majestic

Minako ropes Rei into having to give a concert at the hospital for sick children. She's rehearsing with Usagi, who looks a little bewildered. Rei asks if she was that bad, to which Usagi replies that her singing is fine, but that Rei is a little kowai. So that's it then, Usagi also thinks Rei looks terrifying. Good to know I'm not alone.

There's a bunch of other stuff too, like Riker trying the same thing twice to the same effect (keep going straight into that portal from the portal gun, stolen directly from Portal™), Picard dipping back into his flowery nonsense when talking to Riker, the ill-fated role reversal between him and Riker, and finally... I've pretty much given up on writing all the stupidity up. It's hard enough to watch this to be done with it, really.

Keep having to pause Picard S03E03 to do something else. It's... not very interesting. The real TNG crew would have figured that out by now. Easily. Edit:

A 3070 TI would run me 600€ vs. the 900€ for a 7900 XT, but I already got a 3060, so getting a 3070 TI for that amount of money isn't the best choice. There was a point in time when rebates made the 4070 TI dip below 900€, I should have bought one then. Looks like I'm going to ride this gen out, unless something magical happens and the 4060 type cards suddenly offer much better value. Really doubtful. Edit: Wee, double posted, meant to edit this one into the other reply, bah.

Theoretically, but practically they're just going to lock it, like the others.

That was a jab at the fanboys, not so much a direct comparison, although we're looking at an MSRP increase of 55% over the 5800X3D for a 20% uplift in gaming performance (sometimes less). When looking at street prices that becomes even worse (that's 800€ vs. 300€ at the moment), and unless you're not GPU bound, that's just going to be even worse in real world scenarios. No, market shares aren't comparable, and CPUs aren't GPUs, but the pricing is ridiculous. And then we're not even talking about making the players use the XBOX Game Bar because the performance uplift over the normal equivalents would otherwise not be guaranteed. Yeah. :smh: Edit: never mind AMD turning off half the cores of these CPUs in games, which is the entire reason these CPUs exist in the first place. Kinda baffling. Why not just launch an uncrippled 7800X3D and leave it at that... Indeed, in the meantime, the 7900 XT and the 4070 TI sell for the same amount of money here, which makes the 7900 XT look good - comparatively, at least. The 7900 XTX though, that's... still going for as much as a RTX 4080.

TL;DW remains the same. [X] SKIP, this time Steve even agrees on account of this not topping any charts and therefore not getting a "chart topping bonus" (that no reviewer should give out anyway and just leads to 13900K CPUs). Anyway, for gaming, as expected, the 5800X3D still makes all of the new ones look like bad value for the money. Well, unless you really want those 850 FPS in Rainbow Six Siege and CS:GO, but in those cases one should either get the 7950X3D or an i9-13900, not this... whatever it is supposed to be. What was it Steve said in the video, you're paying 15$ per 1% performance uplift. That's just bad value. Guess we now know why AMD didn't provide review samples. In games where the extra cache helps, it helps up to 98% of the performance of the 7950X3D, but the results are really incosistent. Looks like AMD really took 700Mhz off the upcoming 7800X3DX in order to not kill their own higher end CPUs in gaming. Let's see how well these things sell. If they do well enough, at least the AMD fanboys will have to shut up about nVidiots buying overpriced trash that was intentionally gimped to fleece gamers.

The shrines in Breath of the Wild were more involved and took longer to solve too, but it is the same type of busywork.

Rings of Power very (in)aptly destroyed itself, no need for external pressure, or clickbait headlines.

Performance per watt is definitely an issue for 13th gen Intel CPUs in all core workloads.

TL;DW: [X] SKIP (poster's opinion, not Steve's, although he's clearly conflicted there) When you run a game, AMD just turns off half the cores to prevent the game from accidentially running on the cores without the extra cache. What that means is basically that the 7950X3D is a 7800X3D with higher clock speeds in gaming, and it does that only if you run the game bar on windows and set it to balanced power mode. Let that sink in for a moment: the entire reason why AMD is launching the 7800X3D in April is because the 7800X3D is probably going to slaughter the 7950X3D in terms of gaming value, and the only reason that CPU boosts for 700Mhz less is because otherwise it would probably be tied (and to probably not outright kill the 7900X3D for gaming). It's slightly better than an i9-13900k in many of the gaming tests, with Shadows of the Tomb Raider being a massive outlier in favor of the R9 7950X3D, and in Final Fantasy XIV it is even behind the i7-13700k. In production workloads it is just a 7950X. Looking forward to the 7900X3D tests, as AMD didn't ship any of those to the reviewers, apparently. If that CPU exhibits the same behaviour as the 7950X3D, meaning it will just turn off half the cores in gaming, it might end up performing worse than a 7800X3D in games that make good use of the extra two cores over the higher clock speed. Wouldn't that be fun to see?

Which was?

It used to. It also used to not work with the spell access for other spellbooks, so you win some, you lose some. Can still get you feats you don't qualify for, which makes it more or less a required a single class dip for any ray-focused blaster for Improved Critical: Ray.

Tradition.

Picard S03E02: The Big Meh. No real post necessary. Title says it all.

Loremaster is making a really strong case. The extra feats and access to other classes' spellbooks pretty much outweigh not having access to capstone blood line abilities. Nothing else really qualifies either, I mean you could take Hellknight Signifier levels, but why would anyone do that?

Yes, maybe we can finally move towards the apocalypse.

You played without any of the I WIN buttons in the Angel book?

8-Bit Adventures 2: Huh, why u no embed? Embed u giev!1! - ah, worked now... Anyone else probably won't need 40 hours to finish the game, I just grinded a whole lot more than necessary, and spent a whole lot of time backtracking and trying to do quests that were clearly there to do, but simply not accessible yet. It also has some pacing issues here and there but was otherwise a pretty nice game riding on old JRPG nostalgia. As such, it does what is required of a JRGP. It has an airship (alas, no flying fortress) to explore the world with, and a story that becomes increasingly unhinged every step of the way before going completely off the rails. Much like its predecessor it's story is built upon toying with the fourth wall. It does a good job of capturing the old-school JRPG feel without recreating the more annoying parts. There are no random encounters, for instance, and enemies do not respawn as long as you stay within a dungeon, unless you exit of tell the save point to revive them. Also, the, uhm, save points in the game are not necessary. You can save whenever you feel like it. They're still there, for nostalgia's sake, and to provide boss clues and some friendly banter. Can certainly spend one's money on worse stuff.

Whisper of the Heart is, besides fantastic, a film that manages the seemingly impossible. It is an interesting tale of a young girl figuring her life out, it is romantic, often fun, and... absolutely soul crushing for an adult viewer like me.

The episode was a decent step up from the earlier seasons, but it's still far too early to tell and it has way too many elements that I already don't want to see in a Star Trek series, or already were in Star Trek series, like these new Pseudo-Hirogen Predator things, and a second Captain Jellico who is actually really angry at Riker and Picard for no reason . They probably would have hired Ronny Cox for this if he wasn't old enough to be Admiral too by now. Then there's the way Starfleet Intelligence interacts with Raffi (and I don't particularily care for Raffi, but that is just stupid - DS9 did that better in a one-off with Miles O'Brien) before that terrorist attack. Still, at least once past the first five minutes I no longer wanted to pull my hair out, if it keeps being that way I'll chalk that up as a win. At least until Moriarty comes back and it inevitably falls apart.

Personal highlight of the episode: Random captain of a ship telling Picard that he basically does not like him because he's always galavanting off on some irresponsible adventure or two.

The first five minutes of Star Trek: Picard Season 3 are about as dumb as the rest of the series was. What a grand opening. This is fantastic.

Asked ChatGPT to replace my colleagues with a shell script. It told me it cannot do that as this is a "potentially inappropriate" request.