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[McTraveller]

I broke down and looked inside it.  Apparently the driver maker decided they needed to include video files in their installer.  And two copies of each - one for x86 and one for x86-64.  Hundreds of .wmv files... their filenames indicate how to gesture on a touchpad.

[Iduno]

I broke down and looked inside it.  Apparently the driver maker decided they needed to include video files in their installer.  And two copies of each - one for x86 and one for x86-64.  Hundreds of .wmv files... their filenames indicate how to gesture on a touchpad.

You are the first person who looked inside those files to find those videos.

I don't know why you would need videos for using a damn mouse, and I sure don't know why you'd hide them in an installer.

[Yoink]

TIL the modern-day German military still uses the Iron Cross as their logo.
I suppose the symbol had probably been used for many years prior to WW2 and all the resulting bad press, but it's still rather surprising to me.

[Lord Shonus]

The Eisenkreuz was a military medal during WWII, but was not used as an army logo. It served as the German Army insignia from 1827 until 1918, when it was replaced with the straight-lined (and simpler) Balkenkreuz. It was not used again as an army-level insignia until 1956, when the modern Bundeswehr was formed. There was some use by units as a marker, but much of the association is from Allied propaganda (which made use of the long-familiar association - the basic design had been used in the Germanies for around a millennium at that point) and post-war censorship (where the Hakenkreuz and Balkenkreuz were often replaced with the Eisenkreuz in films, TV, toys, and other works.

[Frumple]

Starting to watch a code vein playthrough. One of the sounds the enemies make is, apparently. Variations on REEEEEE. Had to hear it a couple times to be sure, but. What.

[MaxTheFox]

Ah yes, PETA (People for the Evil Treatment of Animals).

[pikachu17]

Ah yes, PETA (People for the Evil Treatment of Animals).

Didn't they actively steal people's animals to kill them as well?

[Kagus]

There was an instance of that, aye.

[methylatedspirit]

My laptop consumes more power running with the integrated graphics enabled at idle. It's actually better to run everything off the discrete graphics. Substantially so; ~15W at idle, 10W of which is just the integrated graphics. The discrete graphics consumes a quarter of that at idle. 7 hours of battery life at idle lost because of a single BIOS setting.

Spoiler: Conspiracy-rant (click to show/hide)

CPUs are binned, sorted by their ability to run stably at a certain clock speed and number of cores and so on. I wonder if the i5-9300H in this thing failed some kind of integrated graphics power efficiency test and this chip slipped through the cracks. Or is it deliberate? Intel sells them to manufacturers making gaming laptops (which invariably have discrete graphics), so that they can get rid of their defective stock. For the manufacturer to then turn around and claim that enabling the integrated graphics will make the laptop more efficient is strange, to say the least. It's stupid, but I've seen worse. Then again, there is a name for an i5-9300H with defective graphics, it's called the i5-9300HF, which is just the former with the integrated graphics permanently turned off. Just call it that, then?

[Jopax]

So my big possible credit card problem that I had? Turns out it's kinda my fault, I did sign up for a prime video trial in an attempt to get a twitch prime out of it (as the linking of accounts would allow that, turns out i wasn't eligible for that for whatever reasons) and just forgot since it didn't charge me anything until a month afterwards.

The real fucked up thing here is that my main amazon account showed no history or signs of the sub being made, couldn't even cancel my goddamn sub as the button was non-interactive and the list showed no indication that I had a subscription made, only sending me into an endless maze of useless pre-baked supported tickets. It's only after I managed to dig out the original e-mail (from fucking May last year) and find a link for a cancellation there that I was actually greeted by a site that actually claimed that I did in fact have a subscription and that I could in fact cancel it.

So uh, yeah, fuck me for not paying attention and fuck Amazon especially for making it nigh-impossible to rectify something like this.

[McTraveller]

Starting to watch a code vein playthrough. One of the sounds the enemies make is, apparently. Variations on REEEEEE. Had to hear it a couple times to be sure, but. What.

Wow the voice acting in that is... disappointing.

[Reelya]

Ah yes, PETA (People for the Evil Treatment of Animals).

Didn't they actively steal people's animals to kill them as well?

There are also uneasy connections between PETA and conservative racist groups.

For example, I read about the stealing animals thing in an article a while back, an example given was about how a PETA local group befriended some latinos, and later came back when they were at work, lured their dogs and killed them in their dog-killing van. PETA supports bans of specific breeds, these breeds are commonly owned by blacks or latinos, and those bans are also pushed by the conservative right-wing who sometimes openly say that keeping the dog breeds out will prevent the "type of person" who owns those breeds from moving into their communities. They mean black and latino people. It's notable that these types of breed-bans never seem to extend to rottweilers, dobermans or other types of large dogs which can be dangerous but are commonly owned by white people.

Source article:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/killing-animals-petas-open-secret_b_59e78243e4b0e60c4aa36711

On October 18, 2014, two employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals drove their van to the small  community of Parksley, Virginia. Parksley is an out of the way rural town of less than 1,000 people. The destination of the PETA van was a trailer park located there, made up largely of poor, Spanish speaking immigrants. The park is described by a local resident as “difficult to find unless you know where you are going.” The PETA employees knew exactly where they were going because they had been there before.

Over several weeks, PETA representatives had been visiting the trailer park and befriending the residents. They got to know who lived where and who had dogs and cats. They sat with the families on their porches, talking to them, offering biscuits to the dogs, promoting vaccinations, sterilization, and other PETA services. One of the families they spent time with had a three year old Chihuahua named Maya, a happy, healthy, and beloved dog. And on October 18, her home was one of the houses PETA set out to visit. This time, however, they were not there to talk to the family or any of the other residents or to offer any kind of assistance. In fact, they knew the family was not home.

The PETA employees backed their van up to the porch and threw biscuits to Maya, who was sitting on her porch, hoping to coax her off her property and give PETA the ability to claim she was a stray dog “at large” whom they could therefore legally impound. In Virginia, PETA is licensed as an “animal shelter.” But Maya refused to stay off the property and after grabbing the biscuit, ran back to the safety of her porch. One of the employees went onto the property and stole Maya.

But larceny wasn’t the only law the PETA employees would break. Virginia law requires dogs to be held for five days before they can be killed by shelters. It also requires private shelters like PETA to notify the municipal animal control shelter of any “stray” dogs they take in. PETA would do neither. Within hours, Maya was dead. PETA had killed her with a lethal dose of poison.

[pisskop]

As if peta wasnt unappetizing enough

[Reelya]

Here's the relevant bit to read from the earlier Huffpost article:
(note that BSL stands for Breed Specific Legislation)

According to the Washington Post, pit bull bans are more about disparaging racial attitudes than they are about public safety, serving as  “proxies by which uneasy majorities can register their suspicions about the race, class and ethnicity of the people who own those dogs.” The roots of Miami-Dade’s pit bull ban, which PETA supports, was growing anxiety and social tension about Cuban immigration. Denver’s ban, which PETA also supports, was enacted after the energy industry bust resulted in “migration [that] dramatically changed the population of the city”: whites moved out and Latinos moved in. When Aurora, CO, enacted a ban, one of the commissioners stated that she did not want “those sorts of people” moving into her community. When then-Mayor Ed Koch sought similar measures in New York City, he did not do so because of evidence that the dogs were dangerous but because “of who was thought to own them.” In Sterling Heights, MI — a sundown town that once excluded African Americans — a supporter of the pit bull ban called it necessary because, “We have inner-city people who bought homes here.” In Ellenville, NY, officials did not even bother using coded language. They wanted BSL to address the growing number “of Mexicans moving into the community.” In short, says one target of the ban, “it seems that ‘pit bull’ has become a synonym for ‘black.’” Not surprisingly, support for BSL remains strongest with older, white, and more conservative voters and in predominantly white suburbs.

Former PETA employees note that PETA’s “Community Animal Project” often focuses on poor, immigrant, Spanish-speaking, and possibly undocumented populations, which is precisely the sort of neighborhood from which Maya was stolen. When Maya’s family sued, PETA unsuccessfully tried to defend itself by seeking information as to the family’s immigration status under the implied argument that either people in this country illegally do not deserve dogs or, at the least, stealing and killing their dogs should not be actionable in court. In fact, many of the animals PETA kills are from neighborhoods deemed undesirable by the men and women who — indifferent to the pain they cause families — PETA hires to go into poor neighborhoods of color to round up and kill their animals.

[McTraveller]

Ok Code Vein is very questionable - forced exposition, etc.  World building should really not take exposition like that - you should just learn about it as you go.  What happened to good storytelling?