By the rules of the game you can't surprise someone who is aware of your presence, so you're correct.
That also means you don't automatically get to interrupt a monologue by blasting the bbeg in the face mid-sentence. You need to roll initiative to see if you are able to act before they can respond.
But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby."
How does this make any sense at all? How does one "pass as even younger" but still somehow "look legal to passersby"? Those are directly conflicting concepts.
Alright, my bad, though you still haven't provided a link to any of these.
Also, from what I can see that 8645HS iGPU does not match a PS5 in performance and has exactly the same iGPU as the 8700G. It's not even close to a PS5's performance.
...none of the processors you list seem to exist? The only "7800" ryzen is the 7800X3D which retails for more than that by itself, let alone in a complete system, and I highly doubt you mean the A10 7800 which is over a decade old. No AMD CPU or APU that I can find has ever been branded as 8800 or 8900.
The closest and highest end match to any of those numbers, the 8700G, falls well short of a PS5. There's no way it counts as close unless you're talking astronomical scales and "within an order of magnitude" is considered "close". The iGPU on the 8700G being a newer architecture than the RDNA2 in the PS5 doesn't make up for the fact that the PS5 has three times as many compute units.
I'll happily eat crow if you can link to one of these alleged $300-$400 PCs.
That was your starting point, yes, but I disagree with your conclusion. Both parties pissing everyone off just deepens the current mire. At best you can argue from an accelerationist standpoint that the faster we make things worse the sooner people rebel against it, but I'm not enough of a pessimist to believe that's the best option.
The dems attracting consistent support would begin the lamentably slow process of digging out of the current situation. It should've started 20 or more years ago, but now is still better than never.
The Democrats are unlikely to enact meaningful change, sure, but if they consistently started winning it would create a political environment more conducive to change in the future. The republicans being unable to win would start shifting things in the other direction and it's delusional to think otherwise.
On the other hand, if both parties piss everyone off then the needle doesn't move as the parties lose support in equal measure. This seems to be where things currently sit.
To your last point, back when the Steam Deck launched they described its price point at the time as "painful" but felt it was necessary. Turns out they made the right call and it was wildly successful, so hopefully they stay the course on "painful" pricing.
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of "I'm better at everything because I'm the main character", but she's hardly alone in that, and it doesn't usually attract that much ire.
I really didn't understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
Just head down Randall's lane and take the turn at Carl's. You'll see it right past the old park.
*Randall hasn't lived there in thirty years and the civic name of the road is Oak Line. "Carl's" was bought out by a major chain back in 1998 and hasn't been called that in two decades, also you can turn in two directions at the intersection just past it (obviously you don't want to turn left at Carl's, there's nothing down that way). Oh, and the "old park" was actually closed down in the 80s and there's a warehouse in that lot now.
A distinction without a difference for the purposes of the conversation surrounding this insanity.
Both are illegal. Full stop. That's where the conversation needs to end when discussing whether or not someone should be prosecuted here.
The varying levels of severity aren't relevant at this stage.