Th4tGuyII

It always sucks to know you paid more than the seller did - but that just means Oxfam undervalued the book.

Having worked in one, charity shops tend to have a habit of either really undervaluing or overvaluing their donated goods - cause the people who actually set the prices mostly just guess based on looks and nothing more. Only if an item looks expensive will they do any research, and even then never really enough.

Exactly. If my graphics card is going to be chugging, I’d rather it be because of the sheer amount of stuff to interact with in an area, rather than a beautiful but vapid landscape

Honestly I’d still argue there’s diminishing returns on this front as well.
I play plenty of older titles, and I wouldn’t say I notice that much of a difference - though that is my very subjective opinion

Of course there are, and I do - but the focus of the article, and thus the thread was on the AAA gaming space and its obsession with graphics.
Smaller studios and Indies already figured out the whole “you don’t need to be able to see every fibre of a character’s hair in order for a game to be good” thing

Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it’s nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.

I’d easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I’d still bet the difference wouldn’t be that noticeable for 4K either.

And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid “open worlds”, and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.

I hate that “realistic” graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it’s consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.

I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.

Good resellers do, but I think my point still stands - why risk any of that when Microsoft doesn’t get your money either way?
MAS/Massgrave works effectively, is open source, is well-documented, and literally free.

Considering the grey market is filled with dodgy keys, it’d be better to just pirate, especially when there are easy and safe ways to do it like with MAS

If you must have MS office, then I’d go with MAS/Massgrave like others have said.

It’s well documented, requires minimal setup (if going default route), and is much less risky than going into the grey market for keys or downloading cracks elsewhere.

Haste makes waste - if you want quality content, let the dev and their team take the time they need.

That’s what I figured - pretty much any alarm system would be better, but could technically help you in a pinch

Jlowpoke

I’m a bit late to the party, but I would be inclined to agree with the majority here. Your choice to have their cookies deleted on browser close is adding more friction to an already quite high friction process - you managed to get them to switch over, you don’t want to undo all that over cookies of all things.

You have to remember, it is their machine at the end of the day, and while you might be able to put up with having to redo 2FA loads due to cookie deletion, they’re clearly not… And if that’s going to be the dealbreaker, you’re far better off forgetting cookie deletion for now and focusing on more passive privacy options like blocking 3rd party cookies, trackers, and ADs.

I was genuinely confused by this statistic until I realised it was a double negative. YouTube losen’t Google a lot of money.

Actually “rationalising the pipeline” would be getting rid of all the massively overpaid execs, rather than the people who actually make the Take-Two execs their money

In terms of online presence I think one has to be careful about becoming too private - at what point do you become so untrackable that even people you would like to find you (I.e. old friends) can’t anymore.

Because if they pay out, they make less money, far cheaper to get you to give up trying - which is what a lot of people will do because it’s designed to be an exhausting system.

I’d love to chance to play a bunch of nostalgic titles - just off the top of my head I’d play DOOM, Uplink, Darwinia, Morrowind, and my trashy favourite from that era Themepark world. There are definitely more if I had time to think about it.

We’re always told the people at the bottom rung of society, the people doing “entry level” jobs just need to work harder and harder to earn a proper living…

But how does that work really? Unlike a lot of high level jobs, none of these jobs just exist for the sake of existing, most of these “entry level” jobs are essential to society (we saw that much during the pandemic).

Somebody has to do them or society just doesn’t work, so don’t the people doing these literally essential jobs deserve to be paid a fair living wage? They’re working just as hard as the people above them, yet they’re paid peanuts in comparison

…

That’s the hill Pope Francis is willing to die on? - that Gender ideology is the ugliest danger today?
Not Russia’s endless onslaught against the Ukrainian people or Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people?
Pope Francis needs to get outside more often.