Bartimaeus

There's something I haven't told anyone else until just now, but I, too, have had parasitic worms eat my brain. I would like to ask for thoughts and prayers for my family and I as we go through this difficult time. Thank you.

Man who literally had his brain devoured by parasitic worms reportedly plans to drop out and endorse Donald Trump - after polling made it repeatedly clear that he was taking more voters away from Trump rather than Kamala. A small but rather vicious part of me wonders how Keyrock and Guard Dog feel about their man with no brain leaving the race, especially in this manner.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023). It's...an odd duck of a film. It's more or less exactly what you might think it would be, which is a slow and sensitive coming-of-age film with a vampiric twist. I enjoyed it, but I confess to also being a little disappointed by it, I think it could've been great by being a little more creative and energetic than it was.

That's actually what I meant, but my post was admittedly not very clear. My understanding is that more exposure to bacteria at a very young age (including from breastfeeding) leads to better outcomes. I assume there's also something relevant here with regards to early life gut health (and again, transfer from the mother!), which from everything I've heard over the past few years is an area of increasing interest for determining later life health outcomes and maybe even childhood brain disorders like autism. tl;dr: The vast majority of bacteria is either harmless or actively good for us, especially when we're very young.

I might be wrong, but from what I remember when I was a kid, other kids did have food allergies, it's just that the school didn't really care enough to alert the other parents/students, much less tell them not to bring those foods to school. One of my friends in 3rd and 4th grade was allergic to chocolate, but it was totally left up to him to deal with that. Meanwhile, peanut butter is straight up banned in my nieces' school, which seems just crazy to me. Pretty sure I've heard that children not being exposed to enough foods from a very early age tends to increase allergic reactions, and there's probably something to do with bacterial exposure (and transfer from the mother during pregnancy, childbirth, and when breastfeeding) as well. C-section babies supposedly have a much higher incidence of allergies, so I'm sure all sorts of small and difficult to quantify things go into it. Maybe even the micro-plastics completely permeating and poisoning our environments/bodies like @LadyCrimson mentioned above also have something to do with it...you never know.

Yeah, I think it was very unnecessary to give instructions to enable the built-in administrator account, but the uploader's reply to the top comment saying "please don't do this" makes it pretty clear that they didn't have any clue exactly what they were suggesting to do before they went ahead and did exactly that. I guess the channel's name is "Hardware Unboxed" and not "Software Unboxed" for a reason. I'm curious to know whether the same benefit is experienced if UAC is hard-disabled, which gets you most but not quite all of the way there, though I don't recommend general users do that either. The recommendation really should've just been "wait for Microsoft to fix it".

It was a new addition for this Olympics, and also it's not going to be back in 2028 (though that doesn't necessarily preclude it from returning at some later date; it was decided against for 2028 before the 2024 Olympics even started). I always thought the "amateurs only" rule was silly. Let's have a competition to determine who are the best...buuut let's not include the people that, you know, actually get paid to be the best to do it. And let's ignore that all the Eastern bloc countries were effectively skirting around that restriction by having their governments be the ones who were training, funding, and supporting their top athletes, while we give all the best Western athletes the boot because it was private businesses instead. Farcical. No, we won't ever have an our-amateurs-beating-their-professionals a la the Miracle on Ice again, but that shouldn't have ever been a thing in the first place.

tl;dr: Supposed power efficiency gains with Zen 5 are largely non-existent in gaming workloads (though it is improved for all-core/production workloads), so given that performance is essentially the same, this new generation looks fairly pointless for gaming, go get a 7800X3D if you're building a new PC for that, which performs better and is more efficient for gaming.

That's a pretty attractive trailer...but, why do I know that name, and why do I hate it? One moment, I need to go to Wikipedia real quick. Oh yes, now I remember: it's because I've been tricked into watching a couple of this guy's so-called "films" before, without having realized what I was getting into before starting them. I learned better after the second one. I'm reading now that he has publicly protested this version of the film, which given the positive reviews that have come out, I can only assume is a very good thing.

Rest in peace, X-Ray Engine. You were a load of janked garbage that never worked, but you were my load of janked garbage that never worked.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has become very difficult for me to play, unfortunately - it's always been too demanding on my ravaged hands/wrists, and trying to use a controller to play those games is way too frustrating. The last time I played any S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a couple of years ago when I finally gave the cut-down and rebalanced Lost Alpha mod a proper go, and I think I got about ten to maybe fifteen hours into it over a few weeks before the pain became too much and too constant to the point of affecting the rest of my life on a daily basis, so I uninstalled it and kind of consciously made the decision there that I just would not be able to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for the rest of my life. It's just too much. In contrast, I've been able to handle New Vegas in moderation without too much ill-effect so far, though I've been making great use of aiming/iron sights being bound to ALT instead of right-click, which helps a lot.

Not useless, but a little less insane. With the accuracy-affecting mods I installed ([1], [2], [3], [4]), the idea seems to be that first shots when fired from iron sights are generally pretty accurate (though still subject to a weapons' base accuracy, so not like perfect if you're at a pretty good distance), while subsequent shots fired soon after are subject to both degrading accuracy as well as recoil if you don't give it a moment to let it reset. Recoil is especially bad if you do not meet the minimum stat requirements on a weapon, just as it is in the original game (particularly noticeable with automatic weapons). Accuracy and damage still improve with higher skill levels, it's just...you know, if you take the time to line up a shot that's not even very far away, you can now expect the bullet to not go wildly off direction like it used to, or for your weapon to just be wobbling and swaying all the time like it does in the vanilla game, or for the iron sight to be visually inaccurate because the devs unfortunately didn't line the iron sight up with the actual center of the screen, all of which is important to especially me because I literally never use VATS and so I need to have some way of approaching combat that doesn't feel like poopy doodoo all the time (that or go all melee weapons, but that's not really my thing in these games either). But I can assure you that every time I get into combat where I need to burst off more than a couple of shots, I'm still very much feeling how bad my accuracy is at my Gun skill level of 35 even when using something as simple as a revolver. As for why no VATS at all...I've just never found it satisfying to use, you effectively pause the game to take control out of your own hands and instead put it into a random number generator, and a painfully slow and very goofy-looking one at that. Never felt like a good marriage to this kind of action-y gameplay to me, but obviously other people strongly disagree. Oh yeah, I always did that in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as well. I'd always have a container for all the artifacts I'd ever found throughout the game, a container for one of each of all the armors in the game, a container for one of each of all the weapons in the game... I didn't usually go so far as to upgrade the ones I wasn't going to use though (actually, if I had one I was going to use, then I'd always make sure to have a second untouched copy still in the container instead).

One thing I do appreciate about the garbage can man (aka Kevin Durant) is that he has consistently shown up for the Olympics over his career. And I don't just mean that he played well, but rather that he actually committed to playing for the team, which is something that a lot of our stars have often declined to do. Though LeBron claims MVP of the tournament, Durant has been instrumental in leading team USA to 4 straight gold medals, which is actually a pretty rare feat for Olympic athletes. I think Serbia was the second best team, but it's always been the case that the two best teams can meet earlier in a playoff tourney than right at the end, it's just sometimes how it works out.

I've put like twenty hours into Fallout: New Vegas over the last few weeks after finding a few popular mods that changed how the accuracy of weapons work to make it...uhh, not dumb basically, and have actually been having a pretty good time, especially because I mostly play a stealthy shoot people in the head and/or backstab them type of player (which is pretty necessary given how clunky and bad the combat in this engine is). This approach has been working well, except for when I run into enemies who don't want to die and I get brutally murdered because my weapons are junk outside of stealth...which has happened a lot with mutants/monsters. But the worst part of the game is my own fault, which is the obsessive compulsive kleptomania that afflicts me whenever I play a game like this. I must...steal...all the things. I have a bunch of organized containers in the game's first town's gas station where I'm slowly but surely getting every single type of item into pristine condition by finding other copies of them and repairing them. I know it's just a pool cue and I'm never actually going to use it as a weapon, but I want to have a perfect copy of it. Please send help.

I got me a Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition in a closet somewhere... Idle power usage isn't disastrous by any means and does look mildly improved over the Zen 4, but still does leave a little to be desired next to the Intel chips. Kind of have to think idle power usage is an important metric for laptops and other battery-driven devices, no? Though how desktop chips are tuned versus laptop chips is a whole other thing, so it's not necessarily indicative of much yet. But look at that darling 5800X3D there hanging with the Intel chips (and also the 3900X): what a beaut. I don't think anybody sensible is going to upgrade from one of those any time soon...it's got long legs.

Patlabor: The Movie (1989) by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell, Angel's Egg, Jin-Ro et al.). Ostensibly a big dumb mech movie for a big dumb mech series, for this movie, Mamoru Oshii transformed Patlabor into a slow-moving investigative mystery. There are like maybe ten minutes of action throughout the whole film...a little bit right at the beginning, and the rest right at the end. One thing I do always appreciate about Oshii films is that even though they tend to be thematically heavy to the point of being nearly overbearing, his films are still able to have characters that don't feel like they only exist for the purpose of a delivering a message or the plot, which saves them from being too lifeless and pointed. It's always been a problem that a lot of other more "serious" animes of the time fell victim to which his films largely seem to avoid. So even though I think the story of this film is a bit dumb on the whole, I still had a good time, it's a cute and enjoyable movie - and with a Kenji Kawai soundtrack to help sell its moodier-than-expected atmosphere to boot.

Some synthetic benchmarking of the new micro-code that supposedly fixes the power degradation issues (scroll down): https://tweakers.net/reviews/12320/hoeveel-trager-worden-intel-processors-door-de-nieuwe-default-settings.html tl;dr: Typically a small performance dip (5-10%) versus prior benchmarks, occasionally more significant, occasionally less or even nothing at all...also, occasionally actually better! Mildly reduces clock speeds across the board, reduces power draw significantly in the 14th gen (but weirdly not the 13th). I hope chasing top performance no matter what was worth all this, Intel. (e): Actually, I misread: this doesn't seem to be the new micro-code that just came out (which Asus was the first to release as a beta version of earlier today, and these tests were done with a Gigabyte board anyways), but rather the cumulative micro-code changes that Intel has already made over the past year. Still useful information to know given initial benchmarks of these chips versus benchmarks you might see if they were tested today, but I guess hold onto your horses to see what the latest will actually do. Guess that's what I get for seeing "Asus releases new BIOS beta with Intel's micro-code changes" and then "these guys re-tested and compared 2023 to latest bios update" right after each other and making assumptions from that.

Yes, if you can perform the same at significantly better power efficiency or perform significantly better at the same power efficiency, it's an upgrade...assuming it works both ways. There's always been exponentially diminishing returns as you feed these Zen CPUs more power though, so we'll see how that works out in practice in the coming weeks. AMD should've made sure its release was squeaky clean with good communication of these facts and making sure existing motherboards had stable and functional BIOS updates ready, especially after delaying it for half a month, and that doesn't seem to have happened.

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

Tim Walz, Minnesota's and my governor, is reportedly Harris' pick for Vice President. Very pleased (and surprised!) that he was the choice.

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.

Yikes. As much as I would heartily laugh if Intel were to ever fail entirely, it would be quickly followed by some very grave contemplation. But hey, if AMD survived [insert unending horde of problems they faced for many years here], I think Intel will be okay.

Lily C.A.T. (1987). It's like an Alien and The Thing two-for-one combo rip-off, but instead of being the best thing ever like it should be, it's just pretty alright. It's the only one of these I don't have any misgivings about having watched. A.D. Police Files (1990). (If I could find a not terrible quality poster for this, it would be inserted here.) @Malcador reminded me that this exists. Overall, not a huge fan: first episode (lady cyborg who goes crazy because of being overworked) was pretty meh, second episode (lady cyborg who goes crazy because she couldn't go back to being fully human again) was O.K., third episode (guy cyborg who goes crazy because he replaced his entire body with machine parts and then got addicted to steroids) was pretty bad. None of them had anything to do with each other except for exploring similar ideas, they're standalone stories within the Bubblegum Crisis setting, which seemed to at least be better and more consistent than this, though I've yet to finish it. Windaria (1986). Felt vaguely like a Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind rip-off in terms of visuals, tone, and style...but pretty bad because of atrocious characters and writing, neither elements of which had much if any resemblance to Nausicaa. Look, the girl in the poster even stole Nausicaa's fox-squirrel pet. Not that it does anything throughout the whole film...or, uh, maybe it did and I already forgot. The story is some really basic Romeo and Juliette crap, and I really don't have any interest in describing it further. Golgo 13: Queen Bee (1998). This is one of the worst things I've ever seen. One of those cases I've mentioned before where it attempts to have some kind of story and emotional core that the viewer is supposed to connect with but because it's so completely terrible and at odds with itself (while also offering nothing else of interest), watching mindless action trash would have been less offensive. I hope the idiots that made this stub their pinky toes in real life today.

Everyone loves politics in their entertainment. They just hate it when it's not their politics.

Thanks for the wisdom, Mr. G. I think we should elect that guy, he's clearly aware of the dangers of authoritarianism! Oh...that Joseph G. Well, maybe not.