majestic

I envy people who still have access to a good butcher in their vicinity. We used to have an award winning butcher close by, but he closed up shop a while ago. As did our small bakery, which survived by offering excellent products and great service. They had a breakfast subscription service, delivering your choice of freshly baked products (and milk, if you so chose) to your doorstep, somewhere between 4 and 5am. Sure, it was more expensive than going to the supermarket, but it was also much better and much more convenient. Led to much less wasted food too, as you could select the products you wanted for your daily delivery in just the quantities you'd usually need. The folks who ran the bakery retired, none of their children wanted to pick up the trade - no surprise there, not much material gain for very hard work - and they found no one else as successor either.

So any reason the game screams at you for entering the mountain pass area when literally nothing happens and you can just go back? Because it forces a long rest that might mess up a quest in the first area? Anyway, I am in some monastery now. Doodled on a portrait, which impressed Shadowheart, but Lae'zel thought it was childish.

Ahsoka is, so far, one part boring and one part plot hinging on the protagonist(s) being supremely stupid (as was noted by @ShadySands and @Gromnir), which makes for a decidely unimpressive combination. Even when there is something happening that should be interesting, it just falls flat. Flatness is something that permeates this series: the unimpressive camerawork, the editing, the pacing, the dreadful action sequences and the monotone, emotionless line delivery by virtually every actor on the show. Memoria looks like a fount of suspense next to this. Edit: reading through my thoughts on Memoria it becomes clear that I consistently spelled Colombia wrong. I am disappointed that none of you pointed that out. I know at least three of you read that, due to the reactions.

Also if one likes their bridge crew at least somewhat professional. Not that this was a given in any of the Star Trek series, but the trash talk on the bridge of the Enterprise is really grinding my gears. Small wonder that the only episodes I really enjoyed where those where the writers conveniently forgot that the bridge crew is supposed to be utterly obnoxious and juvenile. If you like you can repeat your point about the showrunners not liking Star Trek so much and more wanting a cool Star Wars/rogueish crew. That's not making it any better. The continuity minutiae aren't exactly minutiae either. But yes, out of all the new Trek offerings (have not seen Lower Decks), it clearly is the best. Which is just saying that a pile of dog poop is preferable to cow pies or horse dung simply because they're smaller.

Virtual Boyswitch?

Spoilered in case you don't want to read it, but yeah, I hope it is nothing alarming...

I also had a dream so disturbing I was actually punching myself inside the dream, yelling wake up idiot at myself. Details are a little vague after waking up, but it involved running through the hallways and classrooms of my high school with people randomly committing suicide while running past them. Did not wake up from punching or yelling at myself, nor did I gain control over the dream from figuring out that I was dreaming. Can't wait for dream recording technology to be ready, I'm going to make tons of money selling them as ideas for films and books.

Well, in Japanese, the honorific term for someone else's wife literally means inside (the house), coming from a term that originally used to express that something is out of sight and inside (a house, or some other enclosure). Edit: It is the polite way to talk about someone else's wife, because indirect address is polite in Japanese, so basically many of the polite words - or words that used to be polite but no longer aren't - indicate the direction of someone, up to a point where the respectful word for person is "direction" with an addad modifier. Example: 日本人 (nihonjin) means Japanese (person), while the respectful variant used to talk about or adress people of higher social standing is 日本の方 (nihonnokata), meaning "from the direction of Japan". So, well, in a way it makes sense to talk about someone's wife by adding the location of where she is supposed to be if you want to be polite. Which is where women belong, after all. Back home in the house.

Entire immediate family came down with the "flu", and now I'm feeling a little under the weather with a dash of sore throat.

Well, I missed out on the stat increase.

Leaked specs for the Switch 2, or whatever it is going to be called, look really interesting. Might turn out to be a handheld with PS5 level of performance. If it's downward compatible with my old Switch games I might even pre-order.

Really, after almost 40 years? Yeah, I'll get my coat.

Died all the same though.

Finally reached level 5, making the Goblin camp clearing much less tedious. Actually, it makes all the combat much less tedious. Also, uhm, not sure if I'm wrong about this, but that Spectator battle was probably not meant for level 4 parties, right?

Relative to the market being the operative word here. Next to a 600$ RTX 4070, it does look good. Next to a 500$ RTX 4060 TI 16 GB it looks like a god tier card. Next to what you'd think you would get out of 500$ hardware, it is disappointing. The RX 6800 XT outperforms it at times, which is - as Steve said multiple times in the video - super embarrassing.

Needed a break from BG3, so I fired up Enter the Gungeon. Did a Rainbow Run with the Robot, and a couple of regular Gunslinger runs. Still missing the co-op unlocks for the Finished Gun. Probably will never get those.

Don't worry, Bethesda is probably going to release the game on every device with a display at some point in the future. You can get the 1st, 5th, 10th and probably 15th anniversary edition on your next smart-fridge for only $ 99.99 in the next years, with upcoming releases on the Playstation 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 as well as XBOX SERIES Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE and the Nintendo Switch 2, 3, 4 and 5. There's bound to be a sale coming at some point. Or you can just sub to Gamepass for a month or so.

You should watch Kill la Kill.

For the record, I am not and will not be playing Starfield. From everything I have seen, heard and read, it is just another Bethesda game. A tedious, shallow, badly written sandbox(ish) game with very sub-par technical aspects to make your own fun in, except this time large parts of it were intentionally made boring to boot, as per the developers' own admission. Already played the same game well over two decades ago and found it wanting. Hard pass. Better? Imagine what I could say about it if I got to play it, but unless someone wants to buy me a copy I am not going to. I could do more useful things with the money, like setting it on fire or throwing it out the window.

There's a DLSS2 by PureDark mod that came out shortly after the game launched. By all accounts I have read so far it works better than FSR in the game (same if not better performance, much better visuals), so if you have the hardware for it, do yourself a favor and get it (it does not break achievements). The DLSS2 version is free, the DLSS3 one is not, but frame generation does not work properly anyway as it leads to very visible artifacts. There are DLSS mods that were not made by PureDark that include frame generation, but those require Reshade, which you may not want to install and coud potentially lead to issues with game patches. I have also seen video footage where rendering at the native resolution leads to better performance than using the FSR upscaling in the game. #justBethesdathings

I have to do my best to avoid watching the first episode. I don't think the live action series is going to run for ten thousand episodes, but who knows...

According to some modders they think the overall poor (CPU) performance of the game is because Bethesda messed up compiler optimizations. The go-to explanation for the relatively poor performance of the Ryzen CPUs seems to be the bandwidth limitation of AMD's Infinity Fabric. It was basic memory speed before, but recent testing showed that to not be the case, the game actually scales less well with increased DDR5 speeds than other titles. As for Intel's libraries that check for the vendor string and use slow execution paths for anything that is not an Intel CPU, well, they're not very likely to be used in desktop applications or games, but I would not put it past Bethesda either way, but I'd like to think AMD would at least do a cursory check when they spend a good bunch of money on a product.

It is because being a buzzkill and bringing people down is one of the few ways I can make my miserable existence more fun. The same reason I approach every competitive game I participate in with Conan in mind: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." Every now and then I re-read the Galactic Starfighter forum thread dedicated to whinging about me playing the game. It just never gets old, although it appeared to get shorter in the meantime as posts have disappeared for some reason or were deleted the amount of posts per page were increased. I thought you would have figured that out by now. I do have been around for a bit, yes?

So, AMD sponsors Starfield to make sure that the 7900 XTX can beat the RTX 4090 in something and to have a game everyone wants to play bundled with their cards, but forgets to make sure that the game runs well on their CPUs. Given Bethesda's track record of making terrible code, I guess the 7900 XTX edging out the RTX 4090 wasn't even intentional*. Not going to lie, seeing the 13600K punching out of the entire AMD CPU stack (including the 7950X, 7800X3D and 7950X3D) in Starfield is hilarious, and the 12600K coming within 10% of the 7950X3D is just bonkers - as is the general performance of the game in 1080p. 67 FPS on average on a 5800X3D/RTX 4090 combination? Yikes. If the game at least had something to show for it, but that's visually just... bad. Never mind those horrible plastic faces. Ugh. *More objectively that is probably a result of being specifically optimized for AMD cards while doing no optimization for any other GPUs, and less of a toggle that goes like if (!Radeon) frameLimit = 0.8;

*sniff* Ah, the smell of copium in the morning. Not that it is morning here, mind, but sure it morning somewhere.