majestic

Well, my current theoretical retirment money is a direct factor of what I paid into the pension plan as it stands right now, in case that was not clear from my post - so obviously that is not going to be a whole lot considering that I have 25 years on the work force left until I am old enough to actually retire. I'm like only a little more than one third through the amount of years I am supposed to pay into the plan before retirement. It also does not factor in my private pension plan and my company's pension plan, although the latter is not going to be much, I only have that because it is tax free (i.e. only a couple hundred bucks per year deducted from my income before tax) and therefore a better use of the money even with the somewhat measly projected return on investment than anything I could reasonably do with it.

Hellpoint, which I got on GOG in a giveaway two years ago. The DLC was on the spring sale for 2.99 €, so I bought that and off I went. Hellpoint is Dark Souls in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE. Well, on a space station. With less interesting and easier boss fights, but better exploration* - although that is subjective. Dark Souls (talking about the first one here) has better combat and equipment variety, and equipment that changes gameplay more than Hellpoint's, which while having similar items to regular action RPG staples like rings or amulets are not particularily interesting, most of them are flat bonuses. That pretty accurately describes everything about the game. I actually liked the game, warts and all, better than the clearly more polished and balanced Dark Souls, primarily because uncovering what the hell is going on was more fun in Hellpoint than in Dark Souls, but let me put a caveat here, I am someone who was disappointed by Dark Souls "story" (you're the chosen one, either go do what the dark snake or the light snake tells you, mmmkay, this is supposed to be incredible? Riiiiiiiight...) after hearing so many people rave about the depth and, uhm, subtle storytelling. Sci-fi worldbuiling is also infinitely more interesting to me than fantasy worldbuilding unless there's something interesting going on. It does have some fun concepts like a part in the DLC where you can set your game to change enemies whenever you kill one. Basically the setting causes all enemies in the game to move to the next NG+ level whenever one dies, making for an incredibly rewarding difficulty ramp that will have even the mookiest mooks one shot you pretty quickly. I survived long enough to realize that at some point the scaling just peters off. The less fun side-effect of this setting is that you'll just break the game really quickly, gathering millions of souls axions in short order. *Keep in mind that exploration rewards the player with a plethora of not really interesting gear, but many, many bits and pieces of lore. If you like the Dark Souls type of exploration that rewards players with potentially gameplay changing items, this is not really a game for you, or at least it will not be the primary motivation to continue. Lore and plot related elements was mine. Just something to keep in mind.

Have fun with your coronary, please let us know if you collapse and die so we don't worry. Discovered that I already worked enough to earn a pension. If I would retire now I'd get a measly third of my current income, but there's a problem: I can only retire after working a certain amount of months to qualify and after reaching at least 65 years of age. I don't think I can fool the government into believing that I am much older than I am. Money would also be a bit tight.

First money I ever earned from a (mandatory, for school) summer job went straight into new hardware. A "Deschutes" P2-400, 256MB RAM and a mainboard. Certainly not the best of times, because I blew most of my allowance savings on a Pentium 200 MMX upgrade just a handful of months earlier, as the Pentium 120 was slowly showing its age. Gotta say the Slot 1 P2s made for the easiest hardware setup ever. Slot CPU in, lock the retention mechanism, put mainboard into any old case, done.

The demo version flat out refused to work with anything other than 3dfx add-in cards, as did the one I, uhm, "acquired" to check if I can play the game. That was a no, so no Final Fantasy VII for me, as I did not have a PS1 at the time. I should really check that game out at some point, although I doubt it will sway my opinion that Final Fantasy VI remains the best of the series. The Riva 128 and Riva TNT 16-bit image quality was famously bad, yes, particularily compared to the popular combination of Matrox 2D cards with a 3dfx add-in card. I had a Riva 128 card for a short while, although not because nVidia claimed it could beat the Voodoo 1, but because I did not buy my own hardware at the time and it is what I got from my parents, and having very little money to spare, well, that is what they went with. Still a damned sight better than the S3 ViRGE card I had before. The TNT was the first informed GPU choice I made for myself (paid out of my allowance), driven by my intense dislike for proprietary limitations. Shortcuts and specialized driver "features" to improve benchmarking performance was not something I considered to be as problematic as Glide. It was also a time when I still had Linux installed for private use, heh, there's a certain irony in nVidia cards being better supported on Linux at the time, although we also of course complained about the drivers not being open source. Kind of funny how that goes, in time, many of the things I tried or did in the past are much easier now, but I have lost all interest. Using Linux is much less of a chore than it used to be in '96, multiplayer is much easier to set up (even on legacy titles with virtual networking software like Hamachi), hardware is much more easy to transport these days, I mean, I used to haul my heavy ass 19" CRT screen and the computer several storeys up to a friend's place every time we had school breaks. If it would be 1996 right now, I would probably not give a damn about Glide, really. Certainly not enough to have spirited discussions with other teenagers about it. Still good for the occasional bout of nostalgia though.

Fun video, but even more fun comment section. People have strange recollections of the time, really, although a handful of comments (at the time of posting) talk about the one really great point of 3dfx later lineup, the hardware antialiasing. That was a pretty neat feature, one not seen since. Boy had we discussions in the classroom back in the day. Playing games in higher resolutions (for the time, which meant above 800x600) was only possible if you had a Riva TNT, or a Voodoo 2 SLI configuration. The Voodo 2 SLI was leaps and bounds ahead in performance, but it also necessitated having three graphics cards. With me being the computer equivalent of a freedom loving hippie at the time, I went with a Riva TNT card primarily because it offered almost (single) Voodoo 2 level performance without resorting to proprietary APIs, and it ran games in 32 bit color, which looked pretty good, but then I also had the hardware to back the card up, as 3dfx add-in cards generally scaled much better with lower end hardware, or cheaper alternatives, like the wonderful AMD K6-2, the absolute bane of my existence and the reason why until this day I will not use AMD hardware in my own builds. To be fair though, nVidia released improved drivers, named Detonator, at a later date that increased performance on lower tier hardware by a whole lot, but at the time, well, it was what it was. A Riva TNT was unlikely to compete with a single Voodoo 2 on any system that was not at a high end level - and even then not fully. As a downside, some games only came with software rendering or glide (or, in the case of the Final Fantasy VII PC port, only worked with 3dfx cards, and nothing else), which was a bit of a letdown - although funnily enough, some 3dfx products of the time were not capable of running the entirety of their own API. Yes, looking at you, Voodoo Rush. That was an unmitigated disaster. Always like strolls down memory lanes. Kind of want to bet that all those 3dfx fanboys in the comments are the same sort of people that complain endlessly about anti-consumer practices by greedy corporations while championing a company that invented trying to drive board partners out of the market and having an unhealthy grip on the market with a proprietary API that eventually was phased out because it hindered innovation and adaptation.

Hundreds and hundreds of moons ago I had a partition for everything. One for MP3s, one for downloads, one for games, one for school related files, one for silly joke programs, one for Windows, one for films, one for stuff I wanted to burn to disc and delete, and so on, and so forth. To keep everything properly separated but also because FAT32 was woefully inefficient with larger partitions. I do have a full backup of these on the external drive that is lying next to my screen right how. It contains folders up until "S", as I copied everything in folders named after their drive letters. The practice has since fallen out of my favor, even though it is easier nowadays to handle partions than ever before (and it even is possible to use them without the silly drive letter clutter that one ended up with way back), for a number of reasons. The largest one: it simply became too much work for too little gain. Eventually that one partition for games turned into two, and then three, the videos one grew in number too over time, then inevitably some spilling happened, I added new hard disks and partitioned them, then a game came out that broke all my partition sizes (hello full installation of Baldur's Gate!). There are other minor reasons too, one of which is a plethora of decently working and really fast file analysis and search tools. Running out of space for no obvious reason? WizTree is done telling you why in a couple of seconds. Need to find something and you cannot quite remember where it was? Everything has got you covered. It of course also helps that my desktop computer stopped being anything other than my private retreat from the real world. There is almost zero production software installed, for instance. I no longer have a printer, I no longer have compilers installed to fiddle with software as a hobby, not even a copy of Microsoft Office - or any other office suite. I barely ever do support for friends or favors any more, so there is no need to keep a large and well stocked driver library for the most common issues at hand. It is funny, for all my need to properly fill out progress bars and subject myself to terrible TV shows for no other reason than because OCD drives me to finish them, the excessive amount of organizing I did to keep everything in neat little drawers on my computer? That went away. Work is work. This desktop here, is not. Working from home blurred the lines a little, but thanks to working exclusively on Virtual Desktops it is still fairly easy. That is the almost part of having almost zero production software. I do have Citrix Workspace installed, that cannot be helped (technically it could, by having a work laptop, but so far I successfully avoided getting one, much like I still have an ancient Nokia 2600 as work phone - ain't nobody expecting me to read emails after work on that device).

I would recommend watching his videos, as they are entertaining and informative, and they offer a different point of view than most critique or review channels, as prior to making his channel and starting streaming, he was primarily an author who published a few fantasy and science fiction novels. Unlike many other streamers and review channels, he is also quite skilled, as evidenced by his plowing through Celeste. There is a copy of his Celeste stream on his secondary channel.

You should try 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ then.

For verbs of motion, when using に/ni, the subject (marked with が/ga, here the train) moves to (and then proceeds inside) the specified location from outside of said location (家に走った - I ran home, implying I entered my home too). Structured a little differently, that sentence could be made to mean a train/tram existed in Hiroshima which ran, but that is not what the title says. At least, not with the grammar I know. So yeah, beats me, someone with more experience with the language could probably answer that, in light of the context it is probably meant to express "The fist train ran in Hiroshima", but why? No idea.

Semi-unrelated, but still relevant if anyone else wants to look for it, I just spent a bunch of time trying to find information about the short animated film, but there's a typo in that title. It is Hiroshima ni Ichiban Densha ga Hashitta (original Japanese title: ヒロシマに一番電車が走った, with Hiroshima in katakana, not the usual kanji 広島). The difference between one simple letter is quite hilarious, as the title with no means something like "Hiroshima's first train ran", and with ni it means "The first train ran to Hiroshima" (走る is not specific to trains, it is a general movement verb meaning to move quickly - also used for running in the jogging or sprinting sense, driving with a car, etc). Also some added hilarity here is that none of the online translators deal with the title all too well, for whatever reason. Note: I do not know if 一番電車 in this context is an euphemism or anything of cultural relevance relating to the bombing. Literally it just means first train, 番 denoting an ordinal number here, as the other meanings of 一番 as "most" or "first turn" make no sense in context, at least not without watching the short.

About as often as they need to finally find a way to incorporate an aging Brent Spiner into the cast without it looking weird, or alternatively until now that Brent Spiner apparently finally gave up and accepted that he's going to forever be Data, but that is mere speculation. I do now know if he was fed up with the role and insisted to be killed off because of the aging issue or the casting issue, or both (rumors went around even as far back as Star Trek: Nemesis, but I never really followed them - I mean I liked Nemesis more than most people, but it still was not a good film). The latter is fixed now though, I guess. Not that any of that matters as the time of having decent Star Trek shows on air died in 2005*, and that might even be a stretch calling Star Trek Enterprise decent when it consists of two seasons that were noticably worse than other Star Trek early seasons, an experimental but rather enjoyable third season with severe pacing issues and retcon nonsense and an actually decent fourth season that showed potential until the plug got pulled and we got that travesty of a final episode that I once thought is going to be in the Star Trek hall of shame as the worst episode ever, but it has since been dethroned. Multiple times. *Not extending an olive branch to Strange New Worlds, as I mildly disliked to hated most of the characters and attempts to write character interactions and the character development. The show is not bad, so that is at least that, but certain aspects of the writing are just too awkward, and it fusses around too much and never truly commits to being full Star Trek - never mind it stubbornly adhering to the formula of having to have at least one awesome action scene per episode.

Rich: "Nothing I'm going to complain about is as bad as the stuff that came before." Indeed, and that is how low we have sunk. Because those middle three episodes were not good, but I guess when swimming in a sea of diarrhea, finding a chunk of firm stool feels like a win.

Even with the gimped core clock speeds there are games like Far Cry 6: I sure hope everyone who bought the 7950X3D needs them for production workloads too, because otherwise they might feel a little, say, uhm, silly? Quoted for truth, if one's primarily a gamer, one is better off saving money on a current mid-range Intel CPU or getting a leftover 5800X3D on AM4 and investing the money saved on a better GPU. Not using an RTX 4090 would move the results even close together than they already are, unless we're talking about games like Factorio, which obviously are going to benefit more from CPU upgrades than anything else (but even then we're talking about practically useless, if really impressive, improvements).

Curiously enough, the biggest hurdle to installing the RTX 4070 TI was not fiddling with the cables. The computer was built cleanly, all I had to do was to just plug a new cable in. Getting the RTX 3060 12GB out of the PCI-E slot on the other hand, that was a challenge. Good thing I have really long fingers, that chunky be quiet! Dark Rock Pro and some of Asus' heatsinks almost completely prevented me from reaching the unlock button for the latch in a way so I could apply enough pressure on it to unlock. Card draws - with unaltered settings - 140W in Hogwarts Legacy on Ultra (1080p, with DLSS). 60° GPU, 65° hotspot with the fans silently spinning at 30%, 1100 RPM at 2760 MHz GPU clock. Idle power draw of the card is less than 8W, what with my (gaming) PC only having one monitor. Playing something less demanding keeps the card in idle mode and it has zero fan spinning. Guess fiddling with the power target or voltages would yield even better results at barely any performance cost. Conclusion: Faster, less noise and pretty good power consumption. The card got a whole lot of hate for the MRSP, which I understand, and it could have a better memory interface (or rather, it could have come with 16GB memory, like the 4080), but for me and my aspirations to play games at 1080p, well, I'll be good for a while now.

Speaking of long form videos channels, this was for the longest while the only channel I subscribed to: Joe's not been very active mostly because he's been unable to properly finish his The Witcher 3 video. It was supposed to be one video about the trilogy but YouTube had technical issues uploading an eight hour 1080p60 video and so he split it in three parts, reworked them, and only managed to release two of them in three years now. He even deleted his 5000$-a-month Patreon account because he feels bad about not finishing it. I guess it'll be done when it is done, in other words, there's a good chance that The Winds of Winter will release earlier. Other noteworthies, just without images: SummoningSalt - long form speedrun documentaries. RLM - well, needs no real introduction, been a fan of theirs for a long while now, even before they moved to YouTube. Plus some other bits and pieces that probably aren't too interesting.

You should see my Netflix recommendations, it keeps telling me to watch Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai specifically because I liked Violet Evergarden.

Well, then he needs to beat up his writers.

Star Dreck: Pikerd To paraphrase Hawkeye in Marvel's The Avengers: "You and I remember Deep Space Nine very differently." Dear Paramount, it is pretty cool that you stopped letting Jar Jar Abrams, Kurtzman and Goldsman mess up Star Trek for this season, but can you please force future showrunners to watch the entire Star Trek canon (ideally without nuTrek) before deciding on major plot points? Or at least make characters that should know better do something else than make a sad face at the poor sob story of a changeling subjected to torturous experiments who was clearly given wrong information about major historical events? Edit: Oh, and Picard and Beverly miss like twenty shots at point blank range. Not even Stormtroopers are that bad.

I can also pawn off the old card for a chunk of money, probably, a friend already said he'll probably take it off my hands, meaning the net cost is somewhere around 650€. While that is a technicality that I just came up with to "justify" spending still way too much on a card I don't really need, it's an okay price, and the 4070 TI comes with the advantage of not having to upgrade my PSU for it. It really is pretty efficient.

Good thing I only almost lied, as I just ordered a Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Trinity on Jeff Bezos' money making and labour exploitation vehicle for a bunch under the nVidia MSRP. Not looking forward to fiddling one more cable into my PSU, but I'll manage. Somehow.

But surly right wingers, they not against bank profits ? Telling people they don't need to pay mortgages, surly you must agree that sounds like socialism and BLM.

The low the radical left will stoop to knows no, uhm, lower bound, I guess. Probably an ANTIFA or BLM plant to discredit QAnon.

Is this left-wing radicalism part of the " CRT curriculum " ? Why teach children about that when surly their no more racism now ? We talking " historical realities " here ? Surly you agree @Pidesco, how about @Gorth we talked about that in Ukraine thread. We over that already why bother @PK htiw klaw eriF what about Texas who would it be received their if Disney pushed woke agenda telling poor white kids they all racist their ? @Lexx another conundrum for Germany what if a back girl called Hitler moved to Germany ? Would " racist " German politics force her to change her name ? Would the left-wing radicals in your governemnt object ? /snort You know, like I posted about before, back when Iron Sky came out, the film was - anecdotally, perhaps, based on IMBD votes - not very well received in the US. Republicans did not like being made fun of, particularily with the Sarah Palin stand-in as president in the film, while Democrats thought it was ridiculous and that Sarah Palin would never become president (well, she did not, so that part came true), and both sides agreed that American politics would never degenerate to the level shown in the film. When I watched it at the theater, I laughed really hard. I recently rewatched it, it really stopped being funny in 2016, for some strange reason. Can't quite put my orange on it why. Ah, well, what a tangerine I went on here.

Yeah, he had enough of all the NAZIs here.