Keyrock

Grain vodkas are definitely more common than potato vodkas. If you were to walk into a liquor store and grab a bottle of vodka blindly there's roughly a 80% chance that it will be a grain vodka.

It always boggles my mind that CCR was a band for only 5 years. In that short time they produced an utterly LUDICROUS amount of super awesome songs. Shame on you Gromny for not including the best of the bunch (I keed they have so many amazing songs that the best one is super subjective... for real, though, Green River is the greatest):

We have some Dream Theater haterz on this board. Y'all can suck an egg because this song is GOD-TIER: Also, I won't go as far as god-tier, but this much more recent song is demigod-tier:

Not the best shooting night for Jayson Tatum, but he stepped up when the game was on the line.

First week or two is always misleading in terms of who the good teams are going to be, and that's in a regular year, sans global pandemic. Who the **** knows this year?

Scooped up GreedFall on a Steam Sale at 50% off. Once I hit a brick wall in La-Mulana 2 and need to take a break from it (it's a super hard game, it's inevitable) I can get my eurojank RPGing on. This is the only Spiders game I have yet to play, so it will soon be time to rectify that transgression.

My parents are coming to visit, so I splurged for the good stuff: Gargoyles in picture for visual flair.

Vritra, the guardian of Valhalla and the 2nd guardian I have fought: I got the job done on my 3rd try. It's a fairly straightforward fight. It's quite easy to get Vritra down to about 25% health, then everything speeds up tremendously and it becomes frantic. Now I can open doors that require 2 defeated guardians.

I defeated Ratatoskr for the 4th time in La-Mulana 2. This was a very difficult fight until I managed to get him into a specific spot, at which point it was simply a matter of jumping over his breath attack and tossing an earth spear at him at the highest point of the jump. He killed me 4 times before I managed to figure out the best spot to get him stuck and how to get him there. To make matters worse, there isn't a teleport point close to that fight and it's a fairly treacherous trek just to get to him. There was a whole lot of reloading of the game where I failed to even reach Ratatoskr. I'm happy to have that battle over and done with, though I will have to go back to that room again at some point.

Not necessarily. An increase in clock speed is often accompanied by an increase in power draw and heat generated. An increase in IPC (instructions per cycle) doesn't necessitate an increase in power draw. Furthermore, advancements in power efficiency can often offset clock speed increase power draw.

Black market fairy trafficking? I don't feel great about this.

I'll be curious to find out if AMD managed to further improve the Infinity Fabric, given how sensitive the Zen processors are to memory speed. Zen 2's IF is rated at 1800 MHz, making 3600 MHz DDR4 the ideal choice (DDR = double data rate, hence 1800 X 2 = 3600). I had heard legends of people overclocking Zen 2 IF to 2000 MHz or even 2100 MHz, but 1900 MHz was the number most people could reliably reach. If Zen 3 IF were to, by default, top out at 2000 MHz, for example, that in itself would be a significant boost to overall performance. It's partly this reason why I've held off on buying RAM for my upcoming build, since I don't yet know what the sweet spot will be for Zen 3.

20% IPC increase over Zen 2. If true AMD would take the IPC lead and it might be enough to overcome Intel's clock speed advantage and take the outright gaming lead. That number seems too high, I think 10% is more reasonable. It would be awesome if true, though. I guess we'll find out soon.

To add more good news, Samsung recently posted 980 Pro SSD specs on their site utilizing their own new memory controller, faster than the phison E16 (previously the only PCIe4 memory controller). They promptly got taken down (I guess someone jumped the gun). Not to be outdone, Phison just announced their E18 memory controller with absolutely ludicrous speeds (roughly double that of top of the line PCIe3 SSDs). These aren't available yet, but they should be very soon, so now PCIe4 actually means something for people with X570 motherboard, like me.

I defeated Ratatoskr in La-Mulana 2... again. This is the 3rd, and almost certainly not final, time I have fought him. He dropped a crystal skull. I now have 3, so 9 to go, I guess. I'm so glad Nigoro exists. In the west, indie games have been widespread for decades and we've gotten a ton of absolute gems because of it. In Japan, until recently, indies were mostly a myth. Japanese indies have started to take off in the last few years, but Nigoro was doing it many years before that.

Well, you gotta wait a month for the announcement and then likely another week or two for availability. Some of the rumors I've been hearing are almost too good to be true, so I'm looking forward to finding out for real.

I've been waiting for decades for someone to make a Dune movie that's even half as good as the book(s). I'm not holding my breath, but I'd welcome a pleasant surprise. Apropos, the trailer: On the positive side: Dave Bautista Javier Bardem Jason Momoa On the negative side: Liberal use of the Inception BWOOOOOOM. How have we not gotten that out of our system yet?

I played AP for the first time well after launch on PC, on Linux via WINE to boot. I had no major technical issues, I guess the game had been patched by then. I didn't even hate the hacking. Gunplay sucked and the stealth was hilariously easily exploited, but apart from that, I had a blast with the game. I still have a boner for SIE all these years later.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that humans will no longer be around 4 billion years from now.

Wombat butt scritches

$300 is an attractive price point. I gotta imagine Microsoft is going to be eating a significant loss on each unit sold for quite a while.

Who knew bats were this adorable?

It takes a long time to get anywhere in these games. The beginning can be a real slog. You can make a lot of money destroying Xenon invading sectors of factions you are friendly with, but you need good rep with said factions and a decent ship for which you need 20 rep and a lot of money. How far are you in the main story? Did you rescue Boso Ta yet? Also, here is a link to a list of abandoned ships you can claim. Some are in rather dangerous areas, so save your game before attempting to claim them. The Osprey Vanguard is in a sector often invaded by Xenon, so you need to be careful and potentially take a roundabout route to get to it and/or gtfo, but it's a big ship that you can fight or trade with. Slow as ****, but well armored and with generous cargo space (that's Teladi for you). The Odysseus Vanguard is VERY hard to get as it's in a sector absolutely littered with mines, so maybe hold off on that one for now, but go for it eventually as it's a freakin' destroyer, and once you have a destroyer it's on like neckbone.