majestic

I have no idea, sorry. I only did the one playthrough with the mage. The game has a whole bunch of options to tune combat, in addition to several presets. You can just drop enemy health to low and turn off death if you don't want to bother with the combat too much.

That depends way too much on your class and your choice of weapons. I played a mage and thought the 2-handed playstyle was slow, unresponsive and not fun to play, so I switched to dagger/orb Spellblade and never looked back, stacking burn, shock and arcane bombs while zipping around the battlefield was very satisfying. Rounded the build out with some burst damage attacks, and it was a hoot and a half to play. At least it was for me, but I like high dps glass cannon characters whose only defense is high mobility and good cooldown management. There's a reason I tend to play sorcerers in Diablo IV and used the Stinger in Everspace 2. But yeah, game is definitely too long. The mage's ranged playstyle with the staff and the entire Control tree is probably also a leftover from the days where you were supposed to have actual players keeping the attention of the enemies, instead of semi-braindead AI companions. Probably. You have your home base to upgrade your gear, and the Crossroads were most likely meant as a lobby of sorts where you could pick where you want to go and check for groups. Most likely the entire reason why you have to reach everything through the Crossroads and not have a more connected game world like in the other games. Pretty standard for the live service game they were going for before pivoting to a single player experience. All the level designs - especially the much maligned city maps - are also left from it being supposed to be a co-op crawl through dungeons, rather than exploring traditional RGP areas. Game's pretty decent for its chaotic development. Certainly better than the negativity heaped on it, but also not great by any means.

No, I just gave up and spam positivity everywhere. I blame it on too much Scooter.

Rings of Power is really great. The internal logic and consistency is top notch, the acting is a tour de force, the dialogue is simply *chef's kiss*, the costumes are perfect and to top it all off they really made sure to pay the necessary respect to the source material. Then there's the casting, just incredible. Galadriel and Elrond really come to life, better than in the books, and certainly much better than Hugo Weaving or Cate Blanchett ever were in the films. I just realized I did not yet praise the editing, camerawork, the sets, the scene building, shot composition, the fantastic sound design and the music.

Not overly surprising, since Trump and his cult call everyone who isn't Trump, or on the extreme end of the political spectrum, "leftist extremists" it only logically follows that the Reptilians also must be leftist terrorists. The problem is now that I am not perfectly clear on the lineage of the Reptilians. While all dinosaurs are reptiles, the inverse is not correct. It might be that the Reptilians are an off-shoot of a different group of animals within the reptilia. When in doubt, just go with guilt by association, i.e. the dinosaur is a left-wing extremist because other reptiles clearly are too.

No, the nVidia driver turns off rebar anyway, except for whitelisted games. If you had an AMD card, then yes, definitely.

I recommend Kill la Kill. This has... uhm... is... uhm...

Two things: Control in your use case is much more limited by turning on full ray tracing than PCIE bandwidth, and secondly, well, even though 8 lanes on PCIE 3.0 seems a bit low by today's standards, it only becomes a really huge problem for your GPU when you run out of VRAM. Which on 1440p, with a 16GB model, isn't going to happen with Control. Or most other games at the moment. If any at all. If you had an RTX 5060 (TI) or a RX 9060 XT with 8GB, then, well, the card would probably crap itself, even on PCIE 3.0 x16. Well, maybe not in Control, IIRC it just starts dropping texture quality or entire textures when VRAM gets low, but for games like Veilguard the 1% lows just drop by over 50%.

If I understood what happened in D2 correctly then yes, except Chaos Uniques in D4 are more powerful than their regular counterparts.

There are two big problems. The first is the most obvious one. Every build only ever needs a very small amount of uniques out of a huge list of them (even with them dropping from the reputation grind), and having them randomly drop with better stats in another equipment slot makes for such a small chance that you'd probably end up decking out your character in all the mythic items you need well before you find a useful chaos unique (although I did find a Fists of Fate chest armor with an almost 400% damage range, which I ended up actually using to finish the season journey). The other one is that implicit modifiers that should be a base part of the item they're on get transferred as well. Meaning none of the boots that drop as chaos armor are really interesting because you automatically lose the boot's inherent evade modifiers unless you also have a boot unique item in some other slot and actually need it. Inverse it also makes amulets in other item slots much more interesting as they always come with very generous +all resistances, more than you could get on the item slot otherwise - and armor pieces that can roll defensive affixes seem to be set to having a 0% chance of actually dropping with a resist all affix. They also get a 50% bonus on the aspects painted on them, so moving an amulet slot around is almost always a huge boost.

So, King Donald I of Gaza just in case he can't quite make it as Donald I Whitehouse?

Just... uhm, turn on the subs.

He's going to make them swear an oath of fealty to Mango Mussolini and purge those who would object to deploying the military for homeland defense against left-wing terror networks like BML and Antifa. There's also a government shutdown right around the corner for a little bit of a information blackout and some (or a lot of) convenient firings. There's always a chance he'll let them wage war against the sea. With this administration, we're not that far removed from the worst erratic behaviour that was ascribed to unpopular Roman empires in later written histories.

So, Diablo IV season is done. This is the shortest time it took for me to clear one, and I generally tend to take my time rather than plow through the content in an efficient fashion. Not that I mind that much.

I use Afterburner because I undervolted the 4070 TI in the past, but I kept running into stability issues with Everspace 2 (no other game though, weirdly enough, Cyberpunk 2077 ran stable with all bells and whistles enabled), so I dropped it and just went with 85% power target instead. If you install the new nVidia app which no longer requires registration and a login, you can use that to set the power target. You really need to make sure it leaves your game settings alone though.

Just set the power target to 85%. If the 5070 TI is anything like the 4070 TI you'll end up with 95% of the performance for a lot less power drawn.

Yeah, rumor has it most trans-prostitutes are also fairly booked out whenever a Republican congress is in town. It's weird, almost like projection is a right-winger's game.

An apology to the Kirk family, lol. His "bereft" wife was on air after the assassination, scoring cult brownie points in an inflammatory speech trying to turn her late husband into a martyr, exactly the sort of thing a mourning widow would do directly after losing her husband and father of her children. Especially a mourning widow from a traditional family the way Charlie Kirk argued for. 99% of right-wing whining is projection. Or as we say here: "So wie der Schelm ist, so denkt er auch von anderen." - meaning, very loosely, it takes one to know one. Although Kash Patel still takes the take. I'll see you in Valhalla bro has to be the dumbest line of 2025 (coming from the director of the FBI), and it's a year where Trump said a lot and renamed the Gulf of Mexico and the Department of Defense.

Well, if one's on the extremely far right-end of the political spectrum, everything and everyone else looks left. Besides, if one just excludes economic politics (in which the AfD is hilariously out-capitalist-ing the FDP) like the far-right populists generally do, backed by wealthy people as they all seem to be, the mainstream opinion of simply accepting other forms of family or concepts of living together outside of what politicians in Germany call the "core" (father, mother, children) family is something that can be seen as left insofar as the left leaning parties are the ones pushing for more sociall progressive policies. It's not like the CDU (or our equivalent, the ÖVP) were at the forefront of opening marriage for homosexual poeple. They hemmed and hawed until they were just forced to. Angela Merkel was chancellor at a time where society as a whole moved towards more understaning and acceptance of alternative ways of life. One act of accepting refugees might have caused a cascade reaction landing us in some dangerous waters in this day and age, but left-wing does that not one make. Certainly not the CDU, and even less their Bavarian appendix.

Finished Silk Song. The final fight is pretty cool, although it will probably make @Lexx tear his hair our, or rage quit again. Unlike with Hollow Knight, I can't see myself tackling the Steel Soul mode (hardcore mode, i.e. only one life, then game over). I mean sure, it's probably possible to save scum by copying or use a speedrunning training mod, but that isn't really the point of the exercise. I guess simply finishing the game with any% would be doable, but a 100% Steel Soul run? Yeah, count me out.

Curtis Yarvin has been blogging about his dreams for almost twenty years, blogs called Unqualified Reservations and Gray Mirror, you can look them up if you want, and he calls it Dark Enlightenment (a name that teenagers could easily pick for their goth or black metal band). Companies existing as their own little kingdoms with their own laws, and them as kings. Cities run as companies, competing for citizens. The final Cyberpunk form of Guard Dog's beloved libertarianism. He blogged about how to turn the US into an autocracy and has inspired the neo-reactioary movement. He's a nutjob who has gone from defining castes of people in the US, arguing that South American immigrants are part of a caste where men are criminals and women on welfare, to giving them names from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (elves are the liberal ruling elite, hobbits are the middle class and dwarves the workers) and wants to replace the elves with dark elves (i.e. him and his ilk). Friends with J. D. Vance (who has publicly quoted the "works" of Yarvin and referenced Yarvin's idea of the Cathedral in speeches), even though he's been trying to distance himself from him, and backed by Peter Thiel. The same Peter Thiel who runs companies like Mithril and Palantir, because referencing Tolkien's body of work is fun. A nutjob who was invited to the inaugural gala of Mango Mussolini because by now he's an influencial figure among the alt-right / neo-reactionaries. You know, someone who wants to turn the United States into a monarchy, with ties to the vice president, in an administration where the president has posted and talked about himself as being the king on more than one occasion. Who said that voting for him would be the last time people need to vote. With people like Bruce still believing he's joking. The tech bros are, as Gromnir put it, vying for control. Absolute control. I mean, what can you do when you're so rich that you and your familiy will never want for anything for any forseeable future? Well, why not become king?

I'm pretty sure the last phase of Grand Mother Silk has some patterns that cannot be avoided. She sometimes throws her blades at you from beyond the screen while you have to track spikes on the ground or falling debris, and they're way too fast to dodge without seeing them being launched. Other than that, was okay-ish for a "final" boss fight, but of an uninspired Radiance knockoff. Onwards to act three, after I get rid of the curse, that is.

I enjoyed the platforming in Hollow Knight, and White Palace and Path of Pain. They were a little more difficult, but relatively short. Silksong, on the other hand, is nothing but a kaizo hack of Hollow Knight, answering a question that nobody ever asked: what if all of Hollow Knight was like White Palace? Nothing of it is ever as long and complicated and without break - at least so far - as Path of Pain was, but it certainly feels like the game after the first act was the result of an AI prompt asking for a full game in the vein of White Palace. One of the great things of Hollow Knight, the fun of exploring the world, has been lost. This I cannot quite quantify, the areas are connected enough, but the game lacks something that the first one had. Reaching a new environment is not like discovering a new world of wonders as they're also not nearly as distinct as Hollow Knight's were. Each one in Silksong feels so interchangeable because the design is too similar, even if the assets are different. Different enemy designs, but super similar movesets and enemy types. There are sawblades in the citadel, hanging spikes in the Sinner's Road, weird cushions in various places or the exploding poison bulbs of Bilewater. They're all variations on the same thing, something to pogo-jump off of. The worst part though? This is the game equivalent of The Force Awakens. That film has no true quiet moment where you could take everything in. Silksong has no quiet moment to enjoy the artwork or the environments, because it is loaded to the brim with platforming and enemies, but without the game design that usually goes along with games like this. For the amount and kinds of platforming nonsense you have to pull in, say, Bilewater, for instance, there are not nearly enough benches for it to remain fun to do. In some way the decision to include the crests and different movesets with them is part of the problem, I think. They had to design every platforming part in a way that is doable with all of the various downward strikes you can do, from Hornet's original diagonal downward slash to the slow Reaper slash and the fast Wanderer slash and whatever the hell you do with the Beast slash, the weird very short diagonal slash of the Architect... well, you get the idea. TL;DR: Beyond the first few, every enrivonment feels the same in Silksong. The devs made the mistake of stuffing everything to the brim with platforming and enemies, making it a chore to explore areas more than fun. Having to balance the platforming for different movesets also left them all being very similar, just with different skins. I'm still having fun, and I can't quite knock the game at the asking price, but it sure is a step down from the first game.

Just unlocked the double jump. Path of Pain was a lot shorter, but also harder, and also switched to the Crest of the Wanderer due to its massively increased attack speed. The short range isn't really an issue so far outside of some really annoying flying enemies. Can't quite grasp why you guys struggled with Moorwing so much, outside of doubling his blade attack shortly before he dies he doesn't do anything spectacular or problematic. Found the Last Judge's second phase much more annoying. I really hated the way one has to wait for a decent opening to attack, and he kept doing his Nightmare King Grimm tribute fire column ability. Which of course always ended up having a fire column right next to him. Impatience killed me a couple of times there.

Images of Shoemaker-Levy 9 (or rather, its fragments) crash into Jupiter were one of the astronomy highlights of the 90ies. 's not always you get to see the aftermath of a 300 gigaton impact.