majestic

How does one "accidentially" do the romances when every interaction that leads to a romance has ginormous red heart as interaction symbol? I mean, really, having a negative opinion of video game romances (Iron Bull + male MC is complete hilarity though) is fine, but you can't do them accidentially Inquisition or Veilguard. They're marked with a giant warning symbol reading "don't click if you dislike romances", after all.

I'm pretty sure you're onto something big here, have you considered making YouTube videos for the Manosphere?

's not just that, the Arch-Militant's Versatility should only have stacked up when switching between different attacks, but it did for every attack after using Wildfire. Combine that with stacking extra turns through multiple Officers and the busted damage bonus from being adjacent to your characters, and enemies would be in a world of pain really quickly. Every stack of Versatility improved damage and your weapon skill, which in turn made hitting enemies with bursts from across the screen viable. It was so silly that Argenta's best weapon was the autogun with its insane burst attack - but I kept on using the bolter because it was more appropriate.

Well, look at that. Gains over the 7800X3D look pretty good, but Steve's chart shows that AMD is doing an Intel here now that moving the cache around increased their thermal headroom. Gains in performance of the 9800X3D come from a pretty steep increase in power usage over the 7800X3D: On the flipside that doesn't look like there's a Zen 5 bottleneck. The increase in performance just comes from using more power on a similarily performing architecture. The CPU is, of course, still more efficient than Intel CPUs in gaming due to their much higher framerates at a still lower power budget. Again this is something that will never change for gaming until Intel - or any other competitor - can get a gaming focused CPU with equally large caches out there.

He just needs to offer Trump a better deal than Hunter Biden, and things will work out just peachy. Like y'all already forgot the time when Trump wanted to attack the Russians with US jets flying Chinese colours?

Says the guy from AfDmany. Don't misunderestimate (sic, best Bushism ) me, my own reaction to this quagmire mirrors yours, but it is problematic to cast stones while sitting in the proverbial glass house. More so for me than you, because technically the AfD isn't the strongest party in the Bundestag just yet, but you'll get there. Eventually. Just like we did. We don't need to look that far away and try to understand this Trump victory. We have Orban, Wilders, Kickl, Höcke, Weidel, Le Pen and Kaczynski as well as Wagenknecht from the other side of the spectrum (sort of). The Brits had their funny Trump copy, there's on the other side of the planet, even when not looking at the US, there's the Argentinian nutjob Milei, there was the Brazilian nutjob Bolsonaro. Not like our population is any smarter, we just have other parties people can funnel their frustration with the establishment into, as you can see with the meteoric rise of the BSW in Germany's eastern federal states. The biggest advantage we have over the US is that our voting systems usually do not have a "the winner takes it all" feature, but even in Europe you can point at the nations that do and their weird election results. Like, well, the Brits, where Keir Starmer's Labour won almost two thirds of the seats with 33% in the popular vote. Keir Starmer of course immediately proceeded to be just another establishment politician. Or France, where candidates were forced to not run to produce a win for everyone who was not in the Front Rassemblement National.

Thanks guys. We got him as a puppy. He was the runt of the litter and nobody wanted him, so he was all alone in the pet shop. My wife immediately fell in love with him (although, yeah, back then she was not my wife yet ). It was a gamble, because we didn't know how the cat would take to him. Pretty well, as it turns out, so a couple of months later we had a young Westie with all the fun mannerisms of his breed who was mostly socialized by a cat who adopted him. It made him borderline untrainable and no matter how hard we tried and added some cat mannerisms added into the mix. They're already a notoriously stubborn breed, and since the cat never once did what we told her to do, neither did he. He peed like the cat, and after he was done, he would take a step or two forward and start scratching the ground with his hind legs. You know, to cover it like the cat does in her litterbox. It was adorable. He eventually started to leave his marks here and there (even though we had him neutered, no idea where he picked that up, but he only ever did that outside) in the normal way male dogs do their business, but that was only for marking. Yeah, he did, tumors aside, he was in really good shape for his age. We only needed the vet a handful of times. The funniest one was when he was lying in a corner, whining and being miserable. That was a Sunday evening and we called the emergency vet hotline, brought him to the vet, the vet pressed a little on his abdomen to see what might be the cause for his discomfort, and then he farted loudly and everything was fine again. 300€ for flatulence. The other stuff were vaccinations and a minor injury from an ill-fated attempt at playing with another dog, and one time he ate dark chocolate that fell out of a bag. That one was a close call, but we noticed it early enough. Vet gave him something to throw up, and Simon then proceeded to take a giant dump right in the waiting area as a thank you. Like I said, he hated being at the vet. Heh. Yeah, can't imagine ever not missing him. He was a happy and super cute little dog who tried his best to be a cat. Speaking of the cat, she's been nervous for a while now. She used to play with the dog and they'd chase each other, and recently always went to check on him. She misses him and is constantly chasing my wife for attention at the moment. Back when they were both a lot younger, she'd sometimes jump on the table to steal some food and throw it down to him.

Guess the nerfs killed the ludicrous damage numbers you could put out with flat bonus damage stacking on Arch-Militants and all the extra turns. By the time it was Argenta's proper turn, she could one-shot all mook level enemies (which was pretty good with the Blessed Bolter Casing and feeding into AP resurgence through kills on her Ultimate) and kill bosses with a single burst. You're not supposed to leave home without your mutant waifu.

Here in Commie-Land, you're automatically added to the electoral roll based on your primary residence. You only need to register to vote if you're living abroad. Whenever there's an election, your local municipal government sends you the necessary information via mail, i.e. when the election is held, where to go to vote and the slip of paper with your electoral roll number on it that @Lexx mentioned. You just show up to vote, hand over your slip, are handed your ballot paper in return and off to vote you go. These people also check your ID in case they don't know you - so when you're living in one of the larger cities, for instance, you'll probably need an ID on you. As I am from the suburbs I never had to show my ID to vote. Kinda pointless when you're on a first name basis with the guys checking the ID. Then again... we also usually have enough votes counted to call the elections a couple of hours after the polling stations close in most cases (i.e. a confidence interval of < 0.5% which is enough for most elections - except maybe the presidential one in a really close race), and only need a couple of days for an official final result. Quite baffling how long some nations need to get their votes counted.

Up to 12$ for a chemical factory pizza with "tomatoes" and "cheese", and here I am not having bought any frozen Pizza Spinaci (they're fairly decent, as far as hyperprocessed foods go) because they're like 3.99€ nowadays.

Simon the Westie, April 1st, 2010 - November 3rd, 2024 Good night, sweet prince. You brought joy to everyone who knew you. On the one hand I am heartbroken, on the other I am happy that he did not have to suffer. Just around midnight he got up for the last time, wagged his tail, and went back to sleep. This morning we noticed that he didn't breathe any more. Being able to die peacefully in his sleep is a blessing we never expected him to have after he was diagnosed with lymphoma six months ago. The vet gave him three to six weeks without treatment, and he went on to enjoy his life for six more months. He put up a valiant fight, and now he gets to rest and hopefully join my mother in law who used to watch over him while we were working when he was a puppy and during his adolescence. Every now and then I catch myself wondering if we shouldn't have taken the vet up on the offer of chemotherapy, but then, he was 14 already, he hated going to the vet to the point where he tried to run away (which he never ever did otherwise) and it would have been a three month treatment, with no chance of actually curing him. Ideally it would have put his cancer into remission for a while. We'd trade three months of him being miserable with three months extra time with him? No, and looking back, I can't imagine to have made a different choice. You will be missed my sweet doggie. I know that every pet owner says this, but he was special and the cutest and the best.

The absolutely most important thing to change in Windows 11 is the stupid new context menu on right clicks. Nothing else comes even close to being this essential. Whoever had that idea over at Microsoft should be shot to the moon without a return ticket, along with the other criminals deserving of such a fate, like Putin, Xi and Trump.

Also, for anyone interested in the Thiry Years War, might I point you to SandRhoman, a duo of Swiss historians doing pretty interesting videos on historical subjects? The only caveat I have is their English narrator who is, well, not a real joy to listen to. Alas. No point in posting their videos in German.

Heh. "Es gibt nur einen Gott, das müsst ihr glauben, und wers nicht glauben kann, den zünd' ich einfach an." So, basically "There is only one God, you have to believe that, and if you can't believe it, I'll just set you on fire." (obviously the German lyrics rhyme ) to the tune of the Pippi Longstockings intro. Had to think of that video reading the thread now.

Does the first game have proper horse testicle physics as well?

I found some elves. There's a token black elf and two asian elves, one of which is a companion. 'Tis so inclusive, it wokes me out of my immersion. To make matters worse, none of the women in the game are masturbatory material, at least so far, and Neve (one of the companions) almost sounds like that transsexual in Hogwart's: Wokacy, even though they have different voice actors. On the techincal side, turning on RT makes the game look and feel better, but it also introduces the typical glowy reflective surfaces of lesser implementations of ray traced reflections. They're not as bas as they were in Hogwart's Legacy though, so it is mostly fine. Initially, the game was excessively unstable, crashing to the desktop with an NVIDIA driver error. I changed a few things in Afterburner*, turned off the EA app overlay and use full screen mode and vsync with a 50% frame lock, i.e. the game now runs at 60 fps. Have been playing without crashes ever since. I don't know which one of these was the problem, but it is stable now. Otherwise the game's running fine with all the RT bells and whistles turned on, even without DLSS. The gameplay is a hybrid between Dragon Age: Inquisition and Darksiders, which is where I guess a lot of the dislike for the combat comes from. I'd say it is not a good fit for a Dragon Age game, but then again, what is the gameplay of a Dragon Age game really? DA:O had a more traditional RPG combat system where fiddling with the AI scripts for an hour or two was necessary to make most of the tedium go away, Dragon Age 2 had a silly click to win action combat system and Dragon Age: Inquisition was Mass Effect with melee weapons and an optional tactical mode that was by far and large completely useless. So, is it actually bad so far? No. However, there are two key elements to the game that can put off players if they actively dislike such things (but such is the case for every game). I mean, outside of the inclusive elements causing incel rage, like the companions not having Tali style thigh gaps or there being a token minority character at every turn. The gameplay is really rather action oriented, you're dodging across the screen, you have to - unless playing on Storymode - use minor combo attacks and ideally perfectly block attacks which you can use to counter attack, all the while you're managing your own abilities with mana costs and cooldowns. It is about as far removed from Dragon Age: Origins as you can possibly get. The party banter and companions might as well have been written by James Gunn or Joss Whedon. If you don't like quippy banter or actively dislike character interactions like those in Guardians of the Galaxy or Firefly, then don't bother. Just early impressions though. There was one sad moment for long time fans of the series, and that comes really early. Bianca dies. *I had a custom voltage/frequency curve set up. It was within spec, it just turned off the boost by capping the voltage and fequency at the stock spec clock of 2600MHZ. That should not have caused the instability, but who knows. Every other game, including Cyberpunk 2077, was rock solid with that curve setting so far, but eh, yeah. I can just switch back to it once I am done playing Veilguard.

Well, yes, but its even worse, you can be a Qunari, just like in Inquisition. Which means being a fantasy mooslim is an option in the game. Vote Trump!

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.