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Pacific Drive | Drive Your Way Fall 2024 Update
  • It is part of the main gameplay loop. In order to keep your car in a state where it protects you and is reasonably driveable, you must gather materials to craft repair items and replacement parts, in order to maintain the car's panels, doors, and bumpers (which together function as armor), its wheels (which are necessary to get anywhere), and the various add-on systems you can craft for it. Tools gradually break with use, so you'll also craft replacement tools, which are mostly for scavenging materials or interacting with stuff in the Zone.

    By collecting a certain resource you gradually unlock upgraded parts and tools for crafting, which is the main way player power progresses during the game.

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    Do you ever get frustrated at your own creation?
  • There are definitely some things it is healthier not to know, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them. It's why I don't ask my mom questions about my dad, who I have never met since being old enough to form memories and I would like to keep it that way.

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    These are the Game of the Year frontrunners
  • Why isn't Echoes of Wisdom in the "upcoming" category? It doesn't release until the end of the month.

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    Why didn't the mainstream media warn people about Project 2025?
  • The headline is a little misleading. The actual article is talking about why, given that Project 2025 is the culmination of 40 years of far-right thought, the media has only begun sounding the alarm bells since the publication of the book, and why the focus is on the most sensational aspects instead of on explaining the pernicious, foundational, fascist ideas it's built upon.

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    ‘Clearly chicken you weirdo’: People respond to JD Vance sharing video he claims shows migrants grilling cats
  • Also, as a huge weirdo myself, I had kind of thought that most people stopped caring how weird I am after high school, and I thought that was pretty neat. Now that it has become a favorite insult to use against fascists, I get the feeling that people only refrain from remarking on it because they're being polite to me, but they definitely still care and would wield it as a weapon given half a reason to.

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    Deadlock has picked up some vital tools for policing bad player behavior
  • Can I put myself in the low priority queue so that I only inflict my shittiness at video games on teammates who deserve to be punished?

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    Remember back when Ubuntu put ads in the dash? I do (~2014)
  • Ohhh I probably disabled it right away and then forgot about it.

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    Remember back when Ubuntu put ads in the dash? I do (~2014)
  • Huh, I was using Ubuntu as my daily driver circa 2014 and I don't remember this at all... maybe I stopped just prior to them implementing it... or maybe it just didn't make enough of an impression for me to notice.

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    Mexico will amend its constitution this weekend to require all judges to be elected
  • There seems to be something contradictory about the idea that letting people elect judges endangers democracy. If you don't trust the people to elect judges, how can you trust them to elect the people who appoint judges?

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    Tell me about what you're doing in OSRS!
  • I saw someone get them today, I'm sure it won't take too many tries! ;D

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  • I just started playing OSRS recently and have been just drifting around from one activity to the next, as I find stuff that catches my fancy. Currently I'm about 20 games into Fishing Trawler and haven't seen a piece of the angler set yet; I ended up liquidating some of my food and crafting materials on the GE to buy more rope. I notice a lot of people prefer to play the lower deck even though swamp paste is so expensive; what's the appeal?

    Previously I spent a while in Camdozaal because I liked that it was a pretty self-contained grinding area; I stayed long enough to unlock all the buffs, and get the barronite mace and the Imcando Hammer. I like the concept of the Vault but it seems like the actual loot is worthless compared to how much time you spend mining to pay for vault runs. The best drops are adamant armor that you could buy on the exchange.

    What's everybody else working on? Grinding skills, making money, minigames, bosses? Having fun?

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    TIL Disney's Star Wars Hotel was a massive waste of time
  • Open-ended, "sandbox" style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than "theme park" style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

    For a "sandbox" style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions... and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can't guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from "how much PvP should there be" to "how much grinding should there be" so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

    I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.

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    Look, if you ask an NPC to solve the plot for you, you're going to get bad solutions.
  • This is my second favorite solution!

    My favorite solution is fireball.

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    TIL there's such a thing as vegetarian Spam
  • https://meetunmeat.us/product/luncheon-style-meat/

    Water, Non-GMO Soy Protein, Palm Olein, Seasonings (Onion, Black Pepper), Natural Flavors, Potato Starch (Thickener), Modified Vegetable Gum, Wheat (gluten and fiber, Sugar, Yeast Extract, Vinegar, Potassium Salt and Paprika Oil (color)

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    Where do you even meet people anymore?
  • My friend seems to have good success meeting people in Discord channels about his niche interests, with the caveat that there is a lot more video calling than there is hanging out, because nobody lives in the same state. Maybe join a furry chat and say hello?

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    Goldenglow (by Ribiadan)
  • Oh my god is she a Scottish Fold catgirl? That's so cute! ^_^

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    ELI5: Why is cheating in online games seemingly so prevelant?
  • In Oldschool Runescape it's pretty common to see characters that are just blatantly bots. If they had plausible usernames and picked a random appearance it wouldn't even be that obvious, because it's a whole game about repetitive actions, but a lot of them have the default appearance and gibberish names.

    Botting is sort of a different problem because it's often related to real-money trading, so there's a more obvious incentive to cheat: running bots generates gold that can be sold for cash.

    In addition to that, many people run bots as a sort of side hustle, either to fund their main or just to fund more bots. And I suspect many people use scripts to automate tedious tasks on their main accounts as well, although that would be hard to notice unless you directly interacted with them while they were AFK.

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    When you're high level, people notice you. Shock!
  • My last character who was getting well known in the local area was also well known for blowing his gold on booze and gambling at every available opportunity, which is a good way to deter the money-seekers!

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    ‘This was a terrible idea’: the incident that broke Republicans’ DeSantis fever
  • My grandfather was a lifelong Republican but also a great lover of the outdoors and the national and state park systems. The idea of putting up golf courses on park land would have sickened him. He wanted people in the future to have the same opportunities he had to enjoy camping, hiking, etc.

    I don't know why Rubio and Mast chose this moment to publicly fall out with DeSantis, but among the rank-and-file Republican voters there have always been individuals who cared about conservation.

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    Final Fantasy Creator Reveals Which Entry He Thinks Is 'Most Complete', and It's Not Final Fantasy 7
  • Don't you press R1 when your attack hits to pull the trigger for extra damage? You do use the revolver part, just only in close combat.

    Or did I hallucinate that? It's been over 20 years since I played it.

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    Peloton is adding a $95 activation fee for secondhand machines
  • Do you have to activate it to use it? Can you not use it offline?

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  • Yes, this is a 4 hour long review of a hotel that's already closed.

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    UPDATE: Ahoyoo has confirmed that Trimming the Herbs was uploaded with TAS tools, meaning that The Last Dance was the final legitimate level all along! Congrats to kazeihinn on the Last First Clear! The journey continues in Super Mario Maker 2...

    ORIGINAL POST:

    Team 0% is attempting to clear every level in Super Mario Maker before the servers shut down on April 8. (New level uploads have been disabled since 2021, so there is no danger of new levels appearing at the last minute.) As of a few days ago, only a single level remains: Trimming the Herbs, uploaded in 2017 by Ahoyoo. (See also Ahoyoo's original upload video.)

    The level is short but extremely precise, requiring Mario to use Bob-ombs to precisely remove Piranha Plants and collect coins while navigating a tight space filled with spikes. There have been over 200,000 attempts so far! If you have a Wii U and feel like you might be a Mario master, this is your opportunity to pick up the final First Clear in Super Mario Maker history.

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    www.ideastream.org This Ohio funeral home will preserve your tattoo when you die

    Getting a tattoo is one of the most permanent decisions you can make; it stays with you until you die. But one Ohio company is changing that: preserving tattoos as tributes to last beyond death.

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    The system:

    MSI Raider GE67 HX 12UHS

    Intel Core i9-12900HX

    nVidia GeForce RTX 3080Ti (laptop)

    32GiB RAM

    Win11 Pro 64-bit

    The problem:

    Once in a while (usually 2-3 times per day), the system crashes, usually resulting in a blue screen with one of various error codes. Codes I've seen include:

    HYPERVISOR_ERROR

    CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT

    VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE

    IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

    Sometimes the system hangs but the blue screen never comes, and I have to power it off manually. When this happens, the fans go to full speed and yet the laptop quickly becomes incredibly hot if I don't power it off as soon as possible, suggesting that the CPU or GPU is maxing out for some reason.

    Checking with Event Viewer shows nothing out of the ordinary in the lead up to the crash.

    Things I've ruled out:

    I initially thought it only happened while plugged in, and bought a new power supply. That didn't seem to affect the frequency of the issue, and I also have now seen it happen while on battery. I also initially thought it was more frequent while playing games that use the dedicated graphics card, but I'm not sure that's actually true; I have seen it happen even while just watching Youtube. At one point I felt that it happened more when I moved the laptop or plugged in USB devices, but I think that may be magical thinking; I have never been able to make it happen on purpose by doing those things. It does seem to be true that after it happens, if I let the laptop restart automatically, it often happens again in a short time, but shutting down and then turning it back on gives more time before the next incident.

    Solutions I've tried:

    I tried updating the BIOS and the Intel firmware to the latest available on MSI's website, but that doesn't seem to have helped. I also updated my nVidia drivers.

    A possibly related issue:

    A week or so before this happened for the first time, I updated the BIOS to fix a different issue. What happened then was: I was playing a game on battery unintentionally, and didn't notice until that "low battery - switching to Super Battery" warning appeared and began throttling system performance. I plugged the laptop in, but performance didn't improve. I restarted and performance was terrible across all applications, even Firefox. I checked Resource Manager and noticed that the CPU was being throttled down to around 0.16GHz. Event Viewer was showing warnings about this that said the processor was being limited by system firmware.

    I tried using various Windows and MSI power management settings to resolve the issue, which persisted across restarts, fully charging the battery, etc. In the end, I solved it by updating the BIOS (to a version that is now one version back from the most current one).

    It was a while, maybe a week, after running the update that the crash happened for the first time.

    Current theory:

    Is it possible I screwed up the BIOS update somehow? I noticed that it instructs you to return clock speeds to stock before doing the update. I don't think I've manually adjusted them, but MSI's "MSI Center" software seems to offer automatic adjustment. It was set to "Balanced" when I did the most recent update, but it may have been set to "Auto" when I did the first one, which I guess could be a problem if the CPU was automatically overclocked.

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    I'm crouched in an empty room, stealing everything. My stealth meter randomly changes to Detected so I stop for a while and wait for it to go back to Hidden. I steal the next item and get a notification that a bounty has been added. I'm still Hidden.

    I finish looting and stand up. Suddenly: "You're under arrest!" A cop charges into the room and starts giving me a spiel. I unload my fully automatic Grendel into their chest at point blank range. Somehow this attracts less attention than quietly picking up comestibles did; no reinforcements arrive, and I remain free to wander around.

    I come back to this room about five minutes later for an unrelated conversation. Everyone politely ignores the dead body.

    I know this is all, like, just Bethesda game things, but for some reason this time it seems funnier than usual.

    Also, minor companion spoilers:

    spoiler

    If all the companions get as mad as Andreja did every time petty theft escalates to murder, my ship is going to get real empty real fast.

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    Spoilers for the Wyrmway

    In the room where you must demonstrate insight by striking down a representation of one of three writers, Amaps is represented as a tiefling:

    !Image of Amaps being a tiefling

    However, the book he wrote clearly indicates that he was a halfling:

    !Image of book description that says Paul Amaps was a halfling

    This is halfling erasure!

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    spoiler

    I broke into Wyrm's Rock and assaulted Gortash at his coronation, where Wyll's dad, Lord Ravenguard, was present. I won the fight by falling back to the parapets (by the ballista) and forcing all the enemies to walk through Hunger of Hadar and Wall of Fire to get to me; they really hate pathing through Hunger of Hadar, so most of them waited politely in the main room while I killed the rest a couple at a time.

    I knocked out Ravenguard and then shoved him to a safe place so that he wouldn't get hit by any AOEs. However, now that we're done, the post-fight cutscenes are over, etc., he's still just KO'd. Wyll doesn't have anything to say about him, and the quest journal entry about rescuing him is still on the step where it says that he's being held at Wyrm's Rock. Well, yes, I know, I found him.

    So what do I do with him now? He's infected, it doesn't seem like I should wander off without him. I tried going to camp and there's still no quest update or word from Wyll. I tried healing him in case we need to talk to him, but I learned that KO'd characters don't get up when healed.

    Update: If I long rest, the journal updates to say he is dead and his body disappears. It also implies the existence of a next quest step at camp, but Wyll says nothing about it. Also all my companions had the wrong dialog after a certain camp event, as though I had not yet killed Gortash who is very dead. Curiouser and curiouser. I think it's definitely true that they didn't plan for you to try to use the nonlethal toggle this way.

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    For context, Extended Information is a mod that shows hit chance popups for every shot, like the older Perfect Information, which (when it works) helps you develop a better sense of how much risk you're really incurring from enemy shots.

    I've got a long and complicated mod list which is mostly (but not entirely) cribbed from ChristopherOdd's last Youtube playthrough, and I've noticed that the percentages EI displays, especially for enemy shots, are wrong. The most obvious evidence is that they frequently miss shots that EI displayed as 100%, but it will also show absurd numbers like 89% chance to hit by a basic trooper against a target in full cover while the shooter is wounded, and they'll usually also miss.

    I think the problem is with shots that are modified by certain other mods, and I currently suspect EU Aim Rolls (which separates hit, crit, and dodge into separate rolls, as well as offering some specific tweaks) and Complicated Red Fog (which applies penalties to aim and other stats based on missing health).

    There is a link in the Steam workshop page to a Discord server where supposedly the mod developer posted an experimental, updated version that solved some of this (at least with regard to EU Aim Rolls), but that link is now defunct (either the server no longer exists or it's private). Does anyone happen to have that version and be willing to share it, or know of another, more compatible mod?

    Edit: For now I have disabled EI and I'm using EU Aim Rolls' built-in stat reporting. It isn't as nice, because it's just plain text on the right side of the screen instead of a color-coded popup over the shooter, and it doesn't have some of the extra info on the HUD that EI provides, but it does appear to be right, which is a good start!

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    Sometimes I can tell when my current DM fudges a roll to miss an attack or reduce damage. He has a tell in the specific way he pauses and breathes before announcing the roll, then tries to hurry to the next turn, which only seems to happen when someone is in a life-or-death scenario, but "luckily" survives.

    Should I let him know he has a tell? Will it be less fun (or more stressful) for him if he knows I know?

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