majestic

The Acolyte season one finale: I saw Darth Plagueis, and I CLAPPED. Then I saw Master Yoda and CLAPPED EVEN HARDER! The series thus sets up a sequel season and a reboot within just one episode. If nothing else, that's a ballsy move in case Disney decides to make a season two, which seems very unlikely at the moment. The reception was (rightfully, although the idiot hate parade dislikes The Acolyte for all the wrong reasons) lukewarm, as it was mostly boring and could have easily been a feature length film instead of eight episodes. What resonates the most is, once more, the squandered potential: the idea that the Jedi are an order of decadent and arrogant hyprocrites lying to the senate and trying to weasel out of governmental oversight, thus preparing their eventually downfall at the hands of Palpatine, is a pretty good one for a series. A sliver of creativity? What a novel thing for Disney's Star Wars. Alas, what we actually got with The Acolyte is a rote Fallen Padawan story that would have best been told in standalone film, or better yet, not at all. The other problems I complained about after watching the pilot episode never changed, of course. The shots remained flat, the characters are by far and large boring and as flat as the shots, and none of the action sequences meant anything*. That it was still better than The Mandalorian season three just shows how garbage The Mandalorian was. *

The socially ingrained pursuit of happiness instead of contentness is relatively new, and with so many things, was driven by corporate greed. If people would be content with being, well, content, then what's the point of buying ever more stuff? Imagine people just buying whatever they actually need to live out their lives, the economy would collapse. There's a surprising number of things we take for granted that were invented and had the need for it manufactured after the fact, by commercials and therefore commercial interests. When Edna Murphey invented the first deodorant, mankind had survived for hundreds of thousands of years without it. Nobody needed a deodorant. Nowadays, after a century of dedicated marketing left us with the impression that body odor is bad, can you imagine a world without deodorant? In German, we have an idiom for finding someone intolerable, that literally translates to not being able to stand their smell. It makes no sense in modern parlance, as humans basically stopped having much of a smell, unlike in times past, where this had a very literal meaning. You found someone's actual smell disagreeable, so you did not like having them around. Anyone who is content with their lives please realize that this is perfectly fine.

Liar, I know for a fact that you celebrated every Scooter video I ever linked to. On that note, not Scooter, but something that only could have come from the 90ies:

As a grumpy early adopter I still have to chuckle about the idea that AI killed the worthwhile internet that consists of Fecesbook* and the hellspawn that crawled out of the underworld in its wake. People glorify a time period where the internet was already dead because corporate interests had taken over, i.e. some supposed golden age between 2010 and 2020. The actual golden age of the internet died at the turn of the millennium** - if not even earlier. Still, good video, as usual. Kyle makes good stuff most of the time. *The actual progenitor is probably MySpace, but nobody remembers that nowadays. **The YouTube microcosm is a little different as it took a while for hardware and users to catch up (making videos is much more time consuming and resource intensive), but the downward slope started when Google turned into the Umbrella Corporation, and generative AI making videos is just the nail in the coffin.

Well, aren't you Republicans happy that you made Biden immune to save your own candidate from having to deal with the fallout of his indictments?

Eh, there's no way I could get 10Gb here even if the ISP would offer it. We were one of the few households that were asked to participate in our ISP's pilot project, and I am fairly certain we've reached the limits of the cables laid back in the 80ies for TV. Networking CPU overhead is a concern for datacenters and speeds beyond 100Gb, which is why vendors have been pushing out smarkt networking solutions with ARM SoCs that handle everything related to networking, freeing up significant CPU resoures. Not sure how much that woud apply to a 10Gb connection at home, but you could always try to go for one of those cards. They just cost an arm and a leg.

ISP seems to have upgraded my bandwidth for free. What a novelty, instead of everything becoming worse and more expensive all the time.

Biden seems to be resolved to run for election regardless of all calls to step aside. Senile obstinancy (Ruth Bader Ginsburg and now Biden refusing to step aside) and a terrible decision by Obama (indirectly letting the Republicans nominate one more SCOTUS justice) are coalescing into a perfect storm that might just end with Trump becoming Cyrus the Great in more than the fanatsy of evangelical lunatics, and half of the US is cheering it on.

That's probably what Wendell was talking about, also regarding his sample size and how he got the information. It's an indie dev allegedly experiencing problems with every single one of their CPUs in every area of use. Many YouTubers, including GamersNexus, use 13/14900K based systems for video editing and rendering have done so for years now. Whatever is going on at Alderon's can't affect all CPUs, even Wendell's analysis of the data suggest 50% - which is insane enough. 's a bold statement that could bring Intel's litigation hammer down on them, although if even half of what they describe is true it is understandable. It could, however, affect all CPUs shipped to them assuming they buy from the same supplier (which is a reasonable assumption, even for smaller companies) and they got a batch with a manufacturing defect. Anyway, from that statement: Well, it would make sense that 100% of all affected CPUs fail. That wording is very unfortunate.

Wendell: "It's weird, if there really would be a 50% failure rate, people would be climbing the walls." Intermittent issues with no rhyme or reason and no obvious connections and no microcode updates from Intel as a fix. The only reasonable* explanation for that behavior is a manufacturing defect leading to silicon degredation under load, and the lack of more widespread outrage over failing CPUs in game servers might point to it being localized. Wouldn't be surprised if the affected CPUs come from the same fab (maybe even the same lithography machine). 50% of all CPUs going belly up would be noticable, and not even Intel could keep a lid on that. Intel should be able to trace the issue with batch numbers and shipping manifests. The caveat here being that this is all based on Wendell looking through crash dumps and server logs. Wendell mentions that in the video, that is sample size is not exactly fantastic. *Well, there's the explanation that Intel is selling unstable bins for the heck of it, but that seems unlikely, as Intel cannot afford to alienate server providers, and the CPUs pass checks when first activated and then eventually degrade under load. I could see management ordering laxer binning standards for the consumer market, but not for CPUs shipped to companies. Too much at stake.

Brian Tanner died. He was only 46, a little older than I am now.

The King Kong Pro 2 comes with rebindable controls, and it has the regular Nintendo layout. It costs a bit more than 50$, but it's not impossible. Unless you mean your JoyCons, in that case, uh, yeah, you would not really be able to play games requiring precise intputs with those.

's an authentic BruceVC post all right.

Yes. You can probably make that a yes for any third person action (adventure/rpg) game with soulslike in its description. Unless you're religiously opposed to gamepads I really recommend finding out whether you like the hand and finger breaking PS-style controllers or the proper ones, and picking one up you like. Some of them can be a bit pricey, but there's plenty of good ones that won't cost you an arm and a leg.

Yeah, sorry, for a moment I forgot who I am replying to. I'll just show myself out.

Not only did you reply in earnest to a bot spam post, you also somehow missed @Wormerine's link to the video literally called:

I wanted to play Still Wakes the Deep. Alas: It's close to midnight anyway, probably better to not try a horror game shortly before trying to sleep. Thanks Microsoft, I guess.

You guys really ought to watch homberguy's Fallout 3 video, if only to find out whether or not Tommy Tallarico made all the music and sounds for it.

If we stop being outraged by the things Trump says we let him shift what acceptable discourse is, and that is not a good idea. We can see that with the Austrian NSDAP offshoot, the FPÖ, where Herbert Kickl has been calling himself Volkskanzler for a year now. Their constant and unabashed Nazi-inspired discourse has pushed what is accaptable without outrage to the point where they can reuse Nazi terminology with nobody batting an eyelash.

Yes, Trump's mental state is mostly okay. Of course. He is a stable genius after all. The most brilliant mind of the century. Ah, what am I talking about, he's the greatest thinker of the modern age. That half of the US population thinks that this moron with the intelligence of a lobotomized chimpanzee represents and embodies them is a scathing indictment of the US education system.

There, I answered your question. Nevertheless, you are right, that was a disaster and the Democrats should nominate someone else, like, yesterday. What's Bernie doing these days?

Anyway, double post time. Just watched episode 5 of The Boys, season 4. Flying the sheep is the new jumping the shark.

*sigh*

Well, it reads The Acolyte - re:View, but it is a little like part one of the Star Wars Holiday Special re:View. They talk about everything else but The Acolyte. Well, almost. They talk about the show for 10 minutes or so. Speaking of The Acoltye, the show continues to be mostly uninteresting, flat and boring (and Qimir had better turn out to be the titular Acolyte, if he's really Mae's master then the entire creative team needs to be detained). Mike and Rich got it right, the show is pretty bland mostly because 90% of the characters are cardboard cutouts, and it would not change a bit even if all the actors were white heterosexual men. They also really have a point in critics being utterly unhelpful by giving all these shows and movies a pass or even praising them for nothing but being inclusive, even if they are complete garbage, something I've complained about for a while now. It is actively hurting their cause. The incels in the comments are pretty funny though, calling them paid Disney shills. Must have been a rough year for them, first they finally realize The Boys is satire and Homelander isn't a misunderstood hero but the villain, and then they have to watch Mike and Rich making fun of them.