majestic

The day is off to a fantastic start when you come to the office and see that the report batch processing died over the weekend, and now there's a backlog of super important and super, super, super urgent reports that were not sent out. Reports that nobody actually reads. Nonetheless, there's always groaning and complaining when one of them does not arrive on time. *sigh*

Well, those are usually cat girls. Sometimes foxes. Eh... *runs*

Well, y'all entitled to your opinions...

Well, what do you know, I actually found it. I guess weird demon thingie still beats Yeston's waifu design, albeit not by much.

Season one of Diablo 4 delivered what the actual launch of the game failed to do. Crashes, lag, the inability to join games. Game booted me out of a malignant tunnel and now I can't get back in - neither on the Seasonal nor on the Eternal realm. Ah well, all's right with the world again.

Can you show me on this Barbarian doll where the bad patch touched you? Feeding on gamer tears. Aaaaah. Exquisite.

I have not watched Andor or Kenobi yet, but the only Post-Disney buyout Star Wars that I acutally liked, in an unironical fashion, were the first three episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, which pretty much puts me at odds with everyone else. How I would currently rate the movies: The Rise of Skywalker > Solo > Rogue One >The Force Awakens >>> dying of rabies > The Last Jedi My initial impression of The Force Awakens was better than it is now. I called it a better movie than the prequels here on the forum, which is a statement I would nowadays amend to more competently made movie. The only reason it is not dead last in the list due to being utterly uninspired is because The Last Jedi is, well, what it is. To address the elephant in the room. Yes, I actually liked Solo more than Rogue One. Not by much, and no real indication of any actual enjoyment there, but Solo was the more fun theater experience. The reason Rise of Skywalker ranks so high is because The Last Jedi killed the past for me, and I could just enjoy the film on its own "merit" - which is to say it was so bad that it became hilariously good. What an absolute blast where Palpatine, uhm, blasts an entire fleet with force lightning. Then there's the ending where Rey Potter fights Lord Sheevdemort. How can you watch the film and not love it for being so bad? I must add a caveat here, I watched all the movies in the theater and did not pay for anything, courtesy of a friend of mine being a member of a fan club that does get hired for promotional trouping. My disposition might be much worse had I paid any amount of money to be allowed to experience those travesties.

He does spiders, from time to time... In case anyone wonders what the worst rated pet on the channel is, with a whooping 0.6 out of 5 points:

Someone's out of touch with reality. Or lying. Perhaps both...

Edit: Okay, so this is basically the same situation with KrisFix a ways back when he had a batch of defective Radeon cards and asked the community for help, and suddenly everyone was screaming AMD DRIVERS KILL THE GPUS even though KrisFix himself never mentioned a single thing about the drivers killing the cards in his video, only that the drivers were the only constant between all the cards he got. So, basically, here's the original video: A rather niche situation that may as well be a real issue (hard to tell because DPC issues can be really wonky and caused by myriad reasons), and commenters and others pick this up as - literally - "Intel systems lag like cheap iPads". A well, serves me right for not watching the actual source in the first place. Also, the, uhm, conclusion is not necessarily correct. DPC issues like that aren't necessarily just the CPU - could be another driver. The Intel Rapid Storage System drivers can cause pretty high DPC latency too. *shrug*

As long as you don't have multiple 4k displays, yes. Then we're still talking like 94 watts idle power draw according to very recent tests by a German hardware magazine. Information is a couple of days old though by now.

A bit behind due to vacationing and playing D4 in my free time, just watched Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season two, episode three. It was a wibbly wobbly timey wimey episode. One of the characters even mentioned the temporal (cold) war from Enterprise. It has a scene where La'An makes out with Kirk. No, really. While trying to fix the timeline with time running out on them. At times it almost felt like a Matt Smith era Doctor Who episode. Oh, yeah, sorry about that Kirk snogging La'An spoiler. In spite of all this, I still liked the episode. Looks like this season might be okay just as long as Alex Kurtzman is not on the writing credits. I still don't like the cackling engineering witch, feels like she should be part of a portrait in Hogwarts. However, there is a caveat. I looks like my judgment is compromised: I recently started rewatching the first two seasons of Voyager and found myself not hating the experience like I used to. I even managed to watch Threshold without facepalming or groaning. Someone help me.

Bruno is in Deadfire?

Clint continues to be funny: "The Eastern Green Mamba has the mildest venom of any mamba. Which is a bit like being called 'the least dangerous hand grenade'."

If the current rumors are true (and the 14700K leaks suggest that they probably are), Intel is going to give the i3-13400 six performance cores. Single core uplift doesn't look good, so the new i7 and i9 are going to be largely uninteresting. The real killer is going to be the 14600k with eight performance cores. Depends on the pricing of course, but the 13600k is already really good value, if the 14600k is in the same pricing ballbark it's going to kill, and the 14100 is going to be hard to beat as a budget option - can still slap the thing on a cheap ass DDR4 board, after all. Until Ryzen 8000 and the inevitable 7000 price drop, at least.

If you have more than one 4K display, then it does. Suck your power, that is. AMD's latest "fix" to the idle power draw issue made it worse by 10%. Some things will never change. Should be fine with a single monitor setup nowadays though. But don't worry, actually lowered idle power draw, FSR 3.0 and HYPR-RX are just around the corner. Like Star Citizen, or Half Life 3. *snark* Other than that, the XTX is an RTX 4080 with more rasterization but less raytracing performance - for cheaper. Can't really go wrong with it, unless you have an AMD allergy like I do.

But rises again harder and stronger.

I have not kept up with Iron Maiden since Brave New World, which I now realize was 23 years ago, but it really is sad to hear that they are growing too old too keep up with their music. My personal favorite, in terms of (power) metal, Blind Guardian, should be safe for a while yet. They are a tad younger, but also creeping up on sixty by now. As for Peter Cornelius, his arrangements are not the most complex, so unless he eventually develops arthritis like Ritchie Blackmoore, he will probably be good enough to keep playing for a while yet. His voice is the bigger problem, he always had lung problems and even as a young man and had to undergo long bouts of therapy during his career as part of the German Hair ensemble - and that was before he became a heavy smoker. He also had a bout of burn out where his doctor prescribed him, to quote, "any- and everything he could without risking the loss of his approbation (German medical license)", which lead to an episode of paranoia and weird interviews about conspiracy theories. At least he is still alive, which cannot be said for some other local artists that I enjoyed who began their carreers in the late seventies. A heavy smoker who died of lung cancer back in 2007 and one who died of a heroine overdose in his early thirties. Then there are the others ruined by alcohol, hollow shells of their former selves. I generally do not post any of their music here because it does not make much sense to do so: they are and were all gifted songwriters, but there is barely any appeal for anyone who does not understand the language, and even then, well, one would need a certain cultural understanding to truly appreciate the lyrics*. The music of Peter Cornelius is somewhat different, like I said, it is maybe possible to enjoy his music even without understanding a word. The guy who died of an overdose could have had a pretty good carreer, even internationally. Alas. *In case anyone's interested. Put in spoiler tags as this post is long enough already.

I originally wanted to comment on the performance and how a certain, say, lifestyle, combined with age can have a detrimental effect on one's ability to perform on stage, but on the other hand, the guy was 71 at the time, so cutting some slack seems in order. Plus, it is still a pretty good song (potentially even if one does not understand the lyrics).

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season two, episode two. We do have an idiom that literally translates to "even a blind chicken sometimes finds some grain", the meaning of which should be clear and which applies rather aptly to this episode, because this was the best Star Trek episode of nuTrek by a very fair margin. Never had to pause, never facepalmed and never felt like venting. If I had to name something negative, it was that the episode was derivative. The complaint that the episode plot has been done before is rather minor considering that it made good use of all the characters and their backgrounds, and was thankfully almost completely free of the jovial teenage crew dialogue that I despise so much about this series. It even took current social issues and highlighted them without being obnoxious about them, and even though they prominently feature the Federation, it does so while staying well within the Star Trek canon. Dare I say it, this was not just a good episode of Strange New Worlds, nay, it was a good Star Trek episode. Good sci-fi. Color me orange and call me sunkist, never thought I would ever say that about anything called Star Trek after 2009. Guess all it took was writing a writer who worked on Once Upon A Time, of all things. Now make her write all the other episodes too.

That usually ends up being a death sentence for me - he generally only spawns whenever I run nightmare dungeons and enemies are 15+ levels higher. Never saw him in a regular dungeon. Sigh.

Hey, my Gedonia character is at maximum level, kills even the most frightening enemies in seconds and has still yet to complete the main quest in the second zone.

Speaking of Diablo 4, while Blizzard introduced a debuff on overlevelled players in PVP areas, it does not work properly. The logical conclusion: high level players ganking lowbies on lower difficulties. For anyone who does not know, PVP in D4 consists of playing in a PVP area, collecting Seeds of Hatred that are purified into Red Dust (the PVP currency) in an event that is broadcast through the zone and marked on the map. Just spent an hour protecting others from gankers. The only problem is that years of playing ARPGs conditioned players to click on anything with a red health bar, so there was some unfortunate collateral damage. I doubt it is ever not going to be funny to see Bully McAssface explode, spilling all their ill gotten seeds on the ground.