Still less racist than the average altmer.

A ryzen 5 7600 and an RX 6800. I didn’t mess with the settings too much and just let it default them to medium, but I turned off motion blur, framegen, and bloom and turned up texture resolution, upscaling quality, and fur/hair quality without any issues. Except the one crash, which may have been caused by adrenalin wanting to force enable its own extra bullshit and me not thinking to check and turn that off until afterwards.

Apparently there’s already further performance patches in the main fork that have been added to the benchmark tool, but which weren’t in the open beta fork, so you could try the benchmark from the store page. There’s another open beta in a few days so you could try it then: they’ve apparently got it set to just autoaccept beta requests and it doesn’t require owning the game to try. It is apparently not going to be patched to have the performance fixes, though.

That’s Rise only. This is back to MHWorld style movement, except with the mount systems from both MHWorld and Rise merged into the seikrets, which can autopath like in World or be manually ridden like in Rise and which kind of circle around the edge of the fight to be ready to let you call them at any point.

Lmao I had the same problem, but it had been long enough since I last played MHWorld that I wasn’t sure if it had been changed up or if I just couldn’t remember how to do it right.

For something a bit more obscure than other recommendations: Akumetsu is pretty good. It’s basically Death Note except the protagonist is a politically incoherent high schooler going after high profile corrupt politicians and the power is some kind of duplication thing so he’s just kind of running in and killing them personally before immediately dying himself, over and over. It’s made funnier by the fact that the targets are apparently really obvious expies of specific real contemporary politicians.

Someone else mentioned Witch Hat Atelier, and I’ve got to second that. I’m not all the way through it, but it’s very good, both visually and narratively.

Ah. It is coming sometime this year, though. I just looked it up and saw that they’ve put out a teaser since the last time I looked, and it looks absolutely amazing visually.

The witch hat atelier anime is almost here? That’s actually pretty exciting. The studio doing it is the same one that did ZOM100 last year and absolutely knocked that out of the park, and I’m very interested to see if they manage the same level of quality with witch hat atelier.

The USSR stood rigid and was snapped apart – The PRC bent, and so remains, changed but intact.

I don’t think that’s accurate: the USSR undermined itself by directly attacking and denouncing its past while pushing through ill conceived liberalization schemes that seemed to have been cooked up on the assumption that markets are a magical and efficient system that would simply magic up wealth with magical capitalist efficiency while getting absolutely no material concessions for this from the west, while the PRC traded market reforms for actual material capital and access to resources and the CPC itself didn’t devolve into a frenzy of denouncing anyone who wasn’t a sufficiently fervent liberal of being a maoist doing a hecking oppression the way Gorbachev’s bloc would accuse people of “stalinist oppression” for not only opposing them but also just not being enthusiastic enough while otherwise actively supporting them.

Getting China to open up as a market and labor pool cemented the Sino-Soviet split and provided a way for the stagnating American economy to expand further while further breaking domestic labor and providing more cheap consumer goods to keep the public placated and passive. They just assumed it would naturally progress into China also becoming more vulnerable to subversion and a reactionary takeover that would enable it to be made into a client state like Japan or South Korea.

Just because they were cynical, scary monsters it doesn’t mean they weren’t also white supremacist capitalist ideologues who were fanatically confident in the divine superiority of their own system and who struggled to accurately gauge the strength and resolve of peoples they saw as inferior to themselves. They also just constantly fucked up all of the time, but had enough of a material and institutional advantage that they won anyways because they could just throw more money and guns at the worst people they could find at any given moment and some of them would do enough violence to accomplish the US’s goals, and they were still aware enough to know that the lie machines they were funding were inherently dishonest about their positions and methods instead of this gormless “well if the lie machine says it it must be the earnest and genuine truth, oh how benevolent and kind the lie machine is with its eternal quest to spread truth” bullshit that modern liberals do or the credulous sobbing and pissing themselves that more reactionary liberals do out of sheer contrarian confusion.

I think it’s more like if “Bush did 9/11” theories were dialed up to 11 and were the canonized orthodox truth for every other major power and they all kept funding propaganda pieces and doing social media astroturfing about how the US government sent in the military to shell their own people because NYC voted against Bush so he wanted to chastise them for their disloyalty. That would quickly go from “conspiracy theory that gets someone blackballed in corporate media” to “the US government starts criminalizing making those claims and everyone just preemptively avoids talking about anything to do with it because it’s a sensitive topic due to the astroturfed conspiracy theories.”

Because that’s basically what the western conspiracy theories about Tienanmen Square are: a ludicrous rewriting of what actually happened that’s grown bigger and more absurd with every retelling, which gets institutionally pushed as propaganda to try to undermine and agitate against China. The end result is that even though people in China are taught about it, the topic itself gets shut down in public discourse because it is specifically this high profile disinformation target.

This is kind of misleading considering like half the maps are just “green hab blocks” lol.

There’s like two maps that go through hab treecko, and only four in chasm terminus overall. That does make it the most common area, though; the torrent also technically has four, but one of those is the special boss mission that isn’t in the normal rotation. All the other areas have three maps each now, except for the ice map and the train map which only have one each.

The carnival maps added much needed visual diversity, and I hope they can make some more levels in the future.

The carnival is some of the best visual design they’ve ever done, yeah. It’s gotten the best music, too, which is saying a lot considering how good Darktide’s soundtrack is in general.

Also wish there were more than 2(?) hive exterior levels.

There are 3, but one of them has been out of rotation for a few months because of some bug with it causing crashes. This also coincided with the studio basically shutting down for a month because everyone was on their annual holiday vacation, and I think they’ve only gotten back into the office and started working again in the past couple of weeks.

Exactly, like there’s some really cool lore from the more creative authors, Dan Abnett’s the one who sticks out the most in my mind, who actually try to do the worldbuilding to make the setting feel realistically varied and weird. It is a shame that then artists then just copy this one narrow style almost exclusively.

40K art has kind of stagnated, really. Like at it’s heart none of it’s really supposed to be literal and diegetic, and instead it’s about translating vibes and evoking a general sense of inscrutability, decadence, and archaicness. It hinges on this sort of gothic cathedral look to do that, which does convey that vibe, but it really shouldn’t only be relying on that specific aesthetic to do it, and should draw from other old architectural styles too.

For example: the spaceships are figuratively “cathedrals” but probably don’t diegetically look like medieval european cathedrals even though that’s how the art portrays them, so it would be a huge step up if they made them look like ancient temples from other cultures too and just kept it so that core design was standardized but all the aesthetic bits varied by forgeworld or sector to represent how they’re all grandiose and archaic but aren’t literally all just copying specifically 16th century French architecture.

*struggling to make a chatbot that works even a little bit, getting worried that the investors might pull the plug if it doesn’t start making them money soon* Uh… uh… uh… “oh no, I think I accidentally invented God and I am very afraid, this is very serious and dangerous for real!” phew that was close, the grift train chugs along for another day!

The CIA’s only real strength in practice was having a functionally unlimited budget to spend on engineering, bribes, and gunrunning. They could spend piles of money on fancy listening equipment or projects to physically breach and wiretap secure comm lines, they could practically just stand waving a stack of cash and promising defectors a comfy life as special good boys in the imperial core and some disaffected official from the Soviet bloc was bound to take them up on it and grift all they could off it (although this was of limited value: defectors could only leak information they already knew, which the CIA likely also already knew from shit like listening in on people talking about it, and then stopped being an asset; that’s before you get to the grifters who just kept making up bullshit and trying to get more money and attention for it, the kind of people who’d now just be given a cushy job by fascist oligarchs to do talk show rounds), and on their real specialty: just grabbing the worst person they could see at any given moment and handing him a bunch of guns and money and telling him the US has his back as long as he does reactionary terror against people the US doesn’t like.

It’s really telling how now all these startup grifts just ask the computer to make something up instead of even putting in like the most basic effort to throw together some concept art and there has been absolutely zero change in the quality level because that bar was already so low. Like empty, poorly thought out compositions with details that don’t make sense, which hinge entirely on vibes is their whole thing, and image generators are amazing at producing exactly that sort of slop.

Startups don’t have a vision, they don’t have plans, all they have are some empty vibes because the economy runs on making rich dipshits feel the right warm fuzzies when they look at your pitch so they give you free money.

I made it through with only one scripted death that happened because I built a state newspaper office and some guy was just really angry about that, and it still did that “wAs tHiS pAtH wOrTh tHe CoSt” shit. Like everyone is happy, healthy, alive, and the only loss was one asshole who got mad about a state owned printing press for ??? reasons, this is literally the best possible situation they could possibly be in.

The point I was making is that, rather than being able to talk about the issues frankly like this, and how the patriarchal status quo we find ourselves in is the larger issue here, every single time instead the comments are full of jokes taking this to the extreme that effectively throw the baby out with the bath water.

Fair enough, though I personally think in general the community culture of casual shitposting coexisting alongside serious analysis and discourse is usually fine, even if things like this or the way some people use “volcel police” memes as a safe way to be horny on main toe the line a bit.

Like at no point am I even bringing up pedophilia

I will be fair and say that I’ve only seen that specific take once here, although some people were agreeing with it, and it’s just so wild that it sticks out in my mind whenever this topic comes up now.

wonder if we’re gonna get more comments complaining about the age of consent again this time

The only complaints about the age of consent I’ve ever seen in any of these threads are people either claiming that 18 is too low or asserting that a large age gap between adults is “literally pedophilia.” The other side has just been a consistent “you have to trust adults to make these decisions for themselves instead of infantilizing them, even if a big age gap is sus.”

And I mean I fundamentally dislike and distrust men in general and find the way they dehumanize, fetishize, and try to control women (or other men for that matter, because cis gay men–particularly richer ones–do it too) repulsive, but the counter to that isn’t declaring that some adult women are literally children because they might hypothetically become the target of some creep’s lust, it’s giving women more agency, rights, and education and trying to prevent the actual power disparity in our patriarchal hellstate that heavily enables abusers to prey on women in general, not just younger women. Is a middle aged man specifically pursuing college students or recent college graduates a creep? Probably, especially if he’s actively setting out to do it and it’s not just some incidental meeting, and it probably ties into gross youth-fetishization aspects of our culture, but it’s also not “literally pedophilia” nor can we can unilaterally say “actually this adult woman is not trusted to enter into this relationship for herself and so it must be prohibited on her behalf, as we have determined it’s some percentage more likely to be an abusive relationship than the baseline chance of abuse that a closer-in-age relationship has, which is also sickeningly high because we live in a patriarchal hellstate that teaches men to prey on women and grooms women to submit to this.”

Yeah, Colombia is one of the absolute worst maps, because it’s several fortresses all sort of stacked together and stretched out into a very long map where it’s a pain to get anywhere. I think Bangkok takes it though, with how its main fortress wing is tiny, densely packed with real NPCs, and has all of two crowded chokepoint entrances to the upper levels - it’s basically Paris shrunk down to a single staircase and drain pipe with a quarter of the map’s population loitering around both.

Mumbai’s a bit annoying, but it’s ridiculously porous once you know it and even though it has three distinct fortresses only the Crow’s hideout is really annoying, and even that not as bad as the underground in Colombia. The super enforcers wandering around the center of the map are annoying and didn’t need to be there, especially not in Freelancer.

Hitman 1 France and Italy are still the gold standard for me.

Honestly it’s most of the Hitman 3 maps for me. Disregarding the very last level they’re all pretty good; Dartmoor’s the weakest since it’s basically just “what if Paris was one big, layered fortress and it was all sickeningly British” but even it’s not too bad, and Mendoza has to take the top spot imo. Chongqing sits next to Miami and probably edges it out for second place, and Berlin and Dubai are both really solid too once you learn them.

I’ve played way too much Hitman Freelancer and I got most of the maps to 20 either when I played for the first time on gamepass or when I replayed a pirated copy using peacock, so I’ve had lots of time to think about every map in way too much detail. There’s just something so satisfying about learning the maps and then grabbing the tools to go about them in a specific way, it’s like how the Shadowrun TTRPG plays, especially when you’re having to do this on the fly with no retries in Freelancer.