There are some games which, for whatever reason, I just don't vibe with enough to keep playing even if I want to see the story. Some of these games will have a "story mode" difficulty which is just meant to be a really easy version of the game you could play to just get the story without worrying too much about needing to overcome the challenges.

Recently I tried going back to a game I had previously dropped because I wasn't really enjoying the combat. I had dropped it down to story mode, but this wasn't really enough to keep me engaged. And on some level, I don't really enjoy games when they're too easy anyway. It may not be that important or necessary to engage with the mechanics to succeed, but you often still need to go through the motions with them and the act of doing this with systems that don't actually serve a purpose at that difficulty. The result of this is that the story that you're continuing to play drains your energy and is potentially paced poorly.

When I was talking about this with a friend, we discussed how let's play videos could serve as a substitute for playing the game if you just want the story. But of course this has it's own problems. The pacing may still be bad, the video maker's commentary might be distracting, and if you decide to go this route before even purchasing the game, the dev isn't even financially rewarded for the work they did at least creating a story you liked.

So I had a thought: It might be nice if for exactly these kinds of games: Linear, cutscene heavy, and story based games, that currently choose to include a "story mode" instead just straight up edited together a movie from some combinations of the cutscenes and either recorded gameplay or perhaps some additional cutscenes to fill in the gaps that would normally be filled with gameplay. That way, if all you care about is the story, you get the best version of that story that you possibly could.

Of course there are plenty of kinds of games this wouldn't work for, but for the ones where it could, I think it would be a nice replacement for "story mode" difficulties, or at least an addition. What do you think?

I’ve been dealing with depression (and anxiety) for well over 5 years now. I’ve tried so many different medications and treatments with no apparent success. Inevitably, in the course of the treatment, the doctor will ask if I’m starting to feel better to see if it’s worth continuing the treatment, up the dose, or swap to something else. And… I never know what to say. If it’s not going to get dramatically better all of a sudden, I don’t really know how to recognize any incremental progress if it’s happening at all and without being able to do that, I might be passing on treatments that could have helped if I gave it more time.

So if you’ve been in this situation, how did you recognize progress? To the extent that you can put it into words, what did it feel like to slowly get better as you were treated?

This is a more focused follow up to a question I had the other day about moving to other countries. I'm wondering what the best options are for learning a new language at the moment. I'm vaguely aware of companies like Duo-lingo losing their reputation lately and it's hard to trust the top google results nowadays with all the SEO junk. So does anyone have suggestions for trustworthy/useful sites for learning a new language? If it matters, in particular I'm interested in trying (In roughly this order) Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish.

I live in the US and even beyond the current stuff going on, I've just become so depressed living in a place that feels like it doesn't care about people. I've been watching videos about some other countries, in particular Vietnam and China, and I've thought it might be nice going somewhere that's more committed to making life better for people. At the very least going somewhere that's building a bunch of trains would be cool. (Yes I'm autistic, how could you tell? /s)

I don't know if I'd actually end up doing anything because it's tough for me to get anything done at the moment, but I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts or experiences to share about living in other places, especially if you moved there. What's your pitch for why it's a nice place to live? What problems does it have?

If you moved there, what were the challenges in moving and adapting to the new place? Did you learn the new language? Was it tough getting used to the local foods? (This is something I worry about a lot because I'm kind of picky) How did you meet people? Etc.

Outside of college, I've lived in the same place all my life. I've only traveled outside the US twice and it was to other western or westernized countries. (France, Amsterdam, and Japan.) I'm relatively introverted and socially anxious, but it is nice to try to get to know people I could be comfortable around. I have a college degree but I haven't had work experience due to my depression, so I'd be kind of starting from scratch in that regard. (I'm maybe about to get some treatment which might help, fingers crossed.) So all around it's hard to say if I'd be able to move anywhere, but maybe at some point I can work up the energy and courage to make the leap and it would be helpful to have some ideas of how to approach that. Maybe I'll try to slowly learn the language as I can.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies. The solution was to turn off Lenovo Vantage Server Boost.

So I have a fairly specific problem that has been surprisingly hard to troubleshoot for some reason.

Very specifically, when I am streaming on discord, while any game software is running, (we've tried it with a few different ones, online/offline, steam/non-steam, 2D graphics vs 3D graphics. Same issue although maybe with varying amounts of time before the problem starts, but hard to be sure.) and when at least one other person starts watching the stream, my discord connection gets unstable. Voice and video start cutting in and out and the connection icon starts turning red. This doesn't just affect the person watching the stream, others have trouble hearing me as well. No stream? No problem. Stream but no game? No problem. Stream and game but no viewer? No problem. Just when all of these are together. Also this doesn't seem to impact my other processes or connections. The game keeps running like normal and for the online ones they don't lose connection. I can still go access sites on my browser, etc.

I got a new PC recently, I haven't had this issue before that. It didn't happen right away though, things worked fine at first. It happened for the first time a few weeks ago and after running through the basic troubleshooting steps, the thing that seemed to fix the issue was updating my nvidia graphics drivers, but it's hard to say for sure. The problem popped up again tonight. For reference the last time I streamed to someone was on Thursday, so it was working very recently.

I checked and there was a graphics driver update, so I went to install that, thinking that would fix it again. It did not. There also seemed to be some problems around the graphics driver installer. Both times this happened the download initially stalled at some % and I had to restart to get it to work again. Plus this time I went to try to reinstall the graphics driver to see if maybe the first time it didn't do it right and I briefly had bigger problems with the PC. During the install, the screen just went dark and didn't come back. The rest of the computer was running, I could still chat on discord, but I had to kill it and restart to get the screen back. That restart took a while longer than normal and when I got back the start menu wasn't working. That got fixed on another restart though.

Anyway, that's concerning and maybe relevant, but back to the discord issue: Other troubleshooting steps that didn't work:

• Turning hardware acceleration off/on.
• Telling windows to use my graphics card on high performance for discord and the games I was testing with. (It already seemed to be doing that on it's own anyway, but I made sure.)
• Lowering stream quality and FPS.
• Making sure discord was added to my firewall allowed software.
• Cleared discord's cache.
• uninstalled and reinstalled discord.
• Checked for windows or other driver updates and didn't find any.
• Tried switching routers and did some speed tests that turned out fine.
• Checked resource usage and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I'm kind of at a loss here. The most I can turn up on google is all the generic troubleshooting advice you get for every problem and none of it has worked so far.

System Info:

• Windows 11
• It's a Lenovo prebuilt desktop PC and it comes with their driver/system management software.
• Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700F, 2100 Mhz, 20 Core(s), 28 Logical Processor(s)
• BIOS Version/Date LENOVO O5TKT3BA, 12/17/2024
• Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER
• Headphones/mic: Razor Blackshark V2 Pro

Any ideas?

I'm hoping this is an ok place to ask a question like this.

I recently had to get a new mouse because my old one broke. I couldn't get exactly what I had before but I got something fairly similar. However, I've been struggling to tune it to feel good to use. It's actually been putting a lot of strain on my arm even after short play sessions.

Does anyone know what might be causing this and how to fix it? What kind of things should I do to find the appropriate sensitivity/settings or maybe I'm holding my arm differently for some reason or maybe I need a different kind of mouse?

If it matters, here's the old and new mice:

Old: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GU8W5AE

New: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0D3PNVQWK?psc=1

I mostly like Doctor Who for being a fun, campy show. I stopped watching after Capaldi initially because it felt like the show wasn't really doing that anymore. I've been re-watching the modern show after checking out classic Who for the first time along with family recently. We recently got back up to where I had stopped and... I'm still not really feeling it. But the show has been on for quite a while since then. So I'm kind of curious what it's like now and if it's worth pushing through/skipping ahead to get to a part that I'll like more.

Over the last few years my family and I have binged all of Star Trek, then moved on to Star Trek adjacent shows like The Orville and Stargate. At the moment we're not really watching anything sci-fi. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for similar shows (or maybe some books) that fill the void left by Star Trek. In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.

Obviously spoilers ahead:

I recently got to the lower city and after taking a long rest I was ambushed by some of Astarion’s vampire spawn siblings who want to take him back with them. The dialogue suggests that killing them would close off the option to have Astarion ascend later, but it seems like I can’t avoid fighting with them. I thought maybe using nonlethal attacks would be the way, but upon reading the description it doesn’t work on undead.

What am I supposed to do if I don’t want to kill them? I tried looking up the quest on some wikis/guides, but they don’t seem to give advice on that option. They just mention that if you fail in this encounter Astarion could be kidnapped, which… wouldn’t be ideal considering at the moment I have no spare party members to fill the 4th slot due to… circumstances…but I’d also prefer not to shut off the option for this quest line.