majestic

Oh noes. I just had to set my pronouns and had a mild shock at having a third gender option with "non-binary". Not going to lie, we're off to a very bad start here.

Especially since you're playing on 4K, where the CPU is rarely ever the bottle neck. Even with the fastest gaming CPUs (i.e. the X3D CPUs from AMD) you'd benefit more from a GPU upgrade. It's a time honed tradition in PC building. Without an unlimited budget, save on the CPU so you can buy the next best tier of GPUs. Even with a 4090, you'll see zero difference in frame rates in 4K in most 3D games between the last three generations of CPUs (unless you have something like a really cheap four core CPU that can't keep up). That is why these videos do not test 4K resolutions anyway, and most also dropped 1440p testing, which was a thing in the past. Slap someting on the level of a 7700 (non-X) into your rig and you're probably good for years to come. It is different for productivity workloads, and you might run into other bottlenecks (PCIE 5.0 support, more PCIE lanes, etc., memory compatibility and availability, etc.) that might make you want to upgrade, but, yeah, well...

Changed my mind, I'll play The Veilguard once it unlocks this evening. Name the last Bioware game with really strong gameplay and interesting combat (or even game) mechanics you can come up with where the good parts were not the story, the characters or the presentation of the gameplay over the actual gameplay that simply added a layer of fun to the game because it is just too cool to shoot your enemies with lightning all the time, all the while the gameplay is actually really just "click on enemy until it dies" and "click on mine to disarm it". Not being facetious, really. Genuinely curious, honestly.

Guess you guys will just have to wait for Veilguard: The Snyder Cut.

Huh. 10-20% performance gains in gaming using CU-DIMM DDR5 and not changing anything else. Also probably some e-core task scheduling issues at work here and there, with another couple % added by a e-core and cache overclock (which makes a lot of sense when the e-cores are working on game threads, as the e-cores have comparatively little L2 cache per core, sharing 4MB per cluster of 4). Except for Horizon Zero Dawn, that game has always been really rough on both Intel and nVidia hardware. That might also point towards why some German YouTube channels that I have watched, including der8auer's, showed so drastically different gaming performance (especially in Cyberpunk) from GN or HUB and Jay's. der8auer used CU-DIMMs for his testing. Still doesn't make Arrow Lake interesting, but it does show that Intel is having some teething issues with the new platform and their new tile designs. That is a rough launch, and for optimal performance you need different memory kits that are currently at a premium, and it makes little sense. Using CU-DIMMs shouldn't even make that much of a difference. Sure, they theoretically allow for higher memory bandwidth, but really, such a drastic performance increase with everything else equal? Something's wrong here. And since Jay also mentions it, the 9000X3D CPUs are going to top the charts soon anyway. Given his remarks I suspect the rumors are true and AMD actually really doubled the amount of cache for the 9900X3D and 9950X3D by slapping it on both CCDs. Otherwise, given the otherwise small performance gain of Zen 4 over Zen 5, his insinuations make no sense, unless the regular Zen 5 CPUs have a severe bottleneck and the 9800X3D also shows massive performance gains by simply having more cache to work with. Well, the specs say there's less of clock speed regression on the 9800X3D compared to the 9700X than there was between the 7800X3D and the 7700X, but that should not be enough to make all these charts look small.

You could buy some Bud Light after the incel backlash against it (with a lot of them hate buying the stuff to destroy it on video, which is what I think @Bartimaeus was getting at ), but that is hard to recommend doing so even to make a point. Buying a Bioware game might still get you a product that is somewhat good, particularily if you're like me and neither hated Andromeda nor Inquisition, but there's not much that Bud Light has going for it. Well, maybe for a teetotaler it could be interesting, as it can't be really called beer.

So funny my belly aches from all the laughter. Ouch, my sides.

Did Bioware turn everyone into transsexuals again? I mean that clearly was what made Inquisition bad. Male skull shapes on female characters. You know what's hilarious though? Angry orange haired pick-me girls and blue haired anime character channels complaining about Veilguard make me want to preorder the Deluxe Edition. On the EA app. *clicks* And done! Probably not even going to play it. *snort*

That reminds me of the good old times when my mother told me she bought seeds for hot peppers, because I like them. When they were all nice and grown, I bit into one to see how hot they really are, because normally what's being sold as hot peppers here tops out at Bird's Eye. Yeah, so it turns out she bought Naga Morich seeds. That was certainly an experience. One I don't necesssarily recommend.

https://www.smbgames.be/super-mario-crossover.php Pretty good idea, worth a playthrough just for the heck of it.

Completed all of the season journey objectives and the Dark Citadel on Torment IV, which means I am done for the season, I guess, unless Blizzard adds something. They are adding "Meat or Treat" with The Butcher for Halloween, so I'll check that out. I'll probably also occasionally check if Blizzard managed to fix the Tenets of Akarat, silly little puzzles strewn through the expansion area that often bug out and cannot be completed. The first wing of the Dark Citadel was by far the hardest as the wing final boss is both a gear check (given the damage Spiritborn do, more like a defensive stat check, as I found out to my detriment when the unavoidable damage instantly killed me) and requires some coordination between the party members in different zones and you need one group to activate a portal for the other once they're done. All the other bosses have more involved mechanics, but you're always in the same screen with your party members. Well, maybe not at the last wing's final boss where you can miss a portal, but that respawns really quickly. The in-game timer tells me I have played for 86h, which is fine. It felt a little more grindy than the other seasons thanks to the Infernal Hordes being basically the best at any farming activity outside of levelling your glyphs (and that is just because you can't level glyphs in hordes) or getting runes, but some of that time is playing the expansion "story" which I won't have to any more from this point forward. Luckily. The Diablo games never had intricate storylines, but they used to be interesting and well written, and ever since Diablo 3, they're just neither. Although that can be said for every game Blizzard made since 2009. Wrath of the Lich King was the last time a story told in a Blizzard game was interesting and they actually cared for world building, and it is such a pity that the story of Warcraft 3 was completed in an MMORPG. The wording implies that Blizzard will be making more of these group only dungeons. Can't say I am looking forward to that, but maybe the next one is going to be more interesting. I also hope Blizzard finds some way of making them challenging without overly relying on either timed instant death mechanics where you need to complete an objective before the timer runs out or spamming the room with instant death effects. Torment IV can also use a wee bit of rebalancing. Having enemies deal so much damage that you die almost instantly is fine when that damage can be reasonably avoided. It is not fine when the entire screen is full of player effects that overlap and make it impossible to see the attacks happening, or cause so much lag that you can't see the enemies perform their actions. World bosses are particularily egregious, The Wandering Death does a giant laser instant death effect that plows through the screen and you're supposed to dodge it, but it was invisible due to massive server side lag. Most of the players near the boss died. I had a good laugh, but that can't be fun for Hardcore players. I guess it is understandable though, Blizzard is a newcomer at this online play business, they only have like three decades of experience, things like that can happen, right?

So, what did I do today? I got up, grabbed a coffee, and checked my YT feed. This was in it: Now, let me translate this simple math problem for you. It reads: A child weighs 16kg (feel free to use half the weight of King George's belt, or whatever pounds are defined as, it is not relevant to the problem anyway) plus one quarter of its weight. How much does it weigh? Now, as the thumbnail suggests it is not a trick question, hence 16 is crossed out, and it is also not 20, because clearly it cannot be twenty. A quarter of 20 is 5, and 20 - 5 is very clearly not 16. Any of you wanna weigh in here? Yeah, I'm getting my coat and showing myself out. That alone would not be enough to post about it, but there's an untold number of people in the comments insisting that 20 is the correct answer. Let it never be said that the German education system is any better than the US'.

Intel has two primary motivations here, one is fighting off ARM's encroachment on their laptop market with efficiency gains, and the other is to be able to slap more cores onto workstation CPUs to take the wind out of AMD's Epyc. Still, it's a massive disappointment that the Lion Cove p-cores of Arrow Lake apparently can't even match the Raptor Cove p-cores. At this point in time it would have been better to slap Raptor Cove p-cores with a node shrink on Arrow Lake and call it a day. Point in case being the upcoming 288 core Sierra Forest (the 144 core variants are already available), although those still use the older Crestmont e-core architecture. Arrow Lake has the new Skymont e-cores that are largely the reason why the 285K can compete with the 9950X in heavily multithreaded workloads even though it has 8 threads less and the p-cores are, well, let's say, clearly not doing so well compared to the old Raptor Cove architecture. Skymont e-cores have roughly the same performance as Raptor Cove p-cores at the same clock speeds (they just clock lower, obviously), i.e. Intel's IPC gains on their e-cores are massive, I wouldn't be entirely suprised if future Intel CPUs are just going to ditch the p-cores because the e-cores are going to pass them in performance. The team developing the e-cores is clearly doing something right, and the other teams aren't. We might be looking at another Core 2 moment in a not very far off future.

Warning, language.

I don't think I've ever seen such a steep divide between synthetic benchmarks and real world application and gaming performance*. Cinebench, 3D Mark, Geekbench, whatever you pick, the Core Ultra 285K is either on par with AMD's best or dominates the charts, and when it comes to actually performing, it falls way short. Except for productivity workloads, but even there, how can so much single thread benchmark performance lead to such terrible Photoshop real world performance? Guess Intel does struggle a bit with glueing their CPUs together. Going to be interesting to see how Zen 6 will shape up, as AMD is also switching their way of glueing CPUs together. According to rumors, if all goes well, Nova Lake will come out with an additional cache tile. Intel will call that LLC (Last-Level-Cache) and is planned to basically be Intel's version of 3D V-Cache. Roadmapped for late 2026/early 2027. It'll be a while before prices for the X3D CPUs drop, there's just no incentive for AMD (or retailers) to do so. *nVidia cheating with driver side optimizations when synthetic benchmarks were detected nonwithstanding. That can't really apply here. I mean, I hope there's nothing in Arrow Lake's microcode that detects if 3DMark is running just to produce better performance. That would be weird, even for Intel.

With testing this time: Well, that is underwhelming. Guess that's one generation I'll be sitting out then. Especially since there are rumors now that the other LGA 1851 CPU generations have been scrapped. Pity, I was looking forward to Arrow Lake, but that gaming performance is just, uhm... not good, and I really don't need the productivity gains, and as Steve puts it, even with gaming as a full time job, which I don't do obviously, it will take years to get the price difference in with the lower power draw. edit: weird though, looking at the released benchmark scores on other reviews, the single thread and multithread performance of Arrow Lake in e.g. Cinebench outclasses everything by a more than decent margin, it just translates into no gains or even worse performance in gaming. Guess that makes Cinebench and other synthetic benchmarks either worthless, or something else is not quite right. Bizarre, at any rate. Especially that performance drop in Cyberpunk 2077, where it is slower than a freaking 12600K. edit2: In der8auer's German video, he gets completely different results from Hardware Unboxed with Cyberpunk, where the 285K is behind the 14900K, but still ahead of the 9950X (and obviously behind the 7800X3D, but that much was to be expected anyway).

I joined a random party and attempted the frist wing of the Dark Citadel (the only actual group content in the otherwise always online Diablo 4) on Torment IV difficulty. At first it went much better than expected as we basically flew through the wing without a hitch, and then we hit a brick wall, and I left the party, which is something I normally not do, but this time was special. Looks like my gear is just not good enough and I made space for someone who is not a burden. Yikes. You'd think you're ready for everything the game throws at you when you can push pits past level 100, but apparently not. The final boss of the first wing gives players a debuff that eventually turns into a void zone that damages the player at least once, the idea is that you carry that someplace where it is not in the way (we also had someone in the group who dropped that void zone in the damndest of areas, right on top of objectives you need to click to remove the boss' invincibility, but that is something else entirely). That one-shot me, while it only moderately harmed the others. In other words, I need some gear with +maximum life greater affixes. On the bright side, Duriel dropped me a nice 3GA Banished Lord's Talisman, so I will be switching to the Overpower variant of the Quill Volley Meta build as soon as I get a decent chest drop.

Ever since we got a cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner, it has been my go-to tool for moving most arthropods invading my living space. It easily moves them from wherever they are into the vacuum cleaner, where they end up a somewhat literal whirlwind of gore, which suits me just fine. I do make an exception for spiders that creep up on me in the shower or hide inside the drain. Those I crush with my bare hands, screaming bloody murder like a viking berserker charging into battle. I blame a rather early childhood experience on that, waking up in the middle of the night with the devil's pet spider crawling across my bed. It was probably not as large as it is in my memory, but that is of no consequence, and you're dead all the same, creepy eight-legged freaks.

The Substance (2024) The film is a rather unsubtle look at Hollywood's treatment of aging women, and a more subtle (though not by much, mind you) metaphor for self-loathing and self-harm, expressed as various disorders ranging from binge eating to substance abuse. I would call it the highlight of 2024 so far, but that would be looking at it from a very limited perspective, as the only other film that came out in 2024 that I have watched is Deadpool & Wolverine, and that is not much of a film, but merely two (somewhat entertaining) hours of fanservice, which is not a very high bar to beat. Well, have you ever watched Perfect Blue and wondered how the film would be if Rumi and Mima were actually the same person, and stuck in the grind of the US entertainment industry rather than Japan's? Then wonder no more, and whatch this film. Fair warning, instead of mind games and rape you will be treated to body horror. The actual body horror in the film is not as bad as it is in many other body horror films, but the sound effects are certainly disgusting. In a way that makes it worse. The film is garish sensory overload, both visually and audially, and certainly knows how to amp up one's misophonia. Whether it is shrimp being eaten or the very frequent sound effect that accompanies a needle being inserted into a body (funny how that works, since that makes no noticable sound in real life), it just frequently makes one's skin crawl (or have involuntary muscle spasms, in my case). On visual side there is the set design, the costumes and clothing, the camera work, the extended and extreme use of close ups, the juxtaposition of old age and youth and most importantly the framing that keeps one on edge, never being truly comfortable while watching. There are segments of this film that pander to the male gaze to the point they become softcore erotica, but the scenes purposefully lack any of the appeal. Instead, all you can do, is feel sorry for the protagonist of the film, Elizabeth and Sue, and her way of continually denigrating and debasing herself for fame, glory and acceptance. Will she respect the balance, or will her self-destructive tendencies and self-loathing give rise to the monster within? Watch it and find out. Gets a recommendation for @PK htiw klaw eriF. Very likely to be way too uncomfortable to watch for @Bartimaeus.

Yes and no. You can watch the first hour and then just skip to the moment Not!Ripley drops the cargo container with the alien into space. You'll miss out on the character deaths and the reason how an alien got there in the first place, but that is better than to sit through what actually happens in the film. Fair warning: you still have to deal with Deepfake!Ash. Disney pulled off another Fake!Cushing, just with Bilbo Baggins this time. Spoilers:

Alien: Romulus. Oh boy. Half of the film is enjoyable, the other half is just garbage, and the less is said about everything that happens once they find Z-01 the better.

Oh noes.

There's a pretty wide range between viable and meta builds, yes, but with the entire endgame of Diablo IV consisting of timed challenges with waves upon waves of enemies, killing them efficiently is the difference between playing an okay ARPG and having a miserable time. At least, well, for me it is. I'm not playing to have fun, but to quickly get through whatever gauntled Blizzard has cooked up so I can get back to playing other games.