It’s the players who are wrong.

/s ofc

Fair enough, that could be the case. Some generic blocking setting. In that case others in this thread have given good technical suggestions.

Don’t, unless you don’t mind losing your job. They did it because they noticed people were watching stuff at work and they don’t want you to do it.

It’s enough to compliment them on whatever is new. New shoes, new haircut, new shirt, new tattoo, etc.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If I’m picturing anything, I usually go for 1 or 2. The difference might be in the amount of time I do it. I can just do it quick, then remember it.

Yes

I bought a Herman Miller Aeron for $500 from an office closing auction. Super worth it.

Smarter people have already figured this out. I’d send them a copy of the golden record we put on Voyager. It contains the kinds of things that could convey “this is where we are, this is what we look like, we’ve figured out about this much of this universe so far, and we make stuff that isn’t utilitarian (art)”

I’m not saying you should buy a refurbished one, I’m saying I couldn’t buy a new one locally because it’s not in stock. Have you tried other laptops?

Have you checked out any other thinkpad? I’m not in Slovenia but my local price comparison website only shows upgrades for this one in stock, and the laptop itself only from a refurbishing place. Maybe this thing is just out of stock.

Given enough time, everything changes. Society as it is now will go away eventually, but it’s hard to say that society will ‘collapse’. Things can get better or worse, and in either case there will be people who think it they’ve gotten better, and people who think they’ve gotten worse.

It’s hard to stay optimistic with how perception is shaped nowadays. Let me try to slightly change that perspective. I don’t have a link to the study, but a majority of interviewed Americans thought that crime was on the rise, and worse than ever, when in fact it has been decreasing steadily since the early 90s. Public perception was shaped by the broad popularity of televised police, detective, true crime documentaries, and fictional media. A good thing was happening, but that’s not what people thought.

Climate change and pollution are bad, but renewables are on the rise on average, and being pushed hard by the public in general.

Increasingly divided and radical governments are bad, but people are getting sick of it, and governments will have to adapt or be replaced.

Economic woes are definitely a problem, but we’re slowly making baby steps, doing things like banning airbnb here and there, etc. Economic woes have come and gone.

Misinformation and disinformation is everywhere, but we’re more aware of it than ever. We’re suspicious of intent, of sources, etc. Not all of us trust the right sources, but we’re starting to implement fact checking, we’re making platforms that show news on the political spectrum, we have ways to find blind spots, etc.

Dangerous health crises aren’t the end of the world. The black plague and the ‘spanish’ flu killed a lot of people, and neither lead to the breakdown of society. We’ll figure it out, we’re tough SOBs.

Look, I’m not saying these things aren’t happening, I’m just saying that for every bad thing that floods the airways and the internet, there is some degree of reaction. We’re not laying down and taking it. And while it’s certainly depressing and disheartening to see so many bad things happening, they can help to galvanize people against it, and not fall into complacency.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed too, which is why it’s not a bad idea to take the time to limit and filter exposure to this stuff. You know about it, you’ve looked into it, you’ve made a (hopefully educated) decision, you know what you’re going to do. It’s not healthy for you to come back and keep looking at the problem over and over again.

There’s also the issue of being exposed to serious problems that you can’t affect in a meaningful way. I’m not American, what the hell am I supposed to do about their presidential election? No reason for me to look at it all the time. When the time comes, I’ll vote for someone on my end who says they’re going to handle the situation in the way that I think is best.

Take a step back, consider your situation. Which things affect you? Which things affect the people in your life? Which things can you affect? What can you do, that matters? Focus your energy on that. You don’t have to make a big change, you can start by clearing your head.

NSFW has become code for porn, effectively. My friend and I use NSFO for ‘not porn, maybe not even nudity, but not necessarily appropriate for the office’. Maybe that’s what we need. A second filter.

I’m certainly not a virtuous person but I don’t think I’m categorically bad.

As I said I don’t think I’d achieve anything by arguing my point. Imo single difficulty is or should be part of the genre. It’s totally ok for others to also just not play it at all.

I’m a huge Dark Souls and Elden Ring fan, but there’s no excusing Fromsoft’s code quality. Under no circumstances should someone be able to execute invalid code on someone else’s machine. I’m a software dev myself and the sheer ingenuity of effects ‘hackers’ can implement is astounding to me. Co-op is also just terrible, IMO. Unreliable, buggy, and kind of unrewarding that you have to do everything once for every participant. Performance has never been all that good, but it’s almost expected for console ports nowadays, which I wish was not the case.

They did update the requirements on pc. I’ve had to take my game down from high to high with motion blur off and lower quality water and shadows. I hope they make improvements.

I am one of those people who prefers that the game only has one difficulty. My friend and I both played Phantom Liberty, and unfortunately he didn’t enjoy it as much as I did because at higher difficulty he struggled too much with combat in a way he didn’t find fun. I could argue my point for a while but I doubt I’d achieve anything.

I can see your point on balancing. A great deal of mobs (not even bosses) in the dlc early game can poise or recover from a heavy blow too fast (not talking about damage). It’s almost like they’re tuned for greatswords and greataxes. That’s fine for me, I didn’t mind the respec, but other people do.

As for the difficulty in the DLC, it is more difficult, but IMO not as bad as it’s made out to be. Early (for me) in the day yesterday I heard people were fighting Messmer, and some have even beaten the final boss. Fucking how? You could only have done that if you did a boss rush and no exploration. People did not play the game and did not have the skills to play the way they were trying.

Whatever levels you have in the base game, they are nearly irrelevant until you get to about your 5th blessing. People need to run around and find those upgrades. I wonder if people even know that some random mobs drop them.

You get several larval tears in the early areas. If you’re out at night, you can find little glowing cemeteries with larval tears in them.

I myself have respec’d my character, and have had to give up a few incantations that I used to rely on, but now that I have more of the blessings, they’re finding their way back into my repertoire. Thinking back, I’m not as convinced anymore that the incantations were the problem, it’s very likely that I just didn’t have enough blessings.

I took down a certain knight in a tomb who wielded a repeating crossbow and a greatsword. It took me maybe 30 tries with 0 blessings. I wonder how many tries I would need with 11.

Elden Ring’s DLC

I really believe that this has nothing to do with kids. “For the kids” has made me suspicious of intentions for a long time. It makes it difficult to argue against it because it implies that you’re a pedo or are doing something illegal otherwise. You implement general monitoring “for the kids”, and then you add some anti piracy stuff to it, then you add some hate group detection, some anti government group detection, etc. Now you have everything you need to get ahead of any danger to the government. If the people can’t organize, you can do whatever you want.

It was pretty rough getting out of the Sellia Crystal Tunnel at like lvl 20. The pest threads catch up pretty fast and I had no hp.

Mind you, I did do it. Then I came back and got my vengeance.