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majestic

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Everything posted by majestic

  1. For something close to two years now Neflix has tried to get me to watch 天気の子. It stopped for a bit when Netflix lost the rights (and around that time, Amazon Prime Video began to tell me that I would probably like watching it), then they apparently got them back, the shilling resumed, and now it basically begged me to. With their sort of 'new' system of marking something as a favorite instead of just liking it, the algorithm proudly declared that I should really, really, really enjoy watching Weathering With You. Plus, it said, the rights to the film will go away in January. So, I finally relented. Normally I'd do a longer post, but I'm not exactly in the mood to find more posting bugs. The forum almost killed a post of of mine earlier today where I found out that simply quoting already existing text is enough to cause it to spaz out again, however, it's not entirely reproducable. I've tried quoting the affected passages again, and it worked. It's taking the fun out of posting, and it is a pretty bad show that it takes so long to even address the issue - never mind fixing it. Looks like Obsidian gave their entire staff off for Christmas. Well, perhaps I'm just bitter because I did not get any time off. Oh, right, the film. I do not entirely understand why all the character models in modern anime films are looking so similar to each other. Hello, I am Hina from Weathering With You! I am too! Well, no, not really, I am Tamako from Tamako Love Story! I don't know what My Name is, but is it Your Name? Also, you're reaching, my eyes a brown! Hey come on, don't be unfair, I don't have pig tails! It's classic anime to distinguish characters based mostly on their hair, that's the reason they often have physics defying hairdo and vastly different colors - but that is within a series or a film, not a common theme between many of them. Certainly not between films that look like they have a decent budget. What, why am I complaining about modern anime aesthetics again? Poor horsie, I know you died 17 years ago. So, anyway, the film was fine, I guess. I did not hate it, at least, which is more than can be said about a lot of stuff I've watched recently. I'll also award it some extra points for addressing a glaring anime issue, how's every teenager living alone and nobody finds it weird? Indeed, the police comes knocking and is looking for the little runaway protagonist Hodoka, who is waffling between being endearing and being stupidly shounenesque. They also swoop up Hina, the titular Weather Child, who has faked her age on a resume and should not be living with her little brother alone, without legal guardian. Well, that's certainly something, eh? Hodoka also happens to find a loaded gun he discharges when he has his biggest shounen-moment and thinks he needs to rescue a girl in distress. It later comes back to haunt him because a camera caught him shooting. Oh my. That said, the film also has the usual trope in full force, any metropolitan area is always as busy or as empty as the story demands it to be. Not that this is anime-specific, this is common in any film or series set in giant cities, like Vanilla Sky's New York that was devoid of people when it was necessary for the story. So what is the story? The weather is weird, and Tokyo is locked in a never ending rain. Will the Weather Girl be able to control it? Are there going to be any repercussions for randomly discharching weapons found on the street? Do you even care? Do you want to find out? If yes, then you're in luck, because the film explains the entire plot within the first twenty or so minutes, and you can fast forward to the final 15 minutes. Good job, Honoka. At least now I'm fairly certain that I don't want to watch Your Name. After all, Weathering With You was criticized for being too similar. Probably not with the plot, but themes and whatnot. Anyway Netflix, it was a decent attempt, but really, really, really liking this? Nope. Maybe if you don't flat out tell me the plot right from the start, make the characters a little more likable, not use distracting CGI for camera pans outside of the one big scene you apparently wanted to look great. Maybe. But then you'd not be the film I just watched. Well, it was at least better than watching Noir was, although Noir was 26 episodes, and this thankfully less than two hours.
  2. You kids these days, back when I was your age and we still had to hike backwards up a mountain to get to school... uhm, insert something witty about super slow internet and connection loss when your mom got on the phone here.
  3. TL;DW: There's a temperature point where, in some of the 7900 XTXs (and presumably, the non-second-X too), the vapor chamber coolant circulation potentially breaks down. As of yet unclear whether it is a design flaw or a construction/material issue, but it sure looks pretty bad. Would watch, but yo no hablo español: Der Bauer bought or traded several 7900 XTX cards affected with the 110° hotspot issue from his subscribers, the proceeded to do some testing. The cards ran hot when mounted vertically, but were still within limits. Mounting them horizontally (i.e. the 'regular' way), the went to throttling and had their fans spin at 2800 RPM after a few minutes. He used both Furmark and Remnant: From The Ashes for the testing, then dropped Furmark as it yielded the same result. He then goes to eliminate all possible causes. It is not gravity pulling the cooler off the GPU, it is also not the mounting pressure (he opened one of his cards and replaced the spring and screws and shaved off some metal here and there to have mounting pressure he would consider unsafe) or the conductor plate between the heat sink and the PCB. He then proceeded to flip the cards while running. Vertically mounted, they were steady at 1800 RPM and a ~90° hot spot. Flipping them to vertically mounted while running increased GPU and hot spot temperatures. The cards reproducably reached 110° hotspot at 2800 fan RPM and throttled down to prevent heat damage. He then flipped them back to vertical mounting, but the temperature did not go back down. Since his testing eliminated all other potential issues, it looks like the vapor chamber is the problem, once past a certain temperature point it no longer works properly. There's either a construction flaw with many of the cards that got delivered, or there's a design flaw. Yeah, sorry Linus, but Jensen is probably doing his best Palpatine laugh impression right now. I know I am, because I feast off copium, and the copium is really, really strong with this launch. Hey, AMD, in hindsight, was it a good idea to laugh at the burning cables that turned out to be by far and large user error where nVidia the anti-consumer monster replaced no the affected cards no questions asked, while you went "110° junciton temperatur is within the design specs, sorry, no RMA" until recently? *snort*
  4. The usual end-of-year decadence. Smoked salmon on toasted bread with a cream and horseradish sauce and gravadlax with a mustard dill sauce. The good stuff has limited availability* and a price to match, but hey, YOLO, right? *In Central Yurop, at least. Probably a bit different in Norway...
  5. @Fionavar @SChin, and whoever else it may concern. Yeah, no, it is reproducable, but it behaves so seemingly random that it is hard to figure out what the actual cause could be. Certain sets of words in quotations, irrespective of which quotation marks are used (both regular quotation marks and apostrophes break it), cause the post function to go on the fritz, but even then not always, it also has something to do with the words following a quotation. See, for instance, thanks to @Bartimaeus, this one does not go through: However, this does: My words were "complete stylistic clone of Dark" POST BREAKS HERE. It is also possible to post this: "1234 1234 123" "robert downey junior" "holy holy man" But not this: Which is apparently caused by beginning the quote with the word more and following it with a space: This one very reliably kills any and all posts it is put in, apparently irrespective of where it is placed in the text. So, yes, with more being a common keyword in command interpreters, this points more and more to overzealous input validation, or a security issue.
  6. My words were "complete stylistic clone of Dark" POST BREAKS HERE. I haven't seen the entirety of the show and I'm not going to do anything to change that, so I don't know what the story is (and frankly, I spent nary athought on the matter given how annoyed I was feeling like I had just dropped into another episode of Dark - the details may have changed, but it doesn't really matter to me whether we're in a small German town, on a boat, in a prison colony, or in outer space...the style of how the show presents itself and conveys its characters and information is much more important than interchangeable details). Edit: Apparently following a quotation with a period is the cause, but only when the content of the quotation is sufficiently long or complex contains a certain set of words and is not wrapped in other text. Which ones beats me at the moment, but that is stranger than usual.
  7. Generally yes, but not in Project Warlock. Stat upgrades do not enhance weapon damage outside of strength affecting melee damage, and even the lowly handgun one finds right at the start is capable of one- or two-shotting every mook level enemy in the game after giving it the .50 cal upgrade. Dishing out damage is not an issue outside of the final boss battle, although that one could arguably work in melee. I had no intention to try running up to the boss and whack him on a run that ends in case this does not work so well. You could potentially get away with putting every point in spirit and simply use the magic staff as weapon that uses mana instead of ammo, that does impressive damage, especially when you exploit the upgrade that gives it a long cooldown in exchange for killing almost everything except bosses in one shot. Because a spell that costs zero mana, magic light, resets the cooldown of the weapon. Even then, there are ambushes that are unavoidable right at the start of a level as you spawn into a sea of fiends and even sprinting for cover takes away a good chunk of your health. Edit: It is also super clunky to switch spells in the middle of combat, so switching between the - in my opinion required - storm rage spell and magic light is not very fun gameplay.
  8. Played a game I bought years back: Project Warlock. Not much to say, it's a shooter made in Unity, designed to look and play like the games of yore. Doom, Blood, Duke3D. This is also reflected in some of the achievements that unlock when you find characters from other games. Blood, Shadow Warrior, Serious Sam, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D. The game time is probably a lot lower unless you're like me and obsessively look for secrets and other out of the way things in the levels, often checking, re-checking and re-re-checking the entire map to make sure I did not miss anything. Hardcore difficulty gives you a game over after you die once as well as doubles enemy damage and speed. That sounds worse than it is, outside of a few situatoins in the game where prior knowledge of the maps is essential, but the game assumes one played it at least once before attempting hardcore mode. The biggest issue with hardcore mode is one of the things that makes the game more interesting than other shooters, it has a stat and perk system. Finding secrets, treasures and killing enemies awards experience. Each level up gives one stat point, every five level up the character gains a perk. There are four stats, strength, life, spirit and capacity. Strength increases melee damage, life increases, well, you get a single guess, spirit increases mana and capacity increases the amount of ammo one can carry. Naturally, when you only have one life and enemies do double damage, the most important part is increasing your hit points. The biggest issue is that there is a degree of randomness involved. Some perks can only be unlocked with certain stat requirements, and the most important of all is one to take as the very first one: Student. Student gives you a random stat in addition to the one you can spend when you get a level up. The earliest you can pick that perk up is level 8, but most likely it will be level 9 because one can only spend points in your workshop between levels. Student will never increase capacity. In an ideal world, it would raise your spirit stat to 7 (for the Soul Collector perk) and then put everything in life, giving you a nice amount of hitpoints that would allow you to eventually increase your capacity to at least five without compromising survivability, but even if you're really lucky and can raise capacity to 10, you need a strategy to deal with the final boss. Anyway, the other random component are enemy drops. They can drop ammo, health and mana ups or treasure. The more treasure they drop, the more levels you can get. The game is winnable even if you end up with something like 11 strength, but an extra 100 hit points? Much more useful than melee damage. The other stuff you need to be aware of comes from figuring out your optimal approach to weapon upgrades and spell usage. There's a spell that places a stationary lightning shooting ball of energy at the player's location that can shoot and target through walls. It has a really high rate of fire and deletes most enemies in a single blast. It makes getting through ambushes much easier, because you can just drop it and run for cover. It can also delete ambushes before they even happen. The speed at which it clears entire rooms of enemies is similar to the amount of mayhem Project Warlock's verison of the BGF wreaks, and since you need 7 spirit for one of the perks anyway, there's plenty of mana to cast it. Fire damage often makes enemies skip their damage stages and kills them outright. So, do you take the double barreled shotgun upgrade that doubles the damage, or the one that turns its shots into red hot pieces of shrapnel that can set entire rooms on fire? Well, perhaps a little unintuitively, the shrapnel variety saves you a lot of grief later on in regular levels, but the damage upgrade makes boss fights easier. Take your pick. I liked it well enough, but it is probably too long for its own good. The gameplay wears thin sometime around the third of the five episodes. Sure, every level has unique enemies, but even there one eventually notices repeats in approach and design. Project Warlock was made by a very small team, so that is easily excusable. The boss battles at the end of each episode are woefully unbalanced even on normal difficulty. The first one is ridiculously hard without being mechanically insteresting and the point where most hardcore runs go to die, the others are not very interesting and, depending on your skill, actually pushovers and the final boss is one you need a separate strategy for on hardcore because it is a bullet sponge that depletes your ammo reserves at capacity 10 even with the spell that summons ammo and all the pickups on the map. Still, it is a solid game, it is fun to play for a while, and it's currently on sale for under three bucks.
  9. Selective Grease trivializes this fight, and more than a handful of others too. There's a bunch of spells that work very well far beyond what their level would suggest, like Glitterdust and Web, in addition to Grease. If you have feat left over for Heigthen Spell, you can use that to increase the spells' DCs, but I'm personally not a fan outside of playing a Lich with merged spellbook, where Heighten Spell helps fill otherwise dead spell levels with great Lich spells. It's - in my opinion, at least - generally better to boost DCs through Spell Foci on more control focused casters due to the way expanded arsenal works. Selective Spell already adds a level anyway and adding Greater Spell Focus: Conjuration benefits whatever you're Extended Arsenal'ing. In a perfect world there'd be enough feats to go around, but there just aren't, and if you're making a damage focused caster, like when you turn sweet little Ember into a Hellfire Ray spamming whirlwind of death, Empower and Bolster increase Hellfire Ray's level too - and they add more damage. That all said, taking Heightened Spell on a control focused Ember isn't going to brick her, I'd just argue that eventually boosting all of her Enchantmen DCs by +4 with Expanded Arsenal beats pushing a Selective Glitterdust from level three to six. Heighten Spell is probably most useful on a Cleric like Sosiel, or casters that have prepared spell lists, as they get access to higher spell levels earlier, especially with merged spell books. There's also one other thing to consider, Heighten Spell is easy to use and doesn't require pre-planning builds or metagaming the proper levels to take feats and Mythic Abilities.
  10. Yes, there are some other circumstances that can lead to the described issues. I've only run into it with parantheses. If anyone runs into the issue on a post without them, post a screenshot please, although I'm hoping someone will get around to fixing the issues soon. Problematic time for the posting function to break, this close to christmas.
  11. This is probably the worst thing I've ever posted in this thread, but YouTube put this in my suggestions, so you shall suffer too: I lack the words to properly describe how offensive this is.
  12. But what about the mystery ? Surly you must agree it is super exciting !
  13. Indeed, we're also giving all the presents on the 24th. The other two days are mostly for family meetings and feasting.
  14. The only thing you really need to do is the marketplace, and perhaps a certain random encounter (but that might even be unmissable) before the inn attack. You can then proceed and do what you want afterwards. Well, the Tower of Estrod might be part of the timed event. At any rate, do the marketplace, go to the tower and things should be peachy. Don't worry about the time limit, unless you really want to skip the battle.
  15. @SChinOne of the advantages of the current broken state of the forum is that it makes it possible to actually reproduce the 'post eating' behaviour fairly easily. Edit one of your posts, add one of the lines that are currently causing the 403 Forbidden error to appear, like so: This will then give you the aforementioned error, like described on the prior page: If you click "OK" you will notice that the button is stuck on "Saving..." The edit post function throws back 403 Forbidden: Now, if you want to post something, it accept the post as normal, but simply not add any reply, just the same way it happens when the forum randomly eats a post. Press submit, nothing will show up. Reproducable like this on Edge and Firefox. Now, this isn's particularily surprising as people seem to have that issue without breaking a post on Safari by the looks of it - there were a number of reports that entire posts go missing and that one cannot react to content at all. The error message from reacting to content is "Something went wrong" which is the same exception (at least the same text, that is) thrown back form the second POST attempt on the screenshot: checking for new replies in the thread. I'm going out on a limb and say this is exactly what's been causing the random post eating for posters here all the time, particularily when the posting in a thread generates a new thread. Something in the function that checks for new replies breaks, the post goes through but does not show up. Since that reply check is happening only periodically, it on and off happens randomly. What causes the issues I don't know, but it's probably also some sort of issue with checking the reply count or replies in a thread when the page changes. Not necessarily only that as I've had posts eaten on new pages just as well. Either way, as long as the forum is broken like that, it might be possible to observe what makes posts disappear that apparently go through but then don't, and prevent it from happening in some way.
  16. Hilor is always present once you reach Defender's Heart (first at the tavern, then at your crusade camp, later in the cites), and as far as I know there's a certain amount of free respecs you get before he starts charging.
  17. @SChin I originally wanted to post this, but it also does not get through, and it's getting too late to play around and figure out what causes the issue. This post as written in the screenshot also causes the forum to spaz out.
  18. all hands to battle stations) testing something (this gives no error, right? well, let's see.
  19. Okay, since this also produces errors: And it also procudes a 403 Forbidden when using only a single break, not a new paragraph by using shift+enter, I'm assuming that we're running into a problem whenever the forum produces a paragraph element and at least one of them begins with an open parantheses, and one ends with a closed parantheses. Because the request sent for the above text in the image is like <p>(okay so...</p><p>this is weird)</p>. But only if in the proper order, because this works: As does adding a space here, for some reason. Yay. (
  20. (test) is it maybe also the end) (or only the beginning without one?
  21. Doing anything that annoys the backend in an edit gives back the usual response when you're trying to edit a post that is in a locked thread or has been removed. The server replies with a 403 Forbidden for some reason. I'd laugh, but it makes posting really annoying.
  22. There (maybe is) another (issue) with more than one ("parantheses") per line. Edit: Odd, it's hard to reproduce any of the weirder behaviours. Single line within () works well enough, but everything else is behaving weirdly. {{}} "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" Uuh...
  23. It's a problem of scaling. Take your paladin there, for instance. If you slap one of the heaviest armors on him that you can find, you'll get +15 or something AC. Sounds nice, yes? If you take the character you made, add a level of Scaled Fist Monk [CHA to AC, when not wearing armor] and Oracle with Nature's Whispers [CHA bonus works as DEX bonus] and remove the armor, you're now at +10. Essentially, you're starting the game with an Adamantine Full Plate, and the Paladin abilities provide a really nice saving throw bonus. You're wearing your charisma as armor, basically. Your AC is 10 + 2 * CHA-Bonus, and if you spend all your points in charisma and add a +6 item you're looking at 30 CHA (or 32, with a Kindred Half-Elf) without any buffs or other abilities, giving you +20/22 AC, and your smites a +10/+11 to hit against pretty much every enemy in the game that warrants it. There's no armor speed penality on your character, no armor penalty for skill checks and it leaves you open to add other sources of "armor" - like Bracers of Protection or the best option there probably is, the Archmage Armor mythical ability that adds your mythic level (goes up to 10 over the course of the game) to Mage Armor, which adds +14 over the long run and although you're not spending a whole lot of time at Mythic 10, but you're getting to +7 or +8 AC out of that ability rather quickly. Any character can procc Archmage Armor as long as they're the source of Mage Armor, so potions work for everyone. On the other hand, you can just have Lann turn into a Divine Hunter and have a leopard pet, that starts out with 31 AC and can last you for a while. Arguably the entire game on Core if you buff the pet well enough, and here's a tip: treat your pets as well as your characters, they'll be really helpful. But, actually, that's not even what I meant, although it is a part of it. Core was not designed to be played like this: You don't need to go all the way and break the game in every way possible like you would if you wanted to do a full unfair run - like the CHA/AC scaling which you could do simply because it's easy and convenient and you have the charisma for it anyway - but you should have a more than decent idea what you can and cannot do in the game. Play around until you get a feeling for what you want to do. Drop back to normal when the going gets too tough. Enjoy the game. Nobody's going to laugh at you for not playing on Core. Paladins get two different mount choices: horses, and black horses, but that is not bad, horses are good because you can still ride them when enlarged, provided you and your mount are enlarged by the same size factor. PARANTHESES ARE DEATH.
  24. There's something wrong with her design? There's an episode down a ways where a guy starts talking to her and she goes "I'm not as cheap as I look!" and that had in me in tears. I'm not sure that was intended as comedy, but I laughed. Hard.
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