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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.

    Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.

    This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).


  • From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.

    Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.


  • Alternatively, this could be a good opportunity to educate people on how much of a presidency is the cabinet rather than one person. Run ads highlighting the people actually responsible for things in Biden’s administration. Make the narrative more about Biden’s team and contrast them with Trump’s chaotic mess of a cabinet.

    No matter which old man gets elected, there is a solid chance the next president dies in office of age-related causes. Showing that we’d be in good hands if/when that happens, and that there are people paying attention to catch things Biden might miss could go a long way towards reassuring people.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a different candidate, and voted for someone other than Biden in the primary in 2020, but I also don’t trust the DNC to pick a replacement without making things worse. At least the Biden campaign has been admitting today that the debate went poorly, rather than pretending it was fine.






  • They know the meaning. Most of the ones I grew up around chose to believe that since “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution that it was a fringe idea a couple of the founding fathers had, that “liberals” today have made into a bigger deal than it should be so they can keep “persecuting” Christians.

    Christian nationalism takes all the dogmatic thinking they have about the Bible being instructions from an infallible, all knowing God, that must be followed, and applies that thinking to the US Constitution and the founding fathers. Once you’re in the mindset of reading something like it’s absolute truth that can’t be questioned (at least the parts that tell you you’re wrong, the parts that say I’m wrong are different), it’s easy to get stuck in that mindset for everything you read.













  • I remember this with nursing degrees when I was in college in the late 2000s, there was a big deal made about a shortage of nurses around that time, and a bunch of kids were convinced they were going to make bank and have guaranteed jobs when they graduated, then they started graduating and flooded the market. A bunch of them ended up staying in school for grad degrees in other fields, since they couldn’t find nursing jobs.