majestic

Good to know the scorpions didn't get Frankie Muniz. They were after him for a while.

Diablo IV: Season of Slaughter Ah, just kidding. It wouldn't be a Blizzard D4 season if it actually worked an hour after going live.

Cammy is great. Oh yeah me love new forum software, long time Outside of trying to make your party Unfair viable* (as in playing on Unfair the whole time from start to finish), she's actually one of the better companions - Spirit Hunter is a really good Shaman subclass. Offers good support, decent martial prowess and hexes - and she doesn't run away when you go down the more evil paths of the game - well, of course she doesn't. *Not a problem of Camelia alone. The various patches of the game introduced sweeping nerfs to many mechanics that were, while broken, a staple to make some companions really good to use even on Unfair. Some survived the nerfs, more or less. Ember went from deleting endgame bosses in a single turn to "only" dealing upwards of 600 damage per turn, so there's nothing wrong with bringing her along, but others not so much. There's a hilarious exception in Wenduag - with the new classes she does really well as Sharpshooter, if you don't mind having to babysit her, like, a lot, and with Lann being a waste of a party slot in this day and age, that's a win, I guess. If, uh, you don't mind having Wenduag in the party. Good old times of double dipping AC gains, pet levelling being bugged, Crossblooded bloodlines stacking dragon element damage buffs, Greater Vital Strike damage being multiplied by critical hits, Geniekind stacking and Loremasters being able to pull the wildest feats out of their butts. The issue is not that you can't make companions work on Unfair - epsecially when you play one of the stronger mythic paths, an Angel with a merged spellbook will, even with all the nerfs, still pretty much win the game, but you need to get to that point, and the journey is that much less arduous if you take properly min-maxed mercenaries. Playing Unfair is an excercise in making the game as easy as possible on your patience. Can't really recommend it. Much better to just play on Core Rules and have fun with the game.

Well, akshually... while scythe is not the best weapon class to pick for them, melee Liches are ungodly powerful. All the bugfixing made fauchards way too feat heavy to pick as weapons of choice, they still do great with Grave Singer, and a lof of the spells you get can't be saved or resisted against, so you don't lose too much from not focusing on your spellcasting abilities. AC double dipping has also been fixed a long time ago, but you'd still benefit a lot from starting out as Scaled Fist Monk. Probably want to go with the Legend path though. It's hard to say no to all the extra levels and feats you get. Makes your melee power go much more brrrrrrrrrr than anything you'd get from finishing the Lich path. Class progression is pretty much what you'd expect - Scaled Fist as first level (AC buff from CHA, extra attack with staves, the works), then Sorceror until you can do Dragon Disciple, then go Eldritch Knight and round out with whatever else appeals to you. If you don't mind hiring a mercenary instead of using companions, having a Skald is a hoot and a half, unless you give your character a class that already has access to rage powers.

That someone is Spawn, the entire album is based on the comics. :p

Eh, the Jackster's going to shut up eventually, no worries. Keanu on the other hand, uh...

Unless one actually buys into my idea that all of Rebuild is Anno's piss take on the NGE fandumb - which I don't even fully do myself - then the answer is yes, because it can't get any worse from here. Granted, I am almost completely unfamiliar with Yoko Taro's body of work except for NieR: Automata, which I didn't enjoy all that much, but not for reasons related to the game's writing (except maybe trying to have this big reveal that was kind of obvious the entire time, but I can see that working for a lot of people). I know the game has many fans on the forum here, but the gameplay was just cra..., ah, let's just say not for me.

I've been expecting the Supreme Court to strike down the tariffs ever since Howard Nutlick's former associates started buying up potential tariff recourse claims. I'd say it can't get any more obvious, but with this administration, any more obvious was stretched to the limit with Trump's meme coin.

I takes a lot of brainage to make the words come out.

Inno3D puts the number of fans in the card name. Not all that relevant for a RTX 5080, but there's X2 and X3 variants of lower tier models. edit: Great, thanks to the new forum software not having an overview of the amount of pages, I keep missing that there's an extra page. Ah well, I'll just leave the redundant information here.

Yeah, dunno. Still have Shadow of the Erdree unfinished, but I'm so burnt out on FromSoftware games that I can't get myself to play it. I killed Moon Knight Whatsherface and then said "Yeah, that's it, I'm good" in spite of my progress bar OCD (having to obsessively scour the world for Scadutree Fragments also really doesn't help my desire to pick it up again). Which means I can't comment on Promised Consort Radhan, but the base game is full of steer manure boss design. It just is generally not all that noticable due to the open world design making it really easy to be overlevelled and getting some leeway in the fights. The game is the culmination of the arms race against players, with a major mechanical shift away from being able to react to enemies towards having to memorize attack patterns, and there's nothing in the game that more exemplifies this than Malenia's Waterfowl Dance. Sure it's easy enough to deal with once you know how, i.e. either that it is somewhat reliably cancelled by ice pots or that simply dropping target lock and walking behind her makes her miss the part of the combo that is otherwise undodgeable, in addition to doing a whole lot of input reading (note that incorrigible FromSoft fanboys will say that the game doesn't actually input read, the bosses just react frame perfectly to player animations, which just proves how far up Miyazaki's ass their heads really are). Her heal-on-hit ability is also a hard counter for a variety of counter attack and block builds that otherwise work fine in Elden Ring and even the DLC, where such builds got a boost by the Deflecting Hardtear basically turning your character into Sekiro from, uhm, Sekiro for five minutes, and they actually even patched out ways to hit trade or stunlock her. And let's face it, the first time you got her to phase 2, you probably died to Scarlet Rot because that bloom effect sure goes for a long way and has an incredibly unintuitive moment when it can be dodged. If your main takeaway for stupid boss design from the Elden Ring base game is anything but Malenia's steaming fountain of excrement you're probably playing with Spirit Ashes or in co-op.

No, I just haven't tried scrolling to the bottom and klicking on a crescent moon. Thanks @Gfted1 .

Everything is really, really white and I don't see no toggle for a different theme in my content settings. Halp?

There's no scenario where a 5080 is worth a 30% premium over the 5070 TI. I'm also continously impressed by the hardware prices in other places in the EU, a PNY 5070 TI goes for 880€ at the moment. Which is still a good deal more than it used to be, last month they went for 819€. Still not a great deal for a card with the performance of the 5070 TI, but it's the best it is going to get for a longer while now, looks like. I should have bought a 4070 TI Super while they were like 750 and pawned my 4070 TI off on the used market. Well, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Congress Clown Greg Steube needs to get out of Florida for a bit. Back in December we had three weeks of constantly overcast skies and a lot of fog. Very, very persistent fog. In fact so persistent, that we've gotten less than ten minutes of sunshine from December 1st to Christmas. Three entire weeks it looked like Silent Hill. Nice shot from our office terrace. So yeah, dunno, how long can water vapor stay in the air given the right conditions? Weeks of cloudy skies? Fog that won't go away for days and days?

"The Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently." -- JD Tarkin

I thought about that almost through the entire finale. Except for the ending bits, which I obviously liked, because a group of people just recently out of High School (Steve and Robin and the gang) with their real lives beginning is just bound to make me nostalgic and sad, especially when there's also the original kid gang just graduating. Found myself wondering: is a nothing finale like that really a good way to go out? It's the most forgettable ending to a series ever, and it ends one of the, if not the, most successful - for better or worse - shows on streaming ever made. Honestly, they should have just replayed a mixture of NGE's original ending and End of Evangelion (mostly in Vecna's mind), with Instrumentality, err, sorry, the thing that is about to happen in the finale that our heroes are trying to stop, playing out in the background. That would have been the best thing ever, and I don't say that lightly. Just follow that idea for a moment and see Kali (with better development and a better actress), El and Will as Asuka, Rei and Shinji for a moment. Just with psychic powers and monsters instead of genetically engineered alien hybrid mechs fighting Angels. It could even end with El and Mike washing ashore on the sea of the Human hive mind. And yeah, the retcons? Not a fan. Worst decision ever. Totally unnecessary. The Upside Down was fine as a eldritch horror mirror dimension / Shadow Plane take. The last 20 minutes are character sendoffs - the best part of the episode, by far and large.

Try playing Auradin, Lilith pops before she gets any mechanics off.

Stranger Things finale: By the Bookside Up. I'm not sure what to say about the finale. It does not happen often that I watch the final episode of a longer running TV series and think the ending was basically by the book, going through all the motions - but this one sure did. Even the only mystery left about the ending was later just narrated out by Mike, because in this day and age and with what apparently Netflix' customers are these days, it is not possible to just let people figure anything out on their own. Anyway, there really is nothing else to say about the finale as it all happens just the way it... had to. In a sea of terrible TV show finales, that is perhaps a good thing, but memorable, it is not. We're still talking about some series endings to this day, even if the shows ended thirty years ago, but even in three years nobody's going to talk about this episode. Which brings me to the big problem here: on an objective level, this season was not good. It had a runtime of over nine hours with material for perhaps an overly long movie, but not three of them. It is very much like Bilbo Baggins on his 111th birthday. Butter, spread over too much bread. The big moments in the season were more often than not badly paced, the setup after the first episode did not really allow for slow character moments, but they still put them in there. People are really hung up over a certain really, really slow scene with Will, but that is by far not the worst one. Jay Bauman's probably got it right, the thing that is wrong with Will's scene is that it just screams Emmy bait moment. I didn't hate it, and it does have a storyline reason for it being there, but it doesn't have a reason for the entire cast to be around for it. And speaking of the entire cast, it sure looks like the production team was contractually obligated to give everyone screentime. Not that it saved Lucas from being the token black guy in the season - he literally had nothing else to do than stick with Max in the hospital. Instead we added a bunch of new characters, and even though they once again are the highlights of the season (especially Derek), one has to wonder why. The new kids are just a McGuffin for Vecna's plan. The pacing is terrible, the performances of everyone in the US military, acting wise and storywise are just plain bad, if you thought the Russians in season three were dumb, they top it all. And still, you know, at the end of the day, I sat through it all without pausing. Binged the episodes, after the first one, even. That is simply because, while I can see the season being bad when I look at it objectively, my attachment to the series and the characters (and by some extension, the actors too, I suppose) makes it impossible for me to truly dislike it. For now, at least. If I ever rewatch Stranger Things some years down the line, I should probably stop after the first season. Back when the third season of Andromeda first aired, I actually found myself disagreeing with the scathing reviews it (rightfully, mind) got, simply for the same reasons. A couple years of emotional detachment later I can't even finish season three on a rewatch, let alone go on to season four. Christ did that show become terrible under Kevin Sorbo's showrunning. It's a good thing it is over.

Game of Thrones' final seasons set the bar so low that a show is going to have to do much worse than Stranger Things to ruin the show. But yes, I agree, that is also part of what @Bartimaeus mentioned. The characters (or most of them, anyway) had complete story arcs in the first season, leaving only the new ones as really interesting in the newer seasons. The storyline of the second and third seasons were never nothing more than a remix of the first one. Sure, the first season had an 80ies style sequel hook, but that was pretty much spot on for the genre. From a purely artistical point of view, yes, Stranger Thing should have been left alone after a single season. From a business point of view, I can't really blame anyone involved for wanting to make more episoes - and much more money, obviously.

Stranger Things wins the award for the most pointless retcon of the year by There's this neat little concept in fiction that when you have something that is somewhat inexplicable, like Eldritch horror hive mind beings from another dimension, there's really no need to come up with a sci-fi'ish explanation for it. Nothing's gained by doing that, and it just adds a completely convoluted set of plot points into the final episodes that - while being somwhat "set up" by two minutes of dialogue in a previous episode - feels very much out of the left field and seriously messes with the pacing of the episodes. I'm kinda loving the fallout of Will's special scene in the seventh episode. Overall the second half of the season was a bit weaker than the first. Not as unecessary as the entirety of the second episode, but scratching the ludicrousness of the Russian plot in season three.

Merry Christmas.

Made a Paladin in D4. Instead of levelling normally, I just farmed 15 or so Whispering Tree gifts on my main. It basically boosted the Paladin to almost max level and gave him enough ancestrals and aspects to come out ready for Torment IV farming (with some gambling for a unique ring). Basically the same gameplay. Charge into a group of enemies and watch them die. Just pressing evade instead of casting Ball Lightning.

How many Republicans does it take to change a lightbulb? None. Trump will just declare that the lightbulb has been replaced, and everyone's applauding in utter darkness.

Eh, there are use cases. Chatbots and image creation might have the spotlight at the moment because they're rather visible and easily accessed by the public, but they're far from the only ones out there. Back in 2024 the Nobel prize in chemistry went to a group of scientists behind an AI project called AlphaFold used to predict protein folding. The potential for AlphaFold 3 is basically endless, down to creating custom proteins for specific individuals to treat their medical conditions (and for everyone outside the US for reasonable prices even). AI models are already better at finding tumors than humans. That doesn't mean that OpenAI and the other tech companies aren't at the heart of an insane investment bubble at the moment. OpenAI is bleeding money by the tens of billions each quarter but still wants to buy 40% of the world's DRAM waver supply and buy northwards of 30 billion dollars worth of AWS computing power. Datacenters are being built with no hardware, no power and no water to supply them. It's probably no longer a question of if, but rather one of when the overheated market will correct itself, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money in the process while a few will gain a lot. Like with every gold rush and investment bubble, ever since ye faithful tulips of yore. Or, for a more recent one, the NFT hype. AI on the other hand, that is here to stay, and not all of it is bad.