Keyrock

There are people out there that don't like the works of David Lynch?

I'm borrowing a DVD set from my sister that just has the original 2 seasons. One way or another I'll watch Fire Walk With Me and the 3rd season, but I have a lot of episodes to get through before I get there. When I get to roughly the halfway point of season 2 I'll start searching around streaming services to figure out how I'll watch them. If it comes down to it, I'll buy a blu-ray or DVD, but I'm still a ways from having to cross that bridge.

Francisco Scaramanga best Christopher Lee.

I'm rewatching the original run of Twin Peaks from Mark Frost and delightful weirdo David Lynch. I haven't watched this since it initially ran on TV 3 decades ago. I'm happy to report that it 100% holds up to my memories. If anything, I actually undersold the show in my own mind, it's even better than I remember. It's like a baguette with brie cheese.

I'm predicting that by the time they get to either the D (Druid?) or E (Elementalist?) generation, Intel will be pretty close to on par with AMD and Nvidia, at least in terms of hardware capability. Drivers, on the other hand...

While I am overall enjoying Soul Hackers 2 so far, I do have one big gripe. Loading screens. SO. MANY. LOADING. SCREENS. I feel like I'm playing a game from 15 years ago in that regard, it's been so long since I've seen a game with this many loading screens. It's not the end of the world since the xXxBOxXx has fairly quick load times, but I pity anyone playing this on a last gen console. I mean, I get it, it's not an open world game, they can't use streaming tech, there are going to be loading screens. Some of them could easily be eliminated, though. For example, when I want to heal up I go back to the safehouse and rest. Let's say I'm in a Soul Matrix dungeon and I want to heal up. Here's the process: 1) Go back to the entrance of the dungeon (there are fast travel waypoints that make this fairly quick) 2) Exit the dungeon to the main Soul Matrix hub *LOADING SCREEN* 3) Exit the hub to the main Axis screen *LOADING SCREEN* 4) Exit the Axis to the map 5) Go to the safehouse *LOADING SCREEN* 6) Rest Then you do the same process in reverse to get back to the dungeon, loading screens included. I wish Atlus just put an area at the entrance of every dungeon that allowed you to rest. Better yet, just let me rest at any fast travel waypoint. It would give me no tactical advantage but it would be a HUMONGOUS quality of life upgrade. Maybe there is an ability I get later on that lets me do that? Even if that's the case, that ability should be available right away.

I suspect that I didn't use enough yeast and my first attempt is low ABV. I don't have a hydrometer, nor any other tool to help test ABV, and I didn't drink enough to give an estimate off how buzzed I got, but it wouldn't surprise me if my mead is only 3% or 4%, given how sweet and easy to drink it was with hardly any time to mellow. I'll probably double the amount of yeast per volume on my next attempt as my target is around 10% ABV. I went back and forth on whether to use ale yeast or wine yeast and decided to go with ale. Technically, any yeast will get you fermentation and produce alcohol, even baker's yeast, but I figure either ale yeast or wine yeast will produce the best taste. In the future I may try to brew beer, but I started with mead because it's fairly straightforward; only 3 ingredients in its simplest form (water, honey, yeast).

The most scientifically stringent method of determining the best snack food:

I decided to try my hand at making mead: It's my first attempt so I made a small portion (that's a 3 gallon carboy and it's less than half full). It spent nearly a week fermenting and today I transferred it into another container. I took a sip just to get a baseline and it wasn't nearly as harsh as I expected, very drinkable. Still, I'm going to give it at least a month to mellow. Side note: I added mint & lemongrass in addition to the honey, water, and (ale) yeast.

Soul Hackers 2 has some great music:

I'm not sure if enemies have more HP and/or do more damage on very hard difficulty as compared to hard (if they do it's not by a lot) in Soul Hackers 2, but you cannot use items during battle, which is a MASSIVE handicap. This might get brutal, but I'm still going to try to finish the game on very hard difficulty.

I pay no attention to the NFL off-season, save for the week leading up to and including the draft, so this happened like a week ago but I only just found out about it. Muh Boys' franchise tackle Tyron Smith is out indefinitely following an avulsion fracture of the knee suffered during practice.

The Soul Hacker 2 Extra Difficulty + Useful Items free DLC is out. I have no idea what these "useful items" are, probably some medicine and chakra drops or whatever. I was also tempted to pick up the Costumes DLC so that I can dress up Ringo & Co. in the Samurai outfits from SMT 4, but I ain't about to pay $12 for 4 outfits (you get way more outfits than that plus BGM, but the SMT 4 Samurai outfits are all that I care about). Regardless, I'll be restarting on very hard difficulty.

Which Hot Shots! had the Kickboxer parody scene where instead of dipping his fists in broken glass Topper Harley (tremendous name BTW) dips his fists in ice cream toppings? That's the scene I most vividly remember.

Nothing like some good old fashioned Jingoism to drum up recruitment.

I already think you're a blasphemer if you use thousand island instead of Russian dressing, so I'm just going to turn a blind eye to all these proposed modifications for my own sanity's sake.

I disagree. Some terrible movies have rather straightforward plots, they just fail spectacularly in many facets of execution. Other terrible movies, however, have completely bat$#!+ crazy plots, bordering on incomprehensible. In those cases, I absolutely want to follow the story as best I can. I want all of the madness. ALL OF IT. In a Lovecraftian story I would 100% be someone who got too curious and delved too deep, winding up as a broken-minded half-fish cultist.

I'll reserve judgement until independent 3rd party benchmarks. I think it's safe to assume AMD is going to slaughter Intel in the power efficiency department, but a fair percentage of people don't care about that, so raw performance benchmarks regardless of power consumption will be of interest to those people. Power efficiency is of high interest to me since the eventual mobile APUs, where power efficiency definitely is important, are my focus.

Our lord & savior Dr. Lisa Su presenting Zen 4: 5.7 GHz

Hellcats Revenge (2017) - A Len Kabasinski joint. When Trish, the leader of an all-female biker gang, gets murdered, Kat, the new leader, looks for answers and revenge. From a technical standpoint, this movie is light years better than Ninja Prophecy of Death. The sound mixing is fine and there is nearly no shaky cam, tons of camera cuts, but at least no shaky cam. I'd go so far as to say that the cinematography was solid, including some downright nice shots. No pointless Dutch angles, good framing, and Len clearly had access to a dolly because there were some good and steady moving shots. It's amazing how much easier it is to follow a movie when you can see what is happening and hear the dialogue. This movie is fairly light on the action for what I expected from a Len Kabasinski movie. There is plenty of killing but not much in the way of action scenes. I was especially surprised by how little hand to hand fighting there was, given Len's love of martial arts. That's probably for the best given how laughable the fist fights were, except when Len himself was involved (the man can throw hands and feet). Speaking of Len, my favorite thing about the movie was him looking like he plays in a White Zombie cover band: My second favorite thing was a scene of a guy getting his head blown off through a wall that was so awesome that I jumped up and pumped my fist in the air repeatedly. Overall, this was a vastly superior movie to Ninja Prophecy of Death despite how much less martial arts action it had because it was so much easier to follow and more competent technically. It was still cheesy and had some hilariously bad acting, though there were a couple surprisingly decent performances. Len himself was shockingly competent, although his character was extremely one note. This movie is a much easier recommendation than Ninja Prophecy of Death.

You haven't lived until you've had a Reuben.

I'm sure someone has been dumb enough to refuse and try to take off. Granted, you'd have a head start, but I bet that cruiser would catch up to you real quick, especially if you were running heavy. That seems like a sure-fire way of getting put out of service, having your CDL suspended, and becoming unhirable in the eyes of any reputable transportation company. Slightly off-topic: Someone needs to make a Papers Please style game about a border patrol inspector in modern day "alternate history" Murica inspecting trucks near the border for illegal immigrants, drugs, contraband, etc.

Polish double smoked kielbasa: So delicious. I love heavily smoked meats and this is most certainly heavily smoked.