majestic

Well: Okay Amazon.

To post something on topic: I don't mind symbolism in films or series (or even books), but if it is the or even just a major focus, it is far too easy for me to become annoyed by what I perceive to be the creative team or the writer doing it simply to feel smug and superior. Like a group of people telling each other in-jokes in the presence of someone deliberately left out, although as the good Bruno could attest to, I am being a hypocrite here, as I do enjoy that too, but I don't like it being done to me. It's a fine line to walk and it is hard to explain where the breaking point is. To give an example, Mulholland Drive annoyed me to the point of disliking the film during the scene where the blue box is opened. In contrast, a while back I watched Adolescence of Utena, a film that has the two protagonists reach a car wash, with one of them entering as human and leaving it as a car. The other then gets in and drives off, being chased by a medieval style castle, leading to the final action/chase scene of the film and the ending. The difference is, I guess, insofar as that scene with the car makes perfect sense within the film and all of its established symbolism, while opening the blue box came, appropriately I suppose, more or less out of the blue. That is not to say that Mulholland Drive defies understanding in any way. The film is, prior and after the change, a criticism of Hollywood and the way it tends to (ab)use people's hopes and dreams. There is just no point in the switch besides being intentionally confusing. It only gets worse if you're taking the scene at face value and ascribe everything that happened in the film to this point as Diane's fevered masturbatory (for those who have not seen the film, this is meant literally) fantasy that still pertains to reality as it is her way to cope with the other scene that happened in real life, which is the very beginning, albeit probably in a different manner than shown. The scene breaks the narrative and adds nothing thematically. It serves no purpose, at least not in my opinion. Utena becoming a car did, and when you look back after the film is over, it was the only way it could have ended. Thematically, that is, they could have done any number of things. Car war perhaps a little on the nose, all in all. Regarding the last paragraph: this is something I thought about not that long ago. I would not call myself an atheist, but agnostic does not truly fit either. I do reject the idea of the Abrahamic god, for instance, but I do not know whether or not there are beings or entities that could be considered, if not gods, then at least godlike. This rejection is not borne out of a counter-reaction to any upbringing either, it is one based on conclusions that I arrived at early on in elementary school, but it is my own, and I do not try to convince others, but I do talk about it if and when the topic comes up. It also happened far earlier than my rejection of the Christian church/organized religion. That did come later. Seems logical: it did take longer to understand the church and its role in history than it is to poke holes into what the Bible describes, especially if it is presented as the literal truth by one's teacher.

What? No, I really just hit the submit button without typing the post first. For me, the forum is working perfectly fine, outside of the REQUEST BLOCKED issues that creep up whenever you accidentially annoy whatever checks the forums for scripting attacks.

This place is turning more and more into work every day. *death stare* Edit: Hey, there should be more to this post, but I accidentially posted it. So it'll sit there, any edits would take too long.

For me, seeing Violet break down at the end of episode seven hit harder than guy-I-just-met having a tragic backstory. Anne in episode ten was a different story as she played off Violet really well and was a very active viewpoint character, but even then I thought they key moments of the episode were the hug (what a massive difference going from telling a distraught customer to rein in her crying in episode two to basically being able to calm down an enraged and scared child) and her admitting that she had a hard time staying professional and distanced while working with her client. Ending the recap with episode ten also removes the emotional high one gets from the ending. I said it before, I guess, but it bears repeating: Violet telling Gilbert's brother that she no longer needs orders is amongst the best and most well earned "feel good" moment in a series I've seen, and it's followed up with Violet finally being able to express appreciation and write Gilbert a letter. The long OVA is not really necessary, as it only explains how Benedict gets a golden bike that shows up in the movie. I mean... there's the story of the OVA, but it's easily my least favorite part. Except for that movie ending, but I've complained enough and at length about it. The movie also contains some scenes where the subtitles fail to convey what it said. Well, fail. More like being incomplete. as for many concepts and things there's no proper way to translate the intricacies of Japanese. This is one huge part where watching original with subtitles is far superior to the dub as you can hear a lot of that in Violet's way of speaking.

Fingers crossed, then.

Interesting take by Der8auer. The 4070 Ti has an MSRP of 899€ for the EU. If it actually comes to market at that price, it will - depending on the games and the resolution you play at - give you performance between a 3080 Ti and a 3090 Ti, at 1080p more than a 3090 Ti, most of the time, with the largest performance deficiencies in 4K (where it drops to 3080 levels in some games, see the GN video). Assuming the 4070 Ti hits the market at 899€ or only slightly above that, as the other 40 series cards, at least for Central Europe (Germany), it is much better value than current 3080/3090 Tis that go in a price range from 1600€ to 2000 Euro. It is less than 30% more expensive than current 3070 Ti stock, giving it a nice generational uplift, and if you set the card to 70% power target it loses 10% performance but the power draw drops to 170w while playing. Zero chance of the card only costing 899€ though, so that's all theoretical. Still not paying 899€ for a card.

I get the feeling Steve is not very happy with the RTX 4070 Ti. Going to be interesting to see for how much these things are going to go in stores here. If it actually ends up being cheaper than the 7900 XTs, the value in terms of performance gain vs. cost over the performance of an RTX 3070 (Ti) isn't as bad as US MSRPs suggest (still not good, mind you), and as long as 7900 XTXs cost 1600€, well, never mind... Also, uh, good job making the 7900 XT look good. Edit: all that said, hard pass on this generation.

Nope. Edit: No need to play Kingmaker first. Only some minor references.

That is... I think purely based on your crusade morale, not the amount of time you spend on your way to Drezen. Still broken. Mount while holding the shield, then remove it. The pet will retain the AC from the shield. Yep. That's a thing...

Right, you have to romance her, and she'll join at Threshold, as a default Paladin. Pretty boring.

@Space KP, Baby @Sarex well... yeah, one can make pretty decent builds all around with mercenaries. Shamans are a pretty good class actually, when they don't come with the caveat of tolerating Bruno's soulmate. Edit: evil nerfs have made a huge chunk of damage coming out of my favorite mercenary cheese build go the way of the dodo, but Brown-Fur Transmuters still have their place. Geniekind/Barrage might no longer work, but enlarging horsies and riders is still fun. As are pets turned into dragons. Bunch of other fun stuff you can do too.

Lann is actually a pretty decent NPC, if you ignore his, uuuh, personality quirks. He can be used as any number of things, a Cleric or as Divine Hunter, which is @Gromnir's favorite, for instance. There were some domain related shenanigans with the Divine Hunter I think, no idea if they've been fixed. There are also some videos on YT where Lann is specced as Divine Hunter 3 / Sacred Huntsmaster 16 / Fighter 1 build - that certainly has its merits too, but it would probably be better to take a level of Demonslayer, a Ranger subclass that is really frontloaded with the bonuses to the most common enemy type - you guessed it, chaotic evil outsiders. Cleric Lann has the issue of him worshipping Iomedae. Not that Sosiel is much better in his choice of available domains without spending Mythic abilities on getting more, but at least he has full Cleric progression - or almost full, if you use him as intimidator. Or you could just ditch him and build yourself a mercenary worshipping Erastil, the ludicrous god of good domains. That said, don't undererstimate the value a blaster cleric can bring to the party. Domain abilities are great so even after the change to Guarded Hearth they can be considered a necessity in every party and there's a lot of gear you can use to increase cold damage dice, and if you take a single level of Cross-Blooded Sorcerer you can get Water Elemental and White Dragon for an extra cold die and energy damage to cold conversion. Use Loremaster to pad your spell book, a Mythic Ability to add another cold die with an added Silver dragon bloodline. There are some really juicy spells that deal screen wide massive damage that you can meta-magic all over your higher level spellbook. Can probably do that on Sosiel too if you want an all-in-one package, but poor Sosiel went to the school of having utterly useless feats and a stupid deity. Alas.

Just wait until she becomes President of the European Commission some years down the line, the terminal storage for failed German ministers of defense.

The half-posting issue is usually at least cleared by removing all forum cookies and accepting the social media cookie. The blocked request error, well, not so much.

Guess you're not getting the Azata option then, and, uhm... probably also no early access to your favorite waifu, Aru.

Yeah, Terror from the Deep is pretty good, even if it was an unnecessary sequel and is just more of the same with even more difficulty. But 17€ for a mid 90ies game? Oh, wait...

Remove any quotation marks and parantheses, that does the trick. Usually. It also bugs out when you quote text someone else already posted in spite of it having been posted, so it's not a really clear cut and always working approach, but it gets most stuff posted.

The original is fine Eurodance/Europop, so of course it is great. And Little V is hilarious. I think I linked his Venga Boys cover a while back.

Hey @Azdeus, you know, I thought Dr. Bombay was hilarious even if 'slightly' racist. Smile was just offensive, but since I've browsed through the comments and that seems to have been a huge hit in one of the Dance Dance Revolution games who I am to be offended when those that it should offend be are not? Basshunter is just an embarassment. However, I have just discovered something that is so far beyond everything that I can only compare it with a train wreck. I know I should not, but I just cannot stop watching. They also have a 'live' performance of this travesty on their channel, which is even worse, in spite of being 100% playback. How, you ask? Well, you could put actual women on stage and give them highly uncanny, super creepy anime costumes with masks that look like they were left over from a Japanese remake of Saw. I WANT TO PLAY A GAME. I am going to quote Rainbow's Stargazer here:

While I am of the opinion that me enjoying film and TV is simply incidental and never really intended (following CLAMP around and watching Tamako Market just further compounded that), that is not entirely the case with Violet Evergarden's recap. The episodes contained in the recap are pretty good, the recap just makes no sense when it omits most of Violet's struggles and instead focuses on the - important, to be sure - standalone story episodes that were the most liked by fans. Of course it would contain most of the tenth episode. Violet Evergarden's "Loved Ones Will Always Watch Over You" sits at an impressive 9.8/10 on IMDB. It is a great episode, and it contains a couple of really important scenes of Violet's post low point recovery, but most of the episode is spent on Anne. Well, the entire episode is from her point of view. The problem is that the recap begins as showing Violet's journey and then simply ends without showing the end of it. It's just one more point of proof that everything I really enjoyed is just a creative accident, huh? It's unfuriating. Someone at the studio thought making this was a good idea. What the hell?

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.

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.

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*

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...