majestic

Hey, Pinocchio is a silent protagonist. Well, jokes aside, it is okay for characters to have motivations that the player needs to come up with, but in such instances the games surrounding that decision need to support that. I am uncertain if I can come up with a video game example, but since I played D&D with friends in the past, well, while there is a DM that prepares an overall game to go through, everything else is player driven. That is fine with me, really. It does not have to be much, I was fine with IWD's character motivation. You're an adventurer and there's money to be made, then you just stumble into the game's story - although I did not really enjoy the game too much, as having no connection to any of the characters in my party was not a very enjoyable experience for me. Having to come up with something on my own in a world and/or scenario that does not support it at all just makes my mind go . That is different from being shown something that needs a whole lot of personal interpretation, for instance, something like Utena is acceptable as long as all the other elements are good enough (which in Utena they were not). See, I almost quit playing Dark Souls right after the tutorial area because nothing about it made sense, and then it got worse, because not only are you the chosen one, you're the "chosen one" for a reason that is entirely for your own to come up with. What? It is a good tutorial area to explain the gameplay, but it does such a poor job at explaining the whats and whys of anything else that I just had no desire to continue, although the biggest reason I continue to talk about Dark Souls whenever such a topic comes up is because there's an army of fanboys telling everyone what a great story the game has. Insofar, yes, I'll take a poor explanation and attempt at giving me motivation and a plot to follow than none. I find it easier to deal with (slightly) worse gameplay when there's an attempt at storytelling, than vice versa, i.e. the absence of sense and motivation weighs worse than anything else in a game, and that extends to a whole lot of games, not just ARPGs. Sins of a Solar Empire was the biggest disappointment ever, in spite of being an otherwise enjoyable game with fantastic presentation (well, for the time). Way, way back my fellow students in high school all raved about how great Total Annihilation was, so I checked it out, and... never got beyond the third mission or so. The game's just a collection of skirmish maps. Thanks, but no thanks. I finished the ludicrously terrible Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, where every single element is horrible, from the gameplay to the storyline where it is revealed that Kane is in fact the biblical Cain, and an alien that got stranded on Earth thousands of years ago. I dropped Total Annihilation like a hot potato, because the game allowed me to, and because I did not like it. Hey, perhaps you do have a point. The absence of anything that drives my need to finish something might really be a good thing, after all. Well, still beats playing the chosen undead who is chosen for no reason, locked up for no reason, and freed for no reason just so the game can begin in a tutorial prison. Although, well, I don't think Lies of P is a game that you would enjoy. It might not lock you into one particular playstyle like Sekiro, but it shares some other elements that you heavily criticised. Next to having a group of uncanny valley characters, justified since they are puppets or not, there's still the issue of exploration being absolutely limited and not really worthwhile.

Amazon made me a really good offer on one of their Fire TV sticks recently, so I bought one for cheap. Currently setting it up so it can replace my PS4 - the only reason I turn on the console is to stream videos, after all, and not only does it draw way too much power for that, resulting in it sounding like a jet turbine after a couple of minutes. Having an actual remote vs. a PS4 controller is also a major usability win.

Well, you know what I think of Dark Souls fabled "story", although that is probably the fandumb's fault. For years before I actually tried the game I just heard two things about it, one is how hard it is, and two just how great the story of the game is. Imagine how disappointed I ended up being when the game was neither very difficult nor did it have an actual plot, the game is worse than Mass Effect 2 in that regard, and that is hard to achieve. It does have great world building and interesting (and bizarre) lore, yes, but story? Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing Dark Souls a lot in spite of my expectations not being met (which is a testament to how good the game really is), but the protagonist does not even have any motivation to do anything in the game. It starts with you locked in a cell with no explanation how you got there, someone throwing you a key telling you to get out, and that's it. In light of that experience, a Soulslike trying actual storytelling is all well and good in my book. Even if it is bad, it still beats Dark Souls because they at least tried. Hell, Hellpoint, for all its flaws, tried both, as you just spawn into the world moments after a disaster and try to figure out what the hell happened and fulfill your purpose, after all, an AI made your body for you to collect that information for it. Eh. Time to step down from the soapbox. Edit: I guess part of the issue is that I feel like the setting of Dark Souls was creative and unique, and it feels a little wasted on the game it houses. I don't really know if the second or third game improve on that aspect, but somehow I doubt it. Edit 2: Pinocchio being very uncanny valley is part of the game. He looks like he looks. Eh. Well, most of the time, you just see his back anyway.

Lies of P, just got the Rise of P ending. If you like Soulslikes and are not someone who needs exploration with any sort of depth or great rewards, this is definitely one to try out. The game is fairly linear, i.e. at best you have a secondary path with some loot or two along the way, which is a clear break from the usual From Software style. There are plenty of arcane stats and mechanics, although nowhere near as bad as they were in Dark Souls. Combat wise it is a hybrid between Sekiro and Bloodborne, but different enough to be its own thing. The game is a lot more rewarding - and probably easier - to play if you remove preconceptions from earlier Soulslikes. Perfect guarding (the term for parry in Lies of P) attacks can stagger enemies, but dodging has a definite place in the combat system too. Dodging a slow, sweeping attack that would knock you back even with a perfect guard gets you close to the enemie and lets you attack them, for instance. The weapon system is fun, being able to freely switch between movesets and special attacks by combining different handles with different weapon blades, but in one of the more arcane design choices combining handles with blades that were not meant for their combat style results in doing less damage than usual, and this is only inidicated by an easily missable and small double down-arrow on the weapon assembly screen. Guess it makes sense, putting a giant wrench head blunt weapon on a dagger handle is possible and gives you fast attacks, but it will not be optimal for damage. Might still be a good combination though. One of the patches along the way changed the behaviour of the combined weapon parts, so more options became viable, apparently. Never played before 1.3, so no first hand experience. A lot of things are straight up taken from the Souls series, like special boss weapons and boss souls ergo that you can trade in for special items. Anyway, as I never played it before the patches, I cannot comment on the difficulty of the game too much. I did not get stuck anywhere, and even the final three bosses, arguably the hardest in of the game, took only a handful of tries to defeat. They're all definitely easier if you're used to Sekiro-style parrying though, so maybe keep that in mind if you want to check it out. Oh, lest I forget, unlike the Souls series, this one has actual storytelling, which is always a great plus in my book. The Belle Epoque steampunk setting is also pretty neat.

Look on the bright side, now we can all spec Ember in a much more lore appropriate enchantment/conjuration build without feeling like wasting the potential of a boss deleting godess of death and destruction.

Can always get Cyberpunk for some eye candy. 's 50% off on GOG. Caveat: Have not paid any attention to the gaming threads in a long while, so if you have it already, ignore the post.

I don't watch the anime or read the manga, and even I know the main story is about Anya making faces.

I'm glad I finished my Unfair run while all these were still an option. My Angel Oracle run heavily relied on all of these, and it was still an annoying slog more than anything.

You gut a lot further than I thought you would. Perhaps it really was the glacial pace. Toys In The Attic was easily the worst of the entire show. I hated watching every second of it. Liked Jupiter Jazz a lot more than the episodes preceeding or following it, but that is me and my enjoyment of mysteries. Looking at the episodes a bit more objectively, they basically start with Faye doing something that the plot requires, not something that would make sense in the context of the show. Eh. Well, it would not be entirely out of character for Faye, just a whole slew of episodes too late for her to pull something like that off. The show certainly shares an issue with Noir insofar as that it promises more than it delivers as most episodes just meander about without contributing anything of note to the character development. Dunno, honestly. Don't get why it was so popular, but as we're currently summoning the Wrath of @PK htiw klaw eriF, well, perhaps he'll swoop in with a longer rant.

Things I never thought I'd say, but: I agree with Hitler here.

I don't disagree with your assessment that AMD could use some competition there, and theoretically Arrow Lake, with potential Battlemage based iGPUs, could provide that, assuming for a moment that Battlemage is much more efficient than Arc - which remains to be seen. Perhaps even in the console space - but that rides on Intel delivering the goods quickly enough (and in the case of Battlemage, in working condition from the beginning), and the SoCs not being prohibitively expensive, both of which are a bit in doubt at the moment*. Arc was really good for a first attempt at a dedicated consumer GPU (Larrabee doesn't really count). It eats up a bit more power than most other cards on the market, especially compared with nVidia 4000 series GPUs, but it performs well enough when it works, and they beat AMD in Ray Tracing from day one, and XeSS is better than FSR. If - and that is a captial I if - Battlemage really hits its performance target, which is the RTX 4080, Intel will have effectively caught up with Navi 31, albeit with a year and a half in between. Not to mention that Arc is already a pretty good production GPUs for what hey cost. Geekbench scores are pretty worthless, not only is that a synthetic benchmark, it is also wildly inconsistent between runs. *Edit: And I suppose Sierra Forrest, the new 288 core server CPUs, will probably take precendence and production capacity. Intel needs to fire something back at AMD's EPYC lineup, like yesterday.

Well, not entirely AMD Ryzen related, but anyway: https://cachewarpattack.com/ Good news is that the fix is not expected to have any performance repercussions.

Same here, just that it is also the SVR, our version of the social security number. In addition we have a passport number that is issued when you get a passport (or citizen ID, but passports are universally accepted throughout the world, while the latter is only accepted in the EU and associated nations like Norway and Switzerland), and we also have to register our primary place of residence. There is no need to register for voting or anything of the sort, that happens automatically, you just get a notification in your mail that you bring to voting, along with an ID. Said notification also tells you when and where you need to go to vote. Tax returns are automated as well. The only reason to manually do your taxes is when you have deductable expenses or incomes that are currently not tracked automatically, but the list grows ever shorter.

APO is a great use case for machine learning once enough data has been accumulated, that could also automate testing and should provide results in a much smaller timeframe. At least that's what I would try with APO, because manual tuning after every patch and for each new game (or even application, not like Photoshop for instance has great multithreading, could probably also benefit from APO) release would otherwise only be feasible if the optimizations could somehow be handed over to the community. Well, those are here to stay, what with AMD adding "c" cores to their CPUs in the future. Oh, they sure like to tell how much better their c-cores are going to be to Intel's e-cores because they're basically the same and thus have the same IPC, just more tightly packed and clocked lower, but one just needs to look at the 7900X(3D) and 7950X(3D) and its myriad scheduling problems to give lie to that statement. There are games where a 7700X beats the 7900X and 7950X due to coordination issues between separate CCDs that are identical, and the 7800X3D is consistently as fast or in some cases even faster than the 7950X3D - and that is with the artificially lower clock speeds of the 7800X3D. Having cores that clock lower is going to be an issue for scheduling, whether or not they have the same IPC, and between Intel's Thread Director and AMD's core parking on the 7900/7950X3D, the conclusion is pretty obvious. The c-cores are not going to have the same performance as the regular cores, and therefore AMD's going to run into scheduling issues, unless they just turn off the c-cores in gaming like they do with the 79X0X3Ds - which also not always works properly. Proof is in Steve's benchmarks. With the way APO seems to work according to Hardware Unboxed's video, i.e. making sure one e-core per cluster has access to the full cluster L2 cache by turning the other three off and directing threads to make better use of the CPU, it sort of makes sense that the only supported CPUs so far are the 14900K and 14700K. APO might not work properly or produce no real performance uplift on a 14600K with only two e-core clusters. The 13700K also has only two of them, so for 13th gen that probably would just leave the 13900K. Not unlocking APO for the 13900K is a pretty lame move though, if understandable from a marketing point of view (assuming APO becomes more than a tech demo). There's no reason it would not work just as well on a 13900K, seeing how the 14900Ks are just 13900Ks that won the silicon lottery. I mean, like literally.

Huh, dunno, we've had a digital ID for a while now. I can do my taxes online, register for mail-in votes, sign documents with it, change my place of residence, use my phone as replacement for various ID cards (driver's license, passport, etc.), request various official government issued documents online and receive them digitally signed with no paperwork (e.g. birth certificate, marriage certificate, etc.), request reimbursement for private medical services, and a whole bunch of other things I don't really need, like getting all the documents in order for a newborn kid. Can also check a bunch of information, like my projected pension and how much money I cost my health insurance this year, which is about a thousand euro as of right now. All without having to deal with any public officials. The amount of extra data I had to provide for the ID was pretty much zero, except for my mobile phone number. Which the government could find out any time they would want to, so that is not any more dystopian than it already is, thanks to the EU, which mandated fingerprints in passports back in 2009, and our fantastic conservative-right wing government of 2017, lead my Mr. Kurz, our glorious leader, and their coalition partners the freedom party, who mandated that any and all mobile phone numbers must be registered, before that we had the option of having anonymous mobile phone numbers - well, mobile phones bit that government and Mr. Shorty in the arse, so there is some poetic justice in that.

While reading this, my first thought was: hey, you already said it is a Takahata film. Spoils enough.

So is the overheat quickhack. Well, actually, all non-physical damage is non-lethal, sense be damned. If you want your gorilla arms to be completely non-lethal just get the electric variety, for instance. Anyway, done with the game now. From what I heard people talked about the new ending being more depressing than the existing ones. Well, perhaps. Especially when you're on the King of Pentacles path like I was. Some things really feel out of character and the final conversations feel cheap - actually most of the new ending sticks out like a sore thumb on an otherwise well written game. It is not bad exactly, just not the same quality of the base game. Instead of flowing organically, the dialogue and what happens feels forced to drive home a point. Sad thing is that ending could have really been made into something utterly devastating that would have resonated much more, or say, be a much more poetic "justice" way to end the game while driving home the same point: Well, missed a good way for a shocker there, CD Projekt Red. Well, no sense crying over spilled milk and all that.

In preparation for an upcoming medical exam (routine check) I just had to drink half a liter of a solution containing a total of 3 grams of salt (for those of you who cannot into proper measurements, that is a little less than a pint of liquid containg roughly 0.1 oz salt). Needless to say that was utterly disgusting, even with the added mango aroma and included sweetener. Second dose coming up in a couple of hours with even more salt. Yuck.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/smoldering-headers-on-nvidias-geforce-rtx-4090/ TL;DR: Not every burning RTX 4090 was necessarily user error. The PCI SIG specs for the 12VHWPR headers and plugs were (and still are) so unclear and incomplete that production tolerances alone are enough to potentially fry them under heavy load, i.e. anything above 400W power draw, before factoring in manufacturing cost reduction by making them as cheap as possible, next to a few potential issues caused by AIB's placement of the headers, i.e. some RTX 4090s are potentially more prone to burned headers than others.

Unnecessary Sequel #3 (2021) Woops, I mean, Matrix: Resurrections, now that it is available on Amazon Prime. Big spoiler right from the start: I did not hate it. With that out of the way, is that really enough these days? It almost feels like it is. I would not say I enjoyed this, so it is different from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but as far as the sequels go, it might be the best of the bunch, although that is such a low bar to clear that it is practically worthless as measurement. Half of the film is a parody anyway, and it seems like the Wachowskis are almost aware of how much their pseudo-philosophical ramblings in Reloaded and Revolutions failed to be interesting, and how uninteresting and rote their other films are. A part almost feels like a meta commentary, especially the development meetings where everyone is desparately looking for a way to make a Matrix sequel (it makes sense in the film) that has a game-changing, impactful component. Half of the film makes no sense in the context of the other films, and the other half is a mix of parody and remake of the first one. The one thing that is immediately noticable as it is often directly in juxtaposition with the original 1999 film is that shaky cam adds nothing to the feel of an action scene, and the first film is so much better for its lack of screen shaking. There's a time and place for it, but a Matrix film sure is not it. Still, it did not make me want to kill myself or fall asleep like Reloaded and Revolutions. Eh, I probably am going soft. Always fun to see Neil Patrick Harris though.

Nice. Can stop rifling through videos whenever I need to reference a chart now.

General rule of thumb: never assume our current government knows or understands anything, and you're good. Our chancellor's reaction to the steep rise in food prices was let them eat cake, in a 21st century variation, i.e. let them buy burgers at McDonald's. Bunch of clowns wouldn't find their own noses if they weren't attached to their faces.

Yes.

Well, finally done: Time to shelf D4 until January 23rd.

Dunno, the easiest way for me was just getting them to 5% health and dropping an incendiary grenade on them. Those grenades deal a truckload of non-lethal damage.