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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

    Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

    First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

    Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

    Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

    I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.


  • I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

    It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

    Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

    Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.




  • Rookeh@startrek.websitetoMemes@lemmy.mlts moment
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    7 months ago

    You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

    Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

    I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.


  • Rookeh@startrek.websitetoMemes@lemmy.mlts moment
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    7 months ago

    Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

    Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.


  • I don’t have enough superlatives for it. I’m > 300 hours in between three characters, and I’m still finding new stuff to do. Even at full price, worth every penny. Also an amazing co-op experience - played through the whole campaign with a friend, we both agreed it’s probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, period.

    It’s also the first game of this genre that I’ve played, off the back of this I also picked up BG1 & 2, and Neverwinter Nights, which I’m excited to try out to see what I missed out on back in the day.



  • Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.


  • I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.

    The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.

    The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?

    The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.

    The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.

    Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

    It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.