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This is far better than my wildest dreams. To quote Steve: "It's the Skylake stagnation all over again." Well, and the memory stability problems of early AM5 are back with a vengeance. Steve found two positive things in his review: 1. It is really efficient 2. It is not from Intel Love the (admittedly few, but existing) benchmarks where the 9700X is behind the 7700X. Edit: Guess I was wrong, ey?

Do you think the likes of Mali and Niger matter when it comes to whatever the Global South thinks? There is no such thing as a united Global South, thats basically a BRICS term that gets selectively used depending on the topic and geopolitical development What really matters is regional seats of power that are functional and efficient and as far as Africa is concerned that is suppose to be the African Union which is intended to speak on behalf of a united Africa like the EU but the AU is not united on a myriad of issues both on the continent and internationally and countries like Mali, Niger and Burkina Fuso have been suspended from the AU because the AU doesnt accept military coups as a type of leadership change and never will So these 3 countries now represent there own regional group united by military Juntas but they dont speak on behalf of the AU or whatever the " Global South " is suppose to mean

The newest blog by @MedicineDan is now live. Get a cup of coffee or something cold on this summer day and take some time to explore "We are What We Play" ...

I do like that they've reined in the power consumption of the X CPUs to be more in line with the non-X Zen 4 CPUs, even if it makes the raw performance improvement over Zen 4 look poor. A simple 8C/16T CPU at ~135W was not the direction I liked AMD going in, so I'm glad they've not done an Intel and kept pushing up the power limits. That's not the full story of course. 7700X to 9700X, 5% improvement for around 40% less power? Great, I wouldn't complain if that was what we got compared to the previous best. The problem though is that the 7700 exists, and suddenly the 9700X is more like 8% faster for zero improvement in wattage, significantly less impressive. And also probably a sign that there won't be a cut-price 9700 in our future. Ah well.

Botswana ratified the peace summint memorandum a day after “Mali diplomatic incident” . Seems like it affects the “Global South” as much as bombing children hospitals afects Nestle doing business in Russia and the Kursk, well, this is becoming very juicy. Russian milbloggers have confirmed operational encirclement of Sudzha, which means approx 15 kms in a day, or in other numbers, 2 months and 20k of casualties of Russian Advance in Pokrovsk Direction, after the fall of Avdiivka

Because gamers are discerning and intelligent people.

Started again with Rogue Trader. Tried to see if there is an optimal way of doing the first chapter. In Dragon Age Origins, the optimal play was to not finish areas, but to hop back and forth to unlock always just enough to get a better outcome somewhere else. (Mainly to help the possessed child) Rogue Trader it turns out locks in where you have gone first on arrival. Land, take off, go somewhere else and do that first will still act as if you spent time in the first option. At the same time, minor flavour items will react to the actual order you did things, referencing that npcs are dead even though in the grand scheme the game state of the location thinks you haven't been to where you'd kill those NPCs.

The absolute madman actually said it lmao.

i don't think it's listed anywhere in-game, but the barring death's door trigger (as well as the other ones) for nemnok's cloak functions only one per rest, so you'd have to rest in between doing this.

Skyrim. It appears that you can get pets now. Well so my mage did find one. Looks like a something born out of love between a spider and a mantis, sounds like a tank when walking. Which is kind of grating especially when you try to sneak, but as soon as I found out it messes with enemy pathfinding I'm more than happy to tolerate it in exchange for draugrs doing nothing but very intense eye contact while I pelt them from behind of my spider-mantis mini tank. Elsewhere in Skyrim, I went werewolf. They have their own skill tree and everything now. So I went on some official Companion Guild quest, turned the wolf on, cleared the dungeon, gained a few perks, cool, but it would be pity to let the wolf timer expire without doing some more maulin', I thought. Could come back for loot later, I thought. ...probably half a map later I'm still a wolf. See, wolf timer gets prolonged every time you eat someone and I've forgotten just how many bandits and necromancers are there everywhere in Skyrim. Eventually it should expire some day because I avoid towns and undead are inedible, but I'm keeping the wolf on out of sporting interest now - I want to see that trail of destruction on the map. When I'm allowed to use it again, because werewolves cannot read maps. I do hope my companion is okay, I lost him, like, 30 dungeons ago.

Conan Exiles does not require online access. They set it up so you can play it single-player/LAN.

Given the fiasco with John Deere, a precedent's not needed. I guess in a certain way we've been here before, with Apple and maybe IBM going further back ? Largely will be a lot of independent scuffles in given industries, I feel. But I don't think either way gaming will die, it'll just be more an intolerable pain in the ass, which it has been for me for 15 years or so at this point, heh.

adding onto this - on paper do1000c can do crazy things, but when i actually ran a party with a SC cipher that did this (i think ydwin) it was extremely underwhelming. on most enemies and in most fights, it's completely overkill - a disintegrate is cheaper and will do basically the same thing. i would rather disintegrate more enemies than try to set up a single do1000c + antipathetic field on one target (that's almost enough for a second disintegrate). (edit: i guess with an ascendant you could do a lot more dumping of do1000c on enemy mobs, but you could also do other insane stuff with an ascendant and i'm not sure do1000c spamming is the best use of it) on most bosses, it's close to overkill as well - a disintegrate is cheaper and requires less setup. it's really, really painful to miss or even graze do1000c, and then you actually need some enemy to help trigger a shred combo - or you need to somehow be generating tons of focus and consistently landing a different shred spell... it's kind of a waste of a cipher's action economy honestly. in the end it was mostly just useful as a secondary disintegrate for after when i'd already hit disintegrate and other debuffs on the boss. also it's lame that the tier 3 beam spell is tagged as echo and not shred

A little bit more into the Shrine of Amana again. I am spending now a little bit less time, as I would like to, but having a shoulder injury makes it very painful, whenever I sit and play behind my PS for more than 1 and half hour. Anyway, Looking Glass Knight has been defeated. Not much trouble, as I have called two summons just for the laugh I did not wanted to spent to much time with the fight, knowing, what awaits me next… Shrine of Amana… As I have mentioned before, to my surprise, the areas up to the second bonfire have been “blessed” by much better mob placing, than in Vanilla, so it was not as painful, as I have expected. Of course, I’ve made few stupid moves, so my Deathcounter has increased again, but it was much, much better experience this time around. The issue for me was the third part, before Demon of Song, I have destroyed my equipment few times in the mist from the giant “Sponge Bob”, and then I have spent few times clearing the area, out of the cave, as I forgot, that there is a red phantom invader, and I wanted my Awestone a lot, so I had to change the covenant just for this fight. Of course, I have died in this area as well, so I had to repeat it again and slowly with a crossbow. I have not found a 100% safe way to clear the mobs with melee, like the previous area, so it took a lot of time to get to Demon of Song. I went back to call phantom for the fight, and went through the fog. Took me three tries, as a felt to tired from my pain, but I wanted to get the giant toad at all costs. Of course two more tries meant two more clearings of the pond mobs, so it took me a lot of time to start a new fight. But my goal was fulfilled. With deathcounter stopping at 109 wipes.

Why is it highly likely that they took it from gaming? Seems just how would go as the opportunity is there, so if gaming's "saved", they'll still lock in, or try to lock in people with tractors, or toasters or whatever. So seems independent of a lot else, was just one of his selling points that didn't work with me I'd expect non-AAA gaming wouldn't have the means for these systems, and programming is more and more accessible these days. More of a worst case scenario, heh, well or if "saving" is the right term. I still don't think it's worth saving though

I am looking at The Golden Dragon build that I just found. Seems very fun and a great theme. So handsome too! I think I prefer this over a Firebrand build. another option would be something like this, TWS with HoF. I will experiment.

Yeah, Ross' campaign (Accursed Farms) didn't really need to be gaming-specific here, the right to be able to use the things that you've bought seems like it should be pretty obvious and inalienable.

balance is good especially early and mid game. i don't mind late game being slightly overpowered. a complete balance game in single player games are boring obsidian. imagine no one will be posting builds as nothing is good. this on the other hand is different if the game has multiplayer component. ideally, my hope is that player decision (whatever build and multiclass that player decides) should be equally good. but this don't seems to be the case. also i find that many subclasses are really meh. the penalty is far worst than the benefits it's getting. i do hope you can spend time in buffing some builds and not just nerfs whichever popular builds that was posted by community which is your best talent in doing so

I agree. Many times I plan a character thinking about how to make them powerful, just to mess the build with something I think is cool. That's the reason why the only big concern I have is about Martial Single Class Ressource Pool. They're currently so low that their High Tier abilities can't be used more than a couple of time. Their sustainability is abysmal compared to infinite ressource classes, single casters or multiclass martial. And that feels weak and kills the fun at the same time ^^ The one exception to this is probably single-class monk, which has very good PL 8 and 9 abilities that make the trade off worth it (that and the split resource pool). I agree that they should increase resource pool for single classes, but the better alternative would be to give all martial classes a variety of high level actives that are genuinely powerfu/attractive and not unreasonably high in cost. If investing in a single class character track means sacrificing that much power pool, there needs to be at least one ability that's the martial equivalent of missile salvo, symbol of eothas, etc..

Oh no, it's happening again... Intel falls off a cliff, and AMD immediately rests on its laurels.