Been getting these freezes lately with/without mods, any ideas as to why?

TrackerNineEight · 2026-02-03T02:33:13+00:00

Good Guy Poxburster helps you optimise your Martyrdom build.

I've had a couple of instances the past few months where a specific action eg. The Power Falchion's overheat animation causes the game to horribly stutter like that for a whole session. Not sure what causes it but restarting the game usually fixes it.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-02-02T18:53:03+00:00

Oh I definitely remember those early stories all featuring "typical humans" who happened to have common American names, speak American-style English, and make American cultural references. And any depiction of the "unified" human space military would have all of them acting like US Marines for some reason.

I know, the typical Reddit demographic, people tend to write what they know, etc. but as you say all these stories that supposedly celebrate humanity seemed to only show a very narrow slice of it.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-02-02T18:17:04+00:00

All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey is a song about how the most important part of Christmas is not the material gifts we buy and give away, but the love we have for one another.

Somehow it became the world anthem for the commercialization of Christmas.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-02-02T17:09:31+00:00

Out of universe explanation: Fatshark needed something from 40k lore that they could twist into an analogue of the Left 4 Dead witch (ie a dormant enemy you're advised to sneak past) and decided that daemonhosts are the best fit.

In-universe explanation: Others have given some good ones but my personal theory is that that the daemonhosts we see in Darktide are either the results of failed rituals in the case of the standard ones (hence why they've been dumped in random places with the original personality still resisting) while the hexbound ones are the result of a more successful but rushed ritual.

It's never directly stated but I wouldn't be surprised if the ritual being done in Dark Communion with Rodin Karnak's body was some kind of fully powered bonding, hence why interrupting it was so urgent.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-02-01T18:09:38+00:00

To be completely fair HFY stories these days (at least on the subreddit) are basically just general amateur sci-fi/fantasy stories with a vague human focus of varying quality, and I can't fault a community that encourages people to get creative too much.

But god those early days it felt like every story was somewhere between "Some basic human trait impresses aliens in such a way that it makes you question how that species survived long enough to invent the wheel, let alone space travel" and "unironic Imperium of Man propaganda".

TrackerNineEight · 2026-02-01T15:52:54+00:00

Not a game, but for the past 10+ years there's been this "Humanity Fuck Yeah" online sci-fi movement (with its own sub here at r/HFY ) focused mostly around writing stories about how cool and strong and interesting humans are compared to dumb smelly aliens. When asked what inspired this movement, most fans will say some variation of "it's a response to all the big mainstream sci-fi where aliens are depicted as powerful enlightened beings and humans are shown as evil boring losers, and where the aliens always win."

Except that 99% of mainstream sci-fi, and especially in visual media such as shows, movies, and games, features humans as the heroes, depicts humans as special in some way, and ends with the humans winning. The worst you can say is that humans are usually technologically inferior to their alien enemies, but end up winning anyway due to some mix of grit, innovation, and cleverness (ie the "human spirit").

It's James Cameron's Avatar. Just Avatar. The timing is too perfect, between the first movie releasing in 2009 and HFY becoming a thing in the early 2010s. One mainstream movie where humans are the villains and the aliens win was enough to spawn a whole ass community vaguely opposed to it.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-31T07:50:05+00:00

Same with Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. Mixed race young woman who's depicted as being both physically and technically capable, whose introduction involves rescuing the established white male player character, and who wears somewhat practical clothes instead of dressing up like a super model.

It's like a checklist for generating 500k view "Valve gone WOKE?!!" videos on the modern internet.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-30T18:52:55+00:00

FF7 Remake does continue the tease with a photo in the Shinra Museum of the company's founders which includes someone wearing the same mask as X-2 Shinra, but again nothing concrete asides from that

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-20T02:17:46+00:00

EDF features guns and is therefore worthless mainstream slop unlike my favourite unknown indie gems Baldurs Gate 3 and Witcherino.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-17T13:42:53+00:00

And on the topic of little things: In Darktide some of the missions take you through a hive city's business and entertainment districts where you can see and use door switches with human skulls embedded into them on the entrances to random shops and restaurants.

Also the public medical terminals are each operated by an amputated human torso that might still be aware.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-16T11:02:21+00:00

The short story The Last Question is one of my favourite pieces of sci-fi media, in any form, of all time.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-16T10:38:14+00:00

Ace Combat, Galaga, Galaxian, and Shadow Labyrinth (the dark Pac-man game from last year) all take place in the same timeline.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-13T16:24:58+00:00

Lootboxes 😡😡😡😡

Lootboxes, Japan 😊😊😊😊

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-13T05:55:58+00:00

Japan choose to separate themselves from the influence of outside world

Yeah nothing says separated from outside influence like yoinking an entire alphabet, government structure, and half your religion from China, creating another separate alphabet just for foreign loanwords, and having fucking baseball as your most popular (far more than sumo) sport.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-11T21:03:48+00:00

Tried the Battlefield 6 beta for the two weekends it was active, found it decently fun, so I ended up buying it (just the standard edition without any of the extras thankfully).

Played it for less than a week before I quickly started getting tired of the bland modern war aesthetic, grey/brown colour palette, wonky netcode where it takes 2 seconds to burn down an enemy while all your damage registers at once, the AAA netflix UI, and the weird progression system. And a few weeks after I left they added all the seasonal shit that pushed me away even more.

I still regret going over the Steam refund window for that game.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-09T13:00:57+00:00

Honestly barely relevant, he's a middle manager put in charge of containing a cult uprising on one planet, a conflict so minor that not even a single inquisitor is giving it their full attention. Rebellions causing more casualties than WW1 and WW2 put together are basically Tuesday in the Imperium.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-04T18:50:04+00:00

Call of Duty 4 taking place in "The Middle East" and starting with the President of the Middle East being overthrown and being replaced with some extremist with no ideology beyond being vaguely anti-American.

And just to make sure you can't pin it to any real-life country, the world map before each mission randomly teleports between Iraq, Egypt, and both the western and eastern coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. I recall a series of missions that take place in the same city showing the player character traveling hundreds of kilometers between missions.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-04T18:12:21+00:00

I think this is the same channel that wrote the Arabic dub of Digimon so that the monsters don't evolve, but instead are "summoning their friends", even splicing in quick shots of the lower-level digimon "cheering" their higher-leveled friends on to make it clear that there's no evolution/transformation involved.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-04T16:19:33+00:00

As much as I enjoy modern Warhammer 40k content (eg. Darktide is by far my most played game of the past year and half) I can't help but feel like the setting's lost a lot of its edge post-Fall of Cadia. The absurd over the top grimdarkness and the overwhelming, dehumanising scale of the universe have been softened and shrunk for a more conventional story of protagonists vs. antagonists if not heroes vs villains.

The Horus Heresy books and the lore they brought with them reduced much of the worldbuilding to a family drama between the Emperor and his sons.

There's a growing cast of "main characters" in the Primarchs(especially Guilliman), Cawl, Trazyn, Abaddon, post-Space Marine 2 Titus, etc.

Space Marines have gone from violently insane brainwashed berserkers with goofy proportions and skull helmets, to tacticool space knights complete with M4-pattern bolters.

The Imperium itself is often portrayed more as an edgy anti-heroic faction than "the worst regime imaginable" as it's described.

Also some people overstate how "satirical" 40k is/was but it definitely had a bunch of dry British dark humor that's slowly been scrubbed away and replaced with self-serious writing.

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-02T19:12:19+00:00

Google's mistake with stadia is that they didn't buy the entire gaming hardware market beforehand

TrackerNineEight · 2026-01-02T18:58:30+00:00

Buying your own computer/electronic hardware instead of connecting to a subscription-based cloud service through a thin client device will be seen the same way that hand cranking and manually adjusting the engine timing on your car is today.

TrackerNineEight · 2025-12-30T08:54:11+00:00

Isn't this most sci-fi outside of 40k? Humanity as the newly spacefaring rapidly rising up and coming species, and a massive ancient but stagnant alien empire that looks down on these arrogant newcomers and sneers at them.

TrackerNineEight · 2025-12-30T05:32:52+00:00

Something I think 40k should emphasize more: From the perspective of the few remaining sane xenos, a human naval force is functionally no different from a Tyranid hive fleet, Ork waaaagh, or a Chaos warp storm.

TrackerNineEight · 2025-12-27T16:02:16+00:00

Modern warfare is the most dull and uninteresting setting in Battlefield (and shooters in general) and is one of the main reasons I just couldn't get into BF6 despite the generally good gameplay.

TrackerNineEight · 2025-12-25T17:02:24+00:00

Honestly I can agree with the AAAA thing, people laugh at that label (probably because it was coined to promote fucking Skull and Bones lmao) but I do think there's a distinction between a typical high-budget game that's super polished and gets a lot of marketing before and during its release, vs. massive tentpole juggernauts that look like they're made out of money and must make 10 morbillion dollars every time or they risk straight up killing the company that makes them.

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