majestic

https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/27/legendary-german-politician-wolfgang-schaeuble-dies-at-81 'tis the season. Good riddance.

You do realize you're talking to someone who liked The Rings of Power? Ooh, wait. Never mind. Anyway. Watched What Lies Beneath (2000) with my wife. She wanted to watch the film, and it was fine. It ended up being too slow for its own good. It was sadly far too easy to predict what was going to happen, and therefore the attempts of the film at slowly building suspense fell a little flat for me. Still, as far as horror films go, this one does not rely on an overabundance of jump scares and the pacing is very deliberate. It is well made, and if by any chance you're either unaware of rote horror stories or have never seen a horror film before, it is an easy recommendation. Feels like I am unreasonably hard on the movie just because I figured it out what is going on after a third of its runtime. It probably beats more modern horror films by virtue of being mostly free of CGI and having decent performances by its lead actors, particularily Michelle Pfeiffer.

Help, Chaos is animating my weapons.

Daring. As far as reloading goes: I am also very, very far away from dealing 50 damage per shot with any weapon outside of critical hits. Only Idira's souped up psychic scream comes close after getting every willpower buff available. On the other hand, I'm 10 profit factor away from being able to afford that bolter you carry. So, yeah, was probably a bit later in your game than in mine.

I had Cassia as Grand Strategist for a while, but zone management is so incredibly janky I just respecced. Dunno, I kinda stumble around where I am not supposed to, I guess. Just came out of Footfall and ran into a voidship full of insane tech priests and servitors. A fight with 12 enemies, 10 of which had 150+ HP and insane armor and deflection who basically one-shot my melee characters. Only pulled through because there was enough full cover and it was possible to abuse Steady Superiority's 0 AP attacks. Guess I should follow the main quest for a while. Not sure my 60HP characters should be in an area with enemies dealing 50 damage per regular hit, but you never really know with Owlcat.

Haven't read the thread for fear of spoilers, so sorry if that is a bit reduntant as information, but extra turn abilities have a funky (bugged, I guess) interaction with Steady Superiority, the Arch-Militant heoric ability. Even if you just get extra movement points through something like, say, Jae's Move, Move, Move! ability Steady Superiority allows for an attack. Turned my fighting force into Arch-Militants now (i.e. Heinrix, my main character, Abelard and Argenta). Between Heinrix' and Idira's resolve stacking, everyone's rocking Steady Superiority within a turn or two, that's just too good to pass up. The extra momentum from stacking Word of the Emperor is also really crazy with Jae's Inspire, stacking +damage like there's no tomorrow. Basically that allows my party to stack dodge and parry to crazy levels on my melee characters and extra damage to the point where Argenta kills 200HP enemies in a single turn with one burst, and it stacks up really quickly too. It's a pity that leaves Abelard a bit in the dust for the time being. I love the ol' bootlicker to bits, but Heinrix has Word of the Emperor, and he's cleansing everything with fire, including himself. Like, uh, literally.

Kill Aurora quickly enough and you can save all the shuttles except the one destroyed right at the beginning in the cutscene. It takes some doing, but it is possible.

No. I mean...

That is more or less my Heinrix build. Uses an extra turn from Cassia to light himself on fire and then goes to town. Stacks Arch-Militant's Versatility up the wazoo too. Well, buffing is a little different in Rogue Trader insofar as that it is simply part of the combat mechanics. Some classes (erm, archetypes) are just there to buff others or give others extra turns. That does not take any longer than shooting or using an offensive power, so it is fine. Certainly night and day compared to the ludicrous pre-buffing orgies of their Pathfinder games, but no less necessary, enemies are just going to trounce you without good buff management. The game also has the typical and very hilarious difficulty spikes Owlcat games are known for. You all but faceroll through the prologue and chapter one just to face a 400 HP Chaos Marine with a heavy bolter at the end of chapter one. Fairly hilarious if you're underprepared to enemies that on a lucky roll can reduce your frontliners to a pile of goo in one round. Had to reload twice for the achievement of the fight. Pfff.

Happy nondenominational holidays! /woke

Fun anecdote: in ye olden days poppy seeds were cooked in milk and then wrapped in cloth for babies to suck on. The practice was discontinued after it was suspected to be one of the causes of sudden infant death syndrome. No conclusive evidence that I would know of, but it certainly sounds plausible enough, overdosing on opiates would be much easier for babies. On the other hand, it apparently worked really well to keep the little buggers quiet for the night. Win some, lose some, ey?

To be brutally blunt, we in the West - or at least our politicians - would not have to fear our elections either if our elected officials were not as incompetent, corrupt and contemptible as the very same autocrats they love to criticise. Recently, our chancellor was filmed stating that he is sick of people complaining about rising food prices and not being able to afford a decent hot meal for their children when a burger with fries at McDonald's is 3.5€. Instead of apologizing and doing something about the (still) overpriced food in Austria, he doubled down. There was an investigation if there's been illegal price fixing between the large players of the grocery market, and it predictably found no evidence thereof. But what evidence would exist in this day and age? Price fixing no longer requires the active participation of employees of a company: they just set their price finding algorithms to the desired gross margins and to not undercut the competition, and if everyone does that, prices will rise in relative unison. In reality, grocery prices in Austria are 30% higher than in Germany, in spite of having similar labor costs, energy costs and, well, virtually the same product lineups. The actual difference between Austria and Germany is that in Germany, there are more than two companies (Rewe and Spar) competing in the regular grocery market and more than two companies (Hofer/Aldi and Lidl) competing in the discount market. What else is needed as evidence? It is painfully obvious that we have an oligopoly problem, and even steadfast believers in the virtues of the free market know that this leads to rising prices and a loss of quality through complacency. We do have a legal means of recourse for that. It would be entirely possible to forcibly break up the REWE group, or if that is deemed too radical, simply make them have to give up half their stores to competing chains. Instead, the companies involved explain the difference in pricing on the number of stores and the generally higher cost of transportation, and nobody questions that, there even have been interviews in the large newspapers with the CEOs of Spar and Rewe where they detailed that their net earnings did not go up in the past two years, while conveniently forgetting to add that their investments of said profit (they have begun building more energy efficient stores now that energy prices spiked) more than doubled in the same time. In the case of Spar that meant an increase in profit of almost 50%, in spite of higher energy, supply and labor costs. Claiming that their margins did not increase unduly is just ludicrous, and a competent journalist would have questioned that immediately. You can guess once if they did. Spoiler: no, they did not. Of course not. Newspapers earn a pretty penny from including grocery ads, and they do not bite the hand that feeds them. When politiicans of the opposing parties suggested that the government create a price comparison and statistics portal so consumers would at least realize how much they are being gouged, they replied that it would be too difficult to implement. Yes, so difficult to implement that the first price scraping website made by one person went up a week later, detailing the price differences and just how much prices rise in unison between "competitors" in Austria. Now people can look at the price gouging and realize that the government is not doing its job, which in this case would be to simply apply existing antitrust legislation. Instead, we are staring at a possible Freedom Party lead government, headed by Herbert Kickl, someone who publically calls himself the upcoming Volkskanzler, which is what the national socialists of yore called the Führer. Great. Just... great. While I have never been an optimist, it does not look like the future is going to be better tomorrow.

This is a community filled with ossified posters who have been talking to each other since before the dawn of these hallowed halls. Do not be so hasty to dismiss the five post rule as overkill, once you have been around for a quarter of a decade you might even appreciate the peace and quiet it brings, a bulwark against the storm. A storm only getting worse, as recently it became grave enough to break through the walls and blow unwanted posts across the forums, like so many fallen leaves in autumn.

I just said that to not appear like an unapologetically massive snob.

Should have taken a page from Owlcat's book and stacked dexterity on their characters right from the start. Fixing initiative after starting with low dex is pretty hard, and Russia has an advantage, as the pickpocket background gives an initiative bonus. I'll get my coat.

You know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and art is subjective, but prefering this Beamdog travesty over the original is probably as close to being objectively wrong about aesthetics as you can get.

Well, the difference in efficiency provided by TSMC's 5N process node compared to Intel 7 cannot fully be made up by tuning, and even though you can do more for better effect on an Intel system by undervolting and setting power limits, physics gonna physic... If I were GREG I'd complain about them primarily using 7-zip for productivity efficiency under power restraints. The Ryzen CPUs are really far ahead in this particular workload, while it is much closer (or the other way around) in others. Limiting the CPUs to 95W and performing the Chromium compilation test would probably yield more favorable results for Intel - or at least results that aren't as much in favor of the AMD CPUs for efficiency. I posted about that before, but Der8auer made some tests back when the 13900K released, and locked to 95W it roughly performed the same in his benchmarks as a 7950X in Eco mode (i.e. a 95W power limit). GREG should really get the feeling that Steve picked the 7-zip test primarily to make a point because that is the single one of his productivity benchmark suite that will very clearly be in favor of AMD in terms of efficiency even if you'd lock both CPUs to the same power limit. That was very much a forgone conclusion. Well, GREG set himself up for it by saying all workloads, so sucks to be GREG. The argument that you could beat the larger 3rd level cache in gaming by power limits was also not very well thought out, to put it mildly. The 7800X3D performs exceptionally well even with its artificially crippled clock speeds (well, crippled might be a strong word, but at least compared to the other Zen 4 X3D CPUs, they are) due to having much less cache misses. The gap between the 7950X3D and the 7800X3D in games that do not have scheduling issues is so small that really proves how little the X3D's performance is reliant on clock speeds. That is how the 5800X3D is still sitting very close to the top of the charts in spite of having an older architecture, and the 7800X3D can be that efficient in gaming. That will only change if we either start running into a meaningful performance gain reduction for larger 3rd level caches (technically we're already looking it at, what with the difference between the regular Zen 4 parts and the X3D ones being less than the difference in Zen 3, but the scaling is still more than great) or when Intel just does the same with their new packaging and interconnection technology. The latter will come eventually, if all goes well, the former may or may not happen depending on cache sizes, game development and increasing memory bandwidth, or physical restrictions due to SRAM no longer scaling with node shrinks.

Well, the actual man-worm is in God Emperor of Dune, and that is book 4. I mean, yeah, technically Leto II fuses with larval stage sandworms in book 3, but the inhuman sand-worm is in the fourth one, set like ten thousand years after the first three books.

I actually started watching Diamond is Unbreakable a couple of days before you mentioned it, Netflix recently added it to the library (before there was only Phantom Blood, Battle Tendency, Stardust Crusaders and Stone Ocean). Don't know exactly what it is with JoJo's, but every time I am watching an episode I am having a blast with it, and wonder why I don't go through it at a faster pace, and then I just don't... dunno, I only watch like an episode or two a week, for some reason. The episode with THE LOCK was the first one in a while that I really did not like. The last time that happened was in Phantom Blood which had a bit of a rough start in my opinion. Eh, well, can't keep it up all the time, huh?

Only if you apply a very loose defintion of worth playing.

Whatever it is, it has Udo Kier, which is all that really needs to be said. Not gaming related, but this also has Udo Kier... singing.

やれやれだぜ。

So, with Lies of P done, and my interest in playing games sated for the time being, I went back to my long-ass list of shows and animes that I need to finish. I decided on watching the remaining elven episodes of kemurikusa. (that peroid is part of the name, but it is often omitted), or ケムリクサ - which just really spells out kemurikusa, a combination of smoke and plant. The characters and introduction I already posted two years ago, in case anyone's interested: This was my conclusion from the first episode: After watching the entire series, that changed from "I am happy that this is only twelve episodes" to being somewhat annoyed that it only has twelve episodes. The first episode aside, this is actually a fun, shortish sci-fi show, even if Ritsu's constant nyan-ing is highly annoying. In the second episode, the troupe of girls and Wakaba decide to go on a journey to a different island, to look for water. The world is covered in a strange, red mist, which they call red smoke (akakemuri, 赤煙), prolonged exposure is apparently deadly. There are also mechanical entities they call bugs, that I mentioned before. The red ones were corrupted by the red mist and seemingly attack the girls and Wakaba for no reason. Much of the episodes is spent on them traversing the post-apocalyptic wasteland the world has become, talking about this and that and nothing in particular. Whenever there's action, it usually makes sense, and in the middle there's a teamworking payoff action sequence where they combine their abilities to take down a giant enemy robot that they never managed to fight off before. When they finally find some more water, they end up realizing that things are much, much more dire than they ever imagined... Never thought I would like this, but the characters grew on me, even Ritsu and her stupid nyan-ing. As for the plot: There is not much of it, but that is not a bad thing - it means the anime has much more time to spend on the group just walking about and talking while overcoming hurdles along the way. I'd even give this a tacit recommendation*. Color me surprised. *Keep in mind that I consider myself compromised by prolonged exposure to nuTrek. I am uncertain if I can tell "this is okay to likable" from "well, at least it is not nuTrek level bad" at the moment.