majestic

Well, if we're going that low, I went to the theater for Battle: Los Angeles. Aaaaaaand in case anyone wants to make a comback, I paid extra to watch the 48fps version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

I think they all just suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

How's that? FPÖ, ÖVP and NEOS have the same economic cow manure policies, they just differ on their sociopolitical axis. The NEOS are very liberal while the FPÖ is highly authoritarian, with the ÖVP being more traditional conservatives, i.e. the highly corrupt rules for thee and not for me types who would walk back social policies to the 50ies if only they could. Affordable housing, equal chances for everyone, good education for anyone who wants it, universal healthcare (well, we do have all that, but it could be better). The party was wildly successful in the 70ies and 80ies and with that paved the way for their own downfall in the 90ies and early 2000s. The former working class (more or less) moved towards being the middle class with non-citizens ("guest workers", as the used to be called) taking over much of the former jobs of the working class. Except, well, they cannot vote, not being citizens, and even if they could, they would be more conservatively inclined, basically the same phenomenon that you have in the US where naturalized immigrant communities overwhelmingly vote Republican at times. Nowadays they really struggle with finding a popular party line on migration issues, and in spite of being only a part of a few recent governments, they're still seen as part of the nebulous and unnamed elites that the Freedom Party is apparently against, even though their current party leader is as much of a career politician as everyone else. Hasn't earned a lick of non-taxpayer money in his life, but rages against the elites living off the state. Also, because it once again is relevant to the thread. The video has English subs, at a runtime of under two minutes that should work for everyone on the forum, even those whose brains are nigh overwhelmed with just keeping their vegatative functions going.

Yeah, don't do that, your fists do the same amount of damage, attack faster and cost less stamina...

Eh, I went to the Matrix IMAX double feature for Revolutions even though I hated Reloaded. I mean you couldn't have known that both these films were terrible, I went there knowing I'd have a bad time - and to make matters worse, Reloaded ended up being the better film of the two. :picardfacepalm:

Well, took an extended nap today so I can't sleep. Yay. Dark Souls 3 is progressing nicely so far, though I don't really have any idea where I am going, but the game certainly improved the storytelling aspect. The NPCs gather at Firelink Shrine as usual and their questlines are about as confusing and arcane as always. I have an example from World of Warcraft to back up that claim. Back in the heyday of the game when I still played extensively, Blizzard build what is probably still the least played dungeon of all time, and in many a player's opinion the worst. The Oculus made extensive use of their newly introduced vehicle combat mechanics, which in this case means that the five players in the dungeon eventually need to mount vehicles. Drakes, in the case of the Oculus dungeon. As if the average MMORPG player would not already be overwhelmed with navigating a pseudo-3D dungeon while still playing their class at least passably, the drakes could of course fly and added a true third dimension to navigation. A disaster in the making, but not the point, I digress a bit. The final boss in the dungeon needed to be fought on, uh, drakeback, replacing the player's usual abilities with their drake's. There were three types, ruby, emerald and amber, being the tank, healer and damage dealer respectively. The standard setup would be one tank, one healer and three damage dealers, but the boss had three achievements to its name: one for defeating it without using ruby drakes, one for defeating it without emerald drakes and one for defeating it without amber drakes. Each of them, assuming they were done within the appropriate gear and level range, forced the players to approach the fight in entirely distinct ways, adding a unique twist, changing the tactics and coordination needed to deal with the boss. Well, except for Amber Void, which just meant four tanks and a healer, and the fight would just take longer. Could always argue that such challenge runs could always be played without an achievement as well, and while that is true, it still rewards players for challenges taken on. The dungeon achievements were parts of a larger meta achievement that rewarded a special mount to show off. I have a Violet Proto-Drake that I got during Wrath of the Lich King in World of Warcraft. That was only obtainable by grinding out rare drops and doing rather specific PVP activities in time limited events and took at least nine months complete. It takes that long for all the events to show up. Miss one or didn't get part of your achievement? Woops, better luck next year. The point, uh, yeah, farming a sub 1% drop chance item for an achievement? Child's play. Don't look at me like that, getting the Violet Proto-Drake was the only way to achieve 310% flight mount speed in the game at the time, next to ending a pvp season within the top 0.5% of arena players. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the things that we have complained about with the Dark Souls 2 controls were specifically added or changed to address grievances with the Dark Souls pvp (i.e. backstab stunlocks or the inability to change the direction of heavy attacks with large weapons). There's a reason why Dark Souls 2 is particularily regarded as having the best controls, mostly by players who enjoy engaging in pvp in these games. Which, for the life of me, I cannot fathom, but hey, what do I know. Speaking of chaining attacks, much of my Dark Souls 2 experience was light attacking with a 2-handed rapier. Because it does ridiculous damage, is quick and makes the combat in the game (against bosses in particular, but not limited to them) feel more bearable. Like I said earlier, it was not just the controls that add to the detrimental experience that I had in Dark Souls 2. It was the combination of these recovery times with the encounter design that made it all the worse: you can get more than one hit in even with a slow weapon in Dark Souls, while that was almost impossible to do in Dark Souls 2. Like I said, I barely played anything but WoW at the time (later Star Wars: The Old Republic). Dark Souls is a good game, even with all the jank, the unfinished second half and when played well after it seems to have struck a chord at the perfect time. I still would like to know what they got out of it. It is also not that I generally do not want to engage in that kind of storytelling (and while it is a TV show, Utena was full of the same sort of clues). In Dragon Age: Inqusition, of all games, the best time I had was going through ancient elven ruins that added only tangentially to the plot of the game, but mostly to the lore. That interested me in a way that Dark Souls never did. Take Anor Londo for example, where you can find the trashed room of Gywn's firstborn next to the pristine room of Gwynevere, all the firstborn's statues are missing and you can gather from the item descriptions that he was considered a god of war who fell from grace and had his name and likeness stricken from the annals. That's all fine but... I just don't care? Nor is it actually relevant to the plot of Dark Souls, so that sort of storytelling is perhaps there, but it does not pertain to the story. I actually watched a couple of Dark Souls theory videos, and they're downright bizarre. People believe that every line of dialogue and every item placement in the world mean something. In a game that was clearly unfinished and rusehd to release, no less. The video game equivalent of coming up with conspiracy theories. Well, riddle me this, how is anything in this world in its current state relevant to age old lore when Frampt so clearly states that it has been at least one thousand years since Gwyn linked the first flame and became the first Lord of Cinder? You guys honestly believe that one bow in the Darkroot area was someone meant to cover Havel's escape from confinement some two hundred years prior? Really? How's that bow still there? Magic wood? Anyone ever thought that the reason why the Havel that actually is in the game doesn't drop his armor when you kill him is because the game designers did not want you to run around in Havel's gear during the half of the game they had time to design and make fun, and not because "that is clearly not the real Havel, just someone who traded places with him during his daring escape after his failed rebellion that he incited because Seath abducted his secret girlfriend for experiments"? I guess it beats Makoto x Ami shippers, but not by much. That became a bizarre rant. Woops. No, you're right. Dark Souls' approach is better than having a terrible story forced down your throat. My point is, more than anything else, that Dark Souls' reputation for having such a rich and subtle storyline and amazing lore is merely the result of players imagining much more than that there really was. That was intentional by Miyazaki, who is apparently on record stating that he wanted his game to be like the experience he had while reading English books about mythology as a kid, i.e. only understanding a miniscule amount and filling up the gaps with your imagination. I read that on a wiki somewhere and have no source to link to, but it does make a lot of sense. I am sorry, but... at least in my opinion, the lore of Dark Souls is not all that interesting, and the story the game tells has a dark fantasy trapping, but is still a really basic "you are the chosen one and decide the fate of the world" story, and it is not very well told to boot. I suppose I am salty about this because word of mouth taught me to expect the most amazing game experience ever, featuring hard, unforgiving but still fair bosses, a well designed world and fantastic storytelling and lore. What I got was Dark Souls, a game that is more often janky than not, has more than enough moments that are objectively unfair (and no amount of copium huffing will ever convince me that the Capra Demon boss fight is fair - it is easily dealt with once you know what's coming, yes, but fair? Nah.) and that falls apart in its second half - and it wasn't even that hard, just to add insult to the injury. I realize that is my fault for buying into the hype by the fandumb. It is amazing that I still enjoyed playing the game, and a testament to how strong the things in the game are that it did right. You know, in spite of the Titanite Demon having the jankiest hitboxes of any game ever.

Followed by Mortal Kombat: Conquest.

Deadpool & Wolverine So, like, I don't know. The first half of the film is not good. There's a limit on how many direct (and oft-times rather unclever) fourth wall breaking jokes you can put into an hour before they become an issue, and Deadpool & Wolverine reached that with the intro. It is once again a film that would be improved by cutting out a good thirty minutes. The second half was much better. Not sure how I feel about the movie stealing being inspired by Kung Fury's 2D fight sequence, but it was funny and the soundtrack was just fantastic.

I actually expected the Mari picture, so, yeah, dunno. Good one. Too bad you didn't watch though. It's really good. Like, really good. Especially the CGI stuff. How dare you! How... dare... eh, well, would have been nice to watch along, because that makes rewatches more interesting. It might also have recaptured some of the fun I (and by extension, the collective we, I guess?) had in the thread when we watched shows together that we liked. Instead of, well, dunno, me not watching anything and everyone else spamming the thread with anime gutter dreck. I don't think I want to rewatch Vampire Princess Miyu. Not because I did not enjoy the series (and guessing that ludicrous plot twist 20 episodes in advance will always remain a highlight) but because I think a re-watch will retroactively hurt the series. I don't really want to watch the episodes going in with the knowledge that the series could have been so good but always just teeters on the brink of greatness. While Miyu was infinitely better than Noir, I also would not want to rewatch Noir for a similar reason. Wanna roll the dice on Escaflowne and seeing if the series holds up on a rewatch, or is that too soon? Yeah, that might actually bother me. Guess it would be the same with Steven Universe for you. Which reminds me that I still need to watch the end of Future. Huh.

So, like, anyone up for a CCS rewatch?

I just found Dark Souls 3 at 65% off, so I guess I am continuing my FromSoftware binge. While it downloads, one quick reply (a longer might yet come): Well, yes, I ran into that problem too, which is why Gwyn is one of the few bosses that I had to try more than twice in my original Dark Souls run. Insofar I guess he's harder than Nashandra or Aldia, both of which I killed on my first try, but not overly so, but my game experience with Dark Souls taught me relatively early that when staying away does not seem to work it is usually sticking close that makes things easier. Like the repeated Asylum Demon fights, where the winning strategy is to stick really close to its ass and only run out when it takes off or sits down. Or, well, at least it is when you're playing an accidental glass cannon build and the attacks with the explosion right on top of your character don't happen when you're close and behind the enemy. Although yeah, that probably depends a lot on one's build.

Well, our socialists tried that, somewhat. They're the only party that wanted the return of wealth and inheritance taxes (we had those in the past), but the media and the conservative party conviced people that a 1% tax for wealth upwards of several million € will somehow affect their grandmother's life savings. Not much to say, our media is in the hands of a very few, very rich families. Exactly the ones who would have to pay up, so even the more left-leaning publications argued their best against what is basically a normal left-wing position. But that is also a failure of the socialist's inability to read the room, or the nation, as it were. It's like Dave Chapelle once said, there are topics you can worry about once you're elected. Topics that do not win elections. Like gender neutral language (I realize that is less of a thing for English speaking nations), that is just not much of a worry for a population who has to deal with the fallout of the EU's total failure to deal with the refugee crisis and with our government's complete failure to reign in energy prices. The Freedom Party promised to fix both. One by becoming like our neighbouring Goulash Putin, and the other by, well, dealing with the real one. They probably won't be able to do either of that, but hey, who cares. They can always blame the EU for whatever they cannot do.

Sweet mother of Christ. First projections are in. Keep in mind these are not exit polls but extrapolated results based on historic data and already counted votes, as such there's a 2% confidence interval left.

Oi, I even forgot to mention: to make matters worse, the Freedom Party are Friends of Putin (tm). For real, I mean, they have a pact of friendship and cooperation with United Russia (i.e. Putin's party).

Just came home from voting (we have general elections). I am not looking forward to the results, which will undoubtely lead to a nationalist-conservative government. There may or may not be a time period where the conservatives are "trying" to "negotiate" with other parties only to "fail" because everyone but the Nazis were "unreasonable", and for the "sake of the country" they now need to basically swallow the "bitter pill" and form a coalition with them. For the good of the nation and stability, as it were. Which is hilarious because so far every single time the Freedom Party was part of a government, said government imploded and dissolved well before the legislative period was over. You know, basic conservative logic: better to destroy what there is than to give the plebes half a breadcrumb. Not entirely certain why the people keep electing a corrupt cadre of politicians who only look out for themselves and their own, but it probably has something to do with "rapefugees" and "civil war with knives" and whatnot. The right-wing and nationalist parties already stated that they are going to finance tax cuts by dialing back refugee support and reducing the needs-based minimum income that we have. See, the funny thing is, overall, these amount to like 2% of our budget. The tax cuts they want amount to something like eight times as much. Mind, not that you get the idea that their proposed tax cuts would benefit employees, lel. No, no, for the employees and the common people they're planning to reduce secondary labour costs. Which, you know, are something the companies pay on top of the wages. Conservative logic: both the tax cuts and reduction of labour costs will trickle down to the actual wages. Trickle down economics is something that will work if only tried often enough, yes? <Insert something witty about Einstein and the definition of insanity here> Which brings me to the glaring problem our center and left-wing parties have: they cannot for the life of them, just once, be more populistic. The people, as it were, spurred on by media, do not want to hear about how it is going to be legally impossible to repatriate Afghani citizens. They want to be told that it will be done, by breaking the law if need be. That is dangerous territory, I agree, but if you leave that path to the Nazis then there's much more danger yet to come. And just in case we're once again believing the Freedom Party that they are not Nazis because they said they're not, just now there were some high ranking Nazis singing a SS anthem at a funeral, with every party reacting to it, calling it an outrage. Except for the conservatives, who just stated that this just shows that the Freedom party's leader has contacts to right-wing extremists (no, you blathering conservative idiots, that is the party, not just the party leader - the one you already want to form a government with just so you can stop worrying about dealing with parties who want equal rights for the disgusting homos and trans people). The Freedom Party is of course not bothered by their party members attending a funeral where SS anthems are sung, no, they're bothered that a whisteblower leaked the video just before the election. One really needs to crack down on whisteblowers. Can't have that. Who films people at funerals doing what comes natural in their grief. *sigh*

"Nobody has any intention of building a wall." -- Walter Ulbricht

Lower and mid tier GPUs might as well stop existing in the (not so far off) future as integrated graphics become more and more powerful. If you stick to 1080p at slightly lower settings, you can already make do with Lunar Lake or Strix Point, and those are laptop CPUs. Well, unless Intel walks back on their ARC support and kills the rest of the team in the wake of their layoffs.

The spec difference between the 5090 and 5080 is bizarre. kopite7kimi is usually right though, so I guess that is what we're getting.

The game has an achievement that triggers if you look up 2B's skirt by creative camera movement. It is not enough to just do it once. They don't want the achievement to trigger on accident.

Dark Souls, which was a replay. I replayed on Steam after trading my Switch cartridge for a Steam key with a friend. First of all, in spite of doing a whole lot of grinding to find out whether one can make do with the Greatsword of Artorias if you waste all the stats for it (short answer: yes, but it is not worth it, outside of making it really easy to beeline for the Rite of Kindling after starting a new cycle), it only took me half the time to achieve everything in the game, compared to Dark Souls 2. Which is to be expected, Dark Souls is a lot smaller, and on new game cycles a lot of the game can be skipped. The achievements and the game systems were also designed to waste a lot less time compared to Dark Souls 2 while playing offline, but between completing all Dark Souls, Dreck Souls 2: Scholar of the First Suck and Sekiro achievements, one thing has become abundantly clear: FromSoftware has no idea how to design interesting achievements. They are all just either related to playing the game, achieving all possible endings and looking for equipment. Contrary to the usual edgelord opinion, achievements can be interesting, the ones in FromSoftware games, so far, were not. I think I might have found the reason why Dark Souls feels better to play - for me - than Dark Souls 2 did. The recovery animations are a lot shorter. One can - more or less - smoothly transition from an completed attack animation into a roll in Dark Souls, while in Dark Souls 2 there is a recovery time between finishing the attack and being able to roll away. Combined with the boss attack patterns of Dark Souls 2, that makes it a game of baiting out an attack and punishing it or dodging through a combination and then get an attack in. While Dark Soul's combat cannot be called fast paced and frantic, it feels a lot less slower than Dark Souls 2's: the bosses have more openings to attack and their movesets are not employing as many two or three hit combos. I got lucky in my early game, getting the Black Knight Halberd right at the start, and while that meant playing most of the game semi-naked due to the rather hefty equipment load requirement of the Black Knight weapons, it never limited me to hitting an enemy once and having to prepare a roll because the follow up attack would just end with me being hit. Now, having played the game again, and a couple of times at that, and having listened to lore videos while playing to break the monotony of the grinding and replaying the more annoying parts of the game, I can say with some confidence that, lore and story wise, the only two really interesting parts are not related to the player's quest, which will always be the quest of someone else you just happen to accept because you have nothing better to do with your time anyway. I am, of course, talking about the two NPC related quests in the game, of which Solaire's might be less involved and harder to miss out on, but is the better one, so it is fine. There's some personal tragedy in Siegmeyer's quest, plus some statements by Sieglinde that make you question what happened (girl, what exactly do you mean when you say you have to kill your father again?) but the two outcomes of Solaire's quest are simply fantastic. He either finds his sun, and loses himself, or you help him fail his quest by finding the Sunlight Maggot first. It is the consequence of Solaire failing his quest that is most poignant and which elevates it: he becomes disillusioned and depressed because he did not find his sun, which is what he became an undead for, out of his own volition. He then can be summoned to fight Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight Cinder, and he's so ludicrously strong that he can basically solo the boss for you. Not only can you summon him to fight the very lord he worships, but his rage is strong enough to overcome him without much of your input. Not that Gwyn isn't more of a jokey fight, I wonder why people complain about Nashandra and Aldia in Dark Souls 2 being a boring pair of bosses to end the game with. Gwyn certainly is not much better, even if you do not or cannot parry him, you just need to stay close to him so he misses half his attacks without you having to do much, so is that sort of complaining coming from players working their way backwards from Dark Souls 3? So, anyway, back to Solaire, I found his personal story to be really on point. Was it all lies? Why, yes, it was, although that does not come out as much in Dark Souls, I suppose. It is a part of the game that was made retroactively better. Still, and there we are back at something I already wrote about, at lenght, is how much Dark Souls did not live up to the hype for me. The story is not that great, and while it is undoubtely genre defining in the sense that there is now a "Soulslike" genre, I am not sure if the combat system alone is what defines a whole genre, and even that is blurred with additions like Bloodborne and Sekiro. It is a "difficult" dark fantasy third person action adventure game that just seems to have come out at the right time. I put difficult in quotes because replaying the game just cemented my opinion. The game is not that difficult, outside of a few areas that are not really well designed, and gimmicky fights that are more frustrating than fun. Yes, I'm looking at you, Bed of Chaos. Then there's the issue that Dark Souls falls apart after the first half. Everything that comes afterwards (well, and in the case of New Londo, technically before, because it is possible to complete it before getting the Lord Vessel, as long as you're willing to kill Ingward for the key) is just terrible, with the worst offenders being Lost Izalith and the Tomb of Giants, which one could easily consider to be contenders for the worst areas in any game, period. The forced death to Seath and the run through the Crystal Caves would be high on the list too, if Seath wouldn't be so easy. Well, once you have cut his tail. Cutting his tail is the worst. It is even worse than the Kalameet tail cut, which is annoying becaus you basically have to bait it out, but at least one can bait it out. Seath can just move in a way that makes it impossible to hit his tail - for long, long stretches of time. Now, well, I cannot say anything about the state of gaming back in 2011. That was a time when all I did was play MMORPGs. Maybe Dark Souls really was the moment that brought actual difficulty back to games. Maybe that was Demon's Souls already, and maybe all of that was just Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, both games that were a much greater success than Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. As far as my experience goes, it certainly would not have been, because the game is just not difficult enough to count. Lastly there's the dopamine release and adrenaline rush aspect of the game. I understand that being stuck at Ornstein and Smough for a longer while makes one feel really good once the challenge has been overcome. I just did not get if from Dark Souls - but also not from Dark Souls 2 or Sekiro. Having to fight a boss, solo, for a handful of times to understand its moveset and find counters is nothing next to having to deal with your raid group and having difficult raid encounters lasting up to fifteen minutes. Pulling them over, and over, and over, and over and over again. Not five times, ten times or even twenty. Hundreds of times, in the case of the really difficult ones. I realize that does not apply to a whole lot of people, given the MMORPG population that usually partakes in its most difficult content, but, yeah, this is relevant for my experience. Insofar, well, Dark Souls is a good game with a terrible second half, but with me not really being interested in the world, unlike in Hellpoint, I can say that Hellpoint, while being the much worse game in terms of combat and movement, was still the better experience for me.

I seem to have a thing for tea parties, huh? The tea party in Noir was my favorite bit of the series too. That was a really good scene, at least until Rei just dissolved into goo to drive home a point which retroactively ruined it for me.

And neither do all that well with current AAA games at 4K. The 4090 at least is usually enough to run 4K natively without having frame drops that hurt the experience. They're passable 4K baseline cards if you either do not turn on all the bells and whistles (outside of esports, how does anyone justify spending that sort of money on a GPU then?) or if you accept DLSS as part of the gaming experience. The current versions work quite well in 4K. It is a rather simple decision, albeit a painful one: if you really want a GPU that will last you the next five years for 4K natively, you can either shell out the money for an RTX 4090 now, or wait to see what the 50 series brings. If you can live with DLSS, you can probably make do with a 4080 Super. They're actually available at MSRP, at least here. But, in that case it might pay off to wait for RDNA4, the current rumors have it that it is going to offer 4080 like performance for only a fraction of the price. However, those rumors likely come from the same source that said RDNA3 is going to wipe the floor with nVidia's 4090 and that Zen 5 is going to offer a 40% increase in IPC, so, yeah, well... you shouly probably take those with more than a grain of salt.

Yeah, who knows, they might have learned a thing or two and released the DLC only mostly broken.

A collections of things coming out soon. Looks like F*ck You, It's January is now F*ck You, It's Every Month!