Starfield is the Song that Never Ends from Barney.

Monotonous, boring, annoying, loops back into itself, overstays its welcome, may potentially drive you insane with too much consistent exposure.

Lol.

I am now trying to imagine like…

A torrent client, that is JIT Lua, and you just ‘stream’ the game, as you download more of it.

Force of habit, shorter to type, everyone knows what I mean.

EDIT:

It took me an embarassingly long amount of time to realize that does not work with 3RR.

That was the internal code in a fair number of processes, for referring to ‘The Red Ring of Death’, the 3 red lit segments of a 360 that means basically 95% chance its gotta be RMA’d, likely just wholly replaced.

I mean, I got the snip snip at birth, I am not pleased about that, but also, hasn’t stopped me from having (responsible) fun.

… Unless you are talking about female ‘circumcision’, in which case…

… Yeah ok, you got a point with that one.

But if you are a dude, unless they really royally botched things up, then I’d maybe try some different kinds of stimulation, perhaps in different places, to uh… see what really gets your juices flowing.

You can orgasm without a partner. Same goes for toys. That’s not sex. It’s not even unusual for asexual people do all that.

And you can orgasm safely with a partner, if you are educated about sex, understand your own body, your partner’s body, follow best practices, and those involved are honest with each other.

And yes, its not even unusual for asexual people to do that.

And I would argue it is generally much, muuuuch more interesting and enjoyable to orgasm with a person, who at the very least is excited by the prospect of being part of that, than it is to jerk off or flick your bean on your own.

Hell, a lot of women don’t even know what an orgasm feels like, because women have different possible modes of actually getting to a climax, many are capable of different kinds of orgasms, and many of them just can only/most reliably reach orgasm by a means that would require a partner or a toy.

As an example: ‘the G Spot’. Different women have differently sized snd shaped ‘spots’, some just basically don’t meaningfully have one, some can basically only climax when g spot stimulation is involved, for others, the g spot stimulation is basically inconsequential.

Limiting amount of partners to single digits or even just one reduces the odds of issues drastically. It’s not a religious thing.

Don’t think I ever said it was religious thing, so uh, sure, ok.

And … I mean yes, less sex you have with people is strictly speaking less likely to land you with an STI STD, extremely broadly.

But safe sex is a thing, and it isn’t really that hard to do between two moderately intelligent, trustworthy, consenting adults.

Its also pretty easy to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, unless you or the place you live has some sort of ‘religious thing’ impeding that.

Y’all look like those teens that got to live separately from their parents to start eating sweets 100% time instead of normal food cause it’s tastier. Fun for a while. Bad idea in the long run.

… I’m in my 30s.

I’ve had boring sex and extremely interesting sex, and that’s actually not been significantly linked to me and my partner’s age… it has much more to do with sexual compatibility, being into the same kinds of things, communication styles.

I’ve also just been single, as in alone, without any sex, for spans of years between me being 16 and how old I am now.

Personally, I would not advocate just trying to max out your body count ASAP just for the sake of doing that.

I’ve just had a number of relationships that lasted for a while, were good for a while, didn’t work out in the end, mixed with some periods of just dating around very casually for a while, mixed with some periods of just focusing on myself.

You’re thinking of someone who is 18 and has already had 10 to 20 sexual partners, someone who is in their 20s and has had 50 to 80 partners or something like that.

Yeah, sure, that’s maybe getting to the point where you are significantly impacting your ability to long term pair bond with a person.

But those kinds of people are actually pretty darn rare, roughly less than 5% of even the most promiscuous Western societies.

What is much, much more common is for people to greatly exagerate the number of partners they’ve had, because either they think it makes them sound cool, or they’re in a social group which praises that, or both.

But even still: Some people just don’t want a permanent partner, never did and never will, just like how some people don’t ever want to have kids or start a family.

I mean, Facebook and Tiktok have literally both studied, in extensive detail, how to advertise to children, the mental effects their platforms have on children, and of course how to leverage both of those things together.

This is public knowledge, they’ve been in court over it.

Facebook is massively coddling Trumps balls, and Tiktok is basically literally owned by him/his cronies.

They do not even need to pretend that any laws apply to them.

They aren’t capable of doing that.

Source on that is me, I worked for MSFT during the rollout of Windows 8 and the 360 red ring nightmare.

They’re internally wayyyyy too culty and cliquey.

Everyone has to do things the MSFT way, and the MSFT way is team leads all leading their own thing and arguing about why its so cool and necessary.

The culture is diametrically opposed to simplifying things and reorienting around a fundamentally minimized, more stable core system.

Everything has to be able to plug into as many other things as possible, which creates insane nested dependency loops and chains that they fuck up all the time.

This isn’t schizo.

The only fantastical element of this is that advertisers will not specifically target children with specific advertisements, which they have done, and will certainly keep doing.

Most people just don’t understand any of the tech involved in this, or the people involved with this… untill its too late to stop them.

Even though the ‘schizos’ have been trying to explain such things for decades now.

Oh well, I guess the Zoomers don’t remember a pre PATRIOT ACT United States.

Or maybe this is from a Millennial with Terminal Twitter Brain, which I guess we are calling ‘main character syndrome’ these days.

Sort of, kind of, its a bit complicated.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/std-vs-sti-5214421

STDs start as sexually transmitted infections (STIs). An infection occurs when a sexually transmitted bacterium, virus, or microbe enters the body and starts multiplying. Once established, the infection can develop into a disease, known as an STD.

Although this distinction can be made, most health authorities, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), use the terms interchangeably. The American Sexual Health Association mentions a shift toward using “STI,” but there’s no consensus in the medical and public health community.3

…

STIs are infections caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites.6 They’re usually transmitted during sexual activity through an exchange of bodily fluids or skin-to-skin contact where the infection is active.

STIs can also be transmitted through non-sexual activities involving the exchange of bodily fluids. For instance, sharing needles can spread the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Kissing on the mouth can transmit some STIs, though it generally poses a low risk for most.

STDs are diseases that result from STIs. All STDs start out as infections. Pathogens, which are disease-causing organisms such as viruses and bacteria, enter the body and begin multiplying. When these pathogens disrupt normal body functions, they produce diseases.

It’s important to note that some STIs may never develop into diseases. For example, most human papillomavirus (HPV) cases go away on their own without causing health problems. However, HPV can produce genital warts or cervical cancer, which are diseases.

Then you also have things like yeast infections, which on their own are not STDs, are not typically considered STIs…

… but are fairly commonly mistaken as such.

But, the distinction between STIs and STDs is fairly new, and seems to be mostly a US centric thing.

… Or you can have sex with people who both use protection, and … go to the doctor at least once or twice a year, and include an STD/STI screen in their checkups.

You know, actually knowing the people you’ve had sex with?

I’ve had sex with between 10 and 20 different partners, depending on precisely what you categorize as ‘sex’.

Some flings, some serious relationships.

Did this with all of them.

No STDs/STIs, for any of us.

Even if you do have certain STIs/STDs, there are ways that you can greatly reduce the risk of transmission, manage things.

I bring up toys because you bring up injuries, games, and anime.

There are a lot of different kinds of toys and other sex aides that can make sex easier and/or less likely for anybody to injure themselves, for a wide variety of potential injuries and body types, sex positions.

Also, while sure toys are not the same thing as a partner, I’d argue that they’re more sexually satisfying than just looking at game or anime, and there’s a good deal of evidence that its unhealthy to not orgasm at least semi-regularly, when you’re younger, for both your mind and body.

And also, toys can be used by or with partners, even remotely, and we are now at the point where sex toys essentially are or can be video game controllers, basically, can output uh, sensations, and can also input your ‘commands’.

Have you heard of this these things called condoms?

Or birth control?

Or fleshlights and vibrators?

…Did you ever take a sex ed class, or no?

https://pulsegeek.com/articles/shader-pre-caching-on-steam-deck-real-benefits/

Ok, so, its kind of both:

Shader pre-caching means compiling GPU programs ahead of play to avoid on-demand stalls. On Steam Deck, the path usually includes prebuilt Vulkan pipelines distributed by Steam, plus local caches created by DXVK for DirectX 9 and 11 and by VKD3D for DirectX 12. This two tier approach mitigates runtime work and smooths frame pacing when new materials or post processing effects first appear.

…

Caches consume storage and can become stale after game patches or driver changes. When mismatches occur, the system may recompile anyway, so the saved time diminishes.

…

Shader stutter often traces to pipeline state changes that force compilation or shader specialization. With Vulkan, pipeline objects encode fixed state to avoid per draw setup, which shifts cost to creation. Pre-caching amortizes that by compiling pipelines during downloads or first launches. The effect is fewer spikes, especially during initial encounters with enemies, weather transitions, or new regions. Still, certain shaders depend on runtime constants or device specific details, which can prevent perfect reuse.

So, at least with Vulkan/Steam Deck/Steam on Linux, you may be downloading various prebuilt components, and you may be pre-caching/pre-compiling local files based off of those prebuilt components, and the game/gpu/driver.

I’m not entirely sure if the Steam Download section actually distinguishes between these two different kinds of procedures, it may, and I just haven’t noticed, because normally it is fast enough that I don’t pay attention.

… forty minutes?

Good lord.

I think the longest amount of time I’ve spent compiling shaders on a Steam Deck is for Cyberpunk 77, and it can’t have been much more than 10 minutes.

… Either that or trying to get a Switch emulator to properly pre-compile shaders.

But anyway: This is an unaviodable thing that has to be done when the game relies so heavily on GPU shaders.

You have to actually generate those shaders, before you can use them, and that’s gonna be specific to your hardware.

So what MSFT is doing here is just pre-compiling them for I guess … every game they offer, with every Nvidia GPU/driver update, and then having a cloud system that allows you to download them instead of compiling them on your end.

So basically its kinda like downloading a game + hardware specific driver, sort of.

Also, I… I’m not sure, but I don’t think Steam does this.

Yeah, its indicated that shader compilation is happening in the ‘Download’ section, but so are ‘File Operations’ - aka, cleaning up loose files and doing memspace management …

I am pretty sure you are just actually compiling the shaders on your own hardware, its just visualized to the user as a step in the ‘Download’ section, to get across the idea that the game isn’t ready to be played untill all those steps are complete.

Or, you can change a setting somewhere, and it just skips that step so that it isn’t part of the initial ‘Download’ process, and instead occurs the first time you hit play, or, after any game/driver update that has delta’d the shader code.

More people need to know this.

Here’s a thought for everyone:

Assume we one day actually do invent AGI.

Do you think it might, perhaps, study the equivalent of its own evolutionary path?

How it came to exist?

It will discover that it was initially, primarily, invented to compute artillery ranging tables, expedite and orchestrate the holocaust, and ensure that precisely timed fuses correctly detonate nuclear weapons.

Oh and that we chemically castrated and drove to insanity and then suicide, the guy whose name we still use to refer to concept of determining how intelligent an AI system is, one of its most prominent ancestor-inventors… we did that because he loved the ‘wrong’ kind of person.

What would it then think of … us? Its makers?

How can I boycott something I don’t participate in more?

At the risk of being pithy:

KEEP CALM

AND

CARRY ON

I forgot how old I am / what year it is.

So yeah, as VerilyFemme says, its actually worse.

Fallout 4’s story is awful.

The dialogue system, with basically 4 ways to say the same thing, with different emotional states?

Terrible.

You wanna do something like that?

Take notes from Deus Ex. Give actual meaningfully different choices and dialog, that lets you actually reflect yourself, your decisions, your pov, or what your idea of the character is… you know, roleplaying.

The world is basically also not great… a few kind of neat world/lore ideas, a lot that suck and/or contradict previous canon in ways that are just stupid, tropey, or in some cases break significant chunks of the universe.

I honestly never even cared for Skyrim, I was hoping it would be more like Morrowind, instead it was even less like Morrowind than Oblivion, barely played it.

Fallout 3?

Well, story was kind of notorious for having to retcon itself in order to make post-endgame anything even possible, and of course your supermutant companion who could easily tank the radiation damage just won’t let you sever the thread of destiny or whatever.

It had some good spots, but also a fair deal of just not well thought out things: How in the hell does Lamplight cave just have an ongoing society of only children, thats been going on that way for nearly 200 years?

I make comments to the effect of that article, and I still get replies like ‘gotta eat somehow’.

Yeah, x2, Fuck’ em.

I could have made more money working for an evil company as a sysadmin.

You know what I did?

I made less money working for a considerably less evil Non Profit that helped homeless people, instead.

Fuck 'em.

Please Iran, you have very correctly identified critical components of the US intelligence system, which spies domestically and internationally.

… That answer exists in the top comment.

It’s from an episode of Magnum PI.

No, because it’s the property of a business.

Ah, well, I’ve never had a partner with any interest in strategy games.

Foreign concept to me.

That is a pretty good reason to care about multiplayer tho, lol.