bjornk

I accidentally went "online" with Steam this morning, and it caused me all sorts of troubles (couldn't go "offline" again for some reason) and I unfortunately had to "update" the client after many years. And wow, what a pile of turd it has become. The new client easily eats away 500 MB of memory for literally doing nothing, whereas the old one (2014) needed just 1/10 of it... I had the previous client from 2018 and with the update I can't use it, not only requires too much memory and it's very sluggish on my laptop. Luckily I still had my 2014 client on the other PC (which was older) and I was fortunately able to revert it back to that. It also refused to launch FNV because of a "new" update I apparently lack (some additional app Steam works or some shit) and I refused to download it, fiddled with the config files after I went offline and managed to remove the "pending update" notification. Did the same for Mass Effect 2 which for some reason also required a small update after 4 years, whatever that is. Fuck Steam. I really should find some cracked executables for my games and ditch this shit. By the way, I've realized that I can no longer go "online" with the 2014 version of the client. Not that I care. They've most likely updated servers, CDNs or authentication protocols. If I need something to download I'll create a copy of the Steam folder (without the games), update to the awful new client, download whatever I need and then delete the shit. My advice, NEVER buy anything on Steam again, or on any other shitty DRM platform with an additional client, ever. You may find yourself unable to use, even access the games you've paid for.

Considering the addictive nature of video games, even without the gambling, really easy to think of today's game publishers as drug dealers who are literally asking for tighter regulations by governments. Something that should be harmless and enjoyable is turned into harmful and dangerous, again, purely because of greed.

I had only played Fallout 1 once back in 97 or 98 and finished it, although barely, cause it was literally a crash-fest back then. For the past week I've been replaying Fallout 1 again years later, although this time from within the Fallout 2 engine, which made me realize how ridiculously idiotic this game was. It's an overrated piece of garbage, especially when you look at it 25 years later. No, it's not the turn-based combat, not the interface, not the setting, it is the story and how the game was designed. There's some shit in this game which is at least on par with Bethesda, possibly even worse. While I agree with the tone change and some of the other aspects of later games mentioned in the video, I also think that this guy is romanticizing the first game to the extreme. There are so many things in this game that annoyed the hell outta me, but one thing I really can't stand is this, the game has many smart-mouthed NPCs who either treat you like garbage or try to make fun of you, if you dare to talk back, then they immediately attack you. Literally. They draw their weapon and start shooting at you, just because you said something which annoyed them. In fact, not just them, the entire town turns against you and starts attacking you, literally everyone, even the fucking children. And if you somehow manage to survive and kill them in self-defense, YOU lose karma, not them, as if you've done an evil thing by trying to stay alive. Not to mention that in random encounters, two different groups who would/should normally attack each other (e.g. ghouls vs. raiders) gang up on you together. To the idiots who designed this garbage, here's your belated FUCK YOU! This so-called role-playing game assumes that you're gonna be the idiotic goody two-shoes, who is nice to everyone, says "yes" to everything, tolerates every scumbag and runs around like a headless chicken in order to right all the wrongs in the wasteland. What a fucking nightmare! Also, while this garbage of a game let's you pick a female player character, it keeps reminding you that the PC is supposed to be a guy, cause aside from a couple of dialogues of no importance, everything else clearly feels like they were designed with a male PC in mind. And the goddamn game has multiple time limits, some hidden. The 150 days to find a water chip may be tolerable, but there's another hidden one. After 500 in-game days it's "vault invasion time" which is "game over" quite literally, once you've reached that limit the game ends -even when you're in the middle of a fight- and goes back to the main menu. You are never ever informed that there's an additional 500 days time limit. If you've somehow revealed the location of your vault, this limit is even less. Here's just an example of the retarded stuff early in the game: An inconsequential NPC: "My girl... uh, Tandi, has been kidnapped." Female PC: "I'm sorry, I wish I could help. I've got my own problems to worry about" An inconsequential NPC: "I thought you were a good person. So be it." <PC reinitiates dialogue to barter> An inconsequential NPC: "Where's Tandi? Why haven't you rescued her?" Female PC: (WTF!? I've never said I would rescue her) Female PC: "I decided the little tramp wasn't worth the risk." (Facts) An inconsequential NPC: "You bastard!" <ATTACKS>...entire town turns hostile... By the way, "The little tramp" is described as "About 6 feet tall. Blonde. She's from Shady Sands." Some more crap from the early game: Bunch of guards in Junktown keep complaining about a gang called Skulz, which automatically goes into your Pipboy as a "quest" to do, as if you've accepted it... Fine, you go and talk to one of these gang members, a bitch called Sherry or something, she talks about how she enjoys being in this gang and then threatens you, if you talk back and say "Bring it on!" then she and the whole gang in the back starts attacking you, which may seem okay to you, but wait, you run away from them without attacking back to safety, but to your surprise, you realize that even those guards who were complaining about this gang are now attacking you... WTF!? Some guy called Doc Morbid, sells human body parts as "snacks" to a guy called Iguana Bob, if you go to his basement (he's okay with it) and talk to his midget helper you can learn about their deal, but if you attempt to check the box full of body parts the midget attacks you. If you defend yourself and kill him, YOU lose karma, yeah, not the people who sell body parts as snacks. There's not a single authority to report this "activity" in the whole town, neither the guards nor the so called lawful mayor Kilian is interested. All you can do with this information is to blackmail Iguana Bob later in the game, and you can't report him to the authorities either and if you decide to blackmail Bob, YOU will lose reputation each time you do. If you refuse to pay this so called doctor who tries to rip you off, his goons attack you and if you kill the doctor who sells human body parts, again, YOU lose karma... etc. etc. In an interview with Tim Cain, he claimed that the game didn't force you to kill people, which is certainly true, cause it literally forces you to DIE instead, which makes a pacifist play-through impossible. His motto must be: Play the game my way, or DIE. This is one of the reasons why there's been "min-maxing" guides for "feasible" player characters. It's amazing how some people can call this crap as "role playing"... Even if you want to be that goody two-shoes of a guy, you can't, cause at some point you'll definitely get punished for it. There's no consistent morality in the game, sometimes morality is turned upside down, sometimes it's completely removed, it works differently from situation to situation and the player is encouraged to manipulate everything to get the most out of things. It's all horseshit riddled with hypocrisy. And the same goes to Fallout 2... Player: "I'm gonna be a peaceful pacifist this time, gonna talk my way through things using my charisma and speech skills..." Game: Welcome to the Temple of Trials... it's full of ants, poisonous scorpions, traps... and a tribal who will kill you in a so called not-to-the-death fistfight... Neither of these can be "convinced" to let you through... TL;DR Fallout Series =

Two weeks is highly optimistic, two years or more is more likely and you'll have to rely on other people's efforts for script enhancers, bug/crash fixes etc. Not to mention some of the bugs will never be fixed even after many Legendary/Special/Anniversary editions and many iterations of script enhancers and plugins (e.g. the Bound Sword crash), which clearly proves that the retarded meme of an argument "mods will fix it" isn't always the case.

It's a Bethesda game, as long as they don't do something stupid to either hinder the game's moddability or to discourage people from modding it, I'm sure the game will have a decently active modding scene. Bethesda's downhill trend in making dumbed-down and stupid games and their increasing greed over monetizing the official as well as 3rd party content (e.g. Creation Club, Atomic Shop) is what you should be worrying about instead. My guess is, realistically speaking, the people who liked Fallout 4 at least as much as, if not even more than Skyrim, will more than likely like this game too, as long as every other factor remains the same, because these are people who will ignore every annoyance, every flaw about the game, no matter what everyone else says. If you're not one of them, then I highly doubt that the game will offer anything new that might win you back. For me, not even a "Skyrim in space" will make me interested in playing another Bethesda game, let alone buying it on a sale for a couple of bucks. I have no interest in playing another iteration of the very same game they've been making and re-releasing over and over for years, as Todd himself admits, only with a few technical improvements. I want to see some real innovations and design changes in the directions I'm interested in, which is the incorporation of more AI in the game, but I guess that'd be too much to expect from a company who's been making dumber and dumber games.

Have to admit groundbreaking and Bethesda are the two words that I'm not used to seeing used in the same sentence, but if they were actually working on some groundbreaking stuff, we would surely have heard about them by now, but we have not. However unlikely it is for a developer such as Bethesda to be innovative, the actual people who spend years working on developing those new technologies and innovations would want to present them in various conferences for game developers and/or academia, before they are used in an actual product. We haven't heard anything of the sort. So, in my opinion, there will be nothing groundbreaking or even remotely innovative in this game. If you're lucky, you might get a "Skyrim in space" with tons of bugs and glitches as expected from a Bethesda game.

Kodlak the hypocrite gets killed by the Silverhands. Aside from one NPC, who's trying to appear somehow affected by busying himself with fondling Kodlak's dead body, everyone else are eating and drinking at the table as usual, looking at the scene with eyes devoid of interest or emotion, while repeating the same egocentric bullshit as if anybody cares, with several dead bodies of Silverhand attackers lying around... in this top quality Bethesda game which they have re-released multiple times with sales figures in millions. It gets even more ridiculous when you deconstruct, or rather reconstruct this quest, by manually advancing its stages by using console commands. The game literally takes Kodlak away who was right in front of your nose, alive and well, a few milliseconds ago, and then kills him, and creates this scene to give the player an impression as if a fight took place, which is, of course, nothing but an illusion. I watched an interview with one Bethesda developer some time ago, the guy was bragging about how they created a "living world" in Skyrim with AI packages and shit, and I thought to myself that someone should remind this idiot that a living world and the illusion of it is not the same thing. Needless to say that they even fail massively at creating the illusion...

Delayfield: Q4 2022 -> Q1 2023 -> Q3 2023 There's most likely a black hole in the game, hence the delays... Also, that massive gyroscope, wow, of course, all we need to demystify the mysteries of the universe, what a brilliant idea Bethesda! Totally not a Mass Effect ripoff!

Yes, they can easily track you without needing your IP at all, in fact a lot of people use Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) and so share the same IP address, which makes it impossible to track each person just by using their IP address. Instead, they use all sorts of information to fingerprint their browsers, which you can test it here and here if you're curious. When combined, this information gives you a more or less unique fingerprint.

Apparently LL moderators were at it again... https://www.loverslab.com/topic/206727-fire-emblem-engage-uncensored-mod-get-censored/

@endgameaddiction I always use my browser in incognito/private mode and I just launched it to watch a "Kotor let's play" on Youtube and this is what YT suggests me to watch... which means they're tracking me using my IP address and because I've watched one of the videos you posted above, they recommend me to watch another. I watched your video on late Saturday or early Sunday by the way, in other words, it's been more than a day since I watched it.

Not for me. It's the same washed out textures, same flat lighting, and more importantly, no UNP. If they can pull it off, it may even be a better game than Fallout 4, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Those YT channels that summarize movies while showing related clips from them are quite useful. Make me realize that even the most hyped movies of late were actually total crap and a waste of time, and I shouldn't even waste my time watching their summary.

Feel the same about the quality of the scripts come with mods, most of which are so awful it's almost infuriating. I often find myself rewriting them completely from scratch, which I hate. It is the way it is, not much we can do about it. Modding is an amateur hobby and most people who play video games and make mods are quite young, teenagers even, and this is the way they learn the ropes. Guess we all have been there at some point.

There's no need for convoluted theories bordering conspiracies when everything can be explained with one word, greed, or in other words, global capitalism. You no longer live in a world where let's say, a network TV in the US produces a show and picks its cast purely based on the interests of the American audience. Instead, you now live in a world with global corporations that want to sell their stuff to worldwide markets. I'm sure they've done some market surveys which showed them that the audience in these new markets would be more inclined to watch a show/movie, or play a game etc. if it includes relatable characters who look like them. I'm sure people didn't mean that they wouldn't be interested in them otherwise, but why take a risk, after all, the American audience wouldn't possibly be interested in foreign movies/shows, cause, well, they're foreign, which is why Hollywood kept remaking countless European movies with American actors back in the 80's, surely that would also be true for foreign audiences. Whatever the case, this is why corporations such as Disney, Netflix, Amazon etc. now create shows/movies with a "diverse" cast. There's clearly a significant global market for these products, and these companies basically try to tailor-make their products for their target audience and try to reach as many people all around the world as possible. I'm sure you can easily realize that this new "woke" trend have been accelerating since video streaming became a thing, or if you push it, since the birth of WWW back in late 90's. There's no hidden agenda behind all this, it's just plain old greed, desire to make more money, simple as that. As for identity politics, it's always been with us for centuries. What we know today as politics, has always been about identities or in other words artificially created labels that humans use to define themselves as a person, whether it's race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sex. Wouldn't be wrong to claim that in today's world, all politics are identity politics and needless to say, nothing good for humanity has ever come out of it and never will.

In case anyone uses the UNP Vampire Armor by exeter, you might have noticed the issue where something strange poking through behind your leg whenever you walk. That is because exeter's modified Vampire Armor has some strange 'bones' in it that should not be there. If you open this armor in Outfit Studio and delete those unnecessary bones you can easily fix this problem. FYI.

Something annoying I realized today is that I can't play 1080p or higher resolution videos on Youtube with FF 110.0 on my old laptop. They either refuse to play or keep skipping dropping massive number of frames. No problems with all the other Firefox versions (v96 or older) and Opera. Apparently the idiots at Mozilla introduced some new shit with version 104 which most likely is the culprit. I fixed it by setting the following preference to FALSE which was TRUE by default. If anyone else is having the same problem, they might want to experiment with this setting or the ones below it. media.wmf.dxva.d3d9.amd-pre-uvd4.disabled -> FALSE (Default: TRUE) Some person on Reddit suggests the following changes as well but they didn't work for me. media.wmf.zero-copy-nv12-texture -> FALSE (Default: TRUE) gfx.direct3d11.reuse-decoder-device -> FALSE (Default: TRUE) Note: You need to go to about:config to change these settings and then restart your browser.

Playing video games: Makes him feel like he's wasting his time cause he's now old and has responsibilities. Scrolling social media for hours and hours: No problems there, totally not wasting his time! I have news for you kid, everything you do in life is a waste of time, at least waste it on something you enjoy doing. Funny thing is, cause I've already done it so many times before, anything to do with the topic of "why video games aren't fun anymore" etc. now makes me feel like I'm wasting my time. Probably due to old age.

Didn't think it'd be fun to watch, but it was.

Believe me, I really try not to be doom and gloom all the time, but you all should seriously consider the possibility of not being able to afford to escape into video games in the future. The real real-life will most likely slap humanity in the face soon and wake them up from their slumber once again and this time going back to it won't be that easy. I realize that it sounds really vague, but imagine you were someone in Europe during WWII, which wasn't even a century ago. What would you do? Where would you go in order to escape from the horrors that surround you? Imagine you were an Ukrainian or Russian or Turkish, who used to play video games and suddenly a war breaks out, or a massive earthquake destroys your home. What would you do when the real real-life told you "You can run, but you can't hide!"? The only thing I can consider as some kind of a renaissance for video games may emerge from the creative use of AI and cloud computing, if it offers a kind of experience that cannot be achieved by any other means. However, I still the think the current mentality (i.e. greed, identity politics) that surrounds the video game industry needs a hard reset, otherwise it'll continue to plague everything.

In many ways what's happening to video games is similar to what happened to radio and television. They were each very popular for a time until a new alternative came along. They still exist today, but not as what they used to be. They both thought the audience would never leave and listen or watch whatever the crap offer, and they were right, at least for a while, until a new alternative, the Internet and the online stuff came along. Things in video games industry will also go on like this for a while, until a new thing comes along to replace it. Till then the current audience won't abandon it completely and the quality of games will continue to drop, just like what happened to radio and television. Only when a new alternative shows up the industry may feel the need to reinvent itself.

14:32 I'm glad to see more and more people realize this fact.