darthelmet

joined 2 years ago
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Elden ring night reign single player in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

I was watching a friend who got it and he tried it solo initially before swapping to online play and it seemed waaaay harder. Not sure if he screwed up a setting and it was really the 3 player version or something.

Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...' in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I've dropped in less than an hour because it just didn't feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.

Thoughts? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Actually, I didn't know about this before I looked into it, but that wasn't the first of it's kind. Apparently that started with a story called "The Vampyre"from 1819. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre

Thoughts? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Huh. I had thought that Vampires were just a metaphor for the nobility. Rich guy who lives in a manor and sucks the life from the common folk to sustain themselves. But I just did some quick searching on that and apparently that’s a (relatively) more recent version of them (1800s), but a version of them existed in earlier Eastern European folklore as basically zombies way before that.

Anyway, I could definitely see a lot of what you’re saying, although from what I can tell, the garlic thing has more to do with medical matters than behavior. The two things I’ve seen are that 1) Garlic is an antiseptic, so it was thought to ward off evil probably because it helped reduce disease. 2) Apparently there is a disease that has garlic intolerance as a symptom. Although it also looks like that’s disputed. It can be hard to nail down stuff like this.

What do Americans have to worry about that Canadians dont? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 days ago

I think we might need a book to answer that. A comment seems insufficient.

Why does it feel like protesting isn't as "extreme" as it used to be? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago

They were successfully beaten down. More specifically, the ORGANIZATIONS were beaten down. The most successful protest movements weren’t people spontaneously showing up in the streets. They were the culmination of the efforts of community organizing. There was planning and they had people they could rely on and who relied on them. But things like unions and the Black Panthers were violently destroyed.

Now protesting is atomized like everything else. A protest that forms by posting to show up somewhere at some time on social media with signs is a collection of individuals rather than a group. If you’re just surrounded by strangers you don’t know, are you going to be able to take more radical actions?

That’s not to say none of the more serious/organized protests are happening though. There were those water protectors who tried to stop that pipeline. There were the rail worker and dockworker strikes. I don’t know how organized it was, but it was heartening to see the LA protests start out by actively protecting people being targeted by ICE. And perhaps there are more that just didn’t get any media attention. But in any case, you see how hard they try to crack down on those. But sometimes they can succeed.

That would be a lot in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I briefly tried making YouTube videos (didn’t really stop for any reason other than my usual inability to stick with anything) and when I got a handful of views and comments my reaction was “wait who the fuck is watching this?”

What's wrong with Democratic Socialism? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The quick answer is that the Democratic Party isn't socialist. Socialists work against the interests of capitalists and guess who the Democratic Party takes a lot of money from? The few socialists or democratic socialists that try to run through the Democratic party are fighting an uphill battle and are only doing so mostly because the two party system makes it impossible for 3rd parties to win in most cases.

This has always been the case, but what might cause this confusion is that the Democrats appeared to favor more socially oriented policies in the mid 20th century with The New Deal and The Great Society. But the thing to understand about that is:

  • Despite creating some social spending programs, they kept capitalists in power.
  • They never stopped doing the other part of capitalism: Imperialism.
  • There was a lot of pressure from outside the government. Unions were stronger. The Great Depression was the greatest crisis capitalism had seen up until that point, and the success of communist revolutions in other countries could have shown the American working class a different path forward.

In the 90s, with the Soviet Union dissolved and the power of unions thoroughly gutted, the Democrats under Clinton did a realignment to the right. Clinton famously passed welfare "reform" (read: gutting it) calling it "an end to welfare as we know it." Clinton entered us into NAFTA, a trade deal that helped facilitate corporations moving production to other countries to exploit cheaper labor. He passed the Crime Bill which is credited with being a huge contributor to mass incarceration. Etc.

Since then Democrats have looked a lot more like Clinton than FDR, and even FDR wasn't a socialist. So yeah, the people who helped take things away from the working class aren't super thrilled about someone who wants to take some of that stuff back for us.

What's wrong with Democratic Socialism? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

To provide a simple historical example without getting into too much of the theory, consider the progression from The New Deal to where we are now. That was about as close as the US got to social democracy and that's been all but destroyed over the following decades by capitalists. But yeah they should definitely read more if they want to understand the mechanisms in more detail.

To what extent has Smartphones replaced Computers? Has Smartphones replaced Computers for you or people you know? Will Phones and Computers eventually merge into one device? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago

Some genuinely mind boggling innovations in UX and AI (not to mention battery) would have to happen to make it even close. There is just way too much that is too awkward to do on a smaller screen or without a proper kbm + the posture of sitting at a desk. You never really see anyone actually using those sci fi handheld devices. They always just kind of magically pull up whatever information is needed without us seeing whatever inputs were required to get there.

Only sort of related: But I always find it funny when I see some older sci fi able to imagine some technology way ahead of it’s time, but fail to think through the implications of how humans will actually interact with it. That’s the part you actually have some info and intuition on even without the technology. If I lived in the 60s I might not have been able to tell you whether we’d ever be able to fit the computers that take up rooms into the palms of our hands, but if you showed me a handheld computer and asked me to suspend my disbelief about the technical wizardry behind it, I could probably tell you whether or not I think someone would actually use something in that way because technology changes, but people don’t. Until we go trans humanist we still have the limits of two hands, 10 fingers, etc.

One funny example of this for me is the pad from Star Trek TNG. There are actually two relevant pieces of technology here:

  1. A portable computer that can presumably at least display and edit information.
  2. A ship wide computer that can do all sorts of complicated tasks, has artificial intelligence, a voice interface, and can be accessed via terminals, including personal ones around the ship.

Despite this, they couldn’t put two and two together and imagine that the pads might be connected through the ship’s computer. When crew members want to send information they have on the pads, instead of just sending data through the computer to the other person’s pad/terminal… THEY GIVE THE PHYSICAL PAD TO THE OTHER PERSON LIKE ITS A PIECE OF PAPER!

Calls for Impeachment Grow as Trump Floats 'Regime Change' in Iran in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

"No really guys. THIS time we got him for sure!"

Trump could face another impeachment in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wish I still lived in the fantasy world where this was plausible.

30
How to fix discord connection while streaming a game? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
6 comments fedilink
 

EDIT: Thanks for the replies. The solution was to turn off Lenovo Vantage Server Boost.

So I have a fairly specific problem that has been surprisingly hard to troubleshoot for some reason.

Very specifically, when I am streaming on discord, while any game software is running, (we've tried it with a few different ones, online/offline, steam/non-steam, 2D graphics vs 3D graphics. Same issue although maybe with varying amounts of time before the problem starts, but hard to be sure.) and when at least one other person starts watching the stream, my discord connection gets unstable. Voice and video start cutting in and out and the connection icon starts turning red. This doesn't just affect the person watching the stream, others have trouble hearing me as well. No stream? No problem. Stream but no game? No problem. Stream and game but no viewer? No problem. Just when all of these are together. Also this doesn't seem to impact my other processes or connections. The game keeps running like normal and for the online ones they don't lose connection. I can still go access sites on my browser, etc.

I got a new PC recently, I haven't had this issue before that. It didn't happen right away though, things worked fine at first. It happened for the first time a few weeks ago and after running through the basic troubleshooting steps, the thing that seemed to fix the issue was updating my nvidia graphics drivers, but it's hard to say for sure. The problem popped up again tonight. For reference the last time I streamed to someone was on Thursday, so it was working very recently.

I checked and there was a graphics driver update, so I went to install that, thinking that would fix it again. It did not. There also seemed to be some problems around the graphics driver installer. Both times this happened the download initially stalled at some % and I had to restart to get it to work again. Plus this time I went to try to reinstall the graphics driver to see if maybe the first time it didn't do it right and I briefly had bigger problems with the PC. During the install, the screen just went dark and didn't come back. The rest of the computer was running, I could still chat on discord, but I had to kill it and restart to get the screen back. That restart took a while longer than normal and when I got back the start menu wasn't working. That got fixed on another restart though.

Anyway, that's concerning and maybe relevant, but back to the discord issue: Other troubleshooting steps that didn't work:

  • Turning hardware acceleration off/on.
  • Telling windows to use my graphics card on high performance for discord and the games I was testing with. (It already seemed to be doing that on it's own anyway, but I made sure.)
  • Lowering stream quality and FPS.
  • Making sure discord was added to my firewall allowed software.
  • Cleared discord's cache.
  • uninstalled and reinstalled discord.
  • Checked for windows or other driver updates and didn't find any.
  • Tried switching routers and did some speed tests that turned out fine.
  • Checked resource usage and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I'm kind of at a loss here. The most I can turn up on google is all the generic troubleshooting advice you get for every problem and none of it has worked so far.

System Info:

  • Windows 11
  • It's a Lenovo prebuilt desktop PC and it comes with their driver/system management software.
  • Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700F, 2100 Mhz, 20 Core(s), 28 Logical Processor(s)
  • BIOS Version/Date LENOVO O5TKT3BA, 12/17/2024
  • Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER
  • Headphones/mic: Razor Blackshark V2 Pro

Any ideas?

23
How to set up a computer mouse to be comfortable? (lemmy.world)
 

I'm hoping this is an ok place to ask a question like this.

I recently had to get a new mouse because my old one broke. I couldn't get exactly what I had before but I got something fairly similar. However, I've been struggling to tune it to feel good to use. It's actually been putting a lot of strain on my arm even after short play sessions.

Does anyone know what might be causing this and how to fix it? What kind of things should I do to find the appropriate sensitivity/settings or maybe I'm holding my arm differently for some reason or maybe I need a different kind of mouse?

If it matters, here's the old and new mice:

Old: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GU8W5AE

New: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0D3PNVQWK?psc=1

1
Question about Gaming PC upgrading and crash diagnosis. (lemmy.world)
 

I have 2 questions that may or may not be related:

  1. My gaming PC periodically has full system crashes while I'm playing some games. I've tried looking at crash reports but I couldn't really figure out what was different from looking at them. I've seen it suggested that it could be overheating, although it's kind of hard to tell since the temp range when I check isn't that high, but I do feel a lot of heat coming off the machine when I stick my hand over the vent and I hear the fans working hard when I'm playing some games.

  2. I was thinking that it might be worth it to try to upgrade some parts to maybe alleviate one possible source of issues. So what I'm wondering is what the best approach would be. For example would getting a better graphics card make it work less hard and produce less heat? Or does a more powerful card just produce more heat? How much can I reasonable upgrade cooling systems given a fixed amount of space in the case? It's been a while since I've manually swapped out parts. Last 2 PC I opted for just buying pre-made although in the past I built one. The one I have now is an Alienware Aurora R11 from a few years ago and it's got an RTX 2070 Super for a graphics card. Does it make sense to try to upgrade it? If so, is it worth going for the newest series or would it be fine/better for my purposes to go to the 30 series?

9
How to get involved with unionization efforts? (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
1 comments fedilink
 

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but does anyone have any advice on how to get involved in union organizing efforts? I actually went to school for labor relations, so I've got some familiarity with the concepts, but for all sorts of reasons, the main one being mental health, I haven't really been working or doing much of anything for a few years now. I want to try to get out and do my part and I view the labor movement as a really important avenue for political change.

But I don't really know where to look/start. I'm also pretty shy/socially anxious, so I kind of need some way to ease into this since it involves talking to people a lot. I've also been thinking of trying to learn a language that would help me interact with more workers who might be recent immigrants like maybe Spanish or something. (Although I'm not really sure which would be most useful for this and I'm not exactly a fast language learner, so if I was going to do that I should really prioritize one.)

I'm in the US close to the New York City. (Long Island) Does anyone have any suggestions for resources, organizations, advice on how to talk to people in this context, or other ways to help in a less direct way, etc. that could help me get started?

35
How to handle getting overwhelmed late game? (lemmy.world)
 

My friend and I were playing for sort of our first time at 1.0. (We played a bit a few months ago, but stopped around computers when we heard 1.0 would be soon.)

We were having fun, but as we got later in the game, it felt like things got really overwhelming and slowed down a lot. Especially once we got to T7/8. We ended up spending like a week just to mostly get nuclear power running. (We still aren't handling the waste completely.) We tried using blueprints a bit, but they were kind of clunky and it felt like there was only so much we could do with them.

At this point we're on pause with the game. Does anyone have any suggestions for making things go smoother late game or is this just how the game is after a certain point? It feels bad stopping so close to the end, but the way things were going it felt like we might have ended up spending more time on the last few tiers than everything before that.

6
What has the show been like recently? (lemmy.world)
 

I mostly like Doctor Who for being a fun, campy show. I stopped watching after Capaldi initially because it felt like the show wasn't really doing that anymore. I've been re-watching the modern show after checking out classic Who for the first time along with family recently. We recently got back up to where I had stopped and... I'm still not really feeling it. But the show has been on for quite a while since then. So I'm kind of curious what it's like now and if it's worth pushing through/skipping ahead to get to a part that I'll like more.

131
More things like Star Trek? (lemmy.world)
 

Over the last few years my family and I have binged all of Star Trek, then moved on to Star Trek adjacent shows like The Orville and Stargate. At the moment we're not really watching anything sci-fi. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for similar shows (or maybe some books) that fill the void left by Star Trek. In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

34
Eating healthy when various foods make you uncomfortable? (lemmy.world)
 

I've been very overweight for a long time. Lately I've been trying to eat healthier and lose weight. (among dealing with other nutritional deficiencies.)

One of the big problems I have though is that I have a lot of trouble eating foods with weird textures, smells, tastes, etc. This of course includes a lot of vegetables and some kinds of healthier proteins like fish.

A doctor I was working with recommended talking to a nutritionist who is familiar with these kind of problems. However, I didn't find them to be that helpful. They didn't really have a good understanding of what kind of things bothered me and didn't really seem to want to learn or incorporate that into a plan. I got a lot of "Well can't you just try to put up with some of these things that bother you?" So eventually I gave up with them. So I'm back to eating either miserably small portions of unhealthy foods (which doesn't really solve the nutrition problem and makes me hungry) or a handful of rather bland healthier foods that are fine to eat but just make me sad.

Does anyone have experience navigating these kinds of problems? What did you do? Do you have any suggestions? Types of foods, recipes, resources that deal with this, etc?

10
Question about Astarion quest in act 3 (lemmy.world)
 

Obviously spoilers ahead:

I recently got to the lower city and after taking a long rest I was ambushed by some of Astarion’s vampire spawn siblings who want to take him back with them. The dialogue suggests that killing them would close off the option to have Astarion ascend later, but it seems like I can’t avoid fighting with them. I thought maybe using nonlethal attacks would be the way, but upon reading the description it doesn’t work on undead.

What am I supposed to do if I don’t want to kill them? I tried looking up the quest on some wikis/guides, but they don’t seem to give advice on that option. They just mention that if you fail in this encounter Astarion could be kidnapped, which… wouldn’t be ideal considering at the moment I have no spare party members to fill the 4th slot due to… circumstances…but I’d also prefer not to shut off the option for this quest line.

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