Keyrock

I should try Shroud again. The combat was just so... boring when I played it probably a year and a half ago.

Who knew that Mikey would go on to help carry a magic ring to a volcano?

Everybody remembers Bruce Campbell for the Evil Dead series, and rightfully so but my favorite Bruce Campbell project was The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. It was the campy adventure nonsense I love so much. Firefly at least got the Serenity movie which sort of finished up the storyline, but we never got anything like that for The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., it made me so sad.

Swallowed my pride and turned the difficulty down to hard in my NG+ run of Y:LaD. There is a boss fight in chapter 6 against an excavator and it's just absolutely brutal, not quite Emerald Weapon level but quite punishing. You kind of have to just hope it doesn't use one of two ultra-powerful attacks that can just one-shot multiple party members and I'm kind of stuck in that dungeon and grinding to get tough enough to where I could survive those attacks regularly with my entire party would take so ridiculously long. I'll run through the game on hard, ignoring all the side content, until I get to Sotenbori and the battle arena, which is the best place to grind by several country miles. After I complete the game on hard I'll start NG+(+) on Legend, but at level 80+ and at least level 40 in every job. It's a testament to how much I like this game that I'm willing to put myself through Legend difficulty. It's akin to Supreme Jerk in Wasteland, just an utterly unfair difficulty.

To make matters worse, crypto prices have surged recently, so miners will likely continue to snap up cards. I dodged the last crypto-driven GPU shortage... was it 3 or 4 years ago? My 6800 XT is already ordered, so... well, I guess I can't say I dodged anything this time around given how bonkers buying PC parts has been while I've been building my rig. I'm just glad the whole process is almost over for me. Hopefully all this crap sorts itself out and we go back to something remotely resembling normal buying conditions soon for those wishing to build or upgrade in the near future.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-patent-shows-CPU-FPGA-integration Seems Dr. Lisa Su is quick to put AMD's acquisition of XILINX to use. There is definite potential for significant performance gains from FPGAs integrated into a CPU. I wouldn't expect to see this in Zen 4 as that architecture is probably already too far along, but perhaps Zen 5?

But appreciated nonetheless.

Scooped up Sniper Ghost Warrior Contacts from the Steam winter sale. I've not played the previous games, but supposedly this one is Hitman-ish, presumably with a greater emphasis on putting bullets in noggins from a great distance, as opposed to drowning people in toilets. It's a budget title, so I expect some jank (never stopped me before). It was $10 so I figured what the heck.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a party based RPG with a mix of tense, dramatic, heartwarming, and completely bat**** crazy. It's from Ryu Ga Gotoku, so it's GotY-level good.

Fun fact: Virtually every game ever made has had content cut.

Cousin Nico, we should go bowling.

Prometheus was phenomenal if you're just going by cinematography, but I mean it's Ridley Scott so of course the cinematography was terrific. Where it falls apart is the plot and I've been trying to wrap my head around it for years I still don't fully understand it. As best I can tell the Xenomorphs or the Xenomorphs' predecessors were creations from the black goo which is like a biological weapon that the Engineers were using to fight somebody and the Xenomorphs' predecessors were essentially biological weapons that they employed and then of course things went bad and... I don't know...

My R7 5800X just shipped, it should arrive in a few days. Now I'm just waiting on my 6800 XT Nitro+ and the waterblock for it. I'm on the road and will be until the end of the month, so as long as they arrive by then I can FINALLY build my rig at the start of February. /crosses fingers

Are we talking Mad Max or Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior? The above image is from MM2. AFAIK there is about a 5 year gap between the movies. If the first movie is 2021 then we should dress in Toecutter fashion:

I've reached chapter 6 (of 15) in my NG+ Legend playthrough of Y:LaD. I'm not going to sugar coat it, it's a slog. In the regular playthrough I breezed through most of the game. There were a few tough battles, but nothing really brutal. Plus, if I wanted to overlevel, it was generally a pretty quick process, especially once I unlocked Sotenbori. Playing on Legend difficulty even random mooks can put up a good, albeit manageable, fight. Special fights can be really brutal and require specific party composition and gear, and even then you need to grind quite a bit to get tough enough to survive until you can whittle down numbers. For extra madness I'm currently running Saeko as a Dealer. The Dealer is a SUPER RNG job. Random damage, random buffs, random debuffs, random targets, it's bonkers. There's one particularly powerful skill that can even sometimes hit your own party members and totally screw you over... or it can do massive damage to the enemies, or completely miss, or some combination of those outcomes. I doubt I'll run this job late game, but it definitely makes things tense and interesting.

Cowboys losing in week 17 when they are on the cusp of backing into the playoffs is the most Cowboys thing ever. The cherry on top is losing because of a 4th quarter red zone interception. It's as if Tony Romo never left.

That's several orders of magnitude shorter than a woman.

I almost never use catsup (I just wanted to spell it the other way), not even on hotdogs or fries. Hotdogs get mustard or chili & cheese, fries get salt & pepper.

This may be blasphemous, but I kinda prefer frying pan steak to grilled steak.

I know what shochu is because of the Yakuza games. Score another one for Ryu Ga Gotoku. I had this with my dad during the holidays: I had zero previous experience with Japanese whiskies. Quite sweet and smooth with a good bit of burn (51.4%, it comes with the territory). It went well with a cigar.

The character creator in Wasteland 3 is quite limited, so there's only so much I could do to make reasonable Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers facsimilies, but I did the best I could:

How could you not remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man's name?

X4 is definitely more similar to X3 than X2, or Rebirth, for that matter. There are a few features carried over from Rebirth, such as superhighways and a simplified movement model by default (you can switch to hardcore Newtonian in options). There are more factions than ever to gain or lose reputation with, even with Boron not being in the game (yet?). Ships are more customizable than ever. As with the previous games in the series, the learning curve is brutal and the tutorials leave a lot to be desired. Using wikis is virtually mandatory. It's a massive time sink, it takes forever to get anywhere in the game.

Hopefully Rocket Lake lives up to the rumored performance. I probably won't be buying a CPU again for a good while, but I hope to see serious advancement in the coming years. In an ideal world, next time I build a rig in 6 years or so, it's powered by a RISC V chip, but that's probably unrealistic. Right now RISC V's main selling point is unprecedented power efficiency, so the first area RISC V chips are likely to invade, if they do so at all, is low power embedded devices, then later phones; traditional ARM territory, mainly. It will probably be a long time, if ever, until RISC V is adapted to higher power and performance applications. Given the open nature of the instruction set, there's nothing stopping anyone from adapting it to whatever application, but most likely I'll still be looking at a x86 chip from AMD or Intel in half a decade. By all rights, said x86 chip should be putting my R7 5800X to shame.