LadyCrimson

I think it's like with almost anything else in that kind of category. Under "normal" health-wise conditions, a couple sodas or beers or donuts once in a while is no big deal. It's unlikely to do any big harm. The problem comes when it's more of an addiction so it's more like 6+ a day or whatever and over 2-3 decades etc. Hubby is basically a high-functioning alcoholic and has been forever. Started as a self-medication re: sleep apnea coping issues. When we were young, he'd drown in 2-3 pots of coffee in the morning/early afternoon, and by early evening/after work it was a six pack of beer. He's not a fall-down drunk with any major personality changes (maybe 1 beer an hour until bed, he only wants a certain level of it) but he's definitely an addict. He managed to cut down coffee to a few cups in the morning, but the beer - nope. He managed to quit for about a year once (just like my diet soda fixation), but that's it. We are both "addictive/obsessive" personalities, I'm afraid. :D

^ By "backslide" I mostly meant the inability to be religiously consistent. Moderate level of yo-yo-ing. Not a long term fall off. Like, a super regular workout schedule/routine, every day/week. Or in terms of diet, two weeks "healthy", then can't resist whatever junk/fast/"bad" food for a couple days (pizza, not-low carb Chinese, whatever). Chocolate-stuffed croissants were invented by the devil and I will hoover those like a starving dog, then punch myself in the face for three hours after. On the bright side, I discovered ChocZero. It uses monkfruit, which most of the time I don't like because of an aftertaste, but their biscuits and chocolate bars are "acceptable." For me they don't bother digestive at all and don't appear to produce big glucose spikes. So slightly less self-face-punching when I order some of those. At least I was never interested in drinking/hard drugs. Nor parachuting, cave diving, auto racing, bronco-bucking etc. But apparently, diet-Mt Dew is my biggest (mental) addiction. :P

I find as one ages farther and farther, there are two main types: ---those that increase healthy living to a quite large degree (or always did) and stay there --those that increase it a little (by choice or circumstance) in an effort to at least not age too "poorly", but always constantly backslide into "no one lives forever/YOLO" You can guess which one I am. I try to be healthier than I was at 25, certainly, especially re: T2 diabetes, processed food/diet, some amount of exercise to try to stave off mobility issues etc, but at the end of the day I'm mostly rolling the dice with whatever genetics may have in store for me. I've had a good life so far - it's fine.

Debating with myself whether I want to deal with 30-35fps in CD to use Ray Reconstruction/Max Lighting. On old CRT's 30fps was fine but heavy modern games at 30fps on modern display tech is too sluggish. 45ish is my usual limit. --Game just looks so much better with RR on, even using DLSS Ultra Performance and some of the effects settings turned down. The noisy pixel/shadow-lighting, ghosting, too-soft, etc. --The reason why you can play CD fairly well on older systems seems to be because they decided only RR-On gets the modern-day clarity/refined image treatment. --game still looks good (most of the time) without RR, but the difference is quite stark, at least to me. 🤔

I have yet to mini-game fish in CD. I simply swim around and catch by hand. It works so why not. Every medieval/fantasy game needs the hangin' tree, right? There are 7 trillion "jigsaw puzzle" scenes in this game. Still like his hair. And the cat. Especially the cat. (they've also added birds as tameable pets now, heh).

Recently: "I'm out of diet Mt. Dew. I think I'll try quitting again." (Not thinking about health reasons, just irritating "gotta go get some" mental dependence reasons). Last time I quit (for a year) was 25+ years ago. 3 days later - "yup, I still have essentially zero (caffeine) withdrawal of any kind. Not antsy, no headache, not grumpy. I'm fine." 7 days later - "still fine. but darnit, water is still so boring! (this is stupid I know, can't help it)." Can't/don't want sugary drinks, still don't like herb teas, every other diet-drink/flavor water tastes terrible to me etc 10 days later - "Honey, I'm going to the store." I am going to die with yellow-5-sucralose glowing blood and I no longer care.

Forgot - I tried swapping the DLSS 4+ .dll in CD with a DLSS 3.5 .dll. No clue why, but it seems to work better for me. Less pixelated image noise (foilage/grass, shadow/light noise, no more ghosting, and increased FPS by maybe 10fps. Image is maybe a tad softer but I increased sharpness on my monitor a small amount and it's fine. It's not perfect but it's better than default game DLSS. Maybe older nvida gpu's don't like 4+, or DLSS 4 sucks, or the fact I only install nvidia driver (no nvidia app with all the new ABCD options etc) affects something - who knows.

I watched it with a friend years ago. I think I wouldn't have enjoyed it quite as much without the share-with-friend aspect. It's kind of an uneven film, for me, when looked at as a whole. Like many, I mostly remember the axe-kill-dance scene. That was so funny. The satire of the men all showing off business cards as status/one-upmanship, too.

Crimson Desert - still playing my version 1.02.00 --every play session I go "Most current Faction quests done, time to do another MQ section, if I get to early Chapt. 11 I can probably ignore the MQ forever (for me) then!" Then 5 minutes after loading save, I'm distracted by something (I need to get more poison/ore/whatever) and go running off into the wilderness for 2.5 hrs. My "knowledge" entries are now around 1400 and I'd guess 65% of map exposed. --Kliff has this one, er, spell, called nature's snare. I just love this thing, the visual and animation of it. It's not actually really useful/needed most of the time, outside of certain boss types, but man I love using it. I so wish the game had had more "magic", even just a little more. Mostly it's socket-gems to give your weapons PoE-like ranged attacks. Effective, but I wanna Mage a bit here and there, not spam-fire lighting or mystical orbs or crows out of my sword. And I still keep kinda wanting to create a new start save folder, mostly to create a "perfect" Chapt 4-5 save as a starting point if I ever want to replay whole thing again, that sort of thing. Of course, it's unclear (or somewhat dubious) that I'd replay this game, so then I think it'd be a waste of tedious time. But my brain still wants to. And I still have a serious love/hate for the game. I'd say it does "get better" - if the sandbox aspects appeal to you - but man still so much to aggravate at the same time. yet I keep turning it on. :D :D

I finally watched Alien: Romulus before it left HBO/Max. I actually quite liked most of the first half or 2/3rds or so. Loads better than expected. I don't know when it exactly started to slide down for me - maybe after the first death or two. Mostly it became too much of a retread mix re: 1st two films - which is hard to avoid for this series, I know, but in theory is fine if it's done well. But it was only just ok, with other niggling issues as well, and my eyes started rolling a little too often. :D Still, I'd say I mostly liked it better than all the other films after 1 and 2. I was once again impressed with David Jonsson (1st seen by me in The Long Walk). The female lead/Ripley stand-in was decent too. The rest were meh. The entire original Alien cast, were all better/more engaging, even with shortish screen time, then the expendables in this one.

This is how I'm starting to feel re: what I consider ignorance of even the most basic computer concepts, online, these days. I know, we were all in the category of some kind of geek 20+ years ago, but still. It's horrible. "How do I backup a file." "There is no reason to backup when there's the Cloud" "File Explorer? What's that.". "I shouldn't have to back up my files (or do anything, really) just in case, too much effort, program sucks." I no longer even try to help ppl, half the time it's like talking to a 3 year old.

Law and Order season 21 via netflix - I guess they rebooted this series after a 10+ year hiatus. Still has Sam Waterson as the small-scene head honcho legal, although not a huge presence. Anyway, I haven't decided if the show is simply worse/more uneven than the early seasons of original series, or if it's because I'm too familiar with that whole routine. It's ok. I might watch ssn22 as the "on while making dinner" show. Most of the L&O series I liked the first 2 seasons a lot, then would forget all about them. L&O:SVU has been on forever I guess, surprised to see it was still going, lol. My favorite is still L&O:Criminal Intent, because of D'Onofrio's semi-Holmes detective. I think CSI:Las Vegas is still the only crime/investigation drama where I lasted 8+ seasons. When Season 9 started with a certain chr. being killed off, and I read W. Peterson was also quitting soon, I quit watching.

Irrationally irritated with all gaming, so I've been catching up on some TV/films (er, or at least clearing out the lists), plus taking a lot of naps. Seriously, I feel like I sleep half the day, but in small increments. Still no word re: hubby's back surgery. I am going stir-crazy with "what's the point in anything" grumbles to the max, I really need to get away. I asked hubby if he'd be mad if I went off somewhere wild by myself for a while (cause of his back, plus y'know, we don't have 100% the same interests) and it sounded like the answer would be yes, so -- I take naps. :p

Enshrouded - huge patch. Combat changes. Gear changes, mechanic changes. Forced skill tree reset. Feels like 1/4 of the long time player base hates it/quit the game. Not sure it's quite that bad, but nothing I care about so I may not update it. It at least has the excuse of Early Access re: mega changes. Crimson Desert - huuuuge patch. Initially broke stuff. Hotfix. Multi-storage changes. Skill changes. Nerfs. 3-tier difficulty mode added. Control changes (still can't rebind WASD or some others). Fluff added (more cats, more outfits etc). Pet's ability to loot for you still seems half-broken. Still the worst implementation (graphically) of DLSS (major noise, ghosting in some scenarios, blur for some people) I've seen in years and all they do is focus on ray reconstruction improvement (noise goes away if you turn that on, pfft). I'm going back to previous version and probably staying there until I "finish" the game. semi-rant I'm all for QoL (bigger stash? sure) and options (difficulty options? added end-game activtives? sure), bug, stability, and sure, extra cats, why not, but I'm so fed up with feeling like every 2-3 months (or weeks) a game is no longer the same game I paid for. And half of it, in my mind, is because the "masses" whine and demand that every game be like/have the same features of a previous favorite game, and the dev's constantly capitulate. So in the end it's all the same slop. Frustrating as I found these two games in a love/hate kind of way, at the same time, at least they felt a bit different. Every patch slowly removes that individuality. It's tiresome. Even Teddy's Heaven is going that way - pretty soon it'll just be another tired same-y "shop" game. Yes, I know, sometimes constant patching works in favor. I'm just saying. end-rant

Cat: "Wasn't me."