Zoraptor

Eh, pretty strong rumour is that nVidia's 7nm is not announced due to them committing to Samsung 7nm instead of TSMC and Samsung's 7nm process being about as broken as Intel's 10nm- so nVidia cannot get top tier chips off it, TSMC's 7nm is by all accounts fully booked until their next plant comes online and Apple finishes up their orders, so even if nVidia wanted to do a 7nm release they cannot. And given Jensen's abysmal interpersonal skills who knows if he's burnt the bridges to TSMC along with the bridges to Intel, MS and Sony. Not that it really matters so far as nVidia is concerned, at the moment. AMD actually has no problem at all with raw performance, Vega was so popular for mining because it had great raw number crunching power. RDNA is also equal to Turing there. Their problem is turning their theoretical performance into practical performance and competing with stuff like nVidia's texture compression (albeit that ensures I'll never buy nVidia, while faster I find their colours to be badly washed out). AMD's real advantage will come when/ if they can start producing 'proper' APUs as that will eat nVidia's low/ mid end desktop and laptop lunch and when they've got Infinity Fabric/ Multi Chip Module video cards. On the V64 vs 5700xt comparison, remember the 5700xt only has 44 CUs vs a V64's, uh, 64. There's a pretty significant practical performance increase on a like to like basis, around 40%, it's just hidden by not having an RDNA card with 64CUs to do a direct comparison. End of the day matching nVidia in performance is irrelevant anyway, practically. Even when they've beaten nVidia in basically everything- price, performance, efficiency- nVidia has more sales; the 570 brutally murdered the 1050/Ti price performance wise yet the nVidia card sold better. [I'd put money on the actual top AMD card not being the rumoured 2080Ti competitor Navi21/ 80CU with that being the tier 2 card]

Trump simply doesn't have the ability to 'think' about such things, he lacks any depth of knowledge or critical acumen beyond seeing everything as a business transaction. Situation would have been something like he'd have got a phone call from Netanyahu urging him to 'eliminate a terrorist' and done it with no one left to tell him that it's the equivalent of eliminating the US SecDef, if the US SecDef happened to also be George Washington- Soleimani was ludicrously popular in Iran, even US surveys had him at 80% approval. He was also ludicrously popular in places the US really needs for when they'll be kicked out of Iraq, like Iraqi Kurdistan since Soleimani lead the Iranian response to Anfal and Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds at a time when the US was still arming Saddam and claiming it was Iran framing Iraq for the CW attacks. Of course, the main US supporter there and his party was actually working for Saddam while his compatriots were being gassed...

I've never had any significant technical problems with Origins software (or uPlay for that matter). Very occasional crash, but I'm talking once or twice over multiple years. Only ever used it as a launcher though so I have no comment on its other aspects, but then Fallen Order is also single player so Origin would be just a launcher for it The only 'moral' reason not to was for people who believed poor multi billionaire monopolist Gabe Newell was being bullied, bullied, by nasty EA refusing to give him 30% of their PC revenue. Even that is out of date now.

Hmm. CNN did not break the story of Libyan slaving. It's been going on since 2012 so it took them 5 years to report on it. They did however try to run interference by blaming ISIS for it. Which as with most good propaganda is true, from a certain point of view, however... There's massive slaving still going on despite ISIS practically not existing any more in Libya. The primary slavers are, surprise surprise, western backed militias- and always have been. The collapse of Libya was 100% due to the west. Not the US in this case which largely got dragged along by its allies, but due to that noxious dwarf war criminal Nicolas Sarkozy wanting to cover up getting illegal donations from Gaddafi. Libyans were literally 100% better off under Gaddafi in every conceivable way and every conceivable measure, including the possiblity of arbitrarily being tortured or killed from which the threat now comes from a befuddling array of possibilities rather than just if you challenged Muammar. The popular revolution was so powerful that even with NATO illegally acting as its airforce the rebels still took 6 months to win.

Iraqi TV and a Hezbollah TV channel (and secondary sources like Al Jazeera quoting them) are reporting that the US has droned Qassem Soleimani and PMU head al Muhandis. If so, it's difficult to see anything other than outright war following, but there are also sources (eg BBC Arabic) denying it and the whole situation is pretty murky- the initial reports were of an attack being made on US troops at Baghdad Airport. Given that 10 Iraqi soldiers proper are also reported dead or injured I'd suspect at very least the US is going to be 'invited' to leave Iraq in the next few days.

Libya having huge migrant exploitation and literal slave markets has been known for absolute ages, but nearly no one in the press wants to actually report on it- mostly because it would involve strong tacit criticism of an intervention they were wildly supportive of and make other interventions they're wildly supportive of harder to sell. The really weird thing about Libya is the split in who supports which faction. Sworn enemies in Syria- Russia, Syria; UAE, KSA, France and Israel along with Egypt which was broadly neutral- all teaming up to take on the Turkish backed formal government in Tripoli, and Turkey is even flying in the jihadi mercenaries it used in its ethnic cleansing campaign in northern Syria as expendable cannon fodder.

Beeb's understating it, by a fair bit, though it's a lot clearer in the South Island today than yesterday when that pic was taken. Here in the northern North Island it's pretty much like a London afternoon, a bit hazy and very yellow light but not Mars sandstorm. Should probably be said that the phenomenon leading to the fires is 100% natural (Indian Ocean dipole, for those familiar more with Pacific patterns it's basically El Nino just for the Indian Ocean) but the severity has been made a lot worse by warming temperatures. Think my favourite ScoMo comment was saying that "now isn't the time to talk about climate change and anyone doing so was playing politics with tragedy". Not a dfirect quote, but certainly the gist of it.

Largely reporting bias due to Betelgeuse being well known and 'everyone' wanting to witness a supernova- stars dim (or brighten) all the time, they just don't tend to make the news because GCK53421B doing it isn't very catchy. Somewhere, someone just choked on their empanada.

The sky is orange here, and we're 1500km of sea and a decent sized mountain range away. They've had to add a new 'fire haze' graphic to the weather forecasts. Might possibly be a good idea to start paying those 'volunteer' firefighters who've been working non stop for months, eh Mr Morrison?

Vice City radio, yes. GTA: SA radio even better. Though iirc they've lost a fair few songs if you play the download version due to expiring music rights. Fallout 3's radio had too few songs so I got sick of them very rapidly- Bongo in the Congo, again? oh no no no- and 3Dawg fighting the good fight with his voice by repeating my same exploit between every song too.

He's probably right though. 'Human nature'- which would likely apply to any intelligent species in a similar way- in the form of competition and selfishness drives societal and technological development, but it also ensures there will not be a unified response to problems that effect everyone no matter how pressing because no one wants to give up a competitive advantage.

Finished TVWItcher, and my expectations for a second season took a bit of a dive after the last two episodes. They were far too disjointed and both the dialogue and cinematography felt really weird at times, plus some of the plotting made zero sense. Most of those were minor issues in the first 6 episodes, but were far more pronounced in 7 & 8- and both episodes were short too, especially 7. I kind of presume that a limited budget caught up to them with certain things like the flaky CGI and having the same 20 Nilfgaardian soldiers in every scene but that doesn't explain everything. The fundamental reason I have reservations is that S2 will be more directly serialised plot than S1, but the serialised plot of S1 was its weakest part overall.

Dandelion and show Jaskier are both more 'comic relief' type characters for a similar reason- you need to have some sort of comic relief as, well, relief from all the grimdark and at least to an extent you need a departure from the super competent protagonist or near protagonists characters like Geralt/ Yennefer, plus Triss/ Ciri in the games. If anything the game tends to take the 'incompetent' side of Dandelion a lot further- both TW2 and 3 have rescuing Dandelion as major plot points, after all- than the show takes the 'incompetent' side of Jaskier (with the significant proviso that I haven't seen all the show yet) except for the odd exception like in one of the bad endings of Blood & Wine. Most people will be more familiar with the game character than the book one, and he fits the game character well.

Treat it like a puzzle game and it's OK. It's very much a matter of finding out what is coming and unashamedly gaming the system to your advantage or finding the 'trick' which makes that battle trivial. It's mechanistically awful with its magical and physical armour plus utterly useless initiative system and the game cheats blatantly in its combat design and how enemies behave so have no qualms about 'cheating' equally blatantly yourself, eg spam summons like it's the final battle of Baldur's Gate 1, because you can guarantee your enemies will do exactly the same back.

I've watched the first two episodes of TVWitcher and I like it so far well enough. Pacing definitely feels off- it alternates between feeling slow and far too rushed- plus some of the minor acting and set pieces really do feel rather Xenaish. I also don't like Cavill's "witcher voice" for some reason. But, it has the right feel and Jaskier is top notch. Knowing that the chronology is all over the place helps a fair bit as well, though I would certainly have guessed that it was from playing the games.

Well yeah, but oddly enough the current Boeing CEO Muilenburg is someone I have a decent amount of sympathy with. His handling of the 737MAX situation from a PR standpoint was pretty average to say the least; but he's actually a Boeing man and engineer and pretty much all the decisions that actually lead to the 737MAX disaster were made by the CEO previous to him who was a typical corporate raider MBA type and who, surprise surprise, decided cutting experienced but expensive people while outsourcing software to India and badly and unsafely redesigning an existing jet were great ideas because they were also cheap ideas, with no immediate drawbacks. He got to walk away with bonuses and an unblemished reputation, indeed the replacement CEO is one of his appointees and can be pretty much guaranteed to do all the things that grow shareholder value right up to the point your cost cutting kills 300 odd people and loses you contracts to NASA because your space capsule can't count time properly so won't go into the proper orbit. Every article blames MCAS for the crashes, but if the plane was designed properly MCAS would be irrelevant and unnecessary. You only need MCAS because the engines are too big and too close to the body which makes the design fundamentally unstable; and it was done that way because it was cheaper than designing a new plane that could cope with the bigger engines. Those sorts of decisions were made years ago.

Very, uh, atmospheric conditions for a cricket match in Australia. (Match abandoned with an Air Quality Index at 1100 due to bushfires- anything over 400 is considered to be extreme and potentially dangerous to health. How on earth anyone thought it was a good idea to start in those conditions I do not know)

Series X was definitely named deliberately for meme potential, nobody could do that accidentally. God knows what they would have come up with if Ballmer was still in charge.

I disliked TLJ enough that I have zero interest in going out of my way to watch RoS. I'm almost certain not to see it in cinema at all, and since I'm also unlikely to sub to Disney+ any time soon that probably means I'll be waiting until it's on plain old bog standard broadcast television in 2 years.

The really big missing site is, and I hate to say it, The Daily Mail. Which is of course crap, but is hugely popular. Straight after posting I see it is there, utterly typical. OTOH I think that excluding RT- and VoA/ RFE/RL too for that matter- is fair enough since they're more or less explicitly direct media/ propaganda wings of governments instead of 'independent media'. They aren't really expected to have editorial independence, unlike the BBC which while government funded is (supposed to be) wholly independent when it comes to reporting. Would get a bit complicated though, I'd pretty much have to exclude Al Jazeera Arabic as being Qatari propaganda but allow AJEnglish... I always suspect those sort of charts are made by mainstream media to pat themselves on the back for being 'fair, balanced, intelligent and impartial' as defined by (a) member(s) of the mainstream media themselves.

As a franchise SW still has a lot of potential, and not just to make Disney $$$. It desperately needs new and better leadership and a proper unifying vision though.

I reckon that would be a terrible idea though. It would play great to those who'd never vote for Trump anyway and just want cheap gotchas! but I could very easily see it backfiring spectacularly with the general public. The big talking point from the R side of the impeachment was about how it was a narrow political witch hunt, monkeying around with the process will just give them ammunition for that point of attack instead of being able to claim acquittal. And they'd hammer that, and point out that an impeachment largely based on Trump improperly playing politics to benefit his own position against a political rival was being used by the D side to, well, play politics to benefit their own position vs a rival. Not transferring the impeachment to the Senate for trial may not be strictly illegal unlike (at least potentially) strongarming a foreign power to investigate a domestic rival, but it also isn't what is expected or 'meant' to happen either. It's obviously a political process and equally obviously McConnell, Graham et alia will vote for acquittal in the Senate no matter what the evidence is. If they didn't want that end result they shouldn't have impeached. At the moment a reasonable and impartial observer probably thinks Trump is pretty sketchy, though maybe not sketchy enough to remove from office- and that's about the best that can be expected.

Funnily enough they're trying desperately to bring in armed police here by stealth, at exactly the same time they're buying back newly banned firearms- 2 days to go, less than 1/3 bought back despite increasingly strident "but you have to, it's the law!" adverts from the popo. It's by stealth because arming the police is spectacularly unpopular with pretty much everyone including a large subset of the rank and file police themselves, and even anti gun people are at best bemused by the ham fistedness of the timing.

Won't post screenshots, as I've uninstalled most games. I'll put the focus on 2019 release games since I've actually played some, with a couple of honourable mentions for other games played in 2019. Metro Exodus I've been pretty negative about it elsewhere so I'll focus a bit more on the positives here. It's certainly pretty but was almost completely smooth, nearly bug free, the gunplay is good too and well written enough that I can actually identify pretty much the entire crew. The stealth gameplay is worse than Thief certainly, but equally certainly not actively bad as it too often is in other games and works pretty logically. While I prefer a 'proper' open world system like Stalker(s) and their open world sections are a bit too small for my tastes they've done a good job with the environment. They are Billions I bought this mostly because I liked Lords of Xulima and it was the same devs, but it's a pretty good game on its own merits. It's a very typical 'survival' builder though, you're likely to lose the first playthrough of any level since you don't know what is coming or where the resources are or just where best or how much defence to invest in but will usually fly through a second with lessons learned. Dawn of Man A good time killer builder game probably best compared to Banished, and prehistoric man is an interesting and little covered time period. It's pretty well balanced and still being actively added to, if there's one major criticism it's that- much like I found with Banished- you tend to end up playing every game the same way which reduces replayability. The Outer Worlds Yeah, it's good, though not the 2nd coming. Think I described it as being a sort of archetypal 8/10 game and I'd stick with that. Doesn't really do anything superbly but at the same time doesn't do anything badly either. I had horrendous level loading crashes but it was still an easy game to finish. And Honourable mentions for non 2019 games played this year Prey (2017) A worthy successor to System Shock (2) and while I thought it dropped the ball a bit in the latter third of the game- ultimately too much backtracking and too little enemy variation- it would come very close to being a top 10 game of all time for me despite that. Frostpunk A builder that oozes atmosphere, interesting setting and is well designed and balanced. Rather like This War of Mine it has some... false/ gamey feeling moral choices and some well thought out ones. And rather like They are Billions you will stuff up the first playthrough of a scenario most of the time and it's a lot easier once you know what is coming; but as a 'flaw' that's hardly limited to those two games. Egypt: Old Kingdom Bit of an odd one for me but I really enjoyed this and found it almost infinitely replayable. Certainly not a typical strategy builder like Pharaoh or Children of the Nile and it feels rather like a directish adaptation of a board game or a FB/ Flash game but I love ancient Egypt and the simplistic feeling gameplay gave surprising depth. Probably a bit too deterministic for my liking overall (ie doesn't matter how well you're running your empire, it will fall apart when scripted to) but that's just the game's style. I also enjoyed the previous game in the series. Atom RPG Very much a direct Fallout spiritual successor, considerably more so than TOW. Not as memorable or gripping as Fallout and has some of its flaws too (hello clunky pop culture references) but it's clearly a labour of love. Assassins Creed Odyssey which I'm not 100% sure I played this year rather than last, but I'm adding it because I loved the atmosphere and I really do have to go back and finish it if only because I suspect I'll be sticking a knife through Cleon sometime. I also never thought I'd see a AAA game where history is (more or less) respected and I'd fully believe the writers had actually read Thucydides rather than just trawled wikipedia. Surviving Mars Last but not least, another flawed but enjoyable strategy builder. I could write an awful lot about this game's flaws but I did enjoy playing it a lot so won't except for the main one- lack of challenge and content in the later game. It must have been awfully, er, barren content wise without before terraforming was added since most of that takes place in the later parts. I'd also have to note that it's likely my most played game by time is actually Stardew Valley, probably for the 2nd year in a row.

Think I might be finished with Metro Exodus. It's a game I should like a lot in theory given how much I like StalkerSoC/ CoP and even the much maligned Clear Skies and even though I tend to dislike straight out shooters, but... dunno. You're kind of forced into stealth gameplay quite often which is theoretically fine since I liked Thief but it simply isn't as good at it as Thief was, the open areas are theoretically an improvement but practically tend towards being just wider corridors than 2033, the objectives are sometimes far too opaque and there isn't quite enough variation, atmosphere or story to keep me interested. I'd probably have soldiered on through but (and it's a bit of a rant since it's a pet peeve of mine)...