Keyrock

Kind of an ***hole move by the NFL to put the Fins vs Chiefs game only on The Peaschlong. If only there was some other way to watch the game, one that could easily be found with a simple web search, possibly even the top result, if the right very obvious search phrase were to be used. If only such a thing were possible. But alas...

I have some exciting news for y'all. The greatest mobile game ever is now available to play on your PC. That's right, RAID: Shadow Legends has been released on Steam. It gets better, if you use the promo code "ImJust****ingWithYa" you will receive 20000 of one of the 876436 different currencies free of charge to get you started! Enter the fight NOW!

If the Russkies can teleport then we're all ****ed.

But Russia doesn't share a border with Sweden. They can't just teleport tanks and troops to Sweden, how do you propose Russian troops reach Sweden without crossing a NATO nation's land, waters, or airspace?

All your years of training have prepared you for this moment.

I just realized RSA = South Africa, not Russia. Yes, South Africa is nearly 3 times the size of Sweden by land area. Still, my point is that Sweden is far from small and defenseless, not to mention that Russia would either have to go by air, sea, or through Finland or Norway to get there. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that both Finland and Norway would object to a bunch of foreign tanks and troops rolling through their land.

I mean, you can literally name any other country on planet Earth and it will be small compared to Russia.

Little? What the **** are you smoking @BruceVC? Sweden is one of the largest countries in Europe. Once upon a time it was one of the most powerful and warlike empires too. Did you get Sweden confused with Luxembourg, or something?

I don't think Russia would be dumb enough to invade Sweden. The smell of the the food alone would be enough to send 'em packing.

I'm looking forward to seeing 3rd party benchmarks. I'm also hoping for an ill conceived partnership with the Von Erichs movie.

tl;dw: AI, AI, AI, and also AI. Wait, did I mention AI? They announced the very soon arriving 8040 APUs, these are functionally identical to the current 7040 APUs that are powering many handhelds sans the Steam Deck, except they also have more AI cores. I don't expect these AI cores to have any impact on gaming, not right now, anyway. I guess, in theory, they could make FSR3 frame generation or fluid frames or whatever the **** they call it better? Then we got the 8000G desktop APUs which don't interest me, but they might be of interest to somebody. I was hoping to get some news on Strix Point APUs, which is what I'm really waiting for as I suspect they will be the chips that finally deliver on my dream of a true 1080p handheld, but they were only mentioned in passing.I suppose it makes sense, given they are currently launching the Hawk Point 8040 APUs and giving details on Strix Point would be stepping on their own launch. Oh well, I'll have to wait for the next big conference. Side-note: My definition of "true 1080p" is that I can throw pretty much any game at it and get acceptable framerates at 1080p at medium or higher settings.

Uncharted was obviously inspired by OG Tomb Raider but streamlined a lot of stuff. Then, NuLara Tomb Raider wound up aping Uncharted and ultimately doing it better in Rise and Shadow. Now Uncharted feels so dated because SotTR did it so much better. The circle is now complete.

I'll pan fry my steak in butter garlic and thyme then spoon a bunch of the sauce from the pan on top of the steak sometimes (typically when I'm too lazy to make a chimichurri). That kind of feels like cheating, though; you drown something in butter of course it's going to be delicious.

Inhuman monsters. Anyone that does that is almost certainly on a list, there's a high probability that there are bodies under the floorboards and/or someone chained up in the basement.

If we're talking steak it's chimichurri or GTFO. If you so much as put a ketchup bottle on the table while steaks are getting eaten we're getting into a fist fight.

Ketchup only belongs on meatloaf, it's disgusting on anything else, fries included... Well, it's okay on hot dogs, but there's a handful of better options. In an unrelated story, I should learn how to make pemmican. Not the tasty pemmican, mind you, but the you can leave it out on the counter for 5 years and it's still perfectly edible (albeit not particularly appetizing) pemmican. I already know how to make hardtack, it would be a good idea to learn one of the other ultimate survival foods.

Yeah it's really disappointing when you get "tartar sauce" that's 98% mayo. The good news is that it's laughably easy to make, so I make my own and I go hard on the pickles.

Hot take: The best french fry dipping condiment is tartar sauce.

@BartimaeusLooks like our teams are meeting in the wild card round. I'll never hear the end of it when muh Boys $#!+ the bed like we always do next weekend.

I vaguely remember doing the gold coin baked into bread thing when I was a wee lad in Poland. It's not a tradition in Poland so we must have been with someone who was Serbian; this was many decades ago, I have no recollection of who. I didn't get the coin, I remember that much.

Harpoon master Chris Roberts relentlessly hunting whales.

It can enjoy a silent movie, so long as it has Buster Keaton in it.

But that's in a laptop, typically laptop chips are roughly 65 W, you ain't running the chip at 65 W in a handheld... Well, not unless you want to play games with welding gloves on. For a handheld you're looking at around 15 or 20 W, which will obviously hamper performance as compared to 65 W. Who knows, though, maybe they've managed to squeeze out some extra efficiency since the engineering samples? This is where the Switch has an advantage running on an ARM chip. x86 chips have gotten more power efficient... Well, some of them, but they still can't compete with ARM in that department. One type of chip that can is RISC-V, but we're probably a ways off from the glorious RISC-V future for anything other than embedded systems.

Rumor is that MSI is preparing a handheld powered by meteor lake, supposedly called The Claw (lol). Well, MSI preparing a handheld is confirmed AFAIK, the rumor is that it's powered by meteor lake. If true, this is exciting news. I'm always pro competition and AMD has thus far been pretty much unchallenged in the APU space. I'm very curious to see how it will perform.

I got a pasta maker for Xmas and I put it to use for the first time yesterday. You can, of course, make fresh pasta without a machine, but it's quite tedious. The machine makes it significantly less tedious, which means I'll actually do it. Anyway, I just made spaghetti, nothing special. Still, fresh pasta tastes so much better than dried, it's a night and day difference.