Keyrock

I almost feel bad for Vince McMahon. The first time the XFL died because it was terrible. This time it was halfway decent and it died because of a global pandemic. Word is, Vince poured an awful lot of his own money into the XFL, counting on recouping it a couple years down the road with a big TV deal, which is obviously not going to happen now. It just wasn't meant to be, I guess.

That's an emergency situation if I ever heard one.

My dad sent me an early birthday present: It's got a warm, slightly sweet taste with an unbelievably smooth finish with almost zero burn. I don't even want to know how much this cost. I'm drinking it with no ice and just the tiniest splash of water.

They are quite playable with m&kb alone, though it obviously won't be quite as good an experience as with a good flightstick, but the learning curve for these games is BRUTAL and the time commitment to get anywhere is massive.

From the Games Not Even Melkathi Would Likely Play files, here's a couple very early X4: Foundations pics: Right now I'm less playing the game and more fine tuning the control setup of my new flightstick. To it's credit, the game has a profile for my exact flightstick (Thrustmaster T.1600M HOTAS), though it's not exactly how I want it set up, but at least it gives me a solid base to start from. As a bonus, here's the flightstick in question:

After just over 2 months of the carnivore diet I went from 215 lbs to 193 lbs and I feel great. I'm going go back to a more balanced diet now, but I'm not going completely back to how I was eating before. Refined sugar is definitely out, that's enemy number one. I'm fine with naturally occurring sugars, such as the lactose in milk and the fructose in fruits, but anything with added sugar is no bueno. I'm still going to try to keep my carbs fairly low. Bread and pasta are still out. I'll allow myself potatoes, rice, and some of the other grains, but I'll try to limit them to small quantities. Right now I want to see if I can keep the 22 lbs I lost off now that I'm off the carnivore diet. If and when that's successful I'd like to eventually get down to 180 lbs, which is my ideal weight.

I'm on chapter 16 of Valkyria Chronicles 4. On the one hand, I'm only roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the tech trees. On the other, story wise, it feels like I'm right at the end. My squad's all either lev 18 or lev 19, so I guess I'll find out if the game is capped at lev 20 or not real soon. On most of the missions there's usually a strategy that you can exploit to cheese the mission and get an A rank (A rank is the highest rank in the NA version of the game). I guess it's not really cheesing... I mean, it's a tactics game, the whole idea is finding the best tactic and exploiting it as hard as the game will allow. To the game's credit, the best tactic to exploit varies quite a bit from mission to mission.

I had no idea the stuff even existed until I moved down south 4 years ago.

Just got home from the road. It's late, my fridge is mostly empty, and I don't feel like cooking today, so I heated some premade, frozen shrimp scampi and I'm drinking bacardi and diet cheerwine. #LivingTheDream

Yes, the Ryzen 4000 laptop chips are 7nm Zen 2, wile the coming 4000 desktop chips are 7nm+ Zen 3. Laptops are basically 1 generation behind. My general stance on building a new rig is "just do it when you feel the need to do it". It's easy to get carried away waiting for the next thing, I'm guilty of that myself, but there's always going to be some exciting new tech "right around the corner", so you'll wait forever. If gaming is your primary function for the new rig, then, quite honestly, it makes little difference if you get a Ryzen 3000 or wait for a Ryzen 4000, or get an Intel chip, for that matter. Unless your CPU is of the super budget variety and becomes a bottleneck, the GPU is going to be the OVERWHELMINGLY biggest part of the performance equation. If you plan to do a lot of heavy multitasking and have highly threaded workloads that the rig will run regularly, then it might be worth waiting for the new Ryzen 4000s, but it's not like a 3000 is going to be a slouch. To the best of my knowledge, there should be no issue running a team red/team green combo, as unholy a union as that is.

The scuttlebutt is that Intel's Comet Lake (still 14nm) desktop cpus should arrive late May/early June. I expect higher clock speeds (the one area Intel still leads) and competitive performance with Ryzen 3xxx chips. At ultra high clock speeds they'll suck tremendous amounts of power and give off tons of heat, but they'll make very good gaming chips. AMD's Ryzen 4xxx chips are supposedly coming late August/September. I expect even higher core counts and bigger L3 cache. The rumor is 10-15% IPC gain over Ryzen 3xxx, which, combined with higher core counts, would make them absolute monsters. Of course, I don't take AMD's (or Intel's) own internal benchmarks as gospel, so we'll see once we get independent benchmarks. Also, these are supposedly going to be the last chips using the AM4 socket. The 5nm Ryzen 5xxx chips will supposedly use a new socket (AM5?) and even more supposedly may arrive as soon as late 2021 (I HIGHLY doubt that).

I'm just doing my job, you're right there on the front lines dealing with the ill. I'm the one who should be thanking you, and I am. Thank you. Everyone in the "essential jobs" fields right now is getting put at greater risk, healthcare field especially, but we also have job security, so it's a blessing and a curse.

Yesterday: Driving a tractor-trailer. Today: Driving a tractor-trailer. Tomorrow: Driving a tractor-trailer. On Friday, however, I get home and get to join the rest of Murica in #QuarantineLife, which will consist of bike riding (weather permitting), vidya games, and day drinking.

Some PS5 gamepad porn: PS5 gamepad is apparently made by Aperture Science.

I could see someone in Loren's world getting a sword ran through their (exposed) chest and exclaiming "oh thank god, they didn't get my shoulder!"

The folks in that Loren game are very serious about protecting their shoulders.

I'm on chapter 14 of Valkyria Chronicles 4. I'm guessing I'm 2/3 of the way through the game. For the first time in forever I actually don't have enough development points for all my gear upgrades. At the same time, there are 3 skirmishes I haven't done yet, so once I run through those, that should take care of the r&d situation as well as get me a level up for all my soldier classes, granted level ups don't mean all that much in this game, except lev 11, which promotes a class to elite status, which comes with a new ability (except for engineers and grenadiers). I wonder if lev 21 will bring with it another status upgrade, or if you can even reach lev 21? My scouts are lev 17 and all my other classes are lev 16 now, so I guess I'll find out in the near future.

^ There are so many World of Darkness games that either just came out or are coming out relatively soon that it's easy to get them confused. World of Darkness is the new Warhammer?

Okay, it seems we're talking about 2 different games here. After some brief googling, I found out that the game Big Bad Wolf is making is indeed a VtM game called Swansong. They say they want to continue making "narrative RPGs", so I expect it will be at least somewhat similar to The Council, which is fine by me. Bonus points if the again include a Chesty McBoobs character. https://www.google.com/amp/s/onlysp.escapistmagazine.com/vampire-the-masquerade-swansong-announcement/amp/ There is also a Werewolf the Apocalypse game in development by a different studio (same publisher, though, I think) As for what I'm playing, it's still Valkyria Chronicles 4. I'm in chapter 10. There was a bit of a jarring tonal shift when I had played 25-ish hours of what is essentially a pseudo-WW2 tactics game with exclusively conventional weaponry when suddenly MAGIC.

Thank God. I have nothing against open world games, but we certainly have no shortage of those; not every game has to be open world. There are benefits to keeping the player on a more rigidly controlled path, namely in the pacing department.

^ Have there been any updates on Big Bad Wolf's VtM game? I am a big fan of The Council, so when I saw that same studio was making a VtM game I got super excited (I am honestly more excited for their VtM game than for Bloodlines 2). I haven't heard a peep about it since.

I figure I might as well make one of my last meals, before The Covid kills us all, a good one: From a BBQ place 150 yards from my company's terminal in Florida. The sausage was good, the ribs were terrific. The best part is that it fits my carnivore diet, on the off chance I survive and wander the desolate streets of what was once civilization.

Wasteland 3 delayed to August 28th

I may be getting carried away. In anticipation of playing X4 when I get home, I ordered a new flightstick. My Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS X is pretty beat up (I've had it for many many years), the stick... errm.. sticks when twisting the z-axis, the deadzone feels too big no matter how I adjust it, and a couple of the buttons work only when they feel like it. With that in mind, I ordered a Thrustmaster T.1600M HOTAS. I was torn between that and a X52. Were the X52s still made by Saitek, I may have been more invlined to get one, but they got bought out by Mad Catz a few years back and I live by the mantra "Mad Catz = Garbage". These days I believe Logitech makes the X52s, so maybe the quality has bounced back, but I decided to go with the T.1600M since it uses the same stick components as the top of the line (and ludicrously expensive) Warthog (albeit without the awesome metal casing) so it has the same surgical precision. Also, way more buttons than my T-Flight and a buttload of 4-way hats. All in all, it should be a significant upgrade. I'm pretty excited to start building my galactic empire.

I know what I'm playing when I get home from the road (and into quarantine) in a week and a half.