Keyrock

I'm already starting to feel a lot better. I popped a couple ibuprofen this morning and the headache is mostly gone, plus I got some of my energy back. I think I lucked out getting the 1-shot Janssen vaccine. I didn't know that's the one they would give me, that's just what they had. My dad got a 2-shot vaccine (I don't know what kind or if there are multiple 2-shot variants), he was mostly fine after the first shot and had a really sore arm after the second for a couple days.

I got the vaccine just after 10 am yesterday. I felt perfectly normal, save for the occasional tiny bit of discomfort where they stuck my arm, for most of the day. Around 6 or 7 pm I got a headache and felt really worn out. That's how I still feel today. Thankfully, I don't have to do anything today, I can just veg out.

I'm sure we can find you something on PureFlix.

This might be the single most generic superhero show/movie I've ever seen, at least going by that trailer.

I got my microchip vaccine. Just 1 shot and apparently I don't need a second. It's the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) variant.

Nothing to do with this season, but I'm just going to post this clip of Ichiro throwing a strike from the outfield to throw out a runner trying to go 1st to 3rd That's not really a base running error, either. 90% of the time you make it to 3rd easily, and this was barely a week into Ichiro's MLB career. Players hadn't yet learned the cardinal rule "never run on Ichiro". My man had a freakin' cannon for an arm.

No, I'm waiting for the upcoming Hearth & Home update which will presumably bring new building pieces. I found a good spot, dug out a moat, and started raising up and flattening out the area in preparation (it's going to be a pretty big castle, so the amount of stone required just to make the foundation is ludicrous). I won't start building any walls or anything like that until the update. Yeah, sniping is fun, I like doing it even in games where that's not the primary focus. I've gotten fairly decent at it in Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts. Anything 150m or less a headshot is routine, up to 200m I'm highly accurate, 250m hitting the body is easy, headshots I'm probably at about 60% accuracy, at 300m and beyond it gets quite dicey because the wind becomes such a big factor at that distance. I've not tried a shot at beyond 350m yet. 337 is my longest kill at the moment, it was a headshot. I always aim for the head when sniping except against heavies. Against heavies I aim for center mass since headshots don't 1-shot them.

I'm an equal opportunity assassin, I don't discriminate: My stats through 2 completed missions:

I'm getting the microchip vaccine Thursday.

After having completed the first real mission of Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts (6/6 objectives, 2/6 challenges) and started the second, here are my first impressions: The comparisons to HITMAN are fair. The basic framework of the game is quite similar; you are dropped into a fair sized open-ish area, similar in size and number of different paths to a typical HITMAN level, and you have a number of objectives to complete, ranging from eliminating targets to gathering intel to planting explosives and so on. Not all of the objectives are necessarily required to be completed to successfully finish the mission. There are also challenges like no alarms were sounded, get 20 headshots, kill the main target and his 2 bodyguards within 10 seconds of each other, etc. The biggest deficiency, when compared to HITMAN, is the absence of the fun creative kills, like locking someone in a sauna, overriding the safety shutoff, and boiling them inside, or electrocuting a rocker with a faulty microphone. The kills in this game are generally weapon kills or explosions. The biggest advantage this game has over HITMAN is superior gunplay. Obviously, the sniper rifles feel great, it's a sniper game, they damn well better. However, the secondary weapons (mainly assault rifles and shotguns) also feel quite good, varied, and appropriately punchy. The sidearms are also pretty good, as well as the gadgets (grenades, throwing knives, mines, gas bombs, etc.) Stealth works fairly well, though the distance and time to getting spotted is still too long for my liking, even on deadeye difficulty, which makes me wonder if there is an even harder difficulty to unlock. The story is fine, your standard military fare and I can smell the future "shocking" plot twist coming from 1000 miles away. The dialogue is too edgelord for my liking, but that's expected from a smaller developer that's obviously trying to lure some of the CoD crowd. Overall, I'm having fun with the game so far. The level of polish and quality isn't quite up to AAA standards, but it's a budget title, I didn't expect AAA quality. Still, outside of slightly sorta wonky first person platforming to climb cliffs and jump over ravines, it plays fairly well. I do wish the game had manual saves, I hate relying only on autosaves.

You have no idea...

Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts: This guy is about to have a splitting headache: Our baddies are using UNIX, Linux, or some flavor of BSD:

Getting down on some moonshine made right here in cackalacky: It's quite tasty and smooth, sweeter than I expected; it's almost like a liqueur. I'm drinking it straight at room temperature, it doesn't need ice, nor a mixer, nor a chaser. If I wind up passed out face down in the middle of my living room, y'all know why.

I started up Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts. I've never played any of the games in the series before, but I went ahead and started playing on Deadeye (Hard) difficulty. This game is supposedly Hitman-ish, and I fancy myself pretty good at Hitman and always play on the hardest difficulty available, so I'm feeling frisky. So far it's aight. It looks pretty nice for a budget title, though the whole game takes place in Siberia, so I suspect is will look quite samey (snow, snow, snow, but look over there, it's snow). I do like having to hold my breath to temporarily reduce sway and having to compensate for wind and bullet drop. I appreciate it when games have proper projectile physics and conventional guns don't magically shoot like lasers. I also like that I can go prone and crawl. Not nearly enough games let you go prone. You can crouch is 95% of games, but very few actually let you go prone.

Stay strong, Sunny

I'm going to be looking at replacing my lappy in the next year or two. I may not necessarily replace it with another lappy, though. I pretty much never use the screen on the lappy, I just HDMI out to the cheap ass 27" 1440p monitor in the truck, so a miniPC would work just as well for my needs. The dream would be to not even need a discrete GPU. What are the odds AMD or Intel puts out an APU/iGPU (someone needs to come up with a vendor agnostic term) that can do 1440p @60Hz in the next 2 years?

Star Wars is in a weird place. They have pretty much milked the fan service cow dry and they've tread over old ground so much that I have doubts that would fly in the future, but almost every time someone has tried to do something different with the universe it has fallen flat on its face. The one exception is The Mandalorian, which is about the only thing keeping this franchise out of the graveyard at the moment.

That Bloomfield i7-920 processor was legendary, it had ludicrous staying power at or near the top of performance charts.

Does that qualify as "subverting expectations"?

Platinum games is putting out a shmup, of all things:

If I can get myself to divorce the Star Trek from Star Trek 2009, then I can appreciate it as a cromulent action adventure movie. The biggest miracle of the 2009 movie is that it survived Alex Kurtzman's touch and wasn't a complete pile of garbage. Into Darkness, on the other hand, was a horrific nightmare no matter how I look at it. Beyond is a mess, but at least it didn't make me violently angry and ashamed to be a Trek fan, like its predecessor. I tried to watch Discovery, despite Alex Kurtzman's stench on it. It was a new Trek show, I had to give it a chance. Mistake. Between 5000 ships shooting at each other and Michael Burnham constantly sobbing, it was enough to make me want to throw my TV out of the window and kick a puppy. I haven't touched Picard. I have learned to avoid anything Alex Kurtzman has so much as looked at like the plague. I just have to accept that Star Trek is now just another dumb action franchise.

If the faux minions left subtle clues, this would be awesome.

Whenever my YT recommendations page goes to ****, my go to move (now that I've caught on to YT's game) is to bring up the search bar and type in something along the lines of "cute capybara*", then I watch like 6 or 7 lovable animal videos in a row. Within a few days, my YT recommendations page becomes something I don't dread to see. *insert your favorite animal

This looks fittingly ludicrous and over the top.