majestic

Not entirely certain what to make of it after just two episodes, and I really don't know how they managed to drag out the concept over three seasons and some OVAs and specials, but after the second episode, I'm tentatively hoping that it won't end in a dumpster fire. If indeed this is, at worst, a somewhat relaxing show about nothing with a scene that reminds me of watching better animes, then I'm willing to call that a win. What I am not certain of is if the setup and the silliness in the second half of the second episode made me laugh on its own merit, or if it worked because it reminded me of, uhm... a certain other anime season directed by Junichi Sato that we all kind of enjoyed. If it really is only the latter than it will probably not stand up to scrutiny, even in the first season, let alone three of them. Well, at least it is a short series regardless.

Going down an Einsteinian Insanity Rabbit Hole (tm), perhaps the fourth time is the charm, ey? After Princess Tutu, Magic User's Club and Tamayura, I watched the first two episodes of Aria The Animation. Why? Who knows. Maybe because this is based on a critically acclaimed manga for a younger audience, so Mr. Sato cannot ruin it too much with "hilarious" slapstick and sexualized young girls in mini-skirts. Maybe because this is a part of its wikipedia page: Nothing happened in the two episodes, and I think that'll remain true for the rest of the first season. The series plays on a terraformed Mars renamed to Aqua, in a city modelled after Venice, creatively named New Venice. It follows a group of gondoliers. No, really, that's pretty much it. The opening episode has trainee ("Pair" in Aqua-speak) Akari ferry a girl from Earth ("Manhome") around even though she is not allowed to as pair, and they become friends. Akari provides the narration of the series, in forms of e-mails to the girl from the first episode. Since she's a recent immigrant from Manhome, things are as curious for her as they are for the viewer. In the second episode, her friend Aika from a rival company has a fight with her superior Akira and stays with Akari over night. Akira comes to visit the company the next day, meeting her childhood friend, Alicia, who is Akari's superior. Alicia, who is the resident gondolier progeny and genious paddler () is rather appropriately voiced by Sailor Neptune. Confused by all the names yet? I sure am, because I just spend some time fixing the errors in this post. The third episode will introduce the final main character Alice (Arisu in the original). Akari is friendly and makes friends easily, and she's just stumbling from one low-key "adventure" to the other. The ending of the second episode made me laugh in that silly way only comedic elements of anime can. Ara, ara... I guess my brain's already fried from looking at too many silly clips from modern shows, but the art of the series is, so far, not making me want to claw my eyes out. The character models are what they are, but, well... , at least the backgrounds are nice in their simplicity.

That's in the specs thread, but the Corsair Vengeance sticks without RGB, which by all accounts should be fine in terms of height. Not so sure about the Asus ROG Strix B660-A's heatsinks though.

Ordered some more upgrades: Rolling the dice on the 280mm AIO here, it should fit into the top mount of my case. If it doesn't due to mainboard clearance, I'll just send it back and change some things around, the DR4 I have will be able to deal with the i7 until replacements arrive. I can live with a couple of days of noise, although... what noise, really, I'm not going to be doing full core workloads anyway, and a 200W TDP air cooler can easily handle any gaming loads. edit: Well, actually, the 280mm AIO would easily fit into the front of the case, but I don't really want to reduce my front intake airflow, so it would be a 360mm AIO, and that would get a bit crampy with the RTX 4070 TI in there. Eh. Should probably get a larger case too.

Ah, Sweden, the land of ketchup on pizza, ketchup on pasta and, uhm, Caramel...la Girls. It is the musical equivalent of a train wreck. I cannot stop staring with my ears.

Binning and VBIOS shenanigans in the RTX 4070 MSRP models. TL;DR: Some RTX 4070 MSRP cards with a decent enough cooling solution and a 215W power limit can easily reach the same clock speeds as the OC models with a 240W power limit. If anyone is in the market for a 4070, which currently appears to be no one on the planet (), it might pay off to go for a three fan MRSP model, as they can potentially reach stable 3GHz clock speeds within the 215W MSRP card power limit. Not that it makes much of a difference, and the OC markup is really not worth it on these cards (arguably on any of them except for the 4090). Speaking of making a difference: Clocked it "down" to the RTX 4070 TI's default boost clock and lowered the voltage some more, 2610Mhz @ 900mV. 3% loss of performance, but a silent GPU even under heavier loads.

What do you mean, Bravehart was not a documentary?

I'm not racist, but brown people complaining about browner people playing brown people? Yeah, don't care, wake me when whites are threatened. Or hot Asian women! edit: Islamic values of Ancient Egypt? Well, someone's historically inaccurate all right.

I figure after three and a half years it should run all right. Got it on the cheap, I guess 13€ is okay.

And for something different: https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/austrian-communist-party-stages-major-comeback/ Völker, hört die Signale! Funny, papers and online news portals have been running communist scare pieces ever since. Major wins for the Nazis? Ah, who cares about that. Quick, someone voted for communists. Yikes!

Well, yes and no. This thread became more irritating than usual, which sometimes prods me to reply in the face of better judgment. The initial draft was much different, and a lot more mocking, and not directed at you in particular, just at the idea that there should be a cultured debate about everything, when historically, cultured debate nary made for change, while protests and people fighting for their rights in the face of bigotry and hate did. Eisenhower did not send a debate team to convince the bigotted concerned governor of Arkansas to desegregate schools when he refused, he sent the 101st Airborne. You can look it up, there is plenty of information available. It is simple to substitute homosexuals with trans persons in her speeches, and you will find that suddenly we arrive at the exact same talking points that concerned parents, feminists and conservatives (what an amazing time we live in, when an originally far-left idea proposed by extremist lesbians is co-opted and turned into a right-wing movement, and you have feminists joining in) spout these days when talking about the transgender liberation movement. There is some bitter irony in all of this, back in the late 60ies, the feminist movement attempted to exclude lesbians, and the lesbians rallied and replied by staging aggressive and disruptive protests. Once accepted by the feminist movement, they then immediately proceeded to try and exclude trans persons, because never let it be said that "the left" or minorities are any better in learning from history. Here we are today, with people like Posie Parker being co-opted and funded by the conservatives in the weirdest unholy alliance ever. Left-wing fringes and right-wingers united in a common cause: dealing with the transgender menace (feminists used to call lesbians the lavender menace, by the way, a rather prominent one even going so far as to call lesbians a CIA psy-op to discredit feminism). I would laugh, if it were not so dire. No, they are not. It is the same pushback against a liberation movement that has always come about in the face of liberation movements. The way these talking points are the same is quite scary, Anita Bryant was very vocal about homosexuals not being able to reproduce, while nowadays gay men argue that transitioning is bodily harm because people who are actually "just gay but confused" are castrated by the gender affirming treatments. The amount of mental gymnastics necessary here is astounding. Gay men, arguing against trans liberation because it affects fertility. Here, have a tweet by one of them. Spoilered because very graphic language. He has that legal right, yes, because from what I have read universities have no legal recourse to stop these student events, which is fine in and of itself. The problem we are now dealing with here, and that is thanks to the protest turned violent (although this is just one such event in a long list), is unfortunately that we are now at the stage where bigots who advocate transphobia are now "people with different views" in public discourse. Sure is a different view all right. One that should not be accepted, of course, but sure is. I should have said false moral equivalence, as it was supposed to allude to the false equivalence fallacy, the idea that points of view are of equal merit even when they are not. Rallying protestors to stop Charlie Kirk from speaking is no different than rallying protestors to stop Anita Bryant from speaking, or rallying protestors to disrupt the Second Congress to Unite Women from speaking against lesbians in the feminist movement, doubly relevant because in this case, the "Lavender Menace" actually stormed a school auditorium and disrupted the talks. In closing, here's a quote from Posie Parker, CPAC funded public "gender critical movement" face TERF: Yes men, please, enter women's toilets and protect them from the lesbian transgender menace. If you happen to catch a couple of butch dykes in the crossfire, well, it is just back to the roots. Just in case anyone considering themselves centrist wonder why people in the movement are so "hsysterical" about it, in the face of bigotry, instead of having calm debates. Hilarious, really, the people in the gender-critical movement are telling trans women, who they consider to actually be men, to be less hysterical, a trait historically ascribed to women. And the politicians enacting the laws to counter trans liberation and inclusion in the US? Why, they're mostly men. Conservative men. Republicans. To use radical left-wing nomenclature: OLD WHITE MEN. Hey TERFs, I have a question for you: have you ever stopped and wondered why you're actually helping your sworn enemy here, the patriarchy? Over what, bathroom policing? Uhm. Edit: There is some clarification necessary, I believe. Calm and measured debate and empathy are important to de-radicalize people, but this is a slow process and does not work with everyone, and most certainly not the instigators and bigots who are tirelessly working to change the political climate for the worse. If you think De Santis or Trump could be convinced to let go of their bigotry, then I have a bridge here I'd like to sell you. Only slighty used.

We could, but in doing so we risk creating an impression of moral equivalence where there is, and never should be, one. See, for instance, if we go back to the 70ies, we can take a look at raging homophobe and bigot concerned parent Anita Bryant who was leading the charge against rights granted to homosexuals. Look her up, take her rhetoric and arguments and simply substitute homosexuals with trans people, and you will find something very interesting to happen. History repeats itself here. It is the same states, with the same arguments, and the very much the same rhetoric. Anita Bryant was publicly shamed, demonstrated against, her public appearances stormed and her dignity violated by a protester who gave her a banana cream pie facial (which, admittedly, is more stylish and less violent than pepper spray, but not much different in concept). She eventually lost her livelihood. All for exercising her right to state that the God damned (in a more literal meaning than nowadays) homosexuals should not be allowed to contaminate innocent children with their ideology. Anita Bryant had an abusive father who would much rather had a son and an abusive husband, and all her pent-up rage went against a marginalized group whose, just like transgenders nowadays, threaten to erase the only piece of womanhood people like Anita Bryant can still cling to (instead of facing the actual monsters in their lives, i.e. abusive men): Being mothers*. Hence all this talk about fertility. Really, it is the same load of horse manure, just with a different group of people, and yes, you can find the same sort of rhetoric against raping butch lesbians and pederast homosexuals that is currently thrown against trans people. It is hard to look at Anita Bryant and her life and not muster a modicum of empathy for the terrible things she went through in her life, but at the same time, I cannot sit here and pretend that she did not deserve everything she went through after projecting her trauma and rage onto homosexual people. Nobody forced her to become a raging homophobe and bigot concerned parent (well, deliberations of the existence of free will nonwithstanding, not the topic of this thread anyway). Current anti-trans rights champion J.K. Rowling mirrors Anita Bryant in more than rhetoric, having had an emotionally distance father who would have preferred a son, a history of sexual assault and an abusive and violent first husband. Now she projects her experiences against a marginalized group whom she sees as threatning her womanhood. She even - most likely inadvertantly - paraphrases Anita Bryant ("My father wanted a son, that is the sort of thing that could turn me into a homosexual" vs. "My father wanted a son, I can see myself transitioning for his sake if I were given the opportunity"). Looking at history, change is often messy - after all, it wasn't the Stonewall Debates that eventually led to Anita Bryant championing the counter movement to abolish the better rights and protections spawned from that event, was it? Women did not debate until they were granted the right to vote, indeed, they even got quite violent. Except perhaps in Switzerland, and you can see how well that worked. It only took them half a century longer than anyone else to grant women suffrage. Ah, well, let it never be said that the Swiss are quick with anything, yes**? Let me ask you a question. Suppose we would be in the 70ies, and Anita Bryant just had her right to free speech tread upon by way of a banana cream pie. Would you, as a self-proclaimed friend to homosexual people everywhere, be morally outraged by the repugnant attack, or not? Just curious here, really. I know I would not, and I make no attempt to sugar coat this, as the resident far-left extremist and Cultural Post-Modern Marxist (whoever coined that idiotic term, I wonder?). *Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women. Published in 1983, it appears to be more relevant than ever, in the face of people with vaginas like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Posie Parker, Maya Forstater and, well, sadly enough, J.K. Rowling. It is a fantastic read, if approached with care, Ms. Dworkin is not, say, entirely uncontroversial, for good reason. **In case it is none too apparent, this is a joke.

Kinda enjoy playing rifts on my Stinger, sadly there was the rest of the game to go through to get to the endgame. My initial impression of the Everspace 2 early access from way back when still holds true: game is too long for its own good. Finding secrets is particularily unenjoyable. Not all of them, some are really good, but it is by far and large annoying busywork. The solar flare shadow creature stuff in the final zone was pretty neat, wish there would have been like 80% less secrets but more like that. Ship balance seems to be pretty whacky. Officially the Stinger is a light vessel, so it should not be able to stay in the thick of it and just tank everything, but in reality, between the perks you can choose for your character and the passives on the Stinger class, well... area of effect disabling on a really short cooldown, massive device (like active skills in other games) damage, greatly reduced device cooldowns, a perk to make you invulnerable to the next four hits after using offensive devices, auto-cloak on shield loss and the ability to recharge shields by using devices, well, the only thing that is going to kill you is making a mistake, like overlooking that Sniper Drone over yonder or ignoring an Okkar Prime Protector for too long. Well, perhaps I am making this sound a little easier than it is. It is really necessary to properly prioritize targets, kill them quickly enough and be aware of your surroundings enough to know when to use which cooldowns, probably not for everyone. No idea how other ship classes are supposed to do those rifts, though. That time limit really hurts any of the hit and run style ships, although the invulnerability from dps cooldowns and the area of effect disabling device can be used to great effect on every class of ship, the Stinger's -20% device cooldown and 25% shield restore on device use passives really shine in rifts.

Nothing like buying 700$+ of hardware only to have it literally blow up in your face. GG. Edit: Probably best to make something clear for the inevitable TL;DR crowd, the mainboard melting is an ASUS-specific issue, the CPUs dying is not, so if you don't have a mainboard from ASUS, at least "only" your CPU will fry itself and you can still use the mainboard afterwards, and from what one can gather from the affected users, it is not limited to 7800X3D CPUs at all (der8auer has a 7900X that died in this exact same way), they're just more affected than the others. Why would be pure speculation at this point, a follow up video with the analysis from an external lab is coming soon. Either way, AMD, perhaps it is best to not make fun of melting cables next time. Almost enough to make one believe in karma. Edit 2: I remember Steve telling me that AMD said that they're not going to bin lower grade 7950X3Ds as 7800X3D CPUs, would perhaps be interesting to see if that is really the case, because otherwise the higher amount of affected 7800X3Ds could be explained by them being the CPUs that already failed the silicon lottery, combined with board manufacturers setting EXPO values in a way that slowly (or sometimes more quickly) cook your CPU. Never mind the other hilarious bugs that came up, like the failsafe shutdown temperature values not being correct for X3D CPUs (funnily enough, ASUS got that properly, the others... not so much). Some board manufactueres apparently used Palpatine's solution to quickly fix instabilities. Just shoot it with lightning.

Ah, how the mighty are fallen. A couple of years back they made fun of Rogue One: A Star Wars story for being an absolutely unoriginal vehicle of pandering, and now they're clapping for the Enterprise D throwback in a season that is a partial The Wrath of Khan remake and a nostalgia driven final send-off for the TNG crew with a plot so harebrained and full of contrivances it makes X-Files look well planned by contrast. Did any of you guys clap for the original Star Trek moments the writers came up with*? No? Why not? Oh, there were not any? Oh my... *Edit: That is techincally a lie, but the "original" moments of the season were adapted from the BSG reimagining backstory. The Borg just took over Starfleet instead of shutting down Colonial defenses. Yay. Eh, and that is the explanation that is giving the writers the benefit of the doubt, because otherwise we could say they took that from the exceptional Battleship movie.

Minor fiddling update: The card seems to be stable when undervolted to 0.975V (not surprising, as this seems to be the lowest commonly stable setting across all Ada Lovelace GPUs), at a 2790Mhz maximum core clock, limiting the drawn power at a full GPU load to ~200W. Full load temperatures are down by almost 10° on average. Regular gaming temperatures are mostly unchanged due to the fan curve settings, but the hotspot temperature is down 5° and the average power draw is down by some 20W while playing Hogwarts Legacy.

I found it much more ridiculous that... I think it might be the last 10 minutes of the last episode, really. The first four episodes are "okay" too, other Star Trek fans actually enjoyed them, for me, as usual, the caveat of remakes applies: If there's no reason for a remake, then don't bother, and if you do, it had better be good and different enough to warrant making it, like the first two and a half seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica. The first four episodes are basically The Wrath of Khan with the partial Next Generation crew. It speaks a lot more of the quality of the other Star Trek series recently that this is actually enough to make Mike and Rich like the series, or rather, to make them think that the first episodes were really good.

Negotiations for our new collective agreement are done. This one was pretty good, a 7% salary increase across the board, a 600€ one time payment, a 3.2% increase in overtime payment and the best part - a much needed work time reduction. Decent deal, all in all, particularily for me. Granted, I guess some workers are going to be unhappy with the so called "10% package" as the reduction in work time amounts to roughly 3% less work time for the same amount of money, but for me, as someone who is paid well above the collective agreement wage, well... a 7% increase on the amount isn't much, but I negotiated for a separate increase. So, all in all, pretty good. Funny to see the companies insist on the work time reduction in the face of our lobbyist-friendly government telling us that a general work time reduction is impossible. Yeah, we're really living in the end-times when even the lobbies lose touch with the wishes of their clientel.

Star Trek Picard, season three, finale. Not going to lie, there were some very, very enjoyable scenes in this episode, the problem is, they have absolutely nothing to do with the guano-insane plot or the "awesome" action in this episode, and everything with plucking the old nostalgia-afflicted heartstrings in just the right way. It was a good way to end the season and the series on a high note for former fans, but it leaves a rather bitter aftertaste insofar as it then feels like wool, pulled over the watcher's weary eyes. It almost makes one forget the torture this episode by far and large was. At this point I am convinced that the CIA has substituted waterboarding as torture method of choice by breaking people through nuTrek. Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman run the 21st century version of MK ULTRA. However, at the end, I can say one thing: I would gladly watch a Star Trek series with Seven of Nine as the captain of the Enterprise, provided the people from Paramount prostrate themselves before Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr and beg them to run it. Alas, as that is never really going to happen, well, I am looking forward to the final season of Discovery, if only to dance on the grave of that horrible TV/streaming travesty, and to the next season of Strange New Worlds, where we hopefully get an answer to the question whether Ensign La'an Noonien-Singh is coming back or not.

My wife's cousin is driving me crazy. He got arrested some time ago for possession of a large quantity of drugs in Germany, and has recently been sentenced to three years on probation. He is from the Balkan area and his German is decent enough to be told what to work on, but he is ill equipped to read legalese. One of the conditions of probation is that he is to sign up for regular drug testing. He, being the absolute moron that he is, has of course already lost the one part of the document that details precisely what sort of testing he needs to sign up for. He also asked about this on the same day that was basically the deadline to sign up. Man, that idiot will be the first person to fail probation by being too dumb to sign up for a drug test, not for failing it.

The Mandalorian, season three finale: Well, at least that's over and done with, until the next season. In hindsight, this season makes the first one look like great entertainment. Man, what a collection of stinker episodes.

Indeed, yes, it could have been an outlier on both ends, making the comparison somewhat lopsided, but variation within high end components is much less pronounced, so the chance is lower, but it is not impossible that it could have been a really good 13900K and a really bad 7950x, of course. Well that changed for some parts of the world, somewhat recently, although admittedly not everyone gets as fleeced by their energy providers as we Yuro-Peons do right now.

TL;DR: Up to 40% variance in power consumption during gaming on 7600s. Obviously much less on all-core workloads because those run at the power limit anyway, but that is pretty brutal for playing games. Would be interesting to see a larger sample size, but two bad outliers out of 13 tested CPUs, yeah, those aren't the greatest odds. Expected, as these CPUs - just like comparable ones by Intel - are basically whatever couldn't be sold for more, but still 41% difference under a regular gaming load is pretty brutal, especially if you pick one of those lower end Ryzen CPUs specifically because they're much more power efficient than their Intel counterparts*. *Which in reality is not something one can glean from the all-core workload charts anyway. There are significant differences in idle power draw, for instance - if your computer is mostly intended for lightweight activities, i.e. browsing the web, watching a video here and there and do some office work, the better you're off with Intel - not only do you not need the more expensive AM5 platform, but the power draw difference on idle is something between a factor of two and three - also used to be true for idle power draw of Radeon cards compared to nVidia's, but apparently that was fixed in a driver update. Anyway, Intel really shot themselves in the foot with the 13th generation aggressive boosting policy just to 'win' the benchmark charts. Manually playing with the power limits can make 13th gen CPUs perform the same as their AMD counterparts (X3D in games nonwithstanding) for about the same efficiency. There's a German video of Der8auer for this too, but yeah, it is German. If a 13900K is set to eco mode by manually limiting its power limits to 95w, it performs almost identical to a 7950x in eco mode, while both draw, well, 95 watts. Really, efficiency should be the baseline, and getting a bit more speed out of your CPUs for significantly more power draw should be the setting to be done manually Intel, not vice versa. *sigh*

Well, the weak are rabble, and the willful are just uppity and will resist, so both must go. I mean, that is what I guess it means, it just makes no sense either way. Well, but a dying captain also hands the conn to his second in command with his dying breath, basically, it really is whatever at this point. So, whatever. "No one has seen or heard of the Borg in over ten years." -- Picard, two months after more or less creating a new Borg Queen.

Well, Star Trek: Picard went from copying Mass Effect plot points to copying plot points from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica while taking ludicrous dialogue from Pacific Rim. Ah, somehow, as this show stood on the precipice that Mike and Rich mentioned, I hoped that it will not plunge off in a way that rivals the other two seasons, but lo, it did. It did so spectacularily.