majestic

Local pricing being strange is one of the reasons why I have an RTX 4070 TI. While it is a Zotac MSRP model, it cost me 850€, which is 40€ less than nVidia's offical MSRP for Europe, and at the time vendors wanted 1300€ for a 7900 XT (non-second X!), with the RTX 4080 being cheaper. I mean, yeah, not that I would have gotten the 7900 XT either way, but I probably would not have bought a 4070 Ti if it wasn't severly below MSRP like that. Edit: The 4070 Ti was also cheaper than all the 30 generation cards above a 3070 Ti to boot. I had to laugh quite a bit when it was - rightfully, I guess, if you live in the US - critized for being bad value, when it was pretty good value for a couple of months in Central Europe. Well, compared to other equally fast or even slower options. The price is still way out there, but the prices are probably here to stay.

Wrath of the Righteous sets the gold standard for terrible puzzles, even for Owlcat.

The recent patches killed a good bunch of builds that were easily powerful enough to clear full Unfair as Azata. Favorable Magic and Zippy Magic were great if you stacked some dice on a caster Oracle, but with the nerfs - well, rather, bugfixes - to Expanded Arsenal and Second Bloodlines, uh... yeah. Could probably still work if you just stacked all the enchantments bonuses in the world, but not sure.

I suppose no one talking about the Super launch is really symptomatic of it being not very exciting. Granted, the 4080 Super was never going to be that interesting outside of the price drop, but the 4070 Ti Super was a little disappointing. Looks like the card's additional memory and cores don't gel too much with the power limit of the original 4070 Ti. It would probably do a bit better if you can get one that undervolts well. Power limits in nVidia cards are a bit different as far as I know, as the cards don't necessarily clock lower when power limited, but can also turn off cores. Quite possible that the additional cores of the 4070 Ti Super can't be used fully under heavy loads. Seems a tad strange that 10% more cores only yield a 5% improvement, considering how close the cut down AD103 die is to the original 4080... huh.

Nah, the RX 6500 XT is really just trash - when every tech youtube channel under the sun (even the most biased ones) agree that it is bad, it is really bad. Even the AMD fanboy brigade has a hard time defending the GPU, outside of saying "at least it was available during the mining craze" - forgetting that it initially cost 300$, a price point everyone would agree is too much for an infinitely more powerful RTX 4060, after two years of crazy inflation. Indeed. You can build a really small form factor PC for some light gaming with it, but as @Humanoid said, even his older build was just more for the novelty of it and because he had a pair of RAM sticks left over. It is probably overkill for HTPC unless you need hardware AV1 support - and for that the lower tier APUs will do just as well, and if you don't, any i5 T-model from the past decade is going to be enough for less power draw than the 8700G consumes while idle. There's also a hit in available PCIE lanes in exchange for the better iGPU, making it less attractive for cases where you need the IO, so for actual work cases you're probably still better off with a 7700(X) while just using the regular iGPU. Kinda struggling to see the use case here. I mean, outside of gaming handhelds. Well, perhaps its NPUs are really good for AI workloads. Oh, also, classic AMD:

TL;DR: Well, no surprise there. The iGPU is a significant gaming boost over existing ones, but still beaten by something as trashy as the RX 6500, and completely outclassed by an RX 6600 when combined with a cheap four core i3-12100F, a combination that costs about the same.

I followed @Bartimaeus glowing recommendation after @Sarex mentioned Delicious in Dungeon and watched the first two episodes. What a fantastic experience, my sides still hurt from all the laughing.

Is it just me or are sessions expiring awfully quickly again?

Today, my mother struggled a bit to get her groceries inside her apartment. My wife said that we should go help her, and I put on a really serious expression and said: "Be careful of charity and kindness, lest you do more harm with open hands then a clenched fist." Then I burst out laughing, but in this instance, Kreia was pretty much right: to take the struggle from her is to weaken her.

Unless there were significant changes in some of the patches, it is almost impossible to reach either the max character level or zealot on anything but dogmatic, and even for dogmatic you really need to take every possible option. The convictions really need some tuning. The Calibrated Heavy Stubber is especially ridiculous when you combine it with the main character's dogmatic IV ability that just makes the target ignore any damage reduction, and you did not even get the full fun out of the Compensator Gloves by having Argenta as Bounty Hunter. Compensator Gloves scale the rate of fire bonus off the character's Ballistic Skill, which goes up with each shot on an Arch-Militant. Worse because of the bugged interaction with Firearm Mastery, which makes every single shot give you one rank of Versatility. Not sure if that was fixed yet. Still mostly used the Heavy Bolter on her because it did not matter and bolters are appropriate for Argenta, and they look and sound better than the stubbers.

Yeah, well, I get 30 seconds of unskippable ads on YouTube because they want me to subscribe. It is understandable. I mean, look at Alphabet only raking in 17 billion net profit per quarter. They're basically bankrupt, so trying to force people to pay for an ad free YouTube is fair.

If YT gives you any trouble with your ad blocker, you can just install Ad SpeedUp. It works without a hitch and has (probably?) the advantage that the creators still get a cut of the ad revenue. Not sure, but I guess the companies running the ads through YouTube might be a tad unhappy about it.

Bruce, really, I have no idea how you got it into your head that I was talking about a chapter of his self-help book. I was referencing an interview he did with the BBC, and said so. At any rate, the self-help book, which I only know the chapter titles of thanks to you posting about them, neatly illustrates the difference between reactionary right wing elements and regressive left wing elements: one side tells you what to do, the other tells you what not to do.

It is a MYSTARY for sure.

I just checked if I even have a single game by an Ubisoft studio, and the answer is no, I do not. I do have a couple of games published by Ubisoft, but even those are old. Like The Settlers and Heroes of Might and Magic old.

Well, you got that wrong, Jordan Peterson is the guy who DESTROYS leftists by telling them crustaceans have a strict hierarchy and then proceeding to unironically talk about post-modern neo-marxism, which most likely sounds highly intellectual to his fanbase, but is completely meaningless. Postmodernism's defining feature is the rejection of metanarratives like Marxism as fundamentally flawed. His fabled debating skills, by far and large, boil down to raising strawmen arguments combined with a factually true statement in an attempt to goad the other party into looking stupid or giving him an opening where he can claim that they are misrepresenting what he said without ever really specifying what it is exactly he said. Which is pretty much what he did in his BBC interview, for instance, where he's argued that "the" Left has this idea that all our societal hierarchies are the result of Western patriarchy, but lobsters also have hierarchies and they predate Western civilization. The strawman here being that "the left" of course never argued against all hierarchies arising from the oppressive patriachy. It is, however, fairly problematic to respond to, you can either argue against a fundamentally correct statement ("lobsters have hierarchies"), which will make you look silly, or you can follow his implication and debate that, to which he can just reply that this is a misinterpretation of what he said. Which is pretty much what happened, as the interviewer's response was asking him whether he believes we should organize our society along the lines of lobsters. No, of course not. Silly interviewer. The reactionary core of his implication still stands, of course, and his fanbase gobbles it up like candy. Like him or not, he certainly knows what he is doing, which is pandering to his audience, not engaging in meaningful, intellectual debates.

One of our colleagues died of a coronary. People used to call him 'roidsmurf (or alternatively cokesmurf) because he was a little on the short side and constantly zipping about, stressed out and fidgety. High levels of stress and substance abuse is an unhealthy combination. Guy was just a bit over 50.

That is probably the weakest point of the game. I kept all the companions around to the very end of the game on my Dogmatic run, but only because this is a video game and keeping companions around makes sense if you want to experience most of the game's content, not because it makes sense for a dogmatic character. Actually, well... (spoiler about Yrliet):

Apparently, there's a Russian meme involving frogs.

Probably buggy. The pirate encounter zones also stuck around on my map forever even though I hunted them down.

That fight is much more fun when you do it in Chapter 2, although I am uncertain if I was supposed to be able to reach it in chapter two. I think it took spending Navigator's Insight to create a warp route to the system. Should have been a hint, I suppose...

No, you have to spend 100 hours in the ship builder, because next to it even vi seems easy to use. And, just so you know in case you have never used vi, well... that takes some doing. Does that answer your question?

Like I said, if you play Factorio, going with the better CPU is a good idea...

Finished the game, checked every possible ending - unless there is another, supar secrat hidden one. Did not get the achievement for visiting all optional locations. It was either bugged or I have missed something. The final battle was a joke. Sure, the boss has 14000 hit points on Daring difficulty, but even that much is just leaves in the wind for Argenta and her insane attack rate at this point. The Calibrated Heavy Stubber combined with the Compensator Gloves on an Arch-Militant is insane. Make sure you sell only the stuff giving the most reputation to each faction. It is <expletive> annoying to do, but the reputation items are something else. Worst part of the game goes to the enchanted forest part of the main quest and, as per usual, the mini-game Owlcat can't help but put in. Void ship combat is at least more fun than Bad HoMM was, but it still was not very entertaining. Halfway through the game I abused the fact that the game is basically just saving json fiiles in a compressed archive and gave myself 999 Navigator's Insight. I am not sure if that made me miss any random battles worth of note, or any random events of note, but damn, travel between systems is hyper-annoying, and it is slooooooooooooooow.

Took a chapter out of @Azdeus' Food Heresy (tm). Pizza with kebab. I guess any Italian boardies (not sure, don't think there are any that frequent this thread) will run to mommy to cry at the sight of this, but it is pretty tasty.