Keyrock

Fashionrising: The Saga Continues

I'm already there, not the Caesar 3 part (great game, though), but I think I'm done with building traditional desktops. My last experience building a rig about 2 years ago, mind you I've been doing this for about a quarter century, was so off-putting that I never want to do that again. Granted, the chip shortage exacerbated the problems, but even without that, discrete GPUs have gotten so huge, so hot, so power hungry, and so expensive that, even though I can afford it, my attitude is "**** that!" This isn't a shot at Nvidia or AMD in particular, they're both in the same boat and Intel will be too if and when they compete at the high-end. I'm going with APUs going forward in small form factor, relatively low power devices. I'm looking forward to the day of the 4K capable APU, I don't think that day is too far off. I mean, 4K capable APUs already exist, there's one inside the refrigerator-looking black console from Microsoft in my living room, but that's a 200W TDP part, you can't put that inside a microPC the size of a typical router or a handheld like the Steam Deck. You need an APU with a TDP no higher than 20W for that, hence why power efficiency is my main focus from now on.

I'm getting a kick out of the talking heads whose job it is to make hot takes suggesting that the Cowboys should dump Dak and just stick with Cooper Rush. In the immortal words of the great Bill Parcells "let's put away the anointing oil for now." I will say this about muh Boys, our defense is legit. Micah Parsons is like a slasher movie monster; dude can just appear anywhere at any time, there's no escaping him. You can't scheme against him because we can put him anywhere back there. He's a legit generational talent.

Classic **** move

It might have been early access? Releases November 4.

#TeamCiv4 here, though I haven't played a 4X in quite a while. I am looking forward to Humankind, especially since it's day 1 Game Pass.

Warriors of the Apocalypse (2009) - I went back to the Len Kabasinski well because I'm a glutton for punishment. This time around it's the tale of 3 women travelling across the post apocalyptic midwest toward "the city". Since the great lakes are mentioned I'm assuming Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Buffalo or Chicago. Also, by "post apocalypse" I mean that Len found an abandoned building and a junkyard somewhere in Pennsylvania to shoot. Quality wise, this movie sits firmly in between the other 2 movies from Len I've seen. It has the horribly obnoxious shaky cam like Ninja Prophecy of Death, but at least the sound mixing is decent and you can hear what people are saying. Len uses quite a number of digital effects in this movie and, let me tell you, Neil Breen would be proud. There were a couple of effects that were so hilariously bad that I rewound just to watch them again. Also, the muzzle flares... *chef kiss* I will say this, whenever the action was hand to hand combat, it wasn't half bad... Well, it wouldn't have been if not for the ****ing shaky cam. Len knows what he's doing with martial arts, just, for the love of God, stop with the shaky cam, Len. One of my favorite tropes of crappy post apocalyptic movies is that while the survivors are fighting over some manner of scarce resource, whether food, water, fuel, or whatever, there seems to be no shortage of makeup and hair products. I guess people working for L'Oreal can rest easy knowing they have job security even through the apocalypse.

Muh Boys won? That's unpossible!

Build a rig with that and a RTX4090 and you won't even need to run heat during the winter. Think of the savings!

Next mead brewing attempt:

The Cowboys team bus arriving for today's game against the Bengals:

Fashionrising continues:

The only mermaid that matters:

What are the odds that Intel makes an announcement about Raptor Lake 1, 2, or 3 days before Zen 4 becomes available? 90%? 95%? 99.999%?

I wouldn't put it past Jensen.

I don't think Cobra Kai ever had the legs to go past 2 seasons. What made season 1 work so well, and to a much lesser extent season 2, was the Johnny Lawrence redemption story, but 2 seasons was about as far as you could stretch that out without the dough ripping apart. Once that was exhausted the story had reached its natural conclusion. In an effort to squeeze as much milk from the proverbial cow as possible they went to the same well that every reboot these days seems to resort to, digging up every character they can from the original, desperately banking on nostalgia. Also, the whole thing devolved into a West Side Story gang warfare plot.

I feel like I'm probably 2/3 of the way through Steelrising. I quickly abandoned my earlier strategy of switching between halberd and fans as it would force me to split points between power and agility and just went into a power build. The two weapons I use now are both halberds with the same moveset. My main halberd does a little more damage and, more importantly, significantly more impact, and it has a shield special ability, which I almost never use since I prefer to dodge to create distance to take advantage of the halberd's massive reach. The other halberd I use exclusively for its ranged attack special ability. Both are upgraded to level 5, which is max. I do so much impact that I nearly always knock enemies down with charged attacks, even bosses, and often knock non-bosses down with regular heavy attacks. I wonder if this game has NG+? If so, I hope it allows you to respec; I'd like to try out a different build for a second playthrough.

Yet another Titan, the Treasurer of Les Invalides: I rescued Jacques Necker: More Fashionrising:

Another Titan defeated, the Alchemist of Luxembourg: The fella I saved this time was Antoine Lavoisier: More importantly, I got some spiffy new threads:

Yeah, I was fine with Kiryu, Majima, et al. having a cameo in Yakuza 7... Like a Dragon 7... What do I call the series now? Anyway, I figured they'd have their cameos and then they would distance themselves and Ichiban Kasuga would have his own series. I disagree about the hair, though; I think grey haired Kiryu with the K-pop haircut looks badass. As long as my girl Saeko Mukoda comes back as a playable character, I'll be happy. As for Ishin!, I never got to play the original on account of not owning a PS3, plus I don't think it was released outside of Japan. I'm down for Kiryu & Co. in what looks like Edo Period Japan.

Sounds like I really lucked out getting Steelrising on console rather than PC, hopefully they get this issue sorted soon. I wonder if the game can be forced to run on another renderer with -dx11 or -vulkan?

Fire Emblem I hope it still has a permadeath option.

Wild Breath 2 Bayo 3 Looks properly bonkers. I'm glad torture attacks are still in the game, there were some hilarious ones in the first 2 games.