I didn’t know about the whole Nord sending data to Google thing wtf. That immediately puts them on my shit list.

Yeah cash in snail mail is probably not the smartest haha. I personally use a card on Mullvad for the convenience alone - piracy isn’t illegal here and their no logs policy is good enough for my use case but it being an option tells me they take that stuff seriously at the very least which is why I mentioned it.

Please reply here if you find the other one that lets you send cash. I’m loving Mullvad so far but it’s always good to have options.

This. For most people, they either hated the 3.0 update (assuming 2010), or hated the enshittification after 3.2.2 (assuming 2012).

Mullvad seems to be the go-to if you want privacy (although no one thing is 100% private if you wanna go down that rabbit hole). No personal info requried, not even email. They claim no logs and they have gotten raided once and cops found nothing. I believe you can even mail them cash anonymously for a sub. Flat fee of €5/mo ($5.19/mo US) - you can pay for a single month or buy in bulk, costs the same either way.

Windscribe is another good option. More of your run of the mill VPN that seems to be well reviewed. Their free tier gives you 10GB/mo so you can see if it’s right for you (although torrents may not work - I don’t remember for sure). You can easily snag a whole year for $30 US as it goes on discount a lot.

Personally used both of these and haven’t had much to complain about. Both have great apps for almost every platform, tons of locations to choose from, torrenting works, and Netflix works (for the most part). Speeds also seem solid but I do have crap tier internet. Reviews seem to agree though.

Of course do your own research, don’t just take my word for it. People also seem to like NordVPN but I can’t really speak to that.

Edit: Nord sends data to Google apparently so that’s a big no.

This is the hardest I’ve seen a someone try to not mention Rust. I’m actually impressed.

Sad but true. At least it’s gonna be funny watching the same companies that went overboard and removed the harmless instances just to virtue signal do a complete 180 and allow genuinely hateful content on their platforms.

Also add Community to that list. Can’t watch the DnD episode on Netflix anymore because there’s a gag about Chang’s unfortunate dark elf cosplay looking like black face.

It’s actually kinda wholesome that Harvard Law lets you minor in clowning 🤡

Um, acksually, what you’re referring to as Linux is in fact…

Yup, that’s John Trak, the lead in Star Trak

I wonder how many of the best emulator devs 5 years from now will have started off out of spite because of Nintendo being cunts about emulation and Sony taking down the Bloodborne 60fps mod

That extra 8GB of RAM is probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting to make general use smoother. More RAM = less swapping to the drive when memory fills up (which on 8GB means ~5 tabs in a browser before it starts slowing down haha).

Left a comment as a reply to one of yours about the laptops themselves.

The way I can tell if a game does/should run on my PC is kind of a multi-prong approach

• System requirements page
• DigitalFoundry does really good performance analysis videos on new games (REALLY good if you have a rough idea of how your components compare to others)
• Determining what console my PC compares to in terms of performance and going off that. Specific examples:
  • First laptop had an i7 3610HQ and a GT 740M - a bit more powerful than PS3/Xbox 360. If a game runs on those consoles (720p with inconsistent 30FPS) I should be able to run it on this laptop at slightly lower (trash port) or slightly better (good port) resolution or fps.
  • Second laptop had an i5 7300HQ and a GTX 1050Ti - performance between a PS4 and PS4 Pro
    • If it gets 30FPS on base PS4, this laptop can easily run it at 45 unless it’s a bad port (FPS can be higher if I lower settings)
    • It’s also comparable to a desktop GTX 970 (although 970 is still a bit better) so If I see 970 as the minimum, I know I can tweak stuff to get it running.
  • Current laptop has an i7 11800HQ with a GTX 3070 - quite a bit better than PS5, not sure how it compares to PS5 Pro yet. It’s new enough and supports DLSS so I expect a locked 60FPS at 1440p on everything with some tweaking. Right now, until a new console generation comes out, if I can’t lock 60 on a game, it’s probably really poorly made and not worth my time.
• Once you’ve seen how different games run on your hardware, you sorta get a sense of how certain types of graphics should perform

And then check protondb to see if it can run on linux (most likely will)

Integrated graphics may have some gotchas but the general rule I follow is “if it came out within a console generation, it can’t run that console’s games. Last gen can be serviceable. 2 generations back run pretty well.”

FWIW I think the Surface is the more powerful machine.

I wouldn’t bother with any 3D AAA that came out after ~2010 on the Mac and even then you’re looking at 720p 30FPS

The Surface looks like it might be a solid light indie game machine. I doubt it’ll struggle too much with anything 2D and may even be able to run late PS3/super early PS4 era (before 2015) 3D games at reasonable framerates.

Get out

Wait is that an actual thing?

Those last two made me physically recoil wtf