Starfield demonstrates a complete lack of any cohesive vision in story, themes, and gameplay.
The artstyle has that generic "hard" space sci-fi look. I could just as well be looking at Star Citizen, Interstellar, or The Expanse. The locations might sound interesting in theory but are executed in the most bland way possible. It's kind of hilarious to think that these tiny settlements are supposed to be interplanetary capital cities. I do understand that unrestricted player movement means that they can't really place a massive city in the background like in the Mass Effect Trilogy but explicitly calling the places you visit capitals is absurd.
Bethesda tries hard to ape Serenity-esque space westerns with Akila. An interplanetary capital without paved roads in its main thoroughfare. It really clashes with the rest of the game's attempts at being seen as a believable "hard" sci-fi. A vision of a car free future brought to you by the limitations of the Creation Engine. The game engine is no excuse for not having a space horse though. Traversing procedurally generated terrain on foot is a waste of time.
The vaguely utopian corporate solarpunk of New Atlantis is soulless and not in the satirical good way. Which is ironic because it seems to be inspired by Starship Troopers.
Neon, the cyberpunk offworld oilrig tries and fails to be a hip seedy dystopia. It looks more like the Outer World's Groundbreaker Promenade than Mass Effect 2's Omega. It doesn't illicit feelings of despair from the callous disregard of humanity as a consequence of greed without limits. It's just a shopping mall with boring corporate suits who try to sound edgy.
The same goes for the music. It doesn't convey any emotion and isn't uniquely identifiable. Inon Zur's work for the Bethesda Fallouts weren't this forgettable so it's probably down to Bethesda's lack of direction. The music doesn't build into the atmosphere of any location or any story moment. I don't think Jeremy Soule would've made a difference, and it's good that Bethesda doesn't associate with an accused rapist. That said I'd still say his work with Oblivion was one the best soundtracks of any game.
Ship combat has controls like Freelancer except it plays terrible. The ships feel heavy and are unresponsive to control so it doesn't really work as an arcade space combat game. The mouse first controls with no flight stick support, fast travel, and the inability to actually dock/land manually make it an automatic fail as a spaceflight sim. The ability to fast travel instantly to any previously visited location is good though. With its quest design, it would be painful to play Starfield if they went the sim route.
The gun play is identical to Fallout 4 but plays worse due to procedurally placed enemies and levels. It has to rely on the AI, weapons and enemy design. None of those elements are able to make the fights interesting. It's still a lot better than any of the other spaceflight games with ground combat though.
The bar is being dropped so hard that Mass Effect Andromeda is retroactively becoming a great game. In the universe that Starfield is an 87, Andromeda is at least a 97.
I'll still play Starfield over Elite Dangerous, or No Man Sky since it has actual content. It isn't all procedurally generated and has an actual story with characters. I'll finish the main quest at least, the game isn't aggressively bad in anyway. It's just all around sterile and uninspiring. I still have the hope that somewhere out there I might find a branching side quest that is remotely as good as those in Oblivion, or New Vegas.
28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.
The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren't sub 9nm. TSMC's 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven't matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.
SMIC, Huawei didn't get to where they are by compromising. They never would've bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn't matter in this industry, what they're looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn't compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.
China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the "02 Special Project" all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the world's largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.
It's an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isn't going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.
5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the "7nm" Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.
Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.
TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. It's only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.
Although I'd say these channels are more accurately described as apolitical analysis based on facts.
The only Nintendo console I ever had was a Famiclone so I don't really have much nostalgia for their games.
It's just Nintendo ROMs that are disappearing. It's still easier than ever to find even the most obscure classic PC games on abandonware sites and GOG compilation torrents. It's also only the SEO abusing ROM sites that are vulnerable to Nintendo's attacks. Complete ROMsets for their consoles can still be obtained through torrents, Vimm.net, and the r/ROMs megathread especially for the older cartridge consoles.
Emulating a current gen Nintendo console has never been as good as it is for Switch emulators. Any new PC can emulate Switch Triple As at full speed. Android is getting builds of the Yuzu emulator and mobile SOCs have enough power to run less demanding titles. When a lot people who don't even own a Switch can play Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo is understandably trying to crack down. The portable aspect of the Switch is no longer a unique advantage. It used to be just GPD making those handheld PCs now every brand is trying to compete in that form factor.
Honestly I think the state of emulation in general is experiencing a golden age.
Retroid, Anbernic and AYN are making hardware that is a better solution for most people than trying to jailbreak and refurbish old original portable consoles. The screens, the analogs and the buttons they use are as good if not better than the first party hardware. Unlike bulky handheld PC, their Linux or Android based emulation handhelds are still in the same size and weight class as the PSP.
A couple years ago the Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators were basically just experimental demos. They weren't stable enough to actually finish any game on and most CPUs weren't fast enough to run them at full speed. They're still hit and miss but the list of playable titles will only ever grow.
It has come to the point that the PC can play everything. All previous gen consoles aside from the OG Xbox have emulators at a playable state. There are almost no current gen console exclusives anymore as the PC is getting ports of PS4/PS5 exclusives, the XBone/Series never had any to begin with, and of coarse the aforementioned Switch emulation.
US mainstream media isn't even trustworthy for predicting the US economy.
They downplayed if not outright denied the potential causes of the Great Recession until well after it had already occurred. They then portrayed the Great Recession "from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business" manipulating the empathy of their audience in order to serve the interests of their true masters.
Asian Knockoff Mexicans
Mail order brides for those who can't afford Eastern Europeans or East Asians
To the IQ obsessed HBD types, having the lowest PISA scores in Southeast Asia means we're more Honorary Black than Honorary Aryan on the racial totem pole.
It's conventional warfare, not guerilla warfare, nor a suicide bombing campaign. The worst case scenario would resemble the Iran-Iraq war and the initial conditions resembled Northern Cyprus more than Afghanistan.
The Ukrainians don't really even have an equivalent to the Viet Cong. Insurgencies need the support of the local populace to eat and operate without being ratted out. Only Kherson is even close to divided enough for that to have a remote chance of occurring.
The terrain and culture of Ukraine aren't like Afghanistan. Afghans are more loyal to their tribes than Kabul. The underdeveloped subsistence farming economy of Afghanistan means any insurgent knows how to live off the land and survive living in deprivation for long and sustained periods. The terrain of Afghanistan allows insurgents to easily isolate whatever forces the government sends in an attempt to control the countryside. The Taliban won without any state really backing them. The overall population of Ukraine and Afghanistan might be similar but what matters most is the demographic in the age range for military service.
Syria didn't turn into an Afghanistan. The Donbass republics fended for themselves for 8 years while the DRA only lasted 3 years alone. Even then the DRA still outlasted the Soviet Union so had material support continued they might've continued on as a rump state. It wasn't like the US puppet, Ghani's regime, which just collapsed immediately after the US pullout.
Ukrainians are more Northern Alliance than Taliban. Their ideology isn't anywhere near as unified as the Taliban's. The moderate liberals and extremist fascists would turn on each other if living conditions deteriorated sharply.
There can be no defeat either. Pulling out would be political suicide for anyone in the Kremlin. Abandoning Russians in Russian territory would be different from abandoning the DRA. Nukes would fall before Crimea falls.
Anyway, you can't really predict the future by looking at the past. The similarities are only down to hindsight and brute force exhaustion of every possible historical parallel.
If the Russians were even half as petty and image obsessed as the Ukrainians are, they'd fire a missile into that trident.
Overextend, turn your enemy into insurgents, attempt to kill every one over ten of the "military aged males", cause a global financial crisis, as a million people die due to your shit pandemic handling pull-out
The US is worse than Ukraine. They send their vassals to death without a second thought but with an inevitable betrayal. Yet if they ever fought a war in their own land for once, they'd quickly lose the will and ability to fight.
Liberals are neither intellectual nor do they actually want dialogue.
They're so hostile to differing opinions that they have sullied the very word for propagating ideas. The connotation that such an action is inherently negative and something that entails deception was added by them. The redefinition of the word propaganda is ironically the result of liberal propaganda.
Liberals are only people who could write a post like this and lack the self awareness to realize how blatantly hypocritical it is.
I just don't believe action-less sympathy and defeatism solves anything.
Well you're gonna have to learn to answer invasive questions, if you're meeting with a psychologist.
Even if you're denied you can always try again with another psychologist and the experience of having done so prior will help you succeed.
What is it that you are looking for from HRT and how do you believe that it will make you happy?
Sorry for asking, you don't have to answer if you're not comfortable.
You say your dysphoria is not as strong as most other MTFs yet why are you compelled to commit suicide? You've probably been dealing with these issues for decades, why now has it come to this?
Have you looked into getting hormones through DIY sources?
https://diyhrt.cafe/index.php/Main_Page
https://old.reddit.com/r/TransDIY/comments/142g4m1/looking_for_a_reliable_online_pharmacy_that/
Well the typical maritime disaster back then had far more resemblance with that of the SS Arctic's sinking, which had no surviving women and children no matter their status. It's the crew that's most likely to survive. The women and children were the most likely to perish. Every man for himself was indeed the norm, which is why the Titanic seemed special. It's more down an individual's survival skills, whether they were stationed/staying in the safest parts of the ship, and in some cases even their willingness to screw other people over in order to survive.
Gender, Social Norms and Survival in Maritime Disasters by Mikael Elinder, Oscar Erixson
Our results provide new insights about human behavior in life-and-death situations. By investigating a new and much larger sample of maritime disasters than has previously been done, we show that women have a substantially lower survival rate than men. That women fare worse than men has been documented also for natural disasters (32-36). We also find that crew members have a higher survival rate than passengers and that only 7 out of 16 captains went down with their ship. Children appear to have the lowest survival rate.
Moreover, we shed light on some common perceptions of how situational and cultural conditions affect the survival of women. Most notably, we find that it seems as if it is the policy of the captain, rather than the moral sentiments of men, that determines if women are given preferential treatment in shipwrecks. This suggests an important role for leaders in disasters. Preferences of leaders seem to have affected survival patterns also in the evacuations of civilians during the Balkan Wars (37).
Moreover, we find that the gender gap in survival rates has decreased since WWI. This supports previous findings that higher status of women in society improve their relative survival rates in disasters (35). We also show that women fare worse, rather than better, in maritime disasters involving British ships. This contrasts with the notion of British men being more gallant than men of other nationalities.
Finally, in contrast to previous studies, we find no association between duration of the disaster and the influence of social norms. Based on our analysis, it becomes evident that the sinking of the Titanic was exceptional in many ways and that what happened on the Titanic seems to have spurred misconceptions about human behavior in disasters.
I got the original picture from what is apparently a Forbes ad campaign by Goodby Silverstein.
It wasn't even welded. The sub is so ridiculous that it doesn't even use steel or titanium alloy like most serious submarines. Contrary to its name it was made out of carbon fiber.
Lochridge warned that the constant pressure on the Titan as it traveled deeper underwater would weaken any existing structural flaws, resulting in large tears to its carbon components. It was crucial, he said, to conduct non-destructive testing so that a solid and safe product could be provided for both passengers and crew.
Diving the submersible “without any non-destructive testing to prove its integrity” would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible,” Lochridge said in legal documents.
However, OceanGate allegedly told Lochridge that instead of carrying out the testing, it would install an acoustic monitoring system in the submersible to detect the start of any potential hull breakdown.
Lochridge expressed concern that such an acoustic system would not be able to detect existing flaws. It would simply flag components that were about to fail, he warned—which often happened “milliseconds before an implosion.”
A former M-84 commander kindly accepted an interview for the blog. M. trained as a commander and served as a platoon leader in M-84 tank u...
The end of a hopeful dream, drawn by ZSW
She lit the first match, and saw her lost motherland;
She lit the second match, and saw its great ideals;
She lit the third match, and saw her motherland's aerospace pioneers driven by those ideals;
She lit the fourth match, and saw her long dead little sister Buran.
She was afraid that as the matches went out, these dreams would be lost forever; so she lit all she had left wishing that they stayed with her.
In the end, she died with a smile.
No one knows what beautiful scene she saw at the last moment of her life.【22.3.3-4】
The most in-depth history of the T-72 in English
The T-72 is known as one of the most numerous tanks in the world today, and the tank is likely to remain in some form of serv...
