The entire gambling lootboxes were massively popularized by Valve, turning Team Fortress 2 from pay2play to predatory gambling.

External sound cards have the advantage of less electrical interference, but usually the internal ones have external power not coming from the PCIe slot so it isn’t a big problem. Asus left the market leaving you with good old Creative Sound Blaster again. Choose whatever your budget allows, the two upper tier ones just differ in accessories, but that might have changed. And AV receivers the same, I am not the up to date audio guy what is a good deal. Just try to stay >120 dB SNR on sound cards for high end.

Don’t search for computer speakers, just look for normal speakers on which I can’t help out too much on. Unless you want to invest into an expensive sound card, you probably should go for an AV-Receiver which transmits the audio through HDMI as this will give you the maximum quality depending on the supported formats. I have a sound card -> old school amplifier -> speaker setup. Basically it is your choice where the digital to analogue transformation happens, whether through a receiver or sound card. A sound card does have the massive advantage of providing virtual headphone surround sound (yes on stereo headphones, and no, this is really working) which receivers typically don’t have, because reasons and it will provide you with a massive immersion boost. And no onboard sound is not comparable, even the best one is a clear step down.

FC are just social groups, not raid content. For that you should recruit statics or communities which organize old synchronized content.

FFXIV has quite literally a Fellowship and Community Finder to look for groups which have similar interests as you. Be it Mahjongg, Role-Playing, Try-Harding old content or seeing for LGBTQ interactions. And the rest is done over Discord, because that is for sure a better communication tool than whatever the game devs can come up with. Even the content thing is not true. There is seperate content which absolutely requires cooperation, schedules outside the cookie cutter main content like Bozja and Deep/Criterion Dungeons. More similar to old school MMOs. I’m fine with a diverse array of content.

What else should the PR department say?

Indeed, that is what is so baffling for me. It is called, marketed and perceived as something very different. It is Second Life, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and others. You have a certain core in which the audience is interested in and then social constructs form around them. These modern Metaverse things try to skip the entire core part, but then it just becomes a chat app.

It is overlooked because filesharing gets you into trouble and Plex is for various reasons the much more evolved alternative.

I thought Mortal Kombat 1 was a good introduction to the series for me. The cinematic story is a banger in the first 2 thirds, and the final part is weak, but doesn’t break its neck.

And for quite some hours I had a lot of fun just playing it. However the gameplay will not hold up past the 2 week honeymoon phase, with all the bugs, pricing, always online and truly awful invasion mode, which is the core single player experience next to the story.

So it depends what you expect of it, other fighting games are just better in many aspects.

But how safe from tracking would black and white lasers be? There is no evaluation at all on the chances.

/c/whoosh (if that exists). I try to recreate history.

Let’s say Russia succeeds at first. Shouldn’t the US pay some organization to wipe them out of the country?

Twitter has two tabs, one with and the other one with less algorithms, Mastodon should do that as well. The discussion is about improving it and Bluesky is in its infancy.

That wasn’t clear to me by the UI and I didn’t see the easy switch option.

Mastodon went in two seriously wrong directions, but seems to remedy them which is difficult. First they have no proper quote supporting and failing to realize all communication works this way on the internet. Be it comments on articles, all the newspapers quoting others and thus creating those articles etc. Second the lack of algorithms due to a misguided opinion they are inherently evil. What we got instead is a random feed of random messages where a news like structure like on Twitter is not possible. Extremely important events are buried behind tons of crappy posts. And the only region for whom the explore tab is working is America as nothing is localized. Also scrolling through the feed doesn’t tell you what seems to garner attraction by the number of comments. So most clicks are wasted on deadend topics.

Living off the grid. A world where AI and data collection wasn’t so massive that even not participating in anything they will have a full profile of you. Data will become compromised until everything leaks out everywhere. When abusive powers will mathematically make future decisions for you, e. g. a. negative personality-health profile which makes a college dropout almost certain and therefore deny you the choice. People think in absolutes and not even partial success is viable. Just like now big corporations have such narrow application profiles that every human not built in a genetic factory is not worth it. I think the world becomes rapidly more hostile to neurodivergence. And all will suffer from it, because thinking diversity is key.

There is the psychological factor that Windows behaves more like malware with their forced full screen overlays to shove the Edge into your ass. Over and over again. Microsoft doesn’t take No for an answer like an abusive partner.

I can’t play it, because it bans AutoHotKey. But I need it, because I have no volume knobs or seperate buttons on my keyboard. It is fine, if they scanned the content of the scripts, but mine are extremely simple and Counter-Strike and Valorant both cause no issues, so weird decision there.

You could call ESO pay-to-win to fit this definition, because there is new content added as subscription or paid. There will be new gear sets offering effectively an advantage for many builds and some new skills.

There is a community for that here.