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Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video Game Thread

What are you playing?

Only a couple hours of Deus Ex this week:

Paul is alive and Jaime has joined us too. Maggie Chow was electro-shocked and chopped to bits with the Dragon's Tooth inside the Universal Constructor area. :) Soon after I ran into a bug back in NYC where the Illuminati contact, Stanton Dowd, wouldn't talk to me. Later discovered I had to shoot him in the head with a firearm. That actually worked. Next up, the Naval base.

Then I started a new Civ V game, intending to go wide. I finished the Liberty tree and ended up having only 3 cities by midgame. Whoops.

More Rimworld. But I just haven't been able to scratch the itch. For a good while, I've been craving a proper base-defense/siege kinda playthrough, a fortress against overwhelming odds. This hasn't worked very well:

  1. Raids are regularly derailed by the appearance of ridiculously overtuned enemies. Some modders make overtuned factions, which could be borne if it wasn't for the fact that the internal "cost" of the gear was set too low. Two dudes with god-tier equipment should not be considered equivalent in difficulty to five tribals with spears. It's comical how bad it can get, and I had to sort the problem by driving them over with my car. It's a bit more dignified than using dev mode to delete them, which is what I usually do.
  2. My mod list is surprisingly stable, but not performant. My 9800x3d only manages to run the modlist at 50% higher TPS than the default maximum game speed, despite several good performance optimization mods. Something is eating up a lot of compute, and I need to use Dubs Performance Analzyer to find it, it's not trivially automated by an LLM.
  3. This is worsened by the fact that I wanted to play on large maps. One of the most annoying aspects of Rimworld is that enemies spawn on what's effectively your front door. You need a massive array of turrets or a ton of traps/terrain blockers to slow things down enough for your pawns to get to their defenses, unless you have a very compact base. Large maps fix this, but come at a noticeable tax on your TPS.