majestic

It helps to not forget that the gaming and DIY market is relatively small, large volumes are mostly moved through OEMs, an area where AMD never really got their foot in the door. It's the reason why Intel still has a massive x86 market share (70 to 80%), in spite of the 13th/14th gen problems and notebook CPUs prior to Lunar Lake being noticably less efficient, and AMD outselling Intel at larger DIY retailers (top sellers in CPUs since forever on Amazon, Mindfactory in Germany or Microcenter, etc., perhaps with the exception of the time when Alder Lake was faster than Ryzen 3 and comparatively good value) since basically Ryzen 1's much better price/performance ratio. That said, I just checked what I paid for the GeForce 256 back in 1999, and that is, adjusted for inflation, 550€. Graphics card prices weren't always peaches and sunshine back in the day either.

The last couple of posts made me go over to my parents and check their Miele induction glasstop stove. Not a single scratch on the surface, no scuffed look - and my mother suffers from Parkinson's disease, so the pans and pots move a little more than they probably should. That definitely works, but they also cost an arm and a leg.

Guys, like, @MrBrown is talking about Path of Exile 2, not Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.

That outro/the ending credits certainly have an undertone of, well, loss, I would say. I don't know if it references anything in the original series or the OVA, but by the imagery in the scene there are a few things that work. Loss of herself or her identity, loss of her alternate identity after growing up, loss of her family, or a more general loss of youth and childhood or innocence (like in the Minako-centric episodes of Sailor Moon where she wonders if being a Sailor Guardian is worth losing your hopes, dreams and teenage years over). It seems like it would make sense in a series that is basically about a really young girl having the power to transform into a teenage magician who is the star of her family's magic outfit. Perhaps she's lost the ability to transform in the ending scene where she's just sitting in her room staring - presumably vapidly - into nothing. A thousand yard stare after the loss of her ability (that she suddenly seems to morph back into her red-haired self while looking the same as her teenage magical variant seems to hint at that, at least) ruined her family, a steep fall from fame and fortune. With their family's savings gone and no future, her father commited suicide, leading to her mother having a broken heart and mind, and losing the brother to addiction and crime. She's blaming herself, wondering where it went wrong, and pining for happier times.

Looking pretty good as far as generational improvements go, considering it has ~38% less XEs than the A770. When it works well, it's a really good card for its price range (and it pummels AMD in RT performance). Frametime pacing still seems to be an issue and there's the occasional crash. It's a pity Intel needed so long to get it out, what with the new generations around the corner.

Yeah, it's a lot more responsive now than it was. The forum's still eating the pets, uhm, posts, every now and then, but that'll probably never change. Not with this forum software at least.

I watched Social Nightmare with my wife. She was randomly looking for some mystery or horror film and stumbled upon it. I missed the opening credits, but even so it did not take me long to figure that it was an Asylum film - they all that have, uhm, Asylum look. You know, in the same way one can immediately tell that a movie is from France because it looks like a French film, or a movie is from Germany because it looks, yeah, like a typical German film. Unlike some of the other Asylum films which I found highly entertaining (like Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies), this one has very little redeeming qualities. Everyone's in possession of the idiot ball, the acting is really bad and the plot manages to be convoluted, unrealistic and harebrained at the same time, while still being so obvious that it takes all but the opening scene to figure out the "mystery" and what is going on and why. If that last part sounds like a contradiction to you, then welcome to the wonderful world of The Asylum. To shamelessly steal a line from Will Ferrell in one of his SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skits, I give the film a score so low it cannot be represented with a real number. Sheesh.

"Everything wrong with anime", the series. Oh dear. edit: on the bright side, I don't think I need to feel bad about loving StrikerS in spite of the fanservice any more.

Road tax is getting worse every year. Just shelled out 207.60€ for our cars. Meh.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office A four part drama series based on the British Post Office / Horizon Scandal, with the delightful Toby Jones in the lead role of Alan Bates. Normally I do not really watch these types of dramatic re-enactions of real life cases or situations, but this one's well worth the watch. Arnim Zola would feel right at home at the British Post Office. In case you're unaware, here's a fun little summary by the BBC. Nothing like losing your livelihood and going to prison over accounting software problems both the Post Office and its creator Fujitsu were aware of as early as 1999. Horizon had a whole host of errors and technical problems, including (but not limited to) duplicating transactions, repeating transactions during software freezes, an inability to synchronize with the servers in case of disconnects and a way for Fujitsu administrators to remotely change ledger balances without leaving an audit trail. The people involved are lucky that they're British, I guess. Elsewhere they might have gotten "DENY, DEPOSE, DEFEND"ed already. *The British Post Office has the right to conduct criminal investigations and to prosecute.

You also boot into your operating system of choice within five seconds of pressing the power button on your computer (unless your system spends a lot of time POSTing). PCIE 4.0 NVME SSDs are noticably better than PCIE 3.0 ones, while PCIE 5.0 ones have pretty steep cooling requirements and offer no real improvement over 4.0 ones in everyday use due to having similar performance for random reads and writes.

I have to admit that I like Diablo IV's seasons precisely because they have well defined "endings" - there's always a given set of tasks to do, and once you've done them all, you can of course still keep playing to push the boundaries of the endgame content, but for me it's sufficient to have done all the tasks and have gotten all the rewards possible. I have no idea what Path of Exile 2 is going to do for its endgame, but if it is similar to the first game there is going to be a goal to work towards in every season. Plus probably loads of procedurally generated endgame content that really never stops. I tend to not be interested in those unless they offer a sufficiently fun competitive element or they're part of a list of a checklist to tick off. But I can see why. I had a phase where I tried every roguelike I came across and spent a lot of time with them (like the hundreds of hours I have invested in FTL and Dead Cells) and I really burned out on the gameplay elements that are common to them all. ARPGs don't bother me in the same way though, as its just the maps that are generated procedurally in many of them (Grim Dawn didn't even do that). Yeah, I don't see how there's going to be much of an appeal to go through the content every time a new season starts. The gameplay seems deliberately slower even when it is working and the servers aren't dropping your inputs (in addition to button presses not doing anything, in this case they clearly worked because I could see the cooldown on my skill, but it never got cast), and even some of the regular enemies need to be properly prioritized and anything that's more than a regular monster has attack patterns to dodge. While I think soulslike is being applied to way too much nowadays, in this case it's quite correct. It does have a slower gameplay pace, very deliberate casting of skills that lock you into their casting animation and you need to properly read boss attacks and dodge accordingly. It's certainly an interesting choice, and not a game to boot up to faceroll through monster hordes to blow off steam after an annoying day at work.

Path of Exile 2. 3.2 hours so far. Currently not liking it very much. Bugs, unfinished content (well, it is Early Access) and server performance problems aside - which, quite frankly, I expected there to be anyway - the game's biggest failing, at least on a caster character, is that it just does not play well, like it being weird that non-projectile area of effect spells still obey line of sight targetting and end up where an imagined (but still infinitely fast) projectile would land if cast from your character. I'm not talking about casting something behind a wall, but through elements that would realistically block projectiles but definitely not line of sight. There's also seemingly no input buffering/queuing for abilities. I don't recall this being a problem in the first game, but here it is. Using a skill with a casting time basically locks the game out of accepting any other inputs until said cast time is over, leading to gameplay that isn't fluid and decidedly unfun, and God help if you if you pick up a weapon with a basic skill that has a casting time and don't bother binding it somewhere else than your usual left click, you know, like the core element of these games? Click on enemies until they explode. Well, it's easy to just put some other ability in your left click that doesn't have any casting time where you can just spam to your hearts content and press another ability in between to summon great lightning orbs, firewalls or exploding ice mines, but still, what if you don't have any other spammable ability at the moment? I'm not talking about having the ability to interrupt or cancel animations, but I would really appreciate it if I could chain cast skills with some buffering leeway. Especially when playing online where desyncing and server lag and poor connections can and will happen. While it looks like there's no buffering (I'm still hoping I have a weird input problem or bug or just so much server lag that it just appears to be not very fun to play), the game seems to conserve parts of your characters momentum while using abilities that have no casting time, leading your character to moonwalk at half speed backwards or forwards while spamming fire bolts or little lightning sparks. 's not the worst thing in the world, but pretty weird (and perhaps related to desyncing between client and server). Otherwise the game looks pretty neat, it trimmed down some of the more annoying elements of the first game and it's still pretty complex (arguably overly so, just like the first Path of Exile). I can't say much about the storyline yet, but so far it is not any better or worse than the first game's. Which is fine, the art of telling an interesting and decently written story in games that are mostly about gameplay has been lost since the early 2000s. It's been 24.5 years since Diablo II, and so far the only other ARPG that didn't come from Blizzard that played well enough in my opinion was Grim Dawn. I don't get it. Even Diablo IV isn't as fluid and fun to play as Diablo II was, but it's still leaps and bounds ahead of the competition when only looking at the pure gameplay perspective (sadly, the content and pace of new content for Diablo IV is... nowhere near as good). Grinding Gear Games, hire the Blizzard gameplay team. Or at least the guys from Crate that made Grim Dawn.

PoE II Early Access soon, I guess.

After finishing the D4 season and playing Veilguard I went back to playing Dark Souls 3. I am now done with the game. I am also done with the series, which is fine with me. These games well overstayed their welcome, at least when unlocking all the achievements. The summary page tells me I have played the game for less time than Dark Souls 2, which is only because Dark Souls 2 takes ages to finish. Dark Souls 3 is relatively short by comparison. The grinding for the achievements though, oh, is just so much worse. If you thought farming in Dark Souls 2 was bad, well, think again. Proofs of a Concord Kept will haunt me in my dreams for weeks to come. Having to grab all the "new" rings from NG+ and NG+2 also meant that one couldn't just rush through to the end. Which is doubly unfortunate since +3 upgrades of the rings that I did end up using were all found in the DLC areas, so going through NG+(+) was nothing but a useless chore to finish up finding rings and grabbing spells that I didn't get the first time around. Well, and the Proper Bow emote, for which one needs to fail a certain NPC's questline rather early in the game. I'm pretty sure one of the FromSoftware cultists has a long-winded explanation of how and why this is fantastic game design, but it's just not. Since being fashionable is also one of the cult's favorite past times, I took a screenshot of my character's final appearance. This is a first. Meet pretty Meta McMetaface: McMetaface wears Morne's helm, Havel's armor, Catarina Gauntlets and Harald Legion Leggins, combined with the Sharp Infused Sellsword Winblades and the Grass Crest shield. Not sure how so much of the community arrived at the conclusion that armor is usless in Souls games. Perhaps a holdover from the first Dark Souls where iframes and rolling worked a lot differently, but even there it is not useless. If it were Havel Tanking the Four Kings would not be a thing. Anyway, the physical damage reduction on this combination is nothing to sneer at. The setup is complemented by Havel's Ring +3, Cloranthy Ring +3 and Ring of Favor +3, with one wildcard ring for whatever resistance is best for the area or boss. I don't recall needing more than three tries for any of the bosses except Champion's Gravetender (yeah, dunno, that's just like me having problems with an "easy" boss, just like in my first Dark Souls run where I died more often to the Gaping Dragon than all other bosses combined), and that was limited to DLC ones and Nameless King (Friede, Twiddledee and Twiddledum and Darkeater Midir). The game obviously plays a lot better than Dark Souls 2. The areas look great, and I enjoyed that it is more linear. I also never found myself yelling at the screen because of ridiculous hitboxes, so that is an area that was either improved a lot, or I just got used to it. It also shares traits with the other games in the series that I have harped on for long enough now - it once again features a gripping narrative and very satisfying endings and the same "story" for the third time in a row, although the game now has the third option for an ending that Aldia was probably looking for. Half of the game felt like gratuitous fanservice, and I still like the slower and more methodical combat of Dark Souls better than this one's, but that is probably also liberally seasoned by hindsight and having played newer soulslikes. Playing Dark Souls 3 after Lies of P and Sekiro makes it look like a red-headed stepchild in between with no identity of its own, which is unfair, as one of those games isn't even a FromSoftware title and the other is much newer than Dark Souls 3, and has a much different combat focus.