majestic

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.

Was my first reaction too, actually already had the post typed up saying "Looks like Intel recruited AMD's marketing team", but then decided against it. Kinda reminds me of Microsoft's early 2000 anti-Linux marketing campaign. That was a major facepalm moment too. The maximum die size in newer process nodes is going to go down drastically, as High-NA EUV lithography will basically shrink the maximum die size achievable down to 429mm², and to make matters worse, I/O is scaling poorly with new process nodes and SRAM has all but stopped scaling, but at the same time caches are getting larger and larger, and processors need more and more I/O. Not like Intel did not realize that at the time, but... actually, since Foveros is different enough, that's not actually the really stupid part about saying that AMD is gluing their CPUs together. The Pentium D series was just that. Two Pentium 4 CPUs glued together. Intel did it first, and pretty poorly at that. I actually had a Pentium D based system back then. That was, uhm, yeah. Pretty bad. I mean, it worked, and it was stable, but it required a ginormous copper block with a high RMP fan to cool it down, and the mainboards had to be designed to allow for massive bending due to the weight of the coolers. Netburst also turned out to be a dead end idea. Intel kept saying that the Netburst architecture will pay off once software is written specifically for it, but that never materialized. AMD would go on to copy the marketing idea when all they had were more cores on their Bulldozer CPUs, well, we have more cores, they're going to pay off eventually. Sure they did, just not within the lifespan of that architecture. Things to seem a bit cyclical, although Intel is not as far behind in performance as they were back before the Core 2 and later the Core series came out.

Jokes aside, it is doubly strange to make slides like that just shortly before the Meteor Lake laptops come out. Meteor Lake is going to be similar to the AMD 7520U insofar as they are going to have Raptor Cove cores on a smaller node they call "Redwood Cove", much like the 7250U has Zen 2 cores on a smaller process node. It is the whole reason there are internal slides and leaks showing the MTL CPUs being at best a boost in 5% in ST performance, with a larger multithread performance boost due to moving to Crestmont for the e-cores. Steve also said it in the video, Intel does have a point about the confusing naming schemes, but stones and glass houses and whatnot.

Congratulations Intel, after re-releasing Raptor Lake on desktop as "new" generation, complaining about AMD's laptop naming scheme is really, really pathetic. Never mind the refreshes of the past, and the confusing naming schemes of the past... uhm... fire whoever made this immediately. Edit: anyone wanna bet whether an intern made these slides or if they tried their new AI accelerators on a marketing AI? Can't have been someone with more than two brain cells or at least semi-familiarity with the current tech landscape.

Done with lies of P: NG+ optional final boss sure is something. Actually, the optional final boss is still the only one where I feel I have not really gotten a decent grasp on how to play against, but I've defeated it twice now (need to play through all the three endings for the achievements, and you need to fight it in two of them) by playing just well enough to get it down within a handful of tries. The other two non-optional bosses before it, well, they were pushovers in NG+. Anyone playing and struggling, well, don't sleep on throwables. There's a shop in the Malum District that carries an unlimited supply for all of them, at a fairly cheap price to boot (this should alleviate any concern about having to horde consumables), and they do pack a punch, inflict status effects and a large amount of stagger. If you can get any boss down to half their health there's a decent chance you can just throw stuff at them until they die. Adding extra belt slots and increasing your throwable carrying capacity through the upgrade system is very much worth it. The summoning system where you can get an NPC specter to help you fight bosses on the other hand is really hit and miss. I played though the entire game without using it, only trying it here and there on the later runs. In theory it is a good idea because the specter sometimes has aggro from the boss and you can freely wail at their backside, however, many boss attacks and abilities hit in very wide angles, or even cover 360°, making them more of a curse then a blessing. They also don't stop the boss from just switching to you in a sequence of attacks that is patently hard to read from behind them. Probably the least interesting aspect of the combat system. Could use some work. Looking forward to the teased Wizard of Oz game from Neowiz.

Look, Joe liked Lies of P enough to release his first video in a year: Bit on the short side, but I'll take it.

I always leave my car on the sidewalk. Gouranga.

Let me take a moment to revel in the genious design decision to have a record collection in Lies of P. As you are playing Pinocchio, it should be no surprise - and not a great spoiler - to say that by the end of the game, you can become a real boy. To do so one needs to make the right choice at a certain point in the game and to participate in certain game activities to increase a hidden humanity counter, basically behaving like a human, including lying your sweet butt off (including a growing nose, even if it is not on Pinocchio himself) and the aforementioned record collection. To score humanity points, you can listen to the records you find on a gramophone. However, you can only get the points after listening to each record in full, and as they're regular music pieces, their runtime is somewhere between two and four minutes. This process cannot be sped up, and make no mistake, what a mistake speeding up the process would be, otherwise why else would you be forced to take a break to appreciate the game's soundtrack to unlock the best ending. Have you ever experienced a better, more interactive way to appreciate a game soundtrack than to stop the game dead in its tracks, forcing the player to pause and take in everything they experienced? To put a soundttrack in front and center in game mechanics, even, is such a stroke of genius, that I find myself unable to express it in words befitting the idea, and that is before appreciating the genre of music you can collect, as it is perfectly fitting music for a Belle Epoque game. Not the usual grand, orchestral pieces with a choir, no, but intellectual music: jazzy pieces often including a bandoneon. How can it possibly get any better than that?