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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.

    The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.

    We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.




  • Well, sure, but that’s also because on PC I can choose to buy DRM-free games and have guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. Plus it’s not a closed system based on a console that launched with a drive. People (me included) already own PS5 discs, not from a previous generation, but from this one. It’s bad enough that I need to keep my PS3 around to play PS3 games, it’d be absurd to not be able to play PS5 games I already own because the thing is physically unable to ingest them out of the box.

    So yeah, for people in that position the Pro is a hundred bucks more expensive than it says on the sticker, which is already a ridiculously high number.






  • Oh, how long do you have.

    First of all, favorite for what? For accesibility reasons if it’s not a dual stick game I am defaulting to a fightbox-type device these days. I favor a WASD configuration, rather than a thumb-for-up configuration and I currently favor a tiny, minimalist haute board box with cherry switches (blue for buttons, greys for WASD). It’s great, it lies on my desktop and it causes minimal strain even in high APM games.

    For dual stick stuff, it again depends. Is this a shooter where aiming is a factor? Because then I’m gonna want some gyro. The DualSense is amazing to hold, just bonkers build quality. It is heavy and ugly as sin, though. It also doesn’t work perfectly with every PC game, so it feels like a hassle to use it as my default. There’s the KK3, which has gyro in Switch mode and seems to be less fussy than the DualSense. Plus they are trying to sell their hall effect sticks to third parties, so those are very smooth. It is a jack of all trades, though, and I actively hate KK’s dumb extra button configuration, with start and select all the way at the top, I keep pressing the screenshot buttons by accident.

    If there’s no twitch aiming, and thus no major need for gyro, Victrix’s Pro BFG is fun. It has modular design where you can put the dpad on either location. The dpad isn’t great, but hey, the fightbox’s there for that. It does have a six button configuration, too, if you’re a controller fighting game guy. The best feature, though? Replaceable eight-way gates for the sticks, Gamecube-style. If you’re a Smash guy or emulating Gamecube it’s such a no-brainer high end replacement.

    But honestly? Honestly?

    The JoyCon.

    I know people hate the JoyCon, but the idea of a split controller is amazing to me, and everybody else who has tried to do it, Lenovo Legion Go included, gets it wrong. The big handles aren’t the answer without a middle segment to hold the controllers. The two little boards are fantastic for 3D action games, the amount of tech in such a small frame is astounding and the button-based dpad is so good I’m using fightboxes on the regular now. It’s a shame there are some reliability issues, but I would buy a device just like it for PC tomorrow if they could sort out connectivity reliably.



  • See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.

    I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.



  • I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.

    It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.

    But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.



  • I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

    EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.



  • Okay, I’m here to help.

    Shave.

    Seriously. The amount of pressure put on guys around balding is horrendous, and it can consume your attention if you let it. The moment that superfluous, vestigial hair comes off, it’s such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended). No more fussing, worrying or stressing about it. Plus, in many cases it looks pretty good. Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll just become your face.

    Give it a couple of months and the moment there’s a scratchy, annoying milimeter of hair on your head will be a natural call to give it a shave for the comfort alone.