majestic

I was goaded into watching a video by The Critical Drinker while writing my posts about Star Trek: Picard. It took about five minutes of him making a semi-decent point about why it is bad until he came to the conclusion it is because diversity and because that woman admiral was allowed to yell at Picard. I stopped watching and had YouTube never recommend me a video of his again. Picard was bad for a myriad of reasons, that old, cantankerous admiral yelling at him certainly was not one of them. Gee, unfriendly and unsympathetic female admirals in Star Trek, what a novelty. Must be this woke crap.

All this talk about age appropriate literature reminded me of a "recent" post I made about an illustrated book I read when I was really little, so I went and looked it up. Turns out recent means five years and three months ago. It was originally written because the author bemoaned the lack of decent literature for children and was intended as a gift for his three-year-old. It contains the usual child favorites, really, like girls burning to a cinder, thumbs being cut off with giant scissors, a child starving to death and a kid who had nothing better to do than to go outside during a raging storm being blown away clinging to his umbrella, never to be seen again. I guess it is pretty positive. Only two of the kids die, one gets maimed by a dog, one maimed by a tailor and the one blown away by the storm could technically still be alive, although it seems somewhat unlikely. Why are we not allowing kids to read Asterix again?

The Boys Season 4: Satire Is Over So, the first three episodes are out, and one thing I took away from this is that, in the five years the season ran so far, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket in such a way that The Boys stopped being satire and is now just a pale reflection of actual events, just with superheroes. Still pretty entertaining, but then... I was one of the two people on the planet who thought season two was better than season three, so take my opinion with an unhealthy dose of sodium chloride.

No, that was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. While I did not like ToEE, it was never that bad. The only time my computer got infected was back in the ancient DOS times from a shareware collection on CD from a trade show I went to. That was in '93 or so. Well, techically untrue, I once installed a remote control tool with trojan capabilities to test it out. Should probably say the only unintentional infection with malicious software.

Ah, yes, performance leaks and performance expectations are wonderful things. AMD expected RDNA3 to outperform Ada Lovelace. The rumor mill expected a 40% IPC increase with Zen 5. Leaks said Intel is going to up the core count on the 14th gen i5s. Intel thought Meteor Lake would be able to outperform Raptor Lake. There were leaks once about how Battlemage was going to have 512MB of L2 cache. Karzak once expected that Temple of Elemental Evil is going to make people forget about Baldur's Gate 2. You can guess thrice which one of those turned out to be true.

Got a new credit card as the old one expires next month. Spent like half an hour updating various subscriptions and online shops. #firstworldproblems

Watched most of the first episode of Disney's new Star Wars outing "The Acolyte", and I already regret it. I wish I could stop doing this, but alas... So far it is just like Ahsoka insfoar as it is not so much offensive and stupid as it is boring, wooden and flat. It therefor, just like the aforementioned Ahsoka, stands in stark contrast to The Mandalorian, where the craftsmanship of the series is often good (even if production values scream tight budget at you, but that is a problem every Disney Star Wars has), but many episodes are just so utterly dumb that one cannot but wonder if a half-witted fanboy was involved in writing the scripts. Every camera angle in this episode was so flat it gives credence to the Flat Earth conspiracy theory. Everything is drab, boring and uncinematic. Every dialogue is set up as shot/reverse shot, and the actors were all wooden, talking in this strange monotone that Disney seems to think Jedi should talk in. Watchers are apparently review bombing this based on it having a diverse cast, as if the series has no other problems it deserves to be review bombed for. They hired Carrie-Anne Moss as a guest actor for the first episode, where she's doing her best Matrix martial arts fight impression in the cold opening. I like Carrie-Anne Moss as an actress, but I facepalmed throughout her fight. Since this happens in the first two or three minutes of the series it is not much of a spoiler, but I'll mark it anyway: Verdict: Unless you're like me, just stay clear of this. While it wasn't a dumpster fire in the same way The Mandalorian season three or Rings of Power was, it just is not worth your time, and I am fairly confident the rest of the series will not change that.

So, just in case you read the half-finished post, it is now fully finished. I just got dumberer from watching the episode. I need to lie down. Good night.

You are all dead to me now. Fie. Shoo. I am also aware that I said the exact same thing when @Amentep posted about watching Discovery and not hating it way back when it happened. A special thanks goes to @Zoraptor whose reminder turned my evening from being purely occupied by grinding in Diablo 4 to sharing my brain space and time with the beginning of Discovery Season five. Disclaimer: I will be watching this at 2.25x replay speed, which worked wonders when I wrote my Sailor Moon Cosmos recap. Yum Yum. The Red Directive Yes, that is actually the episode name. Yikes. I haven't even begun to watch, but the title hangs there, ominous in its wording. You know, that situation in a horror film where the protagonist is clearly aware that they are making a mistake by walking down an aisle, or entering a door, or leaving the safety of their room, but they are doing it anyway? Yes, this is exactly like that. At least this is going to be the final season of this travesty of a show that should have never been made. With the possible exceptions of the Michelle Yeoh focused mirror universe episodes, which were just absolutely delightful. Without any further ado, let us begin. Great, the forum just posted my post due to a software update, while it is not finished. At least it is not gone. Freaking forum software.

Is that out already? Oh no...

They fixed DX9 a while ago, it is now supported natively in the drivers and no longer emulated. GN retested Arc every now and then.

Finally managed to find some time to finish the first season of Invincible, which I started way back when it came out at the recommendation of a friend. Except for the plot twist of the first episode, the first three episodes of the series were so dreadfully boring that I put off watching the rest of the season for a while. The following episodes got a lot better, but there are some problems that ended up gnawing at my brain while watching. Well, I've watched worse. On the other hand, I've also watched much better series. Onwards to season two then.

Well, here's to hoping Intel's Battlemage can deliver better compatibility at a decent price. The A770 cards wouldn't be half bad as alternative to nVidia's and AMD's very underwhelming cards at that price range, if it would be less of a dice roll with fresh game releases.

Yeah, they're making more but shorter videos while covering Computex this year.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/30/trump-guilty-crime-felony-what-happens-next.html So sad, this injustice in this country and this witch hunt. Doing my best Beavis and Butthead laugh impression right now. He hehe he.

https://www.iclarified.com/93724/icq-to-shut-down-on-june-26-after-28-years Well, there goes a part of 'net history.

I would suggest Kill la Kill.

Blizzard are the true kings of never learning from past mistakes. Diablo 4 is transitioning to the new season, it says. Patch it as soon as possible, it says. Yes, oops, something went wrong. Well, at least 1.32MB/s is better than the 3.6KB/s from last season's patch, I guess. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother. Game's not even that good. Or actually good.

I have to admit I am impressed by the sheer amount of work that went into the three minute presentation of Ireland's entry. Love or hate the song (one can certainly do both at the same time!), the perfomance is mesmerizing.

Currently watching the ESC 2024 semi final #1. This one is more entertaining than the past five combined. And by entertaining I mean the acts are a blast to watch. Not so much a blast to listen to, though.

@Guard Dog checked in a longer while back and talked about some serious health issues. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd really want it just him being happy and busy and all that jazz, but... you know. Never been an optimist.

Something like a LG UltraGear OLED 27GS95QE-B, but probably not before summer, unless the problem's not the cable and the screen dies before that.

My screen randomly decided to go "No Signal" on my ass. Tried replugging the cable, tried all three display ports on my GPU, tried the onboard display port - all to no avail. Either the cable died, or the display port on my screen. Switched back to HDMI. Not much of a loss going from 144hz to 120hz anyway. Going to try the cable at work, if that is not the culprit, I guess it is time to buy a new screen. This ancient AOC screen with a TN panel is, uhm, well... let's just say it wasn't state of the art when I got it a long ways back, and it certainly did not age like fine wine.