majestic

Something random YouTube came up with had me in stitches. I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Can you imagine, The Critical Drinker apparently had a Kickstarter project to make his very own short film. Now, for those of you who don't know, which is I hope most of you, The Critical Drinker is one of those obviously conservative YouTube channels that focus on criticizing wokeness in mainstream media. Well, actually, no, he's calling himself a film critic, but in reality once you have watched a video or two of his it becomes clear that his own critical thinking ability is not all that greatly developed. This leads to having content such as stating that Star Trek: Picard is bad because a female admiral is giving Picard some lip while at the same time extoling the virtues of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a series that has plenty of episodes with female admirals giving Picard some lip, or even sue him with the intent of ruining his career. For the longest while of the Next Generation era of Star Trek, Admirals were the go-to people in the Federation whenever the writers needed a threat, a villain or just someone who is a completely unsympathetic higher up serving as a foil to properly contrast our heroes. If he had actually watched any of the TNG era Star Trek while paying attention, he would have known that. Alas, he either didn't, or didn't have the mental capacity to process, and his brain reached the conclusion that wokeness RUINED Star Trek. As if Star Trek wasn't ever among the most woke series on air. What it used to be, though, before the TNG movies, before Enterprise and arguably before parts of Voyager, was well written and engaging in addition to presenting philosophical conundrums and a brighter, optimistic look at the future. Star Trek: Picard ruined that by making the Federation Tump's America, which was a current issue at the time, and by having that cynical backdrop that simply does not fit into the existing Star Trek canon than further dragged down by atrocious writing, a stupid plot and terrible characters. But @majestic, what does that have to do with his Kickstarter project? Well, it just recently came out. A forty minute short film that no longer is a film, but has been turned into a TV series proof of concept (they at least had the sense to not call it a pilot). A project that overshot its Kickstarter goal by a factor of fifteen, raking in some 300,000 pounds instead of the 20,000 he asked for. This is it: I don't blame you if you do not want to sit through forty minutes of the most rote Steven Seagal level straight to video schlock. In fact, I suppose, I encourage you to not give him any clicks. Watching it makes it clear why he has called it a TV series proof of concept. It's not that all technical parts of the film are terrible (the stunt work is fine, actually), except for the soundtrack and the audio mixing, but that writing is... well, how do I put that nicely? It's an incoherent disaster, hence why it is called a proof of concept - after all, if all you have is a bunch of scenes you cannot string together into a coherent narrative because you suck at making films (oh, the irony), just call it a proof of concept and hope your seriously dumb fanbase does not notice*. Here's the bit that made me laugh though - I mean, as bad as the film is, what else would one expect from The Critical Drinker - it's that precisely the same people who watch his channel for his critiques are the ones making fun of him in the comments. People are calling him a grifter and a hypocrite, and those are the nicer ones. It's fair, considering that the thing he is most famous for (aside from writing forgettable spy thriller novels which are what this proof of concept is sort of an adaptation of) is making fun of bad writing on YouTube. Eh, looks like bad writing is still bad, even if you subtract the wokeness, although, dumb short film still features a girl boss coming to the rescue of the protagonist. Edit: Contrast this with the aforementioned Turbo Kid, which had a budget of 60,000 Canadian dollars in 2015, and out came a heartfelt and fun movie that is also a great homage to the 80ies... and it featured Michael Ironside as villain. *There are those who blame it on not having enough creative control. Over the film he raised the funds for and credits him as one of the writers of the script, with behind the scenes footage clearly showing his being present and giving input at every turn. Right.

Today, Netflix suggested to me that there's a chance that I would enjoy Reincarnated as a Sword. Knowing nothing of it, I took a look at the picture Netflix used as thumbnail: What have I done wrong that the Netflix algorithm thinks there's even a remote chance of me liking this? I could understand Prime giving me that suggestion, given the abject weirdness I indulge in there because it often has the strangest animes and I play the "close your eyes and cycle through available animes, randomly stop and watch what the cursor ended up at"* game there, but my Netflix watch history of anime is pretty much limited to Cardcaptor Sakura (which is no longer available there, sadly), Dungeon Meishi and Sailor Moon: Eternal. Well, unless it counts the Castlevania animated series as anime, in which case I still don't get it, but there'd be an medieval action base to work from. *You know what's actually funny and a bit sad? Said silly method of picking animes to watch has an actually higher success rate at finding something I at least enjoy a little than trying out series I looked into before. Both Dropkick on my Devil and kemurikusa were fairly enjoyable. Escaflowne was a Prime suggestion too, now that I think of it.

Commando Ninja (2018) To quote the synopsis from imdb: It's a goofy homage to 80ies classics, similar to Kung Fury, but different insofar as where Kung Fury relied mostly on digital effects, Commando Ninja has pratical ones - and the they are hilariously bad at times, and silly at their best. The biggest problem of Commando Ninja is funnily enough also a source of much amusement - it certainly feels more like a parody at times than a mere over the top homage, from directly copying scenes from Predator to having a Terminator style time travel arrival (sans the male nudity, what a missed opportunity). At only a bit more than an hour of runtime, it's well worth checking out for a laugh or two. Very, very much in the so bad its good territory. Since this was a Kickstarter project (like Kung Fury) it is freely available on YouTube - the link is in the title. Anyway, and I can't believe I am writing this, what differentiates Kung Fury from Commando Ninja the most is its originality. Where Kung Fury is an actual homage and an "original" story told in the over the top way of 80ies cannon films, Commando Ninja consists of heartfelt and well-meaning (parody) copies of scenes from other films strung together. As such Kung Fury works as a short film with only a (passing) familiarity of 80ies cinema and B-movies, while Commando Ninja requires much more specific knowledge. The film is also so full of anachronisms they had to be intentional. "Present day" is in 1986, but there are movie posters of Predator and Bloodsport and John's daughter is playing NES games that released in 1989 while her mother uses a 90ies VCR, and a bunch of criminals buy weapons with dollar bills from the 90ies. As it stands, if anyone wants to watch an homage to 80ies films that is actually also a really good movie on its own, go and watch Turbo Kid. Turbo Kid is awesome.

Found a music reaction channel you like?

Gorgon Mah Ung

Ah, yes, the great Canadian drug cartels and their illegal maple syrup smuggling.

The Utena movie is, in a way, a trinity: it is a sequel to the series, a parallel story and a retelling. It is well worth watching just for that alone, although without subjecting oneself to the somewhat overly long series that precedes it*, it is impossible to see or appreciate. I also expect that the film makes no sense without the context of the show, which is another achievement. I think movie only watchers, in spite of the film being a retelling of the series' story (of a sort), would not really to be able to make much sense of that, unless they're very versed in the subject matter. I guess I liked the series the most of all who watched it here, but even then, I am not sure if the occasional moment of brilliance (and figuring out what is going on well in advance of the conclusion) was really worth the time investment. It most certainly was not what I wanted to watch after I decided to try out another Ikuhara series, but then again... Utena is certainly not alone in that distinction. Out of everything I tried that the Sailor Moon creative team went on to make or was a part of, only Escaflowne ended up being really good - and we're talking about writers here who joined Sailor Moon relatively late (SuperS and Stars). *Arguably, the length of the series and its repetitions are part of the experience and therefore necessary to truly appreciate and understand what is going on. That does not, however, excuse the pacing issues of the Black Rose arc.

You might want to familiarize yourself though. There are some parts of IT Crowd that haven't aged too well, but it's still incredibly funny.

Well, yeah. Like I said, it depends a lot on what sort of games you play, and when and with what you're going to replace that RTX 3070 with (that VRAM is going to cause trouble at ultra-wide sooner rather than later, especially since you probably need DLSS to get playable framerates for most recent releases).

Prices are way too jacked up due to high demand and low availability, and the difference in performance to the 7800X3D is achieved by blasting 40% more power into the CPU, but yes, if only the best for gaming is good enough, right now that is the 9800X3D, no questions asked. Painful as that might be for me, but getting a 7800X3D is also a pretty good choice right now. Not sure when the 12 and 16 core Zen 5 X3D parts are coming - allegedly all their cores are going to have the extra cache this time around, so they might actually pull ahead of the 9800X3D - depends a bit on the power budget. You're right though, looking at GN's game performance charts, if you have one of the AM4 X3D's, there's no point in upgrading unless you need the extra core performance for productivity. They were with AM4. There's an interview with AMD engineers on GN where they rather freely talk about the longevity of AM4 being a byproduct of not being able to afford developing a new platform,though, and Tim from Hardware Unboxed likes to point out that AMD very stubbornly refuses to confirm that Zen 6 (their next generation, coming up in two or so years, most likely) will still be for AM5. AMD just promises to support AM5 through 2026, which can mean anything, as they can technically say they're still supporting AM4 by still releasing "new" CPUs. Personally, I don't think AMD is going to switch to new platform for Zen 6 unless AM5 ends up being incompatible with what AMD is trying to do with Zen 6 (introducing new packaging technology, i.e. a different way to glue chips together), but it would be tremendously hilarious to see the fanboy copium if they do, so I am rooting for Zen 6 getting being on AM6, or whatever they're going to call their next platform. However, that's rather unlikely to matter. If you get a 7800X3D or a 9800X3D, they'll probably last for half a decade or much longer without having to upgrade. Look at the AM4 X3D CPUs, they're still very competitive (and in many cases only slightly slower than the 7800X3D). There are games of course where the extra cache makes no real difference, and games where it does until it suddenly doesn't (once a Factorio game outgrows the extra cache, CPUs with higher core counts have better performance again), but generally, these CPUs are as good a bet for the future as you can make right now. Well, but there's a but - whatever new system you're going to build is going to be held back by that RTX 2080 TI. You're unlikely to see any real gains in GPU intensive games. Especially on 4K. Future-proofing your CPU is not going to matter as much as long as you're holding on to that card. I mean if you were budget constrained, that means you could go with a cheaper Zen 4 part and do a drop-in upgrade later, but... honestly, just get a 4080 Super or a 4070 TI Super*. *If you want a card that dies as rapidly when turning RT on as your 2080 TI, you can get a 7900 XTX - it's faster in rasterization than a 4080, but as soon as you play an RT heavy title with RT on it tanks to being slower than a 4070. Yikes.

Sure. Especially with that RTX 3070. Depends a lot on what you play and whether or not you're going to upgrade your GPU at some point before buying into an entirely new platform. Getting a 5700X3D would probably set you up to last at least until AM6, or whatever else AMD will name it (or in case Intel comes back with a worthwhile platform, stranger things have happened). Don't know the Swedish prices, but these things go for 180€ here, so that's a fairly good deal, all in all. ASRock says it'll work with the board, provided it has a curent BIOS.

Arrow Lake update from Intel TL;DR: Windows and BIOS/microcode updates allegedly fixing a lot of the issues found in reviews, like the inconsistent performance, strange multithreading behaviour, aberrant memory latency and APO doing nothing (the last one can easily be seen at the GN review). Looking forward to KitGuru's review then, Leo said he'll only review Arrow Lake after Intel fixed it. Certianly won't push Arrow Lake past the 9800X3D (which was never to be expected anyway), but at least it should help in most numbers against the 14th gen lineup (and by extension, AMD's non X3D Zen 5 CPUs). Even assuming these issues are fixed, what a poor showing by Intel. The reviews are already out and nobody is going to care much about fixes after the fact. I'd make a joke about adopting AMD's launch strategies in addition to the glueing of CPUs, but... Intel's glueing tech is so different from AMDs that they only share the goal in common - connect smaller chips to alleviate the maximum die size problem of modern nodes and increase yields.

You also should be getting one of the AM4 X3Ds for your system while you still can. Get some more years and milage out of the system.

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.