Keyrock

Given how buggy Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be, going by reviews, anyway, it's a blessing in disguise that I don't have the rig to play the game on yet. At least, that's the lie I'll be telling myself every day I can't buy PC components to make myself feel better.

What we were promised when the new CPUs and GPUs "launched": What we got instead:

Well, I have yet to find a giant purple dil pickle in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but Kasuga can wield a giant... massager.

Some random Yakuza weirdness

ME3 gave us the cupcake gag, it earns points for that in my book. Granted, the person(s) responsible for sending the cupcakes is the real hero.

I'll argue that the Roman Republic was already dead for all intents and purposes well before Gaius Julius Caesar cast the die and crossed the Rubicon. Once Luscious Cornelius Sulla won the first civil war and was declared dictator for life, the Republic was as good as dead, despite the fact that Sulla abdicated the throne. Fun fact: The entire length of time of the existence of the USA as a nation easily fits into the period known as the decline of the Roman Empire (starting just after Marcus Aurelius and ending with the fall of the western empire) with room to spare.

You can put it in a mobo that doesn't have PCIE4and it will work, but the PCIE interface (presumably gen 3 in your case) will bottleneck the transfer rates, so you are better off buying a cheaper PCIE3 SSD.

I ordered a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2 TB today. I got the beefy AF Sabrent heatsink to go along with it. It's probably unnecessary, but given how much I spent on that SSD, what's another $25 to keep it nice and chill?

50? Are they scaling back?

I had more issue with the combat than going through the same cave a dozen times in DA2. The biggest problem IMHO was that every single battle, boss battles included, was essentially the same. You meet an initial group of enemies, or a boss. You fight said enemies until a trigger point where another group of enemies spawns all around you literally from nowhere. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only variance was that sometimes there was also a second wave of enemies that would spawn all around you. This also made strategic group formation essentially meaningless. There was no way to set up a meat shield wall to protect your squishy members when enemies would just spawn behind you. Those factors made combat in DA2 get REALLY old REALLY fast for me. When my reaction to a combat encounter is "*sigh* Let's just get this crap over with" then that is a failure of combat design IMHO. To make matters worse, there was a ton of combat.

Zen 4 isn't coming out until early 2022, and that's if there are no delays. AMD will surely put out some kind of chip next year, possibly Zen 3+, but more likely a Zen 3 refresh. As far as the planet not becoming a smoldering, lifeless husk... if it does I'll be dead, so it won't matter.

If this can't buy **** madness goes on much longer I may consider getting a 3600 on the cheap as a stopgap, then just getting a 5900XT when the inevitable refresh comes out in 6 to 8 months, assuming this planet isn't a smoldering, lifeless husk by then.

I saw someone selling a 5950X for $1600. Bonkers. Hopefully no one was desperate or stupid enough to pay that much.

Much like with the game series it is both emulating and paying homage to, Dragon Quest, Yakuza: Like a Dragon fails to explain a great deal about its underlying RPG systems. As much as I love Dragon Quest, and I most definitely do, that's one aspect I would have appreciated Ryu Ga Gotoku had not emulated. Alas they did, hence I am left to figure it out for myself and/or seek out wikis, which seem to have little grasp of the situation more than myself. As best as I can tell, Agility seems to mostly be about evasion and initiative. Dexterity seems to be mostly accuracy and critical chance with maybe minor impact on initiative. Attack, Magic, and Healing are mostly self-explanatory. A bigger question is what stats each skill uses as a modifier. If I am correct, heart icon skills use Healing. Skills with a fist icon use Attack. Blade and gun icons I think mean Agility and Dexterity, but I'm not sure which one corresponds to which. A staff icon means Magic, obviously. One thing I am almost completely sure of is that you get to keep the stat bonuses from jobs, in addition to the (usually 2) character skills when using a different job. This makes it valuable to train certain jobs even beyond getting the last character skill. With that in mind, I'm starting to plan out how my late game party will look.

Sucks y'all get an upcharge on most items. I mean, I get you need to pay delivery folks hazard pay because of Drop Bears, but that upcharge is much too steep.

3060 Ti is out tomorrow. Seems like a good value 1080p/1440p card.

I have no clue what is happening in this trailer, but it's a Swery game so... yeah.

"Just" hitting 2800 MHz on a 6800 XT is bonkers. Heck, if you could hit even "just" 2800 MHz on enthusiast-level cooling with a 6900 XT, that would probably beat even an overclocked 3090 (since Ampere doesn't OC nearly as well) and even at 4K where the memory bandwith gives Ampere an advantage. Obviously, Ampere will still win big in Ray Tracing, too big a gap to overcome, but in rasterization a 2800 MHz 6900 XT would be really impressive... and 3000 MHz...

In Yakuza: Like a Dragon I got to fight my way to the top of a lavish Chinese restaurant while this music played: /wipes away tears of joy It's everything I ever wanted.

In the past what Nvidia did was take the Titan, cut the memory in half, strip out boosted compute functionality, like FP64, and release it as a x80Ti. I don't know if that's possible with the 3090 this time around. Does the 3090 have any compute features not found on the other Ampere cards they could strip out?

3080Ti will need a lot more than just a boost from 10GB to 20GB VRAM to justify a $300 price increase. The increased VRAM will have very little to no impact on most titles now and probably going forward for a few years, Godfall's SUPERMEGAUBER textures notwithstanding.

I'm not a vegetarian and I don't go out of my way to get grass fed, ethically sourced, etc. foods (my sister does), but I do draw the line at foie gras; the process is kinda ****ed up. I have no issues with anyone else eating it, that's their prerogative, but I won't eat it myself. There are plenty of other delicious foods I can eat with a clean(er) conscience.

I scooped up a Das Keyboard 4Q during their Black Friday sale. Even on sale, it's an expensive keyboard, but they make top-notch products, this particular model uses Cherry MX Brown switches, which are my jam, plus they have native Linux software. I don't mind paying a little extra to support a company that supports my OS of choice, given that the product is high quality, which it is.

Overclocks like a champ

I got down into the sewer dungeon in Yakuza: Like a Dragon with Adachi as Foreman all pumped and ready to clear the barricades in the dungeon and reap whatever rewards lie beyond. Turns out that only Kasuga, the main character, gets the Demolish exploration skill for that job, which is kind of stupid IMHO. Oh well, it's not a big loss since I was going to make Kasuga a Foreman at some point anyway. The way the job system works is that every job has a few skills you get to keep even when using a different job, so it pays to train every character in every job up to at least rank 16 or 18 or 20, wherever the last skill you get to always keep is. I'm the type that likes to super overlevel my party once I feel the final battle is coming so that I can roflstomp the final boss; that's just how roll. Hence, I'll be grinding job ranks and levels eventually anyway. I also added Eri to my party, she's the lady from the management game. Her unique job is Clerk, a DPS job, but I switched her to Idol, a healer/support job, since I was severely lacking in that department.