Khajit has bathroom…

… if you have coin.

I was able to play HL Alyx with an Index, on… I think it was an AMD 5950X CPU and an AMD 6900 XT GPU… on PopOS!.. back in… 2022.

Not saying you are any kind of ‘wrong’, just saying it is possible now, and was even possible back in 22, to get very good VR performance out of a linux system… full res, maxxed out settings, 90hz/fps good.

You could replicate my old build now for roughly … 65% the cost as I paid for the same parts back then. 5950x current sale price is less than half what it once was, 6900XT current sale price is a bit more than half, though you have to look a bit harder… GPU market is just generally insane right now.

EDIT: For a long while, generally speaking… AMD stuff is better supoorted and more performant on Linux… because many of the drivers are much much more open source.

Also… AMD CPUs and GPUs synergize and perform better when paired with each other, then pairing an Nvidia GPU with an AMD CPU, or Intel CPU with AMD GPU.

If Intel can pump up its GPU game, it may be able to achieve a similar result, but so far their GPUs… while honestly pretty good for the performance/price range they’re in… they just don’t come as close to the high end of GPU performance yet.

… and your choice of either topped with cheese wiz, or a single slice of american kraft ‘cheese’ melted over the whole thing.

Sorry I’m late!

… What? You don’t just eat them outta the can?

… dear… god…

You can also just wear a chest rig, without pants…

Also, I am now just remebering these exist: Utilikilt.

You got it.

Its time to stop acting like all game devs are somehow totally free of responsibility from all this.

I say this as a person who at least used to personally know game devs, mod devs, and I have been modding (as in making the mods) games since the mid 00’s.

Yes, of course management is shitheads.

But there are many game devs who don’t whore themselves out to corpos they know will do this dumb shit.

There are many indie or AA or other devs who build games that are a little bit less graphically fancy, but run 3x as fast.

Go right now and play Titanfall 2, built on a fork of the Portal 2 Source Engine variant, and tell me that any modern, comparable game really looks like it is so much more impressive it needs all the horsepower and cost that goes into getting it to run at the same resolution and framerate.

If people wanna know more about the technicals of how optimization in games is largely a lost art now, go check Threat Interactive on youtube, that guy does an amazing job breaking this stuff down.

Ah! It seems you are… broadly correct on that one!

Though it gets complicated when you dive into the details… it appeara that exactly which name is being used by which language and people … involves essentially some … derogatory puns, slight manipulations of certain vowels/consonants to change the literal meaning of the name.

https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/68544/is-asherah-related-to-ashtoreth#68545

As to books, reading?

I am doing my best (and must admit I am certainly oversimplifying to some extent, and may be making even more errors) … to put together the totality of what I’ve absorbed from watching a large number of videos either by or involving Drs. Josh Bowman and Kipp Davis.

Dr. Bowman is digitalhammurabi on youtube, Dr. Kipp Davis is… I think just eponymous?

Both of them together, or each of them singly have often appeared on the MythVision yt channel, Paulogia, more recently Esoterica… and all of those channels also feature many other scholars relevant to near eastern history, religion, language, etc.

I am not sure if Drs. Bowman or Davis have books that outline exactly what I’ve tried to sum up, but I know they definitely do have scholarly publications and at least some books focused on other topics that end up describing different parts of my summary.

I am not an expert, just a very interested person who follows the experts best I can.

At least some of the plauges approximating some of what is described in the Torah were real things.

Locusts were certainly a common problem.

Sometimes, you would get an absurd amount of frogs birthing all at the same time from a particularly severe natural climate cycle … the entitety of the history of Egypt very much involves figuring out how to handle the Nile’s flooding seasons.

A red algae bloom could possibly have turned the Nile red, and made it basically toxic.

… But the part where the historicity falls apart is the supposed timing of the Exodus event, and the number of Hebrews involved.

…

Long story short: Traditional religious dating of when Exodus occured basically puts it occuring before the time Yahweh even existed as a monotheistic God, in Israel/Judah/Canaan.

At this point in time, the Levant was largely still a bunch of varying cults/clans based around the polytheistic Caananite pantheon.

Yahweh did not develop into, or emerge, as the singular monotheistic God of peoples in the Levant… untill hundreds of years later, after they had been held captive in Babylon/Persia for many decades, where they absorbed much of thr dualistic framework of the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda as the great good God, vs Angra-Mainyu as the great evil God… and then were allowed to resettle in their homeland by Cyrus.

Roughly what I just described is inline with the actual existing and properly dated texts and artefacts from the relevant regions.

When Exodus is tradtionally supposed to have occured… Caananites were still worshipping El, Ba’al, Ashera, Astarte, Anat, Dagon.

El and his son Ba’al more or less merged into Yahweh over time, and gained many attributes of other members of the Pantheon… this is why Yahweh is a jealous god who does not suffer any idol worship, worship of his progenitors.

…

The other huge problem with the Exodus story is the numbers of Hebrews involved.

The Torah is very explicit at a few points about how many men there were… and what you end up with is something like 2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt, spending 40 years lost in Sinai or possibly Arabia… all while leaving literally no archaeological evidence of such a huge movement of people.

2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt is utterly absurd. Its comparable to the estimated entire popation of Lower (Northern) Egypt at the time of the traditional religious dating.

There is nothing in any Egyptian records to indicate anything like that number of people up and leaving.

What there is, is a good number of mentions that small numbers, as in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Caananites … well if Caanan was having a bad drought, or had just had some kind of city state conflict… Egypt would fairly routinely allow some refugees to basically graze their herds in Egypt, or even a few of them would settle into being farmers, or do trading caravans.

There is no evidence whatsoever that millions of Hebrews, or people who would in the future become Hebrews… ever lived in Egypt as a slave class, and then all left at the same time.

To me, the actual main problem with the interactions between Moses (as a proxy for Yahweh) and Pharaoh…

… Is that for the majority of ultimatums that God instructs Moses to give to Pharoah… God also ‘hardens his/Pharoah’s heart’, which compels Pharoah to not comply.

Like, outside or above the scale of things threatened… God literally mind controls Pharoah, manipulates his emotions, and forces him into saying no, not acquiescing or truly negotiating.

This happens multiple times.

So now… God isn’t just an asshole threatening insane plaugues and death… God is just puppeting Pharoah at these key moments, so basically God is orchestrating this entire chain of events… he was in total control the whole time… God is thus just punishing the Egyptians, while also doing a kabuki theatre, a false flag, whatever, to make it look like they actually had choices and chances to avoid this, to make it look like they willingly defied his will… when this was not the case.

This takes God from a belligerent asshole into now also being a sociopathic, deceptive manipulator.

Its abuser mentality.

What are you talking about? That’s not what happened.

If that is what happened, it wasn’t that bad.

If it was that bad, you deserved it.

Omae wa mou shindeiru.

Sure, yes, making your own art would be better in one sense, one way of looking at this, but I guess you don’t appreciate the whole ‘turning it against itself’ aspect of this.

Turning a system against itself is the literal definition of subversion, in the context of complex systems, anyway.

Sure, its not as subversive as intentionally poisoning AIGen stuff to stupify itself over time, but I do think this counts.

Its not like you have to get the AI to draw the image every single time anyone sees it, we can still copy and paste images, host them where many can see them, etc.

To me, there is a sense of ‘art’ in the subversion itself.

If the theft machine already exists, and you don’t have the ability to destroy it, contain or restrain it more directly… using it to generate propoganda against itself, its creators?

I think that’s a clever use of it.

Like, would you say that that one piece of … kinetic/performance art, where its just a machine that you must go up to and hand crank, and it spits out penny by penny at the rate of minimum wage…

Would you say that isn’t art because it forces the art ‘experiencer’ to perform exhausting wage labor, which is simply 100% bad, all the time, no exceptions?

I mean, when Elon bought Twitter, I, having never used Twitter before, created an account just to scream at him, and I managed to get banned in a few hours.

But to attempt to answer your question: Arguably, technically, yes, but it really only matters if it significantly fucks with Elon, or inspires other to meaningfully resist him, or aide those he oppresses.

One person doing that?

Flash in the pan.

Coordinated , consistent swarm, of people or bots, doing this untill the entire site goes down?

Even better: hack in their and reroute it to fucking DDoS itself?

Maybe a bit more meaningful.

I find the use of AIGen to essentially advocate against itself to be fairly clever.

Its not like you have to burn down a bushel of wheat’s cropland every time you copy and paste an already generated image.

If you are subverting the means or process of exploitation against itself, well, that’s pretty subversive, anarchist, punk.

If you’re doing that in the digital realm?

Pretty fucking cyberpunk.

These idiot tech bros whoooshed over understanding the cyberpunk genre as a warning of what not to do, and instead adopted its aesthetic and are just now building that world, as its villains.

Well fine then.

Time to reclaim our culture.

Oh I am still at the 2014 phase.

We… used to have a term for people that advanced further: sell-outs.

Though I do very much prefer the recently popularized Cyberpunk lingo:

Fucking Corpo Scum.

Well that is both terrifying and also impressive.

Fortunately, I just recieved a bag of magic beans from the local apothecary to help me with with restful sleep!

… hdroxyzine beans … funny name, I wonder what realm they are from…

EDIT:

Also, to everyone in this comment thread freaking the hell out… this is a joke meme.

The original top half of this is from a Buzzfeed video from a decade ago, featuring gameplay of … well, some Grand Theft Auto game, beating up strippers.

It has since been a meme template for a decade.

The original video didn’t even mention fantasy games as a genre or anything.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/video-games-appeal-to-the-male-fantasy

In fact you’ll now probably find a whole, whole lot of LGBTQ+ people, as well as cis/het people, agreeing that Baldurs Gate 3 is actually pretty awesome.

Oh no I don’t find that idiotic, that is very annoying, literally anywhere, between any two countries.

I guess the workaround is to plan ahead and do your currency exchanges before hand, but at least in the US, if you do that in cash, well now you’re a drug smuggler or something if you’re brown and/or not in the best mood.

I mean, everybody just has the ability to open up bank account debit/credit cards in multiple currencies, right?

Your bank doesn’t do currency exchange?

Not my problem, pleb, stay in your geographically confined area with a particular force of monopolized violence.

So, I’m from Seattle, basically, and for the longest time I thought no, I do not have an accent.

Then I learned that the reason I thought that was because well, the accent I have is basically the least distinct from the ‘General American English’ or ‘Region Indistinct American’ accent, out of all other regional accents…

With that ‘General American’ accent being what nationwide newscasters, voice actors and movie stars either developed on their own, or were trained into, for being easily intelligible to any other American accent/dialect speaker, or as just sort of a rounded approximation of ‘American’, with no specified regionality to the character.

Thats not to say the PNW or Cali or just general US West accents are all exactly the same as ‘General American’… they are not… its just that they are the least difficult to understand from a general audience perspective out of other regional US accents/dialects… or at least that is the explanation I’ve heard.

As I am aware, the main difference between PNW/Cali English and other US regions is that we have completed the cot-caught merger. Absolutely no difference in pronunciation, the verb sounds are the same… whereas in much of the rest of the US, these are different, distinct vowel sounds. We just use the ‘cot’ pronounciation for both.

Bot cot thot slot thought caught fraught not spot dot.

All the same. No rolling or bending of the first vowel into the u to make a more complex vowel sound, all just ‘bot’ or ‘dot’.

That and pop vs soda vs coke.

For whatever reason, I usually say soda, but that did make me an oddball of most people around me near Seattle saying ‘pop’… but a lot of other places in the US use soda, but also a lot of other places use ‘coke’ to refer to any … soft drink… which confuses and aggrevates my Autistic brain lol.

…

There are a few things that I remember being distinct to Californian accents/dialects as compared to Seattle:

One is the rising tone at the end of the sentence… thing.

I always called this a valley girl accent, and this is because no one I knew as a kid spoke that way… unless their family had recently moved north, from Cali.

Now though, it is more common generally in the PNW, at least in my own experience… but also that could literally be because a lot of Californians have migrated north.

Another silly, but super easy tell someone isn’t from Seattle: Their accent may be essentially indistinguishable from a PNW accent… but they always, always refer to I-5, as ‘the 5’… instead of ‘eye-five’.

No one born and raised near Seattle does this.

I-5 is the main highway that goes all the way down from Vancouver BC, through Seattle, Portland, San Fran, LA, and runs through all of those cities, so its a major reference point of conversation in all those places.

And yeah, the regional vocab difference for how people refer to it is an example of a difference.

Coming soon:

What do you mean my US dollars aren’t accepted at any big intl. tourist locations anymore… I have to actually exchange them?

… If I ever start a band, I’m naming it ‘Courtney Love’s Shotgun’.