexible.

Interesting; I’ve associated them with just making cheap boards. Is that changing?

Hmm… There’s been a lot of quality of life patches (key binds, esc to close interfaces, clicking outside of interfaces closes them, smarter quantities on the withdraw screen, the option to have left click do a “default action” rather than opening the window, middle click drag, etc). He was pushing out changes every day for like two weeks, then weekly patches.

I haven’t really seen anything I’d call a bug (it’s actually one of the most stable games I’ve ever played).

It’s definitely a true early access game (and they’ve said as much; they’re open to a lot of potential changes and have been quite receptive to feedback with strong consensus), so I’d definitely check back from time to time if you like it in concept. They’re talking about adding action queuing and reworking the combat to feel “better” in the near term. Player trading and PvP duels should come soon after as well along with a bunch of other stuff.

The game is designed to be friendly to touch screens and they do plan to have a mobile client eventually (similar to RuneScape). However, they have said they will not add any micro transactions or other predatory stuff … and I believe them; the Gowers have been quite principled about that over the years.

Yeah? What wasn’t clicking for you? I love it

Me with a 7900 XTX playing brighter shores 🥲

The specs in the comic are just crazy. The top of the line option has expanded a lot too. In the past Nvidia wouldn’t have bothered making a 4090 because the common belief was nobody would pay that much for a GPU… But seemingly enough people are willing to do it that it’s worth doing now.

AMD also revived CPUs in desktop PCs from extreme stagnation and raised the bar for the high end on that side as well by a lot.

So it’s a mix of inflation and the ceiling just being raised as to what the average consumer is offered.

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I’ll add this to the list of things that were working just fine that we’re about to break along with using a passport to board a plane.

I’m in like the opposite camp… But I’ve never been able to get past the initial learning curve of the game. Something has never clicked with this one for me

It would’ve been fine… If Google had stuck to it and marketed it, it would’ve worked out. I’m convinced interest rate hikes are what actually killed Stadia.

Also it wasn’t even Netflix like… You’re right about one thing though, part of the reason stadia didn’t do well is 90% of gamers think it was some laggy Netflix for games thing.

Quantum mechanics do “bypass” the speed of light from my understanding.

It’s not that you’re moving anything or actually bypass the speed of light. You just have basically a value that’s “entangled” so when it’s changed in one place it’s instantly changed in the other; it’s really freaky.

Well… I think the idea is once you can reliably send a photon, you can start sending entangled photos. Then you can use those to build networking hardware that transmits bits instantly.

People blame the sunsetting decision, but most people stuck around. Honestly I don’t think the stuff they sunset was all that good. The original planet designs were feeling tired. They have brought missions back as well… But it’s been too long since I played to remember exactly how they brought them back.

The actual issue in my mind is they’ve decided making things hard means giving it a lot of health and make it take almost all of yours in one hit. So the only things that are viable are people’s cracked builds.

Basically without a full team of good shooter players, even easy mode dungeons are out of reach. Things just do so much damage and have so much health, it’s just not fun. Everything feels like a slog unless you go look up a cracked build someone made.

Actually, not everything feels like a slog. The content that doesn’t, everything just dies without any challenge.

So the options to play are roughly:

• comically easy
• this will take forever
• this will take forever + 1 and hit like a truck
• this will take forever + 2 and you instantly die

With some content having only the last 3 options.

They added some new enemy types recently, but it just hasn’t been enough to really make the game feel refreshed. Like, Remnant II showed how to do this well, different enemies, different ways that they attack you, different ways to ideally kill the enemy (i.e. lots of weak spot variety), lots of different attacks for the bosses (and death is a matter of avoiding the attacks not being in a 12 hour fight), every bullet takes a significant chunk of their health bar, etc

The locations have also felt a bit underwhelming, but that would be okay if the fights felt challenging and rewarding … not just like various reskins of the same enemies with either no or way too much health.

If you’re interested, now is a good time to start playing. There are some limited edition hats being dropped for the holiday!

Brighter Shores! It’s a new game by Andrew Gower on his new game engine (just came out last month).

It’s a point and click game similar to RuneScape that’s mostly a second screen game. It’s in early access and a lot will probably change in the coming months based on feedback (they’ve already confirmed they’re rethinking some of their combat design and adding action queuing).

Unlike RuneScape it’s been designed out of the gate to provide people with a way to engage without sinking a ton of time. You can do fully offline training in this game, so you can be gaining XP while you sleep.

The game runs like a dream, has a very well done sound track, tastefully simplistic graphics, and just generally is a cozy/feel good MMO with light humor and puns.

No micro transactions, generous amount of free to play content, and a $6/mo subscription for all content.

Just that their names are so similar… It’s literally “-Link” with a character or two in front.

but we are mostly talking about a very low margin product and the volume of data that you’d need to retrieve and process to sift out anything useful would be massive and obvious so in general I think this is mostly conspiracy level thinking

Bold of you to assume they actually need to make money on these.

They also don’t need to sort through data to be problematic; they just need to be able to be remotely disabled or remotely given the order to start sniffing if they are one of the higher end systems that would be used in major infrastructure (that could process at volume).

Sure a researcher could stumble upon something… But closed source, embedded deep in the hardware, etc the number of researchers working at that level is not all that high AFAIK. The research is also from my understanding very very difficult at that level. It would be borderline equivalent to reverse engineering the Intel remote management engine or something.

The examples you gave are all at the OS level and installing OpenWRT would fix them. The firmware/BIOS level is much more custom and can be susceptible to attacks the OS is completely unaware of (effectively pre-installed rootkits). Hence why I mentioned it may not be enough to install OpenWRT.

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing; that’s just it you’re right.

There’s no conspiracy where the left and right hand have carefully coordinated this system or conspiracy to protect companies from their legitimate competition. We’re not saying this about Taiwan or European devices (even though many of them are better than the Chinese and American devices) and that’s kind of “case and point” that it’s about more than the economy.

Basically the politicians just screwed up and didn’t think through their decisions and effects of trusting a foreign power to do all this manufacturing for important pieces of infrastructure that “think” … and now there’s a problem.

Oof, fair 😅