Monster Hunter is a great series. Not terribly stoked about the endgame in Rise though. I think my ideal game would be something like Generations Ultimate but with the overall clunk removal that world/rise did.

Newpipe is fucking great. Does what I want it to and doesn’t do what I don’t want it to. Favorite thing about it is the ability to easily download video or audio.

If i recall correctly, this is basically the entire premise to Animal Farm. Great book.

Searx (as others have said) is an aggregate of multiple search engines all bundled into one, with very finetuned customization (ie: you can toggle every search option you want or not within each category).

You also don’t need to host your own, though I’m not sure what the significance of being self hosted in this case is.

As far as usefulness over other search sites, it’s generally better with some caveats. Search engines as a whole are in a pretty awful state, so combining them is better, but still not that good. It does offer some very niche search engines that can be extremely useful when pooled together though, which is nice.

Searx also has some captcha issues that I haven’t quite figured out. My understanding is that essentially, search engines don’t like when you use their engine without being on their site, and it’ll stop working via searx (until you go to the site in question and do the captcha maybe?).

There’s also a few different domains for searx with varying degrees of availability as far as what engines they reliably connect to.

All in all, searx is great by comparison to mainstream trash, but it can be a headache to setup, and a headache to maintain. There’s a masterlist of searx hosts somewhere, I’ll try and see about finding it if someone else doesn’t link it.

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate (released 2018 outside of JP) had a ton of dlc quest unlocks and they were all totally free. It’s proving difficult to find a proper separated list of exactly how many, but here’s a google doc that lists ~200 quest related equipment unlocks, the vast majority of which are dlc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hlBLacFYxdh83a-GkxYnsIF6nH7huP_H2aI4APRGicg/edit?gid=408012748#gid=408012748

Something noteworthy is that’s just quests for equipment. In contrast, there’s only 37 event quests (all event quests are free) in Rise that offer any unique item reward, and 23 of those quests give equipment.

Giving a very conservative estimate with that all in mind, I think it’s safe to say that GU had a good five times more free dlc rewards than Rise does.

Just wanna throw it out there that the Monster Hunter series is a perfect example of in game free content becoming microtransactions in just a few years.

Old MH games had all cosmetic items as free event quest rewards, where you’d get a unique and fun battle to play, and a cosmetic reward for winning. No paid DLC even available to buy. MH Rise (the newest game) has 221 paid cosmetic items listed on their site. That number is not including bundles, soundtracks, character edit vouchers, or the expansion (Sunbreak) itself.

$60 game, $40 expansion, and 200+ paid cosmetics that would instead be free in earlier games in the series.

deleted by creator

How long have you had yours? I’ve had 3 8bitdo controllers (iirc, sn30/ Pro/ Pro 2) and none of them work anymore. They also had a ton of connection and software issues leading up to becoming bricks.

I moved to towers for the same reason years ago, but I basically never do major component swaps like I thought I would.

I’ve since realized that having a tower is really nice for other things though, namely maintenance and cleaning/airflow. My rtx 2060 seemed like it was on its way out a year ago (thermal throttling, even on way lower settings than it used to be able to run just fine), so I took it apart and replaced the thermal paste. Runs better than when I first got it. Got some new case fans recently as well and the whole thing runs cooler, quieter, and they use less power than my stock ones, which is nice.

Obviously the thermal paste thing applies to laptops as well, but laptops can be very tough to get open and dig around in.

I run a heavily modded game on an rtx 2060, and the only crashes I have are VRAM related, and your experience sounds similar to my crashes. Crowd density, texture quality (main menu setting only), and dlss settings are the major factors for whether I crash on load or not.

I also recall that ray tracing shadows or reflections helped with VRAM, but the FPS hit wasn’t worth it to me.

Depending on your setup, and if you’re mod savvy, you might be interested in the FSR3 Frame Gen mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/14726. Short version is that it replaces DLSSG with FSR3 and allows frame generation to be used with a ton of GPUs that can’t normally use it. Makes UI elements feel choppier, but the overall performance increase is nuts (helps CPU and GPU bottlenecks). Without it, I can’t reasonably play above low crowd density, and with it, I can play on high density pretty easily.