majestic

Hey, the 14900KS is here! Well, and no one cares, except maybe for overclockers. For them the extra money for (more or less) eliminating silicon lottery might be worth it.

Strange 180° turn by Disney. The Force Awakens was playing it safe to the point of being derided as a remake of A New Hope, while The Last Jedi basically threw everything out. It killed the past, as Kylo put it in the movie. Certainly a lack of planning of everyone involved in that mess. I already repressed most of the mess that the final Game of Thrones season was. There is also the scene where Arya kills the Night King, after several seasons of building up the confrontation between Jon Snow and the Night King. The New Jedi Order novels and following stories were too bleak for many a Star Wars fan. It is easy to see why, it saw captured refugee ships crashed into planetary shields (that novel in particular had great timing, it was released shortly before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center), wars on a scale not yet seen before that killed billions, an alien civilization into self-mutilation and tortue, an insect civilization absorbing people into their collective conscious, the (sexual) torture of an underaged girl and the deaths of many a beloved character, including Chewbacca, almost all of Han and Leia's children as well as Luke's wife. And all that is before we come to the events with Abeloth where the Jedi order is basically persecuted by the restructured New Republic, now lead by a former Imperial hardliner and Luke and his son are exiled because the Jedi order is (not so wrongfully, when you think about it) accused of causing a devastating civil war, and a Cthulhuesque Dark Side entity lays waste to Coruscant. I mean, yeah, you are not wrong, all of that would still have been better than what Disney came up with, but surely you can see why Disney would be somewhat loathe to adapt that material into their newly acquired cash cow franchise aimed at selling merchandise to children.

It makes sense in the context of prior established lore, as Darth Sidious was Darth Plagueis' apprentice, and it was established in canon that Plagueis found a way to immortality, and Star Wars quite clearly has viable cloning technology, so bringing back Palpatine makes sense in the setting's established rules. It is still a poor choice as it both shows creative bankruptcy worse than having a second Death Star in Return of the Jedi and it retroactively makes Anakin's sacrifice meaningless. To be fair to Jar Jar Abrams though, what else could they have done after Rian Johnson killed off the main antagonist in the second movie of a trilogy without any thought as to what to do afterwards? It was a little too late to set up a new villain and Kylo Ren would have made an even poorer one. Alas. True, and I do not expect everything to be consistent in a show of this length and with that many changes and mysteries added to elongate the series past the point of what the creators wanted to do, just because it was wildly popular. However, most of the problems are the less problematic retroactive continuity changes, like when it was established that the Man in Black cannot kill candidates directly, even though he quite clearly killed Eko when the actor wanted to leave the show, or how he was supposed to only be able to take the shape of dead characters, but often ran around the jungle as Walt before that rule was thought of. This is in contrast to the issue with the outrigger that should not travel through time with the group. Here the violation follows the establishment of the rule, without any added clarification. My thoughts on How I Met Your Mother should be somewhere in a thread on this forum already. It is pretty much the only sitcom that I enjoyed, and I particularily also liked the latter seasons where the general consensus was that the show already stopped being funny, but that is on me and my kind of humor. One may or may not like Ted because he is an idiot and the premise of the series was probably not good enough to actually carry nine seasons (the strength of every character who is not Ted on the other hand was more than enough in my opinion), but the quality of the scripts and the work that went into the overall craftsmanship of the series is leaps and bounds ahead of other sitcoms, or most comedy in general. Well, except for the ending. I cannot comment on Newhart, but "it was all a dream" endings are more often than not just terrible. You may not enjoy everything, but certainly more than I do, which makes me a little envious, to be completely honest. I cannot for my life fathom how you managed to like Rings of Power, but I admit I am almost curious enough to try Wheel of Time just to see how bad that must be for you to dislike it. To be fair to religions, they have been around for much longer than the time it took to make the six seasons of Lost, so that is not a very good excuse. I am not sure I would go so far as to say that Lost is an intentional religious allegory in the strictest sense (watch Revolutionary Girl Utena for that, although it not based around Western religion), but it certainly has its roots in the various religions and philosophies of the world and makes heavy use of religious imagery, much like Neon Genesis Evangelion did before. Fun fact, that series also had an ending that was wildly controversial, with a similar problem: offering no narrative closure in lieu of a thematic one. The similarities are striking enough that one might think they were intentional. Most likely not though. Neon Genesis Evangelion was very much allegoric too, albeit on a much more personal level: it was a way for the series director to work through the trials and tribulations of running an almost failing studio and his depression. Lost, as a whole, can be seen as the clashing of Western and Eastern philosophical and religious thought. The changes on the island, especially regarding the Man in Black / Smoke Monster and his relationship to his brother Jacob can be interpreted as the rise of the duality between good and evil as brought into the larger world by Christianity (also represented also by the commonly played Backgammon, and as Locke said, two players, one light, one dark). It seems strange from our point of view perhaps, but the conflict between good and evil and the inherent duality of the two sides, with the ability to actively chose and even switch the side you are on (through redemption arcs or a gradual fall towards villainy), rose with the prominence of Christianity. Look at the theater plays of ancient Greece, for instance. The ancient Greeks would have most likely laughed at the preposterous idea that Darth Vader would just switch sides at the end of Return of the Jedi as your lot in life is preordained by your destiny - as set by the gods. They would most likely not have batted an eye at Zeus showing up and setting things back to what they were though.

I have no idea why you would think so. I have not seen Loki. Nor have I read anything by Robert E. Howard, so I would not know. I liked the Conan the Barbarian movie, but I doubt that would serve as qualification to judge his writing. I also did not hate Conan the Destroyer, but that is probably because I watched it at the age of ten. I was not specifically talking about endings, but series endings are often situations where characters behave like they should not, or events happen that do not logically follow from what happened before, or a lot of setup is wasted with no payoff. This is often because the writers want or have to achieve an ending that they have in mind while the natural flow of the series no longer makes the ending properly achievable. Two examples are the ending of Game of Thrones, and the original ending of How I Met Your Mother. Game of Thrones ended in a way that will probably make more sense in writing, if the books ever come out. Dany in the books is much more likely to burn down King's Landing in a fit of anger than show Dany was. How I Met Your Mother on the other hand was an example where the showrunners actually filmed the series' ending several seasons in advance, and it made no sense any more, but seeing how it contained shots of Ted's children that were long since grown up by the point the series ended, they could not go and re-shoot an ending that worked better. I probably expect too much from professional writers in this day and age. The flood of content must be written by someone, and clearly there are not enough good writers to go around, which contributes to the overall feeling that there is a steep decline in quality. Still, my expectations stand, and they are not even that high a bar to clear. I do not really need witty dialogue, although it certainly is nice, I do not need deep, thought provoking entertainment, although it certainly is nice, and I do not need Shakespearean prose. Fun fact, just yesterday I ran across an egregious consistency problem. I am rewatching Lost, and there is a series of episodes where the characters on the Island are randomly jumping through time after the island becomes disloged from the regular timeline. In an earlier episode they made it clear that only the items they had with them when they time jumps began move through them in time. Cue them finding a paddle boat on the shore two episodes later. They time jump while paddling, and one would expect that they just get dropped into the water afterwards, right? Because the paddle boat was certainly not amongst the things they brought with them, right? Yeah, nope. See, that is exactly the sort of thing I am talking about. The rule was originally introduced so they can bring the Zodiac they were on with them, when the time jumps began. That is fine, really, beacuse who cares about how time travel really works in a work of fiction (one could certainly make a case that introducing time travel is almost always a bad idea in and of itself, but that is not a point I want to argue here). It also helps that they can just always have their small arms and, well, their clothes. Just as long as the rules are applied consistently, which they, in this case, are clearly not. I just do not think that it is too much to expect from a team of professional writers to catch that one.

Beats me, but whenever I complain about bad writing and non-sensical storylines/storytelling in sci-fi and fantasy I more often than not get a reply that I should just relax, turn off my brain and enjoy the ride. It's not high art, you know. Just silly entertainment. Yeah, maybe it is not high art (as if that is not subject to change, Jane Austen's novels are classics today but were very much derided when they were first published), but internal consistency and characters not behaving randomly is not a hallmark of high art. I would argue it is the barest minimum we should expect as an audience.

A German channel I follow recently released a video about the dark sides of YouTube, and oh boy, does that get weird. Weird, and really disturbing. On YouTube, once you take a wrong turn, it seems like all the supposedly friendly family community rules fall off a cliff. While videos get demonetized or deleted for what YouTube considers bad words, it looks like there are loop holes the size of Mount Everest. There's a channel called Lilly, operated by the Only Fans model LillySlim. It has 5 videos and 25k subscribers, but her most popular video has, so far, generated over 875,000 views. It is supposedly a brazilian waxing tutorial, except there is absolutely no waxing going on. She does have a cheap razor and uses it for hair removal, but the point of the video, which features four minutes of full frontal nudity under a shower, seems to be two-fold: it is an ad for her Only Fans and it caters to a shaving kink that seems to have an immense amount of playlists on YouTube (if you are into that, well, just search YouTube for brazilian waxing tutorial). The channel is almost two months old, so if YouTube had any issue with it, it would have been removed by now. Oh, and in case that needs to be said, the results are very much not suitable for work. Well, but these videos are at least gated behind age checks and there are consenting adults involved and they are just at odds with the image Google is trying to project on YouTube. There's also a channel of a (now) seventh grade girl with 15000 subscribers who posts videos about her life, gymnastics and, uhm, swim wear and leotard try on hauls. The swim wear videos have views in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands, while every other video has views more in line with her subscriber count. Just for the record, it is not just a fluke that happened once because a young girl posted some seemingly innocent content because she is into gymnastics and showed off her leotards. There is no way her parents are not the driving force behind those. Gee.

Well, what do you know, our lying sack of manure former chancellor was found guilty of perjury. Not that eight months conditional sentence seems like such a great blow against Kurz, however - while it stands as a terrible indictment of the political landscape of our time that this perjury trial is by far and large a minor side theater in a much larger corruption complex with Kurz and his former associates at the heart of it all - aspiring crown witness Thomas Schmid being judged credible is a major win for our federal attorneys. Sebastian Kurz already said that he wants to appeal, which can be a bad idea. A slap on the wrist sentence (8 months out of potential three years with no time served in prison) like that can blow up in the face of the convicted parties after an appeal, as these sentences are basically unofficial offers to close up cases when the judiciary has better things to do. Usually when the convicted party appeals, the federal attourneys follow suit and appeal the sentence. Well, we will see. I am still rooting for him seeing a prison from the inside, the much more interesting trial for the misappropriation of public funds is still coming.

It is hard to do it proper justice in words, and it is only a short scene (also, the linked video is time coded to the relevant part): A perfect showcase for why it is generally accepted to not weaponize faster than light travel, or at least come up with some countermeasures, in soft science fiction. It renders everything meaningless, and you can tell from the look on Leia's face as it dawns on her just how many lives the Rebellion wasted in attacking two Death Stars conventionally. Or, to follow the train of thought, one has to wonder why the Empire built the Death Star in the first place, if all you need is to strap a hyperdrive to an asteroid to destroy planets. Rise of Skywalker features a scene where Merriadoc Brandybuck (okay, it just is a cameo by Dominic Monaghan, but it could be Merriadoc, and it would not be the silliest thing to happen in Rise of Skywalker) shows up to ask why they are even bothering to prepare an attack if they just could execute another Holdo maneuver (Holdo is Laura Dern's character in The Last Jedi). It is glossed over by stating that it was a one in a million chance to land the hit. It was worth a laugh at least. Disney's Star Wars is very big on breaking established rules in order to have "cool" scenes in their movies and series. This one is just the most egregious one, followed right up by making Vader's change of heart at the end of Return of the Jedi meaningless because Palpatine is still alive and well, but it does not stop there - there is a scene in Rogue One, for instance, where a hyperspace jump is done directly through an oncoming blast wave, while still in the atmosphere of the planet. Made me immediately think back to our heroes' escape from Tatooine in the first Star Wars film, and what a loser Han Solo must be for first clearing the planet, and talking about how hyperspace jumps need to be precisely calculated lest something bad happens. The most damning thing about these? Basic writing 101 that should set professional writers apart from creators of fan fiction, and as far as these films go, we are not even talking about the terrible acting and the flat, boring characters yet, the cringeworthy dialogue or the lack of any proper setup and pay off in the trilogy, except for one scene at the end of The Rise of Skywalker where Rey and Kylo Ren teleport a lightsaber between them.

The Last Jedi, the middle part of the new trilogy, is an interesting comparison to The Empire Strikes back. They are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, one is easily the best Star Wars movie made to date, and a really good film too, while The Last Jedi makes a good case for being the worst Star Wars movie, and it is a terrible film: it has a collection of writing gaffes so jarring that they are breaking suspension of disbelief even in sci-fi as soft as Star Wars, and one scene in particular that was such a bad idea that it retroactively all but ruins the preceeding movies.

4) Like many a true genius artist he simply is not recognized in his own ignorant age. It is for future generations to truly appreciate Neil Breen's works.

People who use instead of the far superior fall on the very far end of the unstable part of the spectrum.

For the names and the likes I might even agree, but considering that the guy keeps saying nucular like he's Homer Simpson or George W. Bush I have to disagree. I take my prior statement back, an AI text to speech engine would have been better.

He's pronouncing every single name wrong, so... Well, at least compared to the Japanese original. I do not know either of the English dubs. I listened to part of the video and began to wonder if someone just had a speech generating AI say a script over the video at times. Droning on is quite an apt description.

I no longer hate The Phantom Menace, probably because it stopped being the second worst Star Wars movie in 2015, and it climbed down the ranks even more with subsequent releases. If this gets a world wide release I just might play the sucker and pay for it just to compare the experiences.

Ho Chi Minh really looks like a weird Chinese martial arts master in a cheap 80ies movie.

And with today, so do I. Played last holdout at Interplay for three days. My condolences. A while back my father asked if I could help him type a bunch of pages he only has as scans. Even though there are rougly two hundred of them, he said, they are written with large letters and he already typed up fifty of them. It would be much faster if I would help him out, as he is a very slow typer (which still is an understatement). He said he would dictate the contents and we would be done really quickly. Admiral Ackbar looked at me and said: However, I wilfully chose to ingore him and agreed. I can type quite fast, not at a world record pace, but well above average, so I figured I will waste a weekend and a half at best. Alas, the devil, as the proverb goes, is in the details. What are the details? Well, am I glad you asked, lest I would write this complaint without an audience. He got his hands on minutes of meetings of the local municipality dated over a hundred years back, from directly after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and before the rise of Austro-Fascism (and the Third Reich later). Needless to say that minutes of that age were handwritten. That would still be not so bad, however, they were handwritten, under severe time constraints, by people with a decidedly poor grasp of grammar and syntax, in the parlance of their time, and most damning of all, in German cursive. Well, how bad can that be? Have a look: It is not his slow typing that is an issue. Deciphering the texts on the other hand? Very much so. In case you are interested in comparing German cursive to modern scripts, the first couple of lines read: "[...] eine Subvention von 2000 Kr. zu bewilligen. Dieser Antrag wird einstimmig angenommen. Anschließend darauf verliest G. Ruckteschel einen Brief des Schriftführers der Lokalorganisation um Anschaffung eines Kastens zur Aufbewahrung der schriftlichen Agenden. Diesem Wunsche wird einstimmig Rechnung getragen." The second to last word of the seventh line illustrates one of the issues rather well. The word is schriftlichen, and as you can see, the letters used for s, f and h are dreadfully similar to each other when written hastily, and there is very little difference between the t and the l. Good thing these letters are not so commonly used in Germanic languages. Dodged a bullet, huh? Minor historical fact, it was Hitler who did away with both German cursive and Fraktur, the blackletter typeface used to print German books, with the Normalschrifterlass in 1941, saying they were Jewish letters and calling them German is wrong.

An OC model RX 6900 XT is certainly capable of overwhelming an 850W power supply with transient power spikes, depending on the quality, age of the power supply and remaining system power draw. No, it will not. All modern cards have a voltage/frequency curve anyway and reduce voltage automatically while idle or under light loads. It can lead to crashing if you undervolt too much, but I would suppose that an automated undervolt function guesses safe limits based on metrics from the card, but it is best to make sure the card is stable by running something like 3DMark's Port Royale test for a while. Especially if you want to manually fine tune at some later date. Obligatory shade-throwing:

There is a long history of medical doctors more readily dismissing symptoms reported by women. Goes, at the very least, all the way back to ancient Egypt and Greece. Hysteria - also known as female madness - was linked to having a sad uterus. It is also quite literally in the name, hystéra, meaning uterus.

I was thinking about suggesting that you check yourself into the nearest mental institution after reading up until this point, but it seems that you already did. Take care man, and all the best, hope the treatment will work out.

Chinese New Year event in D4 is a joke. You click on shrines for a Feat of Strength and kill enemies for an hour. Such awesome.

Barbarian in season three is great. As long as I hit at least three enemies, my charge has a cooldown of 1.5 seconds. Feels like plowing through enemy groups with a freight train. Ran into The Butcher in one of the Nightmare Vaults. I heard his signature "Ah, fresh meat!" and then he was dead. Instantly. Yeah. Guess they really made charge a bit OP.

Hey @Azdeus look, you're no longer the worst food heathen on the forum.

I think it is going to be a movie and can't wait to not see it!