Keyrock

All my CTDs so far have been when loading an area, granted I don't have enough spells to necessitate reassigning yet, so I can't comment on whether I will have that same issue.

Not alcohol, but I discovered this recently: It's a apple cider vinegar-based chili pepper drink and it's super delicious. Strong heat but it dissipates rather quickly leaving a mellow and rather pleasant heat lingering. It's great on its own (I take shots of it) but I bet it would be a great addition to a michelada or bloody mary. Edit: I mixed it 25% vodka 75% agua chiltepin and it's quite good. It almost completely overpowers the vodka, the taste is nearly the same as drinking the agua chiltepin by itself, which is to say delicious.

I've given up on trying to recommend movies to @Bartimaeus. It's crystal clear that the Venn diagram of our preferences has little, if any, overlap.

You need nearly double that space for Forspoken, Squeenix's latest swing and miss. Although I've not actually played the game, nor do I have any desire to based on some of the cringe dialogue YouTube's algorithm deemed I needed to see, so that's based on hearsay. Not the install size, mind you, that's listed on the game's Steam page, the game not being good is the hearsay part.

I'm one of those weirdos that really likes bloom. In the games that have a slider for level of bloom I generally slide it to max. I should probably seek help. I'm also a big fan of volumetric fog. I agree devs can sometimes go too HAM on it, but I find the effect extremely impactful on creating atmosphere, far more so than ray tracing, to be honest. I've given up on trying to take a screenie to prove my point, though. It just doesn't translate to still images the way God rays do, for example. Speaking of ray tracing, I managed to get it running in Hogwarts but I very quickly turned off ray traced reflections because, while some of the reflections look great, often times there's this sparkling effect on surfaces that looks like someone took a shotgun full of gold glitter and blasted the walls. It's quite distracting and looks gaudy and downright bad IMHO. I'm not sure if this is a Linux/Proton specific bug, a game bug, or if it's purposely made to look like that (I sure hope not). Anyway, the game looks better with ray traced reflections off IMHO, though ray traced shadows and ray traced ambient occlusion look fine, though I'm not sure if the performance hit is worth it, to be honest. I'm still working out the best settings. During the intro I was able to run in 4K with no upscaling and even limited RT and pretty much always keep it above 60 FPS and often dip into triple digits. Once the game plopped me into the castle, though, the story changed. Running without upscaling was off the table, unless I wanted to turn everything down to low. With upscaling I've been able to keep a mostly ultra with some high settings mix and, for the most part, bounce between 70 and 95 FPS, which is quite smooth and super playable. There are moments where the FPS will momentarily plummet, particularly where there are a lot of NPCs around. Lowering the visible actors setting didn't have as much impact on the performance as I expected and certainly not as much as I would have liked. I suspect that this game could benefit from some further optimizations to smooth out those dips as nothing I try, short of dropping resolution, can keep the game from occasionally dropping FPS into the 40s and having a slight stutter. It's not the end of the world and happens infrequently enough that it doesn't ruin the experience, but it's definitely noticable and something that hopefully is alleviated a bit in the near future.

I had my first CTD in Hogwarts Legacy. Not a big deal since the game autosaves fairly often and 1 CTD in 4 1/2 hours of play isn't terrible for a game on day 1, or day 4, depending on how you look at it. This is definitely a game where I'll forget about the main quest for hours and hours at a time because exploring is so freakin' great, and I haven't even been outside the castle yet. As an aside, the game plays awesome with a controller. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't play great with m&kb, but I can't attest to that.

The cat on top is giving you a dirty look. "This is a private party, make yourself scarce."

You're just intimidated by my sheer presence. You're probably from one of those other 3 [mutters under breath]lesser[/mutters under breath] houses. It's okay, not everyone has the drive and ambition to be House Slytherin. Can pet kitty, confirmed.

Started up Hogwarts Legacy. I've only done the intro so far but I'm having a blast. No issues whatsoever running the game on Linux , it might as well be native (Proton is really incredible). I'm looking forward to getting into the open part of the game as the intro was, as is to be expected, basically on rails.

Created my witch: No matter what your character is going to sound British so the look I went for was an offspring of a British man and Thai woman, let's say he was a soldier and was stationed in Thailand. White hair doesn't really fit the mold, but I just think white hair looks awesome, especially with a darker skin tone. As an aside, hair looks really good in this game. Even now, in 2023, there are still many games where up close the hair looks pretty bad and/or weirdly plastered on the head. It looks quite natural in this game. I probably should have turned the frame rate display off for the pictures. Oops. Edit: Got my sweet Slytherin robe:

I got you covered, LadyC.

Same. It needs some work and definitely optimization, but there's potential here.

I'm working on an island fortress in Valheim. I found a really suitable island that's 3/4 black forest and 1/4 plains with most other biomes a short sail away. I'm building it up as tall as I can make it with sheer cliffs all around, save for one area for the dock. This will make it nigh impenetrable to non-flying enemies. This is a massively time consuming project that requires ludicrous amounts of stone. Stone is easy enough to get, but it will take a ton of time, given how big I plan to make it. No way I finish even getting the ground ready to start putting down stone floor tiles, never mind any building, before Hogwarts Legacy comes out on Friday, but I'll get done as much as I can.

I saw Dances With Wolves decades ago. I couldn't tell you much about it because I was largely comatose for the viewing, on account of the movie being 427 hours long and boring as ****. I vaguely remember a scene where Kevin Costner is teaching the natives about coffee. That's all I remember. It's probably for the best

If I'm going to play Slytherin, hopefully they will at least let me make my student look properly emo.

I remember he used to come to the ring with a frisbee. He would read a poem off the frisbee's underside then fling it into the audience. It was such a lame gimmick.

My latest batch of mead is done fermenting. This batch is definitely stronger than the last. I don't have a hydrometer, so my estimate is strictly going by how much of a buzz drinking a glass of mead gave me. I'd say I'm in fairly strong beer range, approximately 7% ABV is my guess. That's still short of my goal of weak wine strength around 9% ABV, but I'm getting closer. It's a bit harsh but definitely drinkable. My last batch mellowed out really nicely when it sat for a month and so I have 9 stopper bottles stashed away in a closet that are not getting touched until AT LEAST March. I'll start my next batch fairly soon and will kick up the honey percentage slightly and give it an extra couple days to ferment in an effort to increase ABV.

Kebab Pizza looks delicious.

Lanny Poffo, brother of the late Randy "Macho Man" Savage, best known for his run as The Genius in WWE (then WWF), age 68.

Post-Taxes Celebration Cigar & Scotch: Who am I kidding, I was going to smoke this cigar and drink this delicious peaty goodness anyway.

Taxes = Done

I'd say Rise and Shadow were better than anything after Tomb Raider 3. 2 and 3 were the high water mark in the OG series for me; after 3 the series took a nose dive, though I did kind of like Underworld, the last game before the reboot. I thought it was a halfway decent return to form, even if the story was COMPLETELY off the rails by then.

Whataburger is delicious but everything there has approximately 8 billion calories. When I used to drive to Texas fairly regularly my go to was the Monterey Melt.

I've been doing quite well on my diet; in celebration I'm doing a cheat day tomorrow and I'm going to make a Margherita pizza. Last time I made this, probably about 4 months ago, it was the most delicious pizza I've had since leaving Connecticut many years ago. The pizza is pretty much the only thing I miss about Connecticut, the best I've been able to find here in the Charlotte area, Simonetti's in Belmont, would be a middle of the road mom & pop pizza place up in the frozen north. They make a pretty good Margherita, I'd say it's their best pie, but the one I made was better than that, so hopefully history repeats itself tomorrow.