LadyCrimson

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."

melkathi probably has more creativity (not to mention energy) in one hair follicle than I have in my whole body. Will we get a picture of the cat-pattern for the floor?

The Pitt finale: Hm. I feel like they were trying to duplicate some of the tension re: a certain chr. ethics confrontation of the 1st season and it didn't work quite as well. They also didn't really address/conclude Robby's big "issue" (job related depression) of the season - to be fair, all the docs on the show suffer from at least some level of stress burnout, it's kind of a show-topic - although it wouldn't surprise me at all if the 3rd season starts with: So final episode fell a little flat, for me. Still decent tho. I'll still check out season 3, at least. At this point I kind of want more focus on the other main-side chrs. I know Robby is the leader but the dynamics of at least of a couple of the other regulars would be more interesting to develop.

Crimson Desert - ---my camp finally has a barber. You cannot change Kliff's face, so I tried trimming his beard a bit and cutting/coloring his hair. But then I missed his glorious, dark, wind swept locks and reverted to original hair. I kept the more tidy beard. ---I climbed a snow peak, because a giant tower was on the top and was curious. Was almost to the top when a cutscene suddenly swept me away into a tower locked boss fight with a flying wizard. Killed me a couple times with nasty air attacks. So I countered with my magic swirly repel+attack to dmg. and knocked him down on his butt a few times to wail on him and win. guess I'm OP now. then the area teleported me to an Abyss/puzzle (sky) location. Said "nah" and went back to the ground. ---I climbed another snowy peak in the middle of nowhere. Looked down upon a big square courtyard type building surrounded with lava rivers. Thought to myself "bet that's a story boss location" and left without bothering to go down and look. ---saw a woman in a tent mumbling about the cold. Could have run past, but started a fire for her. She thanked me then teleported away, asking me to visit. eg, I found my 3rd Witch. That was a pretty out of the way location. Wonder where the 4th will be. --found a couple caves full of gold ore to mine and some treasures (that I don't need, but hey, it's treasure). Game is definitely its best when random exploring. Unfortunate that MQ gates so many quests and even npc's etc. But yet, I think if you rush MQ toooo fast, you might lock yourself out of certain things/small quests without realizing. So game still has poor management? telegraphing? information? lack of dev foresight? in that fashion.

Bunch a guys riding giant iguanas or something attacked me for no reason. So I killed half of them, then stole one of their rides and killed the other half. The little beasties even had a purple spit ranged attack. That was pretty fun. Alas, couldn't perm keep the ride, as usual. Why do the enemies have all the hotrods. Mundane sights you sometimes see while randomly roaming. Mundane, but nifty enough to admire for a few moments, before shooting them full of arrows because I need their antlers. :P

I finally got around to watching Nobody 2. The first one as a lot better. Sequel tried, and had a few fun moments, but it kind of went nowhere. Oh well. :) The Pitt ssn2 continues to improve and I'm liking it a lot, again. The season overall is more uneven than the 1st, but still good. Final episode was yesterday/gonna watch it right now I think.