majestic

Aren't you the optimist.

You're making a mistake here. The Republican Regime also signed one to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants. Well, sort of, it signed an executive order for federal agencies to withhold legal documents. Either way, that is clearly unconstitutional, as was their prior muslim ban (Gromnir might have made a post or a thousand about that). They are already being sued over it. Whether or not the SCOTUS could actually introduce the restrictions they want in a reexamination of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, well, that I do not know. What I mean to suggest here is that for the head of the Republican Regime, the legality, implementation and any direct or indirect ramifications of an executive order are completely irrelevant. All that matters is the spectacle for his intellectually underprivileged sect members. Just read that the regime still wants to introduce a 25% tariff on Mexican goods, starting with February.

Pretty sure they would love Heretic as well. I'll get me coat.

I'm taking bets, can we lock this thread in 19 hours or not?

So, the Republican Regime promised to repeal jus soli. As far as I know there is a limited set of exceptions (see United States v. Wong Kim Ark) that allow for the government to deny citizenship that will be hard to apply unless the Republican Regime designates any foreign nationals giving birth on US soil as enemy combatants or diplomats. They could probably try that with Mexicans and muslims, that would be fun to see. I doubt they can get the 14th amendment repealed (if so you're in for a treat, because that means they could topple the 22nd as well). SCOTUS could walk back on United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Very disappointed that they are already breaking campaign and election promises. Looks like they walked back on introducing tariffs within the first 24 hours. So sad. The US lost bigly.

This scam also has a major advantage in that it only hurts his cultists. His inner circle and a couple of crypto bros will make a decent buck out of it, but only at the expense of the MAGA idiots. Not like they deserve any better.

Ey, they did deliver answers to the mysteries. Most of them, anyway. It's just that many of the answers fell within two very broad categories: "the island sits atop a vast quantity of negatively charged exotic matter*" and "doesn't matter, because it was a lie and/or a game by Ben/Charles/Jacob/Man in Black", neither of which were very, say, satisfying - and like @bugarup already said, season six changed Lost from a mystery show with sci-fi elements to a fantasy show with mystery elements. Now, of course, the obvious answer to that problem is to simply view the series as a (quasi-)spirtual backdrop for the characters to work through their personal issues. Seen as such, it is perfectly fine for the events of the series being mostly predicated on a conflict between Jacob, the protector of the negative space wedgie (source of all life, source of all light, source of souls, Guf, whatever else you may want to call the island, as this depends very much on your own world view and interpretation), and his personal mistake: creating his opposite in a fit of rage, i.e. The Man in Black, his twin brother, as Jacob shares this hell of his own making with all the candidates he brings to the island. Through that lens, the afterlife portion also makes sense, i.e. solving your conflicts and facing your inner demons in life gave them peace in the afterlife, and allowed them to move on (contrast with those who did not move on, like Michael and Ben). For Jack, the obvious candidate, and Jacob, the current guardian, this journey ends logically where it had to: their death. Jack because his saviour complex allowed for no other resolution and to give him a messianic send-off and for Jacob, well, because his existence was intrinsically tied to the darkness he introduced to the island. Which is all fine, really, but not the reason fans followed the series in the first place. It works, but is largely an after-the-fact restrospective of what happened, and was most certainly not the intention all along, as it relies on using the events of the penultimate episode of Lost to re-examine and reinterpret events in the past six seasons. Insofar, the finale of season six was simply the finale of season six, not a finale to the series. This is pretty much what I mean with the series having a rather close kinship to Neon Genesis Evangelion, with Neon Genesis Evangelion abandoning much of its premise almost two thirds into its run, moving towards a more psychological exploration in its last ten episodes, culminating in one of the most divisive series finales of all time. There are, of course, differences, and NGE's original ending simply abandons** the (original) narrative entirely, while Lost actively resolves it in one of the most dissastifying ways imaginable - only rather recently topped by Game of Thrones, or the ending of Mass Effect 3 if we allow the point to expand beyond TV shows. NGE's ending also worked better, so I suppose this is just one more point for the idea that mysteries are better left unsolved if one cannot come up with a satisfying answer. Also fairly unique in getting an after-the-fact additional ending in form of an animated film that actually manages to give satisfying answers, after a fashion. Lost is a special case as both splits of the fandom are pretty much right. The ending is both thematically satisfying and one of the most disappointing endings in the history of TV and very much deserves the negative response and criticism it gets, and then some, at the same time. I suppose I got lucky, I watched Lost a long while after the series wrapped (by way of a blu-ray boxed set), so I could binge the series, the talk of it having a terrible ending already tempered my expectations, and I was all too aware of Jar Jar Abram's and Damon Lindelof's inability to follow through with interesting premises (*cough* Alias *cough*). This is what makes the Mass Effect 3 ending worse for me. When I played Mass Effect 3, I was also aware of the controversy surrounding its ending. Unlike Lost's ending, it still managed to disappoint me. *Otherwise known as The Island is Magic. **Relatively speaking, I mean, half of the ending wasn't even animated properly due to running out of time and the dire straits the production of Neon Genesis Evangelion was in at the time, mostly due to shifting the series focus close to the end of the run because Anno was unhappy with how the series was perceived. Gotta respect the man's ability to troll his audienec though. That it actually works as thematic ending to the series is a minor miracle.

In b4 Trumpist Bruce defends this as Trump doing Trump things, and we shouldn't take it seriously anyway.

Looks like I'm not alone in not liking Asmongold.

Sure you do, ect.

I watched a clip of someone making fun of the opening of Skeleton Crew and noped out. Not surprised if no one watched that, even if it became good afterwards.

Average video game VRAM usage is determined by console generations more than anything else. Now that the current generation is widely adopted, we can see more and more games needing the extra memory these consoles have (i.e. up to 12GB RAM for the frame buffer, instead of 8GB or less, outside of the irrelevant XBOX Series S). Right now we have games like Black Myth Wukong that don't need 8GB of VRAM even on 1440p unless you turn on ray tracing, which kills AMD performance so bad the 7900 XTX lands behind the RTX 4070, even with having twice the memory and a much higher memory bandwidth, and we can already see the next tech shift in games to include ever increasing RT workloads that sometimes cannot even be turned off, like in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - which is an AMD sponsored title where they get outclassed by nVidia - that even break the limits of what an RTX 4090 reasonably can handle, it looks more like even these overpriced nVidia cards will be technologically outdated before games reasonably can be expected to break the 16GB VRAM barrier. Look at all those RDNA2 cards that were recommended by tech channels because they had a better price to performance ratio and a more futureproof amount of memory on them compared to Ampere. A 6900 XT does 49fps on average with maximum details, upscaling and without ray tracing in Black Myth Wukong... on 1080p, coming in behind the 3080 10GB, and even with a 40 series card you'll be hard pressed to get decent performance out of turning full ray tracing on without using frame generation at any resolution above 1080p. Yes, Black Myth Wukong is an edge case due to being sponsored by nVidia and therefore using a lot of nVidia code, but UE5 in general shot future proofing from the last GPU generation to the moon. The next console generation is a while away, and widespread adoption to the point developers can discontinue to keep the prior generation in mind even further. My point being that spending twice as much for an RTX 5090 to have more than 16GB VRAM because it might last you longer is a risky proposition. You might find yourself needing more than 16GB of memory at some point, but unable to run the games in your desired resolution anyway. Even more so if that resolution is 4k or maybe even more. Edit: Not that I disagree with the general consensus that it is ridiculous for nVidia to not make 16GB VRAM their baseline on the 5060 and increase it from there, but going to the 5090 just for the extra memory with only gaming is so not going to be worth it. For that it would need to cost less than double of a 5080. Much less.

The professional line was called Quadro until the name was dropped with the advent of the RTX cards. Nowadays they have model names like RTX 4000 or RTX 5880. The key difference is ECC memory and access to nVidia's special (and certified) drivers with higher precision. The old Titan cards were simply aimed at enthusiasts who didn't mind shelling out a lot for high end hardware. That arguably changed, because the RTX 4090/5090 are clearly not just meant as halo products for gaming, but for those professionals who need them for raw computing power, memory capacity and bandwidth, but don't need ECC memory or increased computational precision. And, well, yes, they also basically shifted their product stack along with the new target, because like I said before, in addition to increasing the gross margins, cutting down bus size from the XX80 cards downwards makes sure those professionals have no other option than the XX90ies.

Heretic (2024) The only question left is does he dream me, or am I dreaming him? Do Mormons have magic underwear? Are adult movies a tool of the Lord? Is Jar Jar Binks a prophet of Christ? Is Judaism related to The Landlord's Game, and if so, does that make Bob Ross the face of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints? How many similarities make plagiarism? Why does great responsibility come with great power? Was Voltaire the first Spiderman? Does someone really need to know what they're talking about, or is it enough to be confident about it? What does that have to do with Hugh Grant looking like an aging Jeffrey Dahmer? Can NPCs be resurrected? Can they go off-script? And lastly... is the pie a lie? Well, pull up a chair, get your trusty Monopoly game box and strive to control the board. If these questions didn't pique your interest, then I can't really help you. However, if you ever found yourself wanting to watch a horror film with a fantastically delightful and affable Hugh Grant that doesn't need jump scares to evoke a feeling of terror and dread, then you should give this a spin. Don't let the premise of "two young women walk into the house of an older man, and something's awry" let you be turned off for lack of originality, it is only the film's final act where it becomes somewhat rote (with or without following the red herring). The performances of the actors make the film, and they smoothe over the (minor, but present) problems, and the return to standard horror form in the film's final parts.

Yes. There's a somewhat clear divide between the seasons, which is rather noticable on a rewatch, but probably not so much when you watch the show on a weekly basis for six years with a lot time passing between seasons. Like anyone needs a spoiler warning for an almost 20 year old show, but, warning. Spoilered more to keep the post short than to hide the spoilers. Uh. In the face of this Sailor Moon'eqsue plot, people's problem with the ending was that the characters meet in a church, with Jack's father, who is aptly named Christian Shephard, ushering them into the afterlife after Desmond makes them realize what is important and how to let go.

The flash-sideways universe is a purgatory not related to the actual island storyline - insofar as it pertains to the present of the series - so the complaints are fairly understandable. It is used to tie up the themes and character arcs of the series neatly enough, and it is similar, albeit much less disconnected, to the original NGE ending in that regard. It is the rest of season six that fails in wrapping up the ongoing island storylines (i.e. what happens while the survivors are still alive - the showrunners have stated often enough that "present day" island actually happened while they were alive) in a satisfying manner. I've said it half a dozen times on the boards before, I don't dislike the ending episode of Lost, but the handling of the rest of the season was somewhat unfortunate. Charles Widmore reaches the island is basically Jon Snow vs. the Night King a decade earlier, but the problems crept up earlier, Kate and her forced love triangle being a huge part of it. They could have done something interesting with it, but bringing it back after Sawyer spent a long time apart from Kate (and with Juliet, who the showrunners later decided was his soul mate after all) was... let's be generous here... not good, as was introducing the concept the ending of the island storyline hangs on in what is basically the penultimate episode, and it was not properly related to the events of prior seasons. Turning the island into Guf five minutes before it ends is just not good writing. It's a mess. It's not nearly as dumb as Mass Effect's Starchild and explanation for the Reapers nor is it as much off a drop off in quality as the final seasons of Game of Thrones, but that is hindsight. People not being happy with how the story wrapped up, that I can understand. Many of the other revelations that did provide answers were also fairly uninspired and/or boring to the point where it would have been better to never explain why Richard was seemingly immortal or how the Black Rockended up this far on the island. People not understanding the ending or having a problem with them basically meeting in purgatory to pass onto nirvana in a mixing of relegious themes that was always present in the series? No. That's on them alone indeed. My biggest problem of the ending episode was Sayid's soulmate being Shannon. I mean come on. Really? After Sayid spends six seasons pining after Nadia?

That "some" is what a quarter of that total population voted for. That's some "some".

Lost's problem was not the ending episode (I stated it before, but I think it tied the themes of the show together well enough), but the way they handled long running storylines in season six - they just killed them off, sometimes in a very literal fashion. For three seaons there was this back and forth about what is going to happen if Charles Widmore manages to come back to the island. Naturally, having not thought of anything beforehand, nothing happens when he does, and after that he is unceremoniously shot. The funny thing with the smoke monster is that it started out as something that fits the final season pretty well (rewatch the early episodes with the final season in mind), it was the middle parts of the show that did not fit.

Here's one of the funny moments that I had playing Elden Ring. Prerequisite knowledge: Elden Ring loot icons come in different colors (that used to be different sizes in the other games). White for regular items, purple for rare items, and gold for legendary items. Imagine the following situation: you have just stepped onto a lift, and it is bringing you ever downwards. Down, down, down you go. Further. And further. There is seemingly no end to the ride on the platform. Finally, after what seems an eternity, you reach the ground, and you walk out, spotting ruins. Small parts of the area are faintly illuminated by fireflies casting their silvery light into the darkness of these underground ruins. You take note that they do not try to escape when you approach them, and decide to take a few of them with you for further examination. Not that you have any use for them now, but perhaps they will come in handy, their silver glow being similar to items you have found before. Strange looking new enemies creep about. Carefully you approach one that is standing about alone, to test the mettle of your newly discovered foes. You attack. Your opponent is decidedly unimpressed by your attack, as your combat abilities and equipment are seemingly not up to the task of breaking the clay hide of these shambling people, or whatever they are or used to be. You are clearly not prepared to explore the area, but still, they are slow, and you are not. It takes a while to dispatch them, but they are not an insurmountable challenge. You decide to press on, and explore the ruins. In the distance, you can see a human figure atop a broken pillar, clearly clutching something intricate in his hands (out of character note: the corpse has a purple glowing loot icon). Ever so slowly you make your way to your freshly discovered point of interest. It gets dicey for a while, as you notice that these new enemies can also cast spells. Luckily for you though, the projectiles of their spells are as slow as they are, and only the enemies equipped with bows are a slight problem, as they rain arrows down on you from elevated positions difficult to rush to. You persevere, and finally reach the pillar. You see that the humanoid figure you spotted is an old, desiccated corpse. Carefully you make note of your surroundings and find that there is no way to reach the top of this pillar from where you are, but you can see the crumbled walls surrounding the ruins could perhaps be used to reach the elevated platform above the broken column. It would be easy to jump down from there. Tracing your path along the walls you reach the other end of the area you are in. Carefully you climb in top of the partly crumbled walls, going higher and higher. It is a long way down now, a stumble now would surely kill you. There is a broken walkway atop a series of columns, and after a series of carefully executed jumps and a lot of sweat and anxiety, you finally cross the entire area and reach the platform above the corpse. You drop down, and immediately pick up the item the corpse is clutching. Carefully you inspect it. It is an intricate backpack. Slowly, with bated breath, you open it. You wonder what it is you have discovered. A lost incantation? A new sorcery? Some ancient secrets allowing you to concoct potions to ensnare the senses and befuddle your enemies? A new weapon, perhaps? Oh, isn't anticipation just the greatest of feelings? You find three of the fireflies that are buzzing around everywhere and that respawn whenever you rest at the nearby bonfire site of grace. They're classified as rare crafting material, giving them a purple loot glow, and you've just wasted your precious time doing a FromSoftware jumping puzzle for nothing.

Found myself with ample and somewhat unexpected free time in the past three weeks, so I figured I'd get this one done and over with too: Funny how this was, purely in terms of getting all the achievements, the least hair pulling out of any of the FromSoftware game catalogue that I have so far 100%'ed (meaning the three Dark Souls entries, Sekiro and now Elden Ring) but it bordered on being the most miserable experience I have had playing their games yet. Not surprising, given that I generally detest open world games. At least it plays better than Dark Souls 2. Well, arguably, it plays better (in terms of how your character controls and how responsive the controls are) than all the other games except Sekiro. Cannot talk about Bloodborne as that is still somewhat out of reach. Not sure what I can say about the game that hasn't been said yet. I find myself agreeing with Joseph Anderson's initial assessment. In some ways, Elden Ring contains the highest highs in the series (it might be worth the price of admission just for exploring Síofra River for the first time, assuming one does it the moment you find it) - but it also so utterly falls off a cliff at a certain point that one's experience ends up being worse than Dark Souls 1's latter half - and that is even before factoring in the amount of FromSoftware style bullsh*t that creeps up towards the end of the game. It makes the fandumb even dumber for defending it. I have yet to complete Shadow of the Erdtree, but I'm not sure I want to do that just now. I'll get to it eventually.

On the one hand, yeah, honey is a scam run by PayPal, no less, on the other hand, anything that scams scummy influencers and scummy shops out of their money can't be so bad. Then again, that scammed money is going straight to PayPal, so that's bad, but on the other hand, it's money that would otherwise go to scummy influences and scummy shops, but... error, maximum loops reached. Aborting. That's a tough one.

There's always the option of just not doing any of the DLCs. There's nothing in there that forces you to do them im NG+ or higher (the platinum sure doesn't, unless it's different from the PC version's achievements).

It doesn't work based off of weapon classifications but on a per attack basis, i.e. it works for all thrust attacks whenever counter damage is applied. The boost is limited to whatever FromSoftware designated as thrust attack on your Black Knight Halberd. The Heide Lance on the other hand would gain a pretty substantial boost on counters, what with its base scaling being 1.6 already. The Fire Clutch ring gives you something like +30 fire AR with your Black Knight Halberd, in exchange for lowering your defenses. Not sure the tradeoff is worth it with a halberd, especially when you're already having trouble surviving. Speaking of the gank squad, well, I actually used heavy weapons in hit-and-run attacks against the archer. Probably best to cheese them though, there are some stalagmites you can hide behind where they cannot attack you, but you can attack them. They were never designed to be fought solo anyway, so who gives a damn.

It's probably not the playstyle you want (still melee though), but respec into a rapier build, the rapier's super fast attacks make playing turn based Dark Souls much easier. It's your turn more often, and they do really good damage due to their insane counter attack scaling. Core outline is pretty simple: 105 AGL, (up to) 40 DEX, Stamina soft-cap at 20 END Old Leo Ring, Ring of Blades Rapier, Espada Ropera or Ice Rapier (2-handing rapiers is generally the better option) The regular Rapier has the lowest stamina cost while the Espada Ropera has better DEX scaling and the highest durability. The Ice Rapier is special insofar as infusing it does not tank the weapon's physical damage too much. I would also recommend running the Ring of Stone outside of boss fights because that gives the rapier enough poise damage to stun lock most enemies, including phantoms, which leaves you with one free ring slot to play with in levels (like the Ring of Binding) and up to two for boss fights - you can use the best defensive options and stat boosts as you want. The reason why this works so well is the scaling from counter attacks, which is, during boss fights, pretty much all the time. Rapiers have a 140 counter damage rating, the Old Leo Ring boosts that to 157.5, meaning as long as you attack during an enemy's attack or recovery animation, you deal ~60% more damage per hit. The Ring of Blades adds flat extra damage per attack, which is ideal for a weapon with quick attacks and a large percentage boost on many of these attacks. Ricard's Rapier is an option too, but its lower base damage is only offset by the better DEX scaling once you reach 40 DEX and beyond, and it's heavy attack is a flurry that shreds weapon durability - and the damage difference is not that consequential even after it catches up with its scaling. For how much people seem to love this weapon, it's a bit of a paper tiger. The effects of seeing big numbers on your screen, I suppose, a well placed flurry attack can deal tremendous damage to a boss. Looks fantastic, but a regular rapier isn't far behind in the same time span and doesn't break from usage as quickly. From there on out there are a couple of options: You invest in your stats normally for a purely physical damage build. Nothing wrong with equipping decent armor, its not nearly as useless as people make it out to be, plus all that weight saved in heavy weaponry goes a long way in having heavier armor options poise and damage reduction. Rolling i-frames are the same, as long as you keep yourself from fat-rolling, you're good. It still affects the run speed and stamina recovery, so, uhm, just experiment. You go with ~14 VIT and Flynn's Ring - that locks you out of wearing anything but paper for armor but that extra damage is pretty good, because as long as you keep your maximum equipment load at somewhere around 60 it adds 50 damage per hit. On the bright side, you'll have a lot of points left over for VIG. Dark infuse your rapier and invest into FTH and INT enough to make use of Dark Weapon or Resonant Weapon. The Ice Rapier is probably the best base for this. Resonant Weapon is 2 spell slots so you would need the two slots. Dark Souls 2 very graciously does not scale buff bonus damage from your caster stats, and the Dark infusion scaling on a non-dark base weapon isn't great, so just invest enough stats to cast your buff of choice. Again, this works because weapon buffs add flat damage to your fast attack weapon with a massive counter bonus. Eh, technically there's nothing wrong with combining 2 and 3. You'll be dealing greatsword damage per hit on bosses, with a very fast thrusting attack weapon. Besides, as is often the case, thrusting attacks are pretty good in these games in general. Weapon damage in this game would work much better if FromSoftware just added normalization based on weapon attack speed, but hey, it is what it is. With that build you deal a truckload of damage rather quickly and can still respond to enemies without being locked into massive weapon swings.

It is, sort of, but not for gamers. There is a group of people who do not need these cards for gaming or for mining, but for their computing power combined with memory bandwidth. That made the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti a very attractive alternative to nVidia's professional cards. Plenty of use cases where you do not need certified drivers that calculate values more accurately than what is good enough for gaming. nVidia decided that professional users who want to forgo their even more expensive professional cards should at least pay flagship model prices. So they made the RTX 4080 with a smaller 256 bit memory bus than the RTX 3080's 320 bits (and 384 bits for the TI veriant), and increased its L2 cache to compensate. Thus the card was actually slower in some workstation applications than its direct predecessor, while still being faster for gaming. It's a win-win situation, you force professionals to use your halo products and the lower tier cards are available for purchase because nobody but gamers are gobbling them up. Indeed. nVidia can charge whatever they want for their halo models because they're only interesting to a group of people who will pay the money regardless. Those 5090s would sell like hotcakes even if they charged 2999$ for them, because that would still be cheaper than getting dedicated AI processors and they are available. There's a reason the US government banned the export of the regular 4090 to China, and it's not because they want gamers to have GPUs.