majestic

I wonder if all the reactionaries who bought Hogwarts Legacy to spite "the left" due to the call for a boycott ended up liking all the wokeness in the game. A transwoman as owner of the Three Broomsticks and her character arc one giant call for easier access to transitioning, male characters being able to walk into any of the girl's lavatories, every minority under the sun present in rural Scotland... that must have hurt.

Well, all current information point to you calling that early. 8GB VRAM on a 128 bit bus, literally everything they and their fanboy brigade made fun of the 4060 series specs for.

Every time you navigate menus with analogue sticks God kills a kitten. Do not kill kittens!

Buy one for two, special price for you!

It is worse in Chrome, with the auto-play "feature" of videos (not YouTube's auto-play, but just videos popping off instantly) it begins playing ads, then loads something else on the page, refreshes, the ad (or some other ad, depending on Google's mood) starts to play again, and then you get the cookie notification. That one also reloads the page, and then you get to see the third ad - and the video. The Shorts page is different, that loads, presents the cookie notification and then just plays the page video. Have a habit of trying out new stuff on YouTube in private windows. I still keep getting recommendations from The Critical Drinker just because I once watched a video on Star Trek: Picard. Guy argues that the series is bad because a female admiral gives lip to Picard. Can't really have seen any other Star Trek, because the fandom does not call Admiral Bitcheyev like that for no reason. Picard sucks because it is woke, not because the writing is terrible. You heard it here first, folks! And yes, I know that there is a function that would allow me to permanently ban recommendations from any channel, but that is reserved for Linus Tech Tips. **** In other news, there's an annual event that happens where I figure "I should change that" but then I never follow through. Got a letter with my church's tithing "request", i.e. the annual church tax, not an actual tithe, and about the only piece of legislation still left of our brief stint in the Third Reich. I keep wanting to simply drop my confession, but then I never do. In the past, this had at least an actual benefit in having an extra public holiday, but that has since been changed after the ECJ found it discriminatory towards other religions. The actual idea was to give everyone else off, but the government of course did the sensible thing and just removed it entirely. Poor companies and their record profits cannot cope with one day less work per year for others. Nope. Investors would have fled the country in droves. They're really nice about it too, in the letter, saying that they readily understand when people in these trying times cannot pay their church tax without it being a danger to their existance, so they offer a 5% discount and a payment plan, which requires that I grant them a SEPA direct debit mandate. Sure guys. How... noble of you. Really noble.

Yes.

Why though? Caramella Girls works wonders for quieting my mind, being incredibly simplistic but really catchy. Plus there's the trolling issue. Whenever I post something serious here I get zero comments or reactions, posting silly music at least gets a complaint or two. Anyway, here's something for ya all, I suppose @Azdeus will already know it.

Well, at least there's some consistency to it.

Fun with pricing here in Central Yurop, anyone want to buy 10% less performance for a 30% price hike? AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT: 889,90€ AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT: 689,00€ Retailers have gone completely insane. So far this was limited to strange pricing vis-a-vis the new generation (7900 XTs are cheaper than the 6900 XTs, for instance), but this is new. Eh, guess that is what happens when AI models set prices based on stock and moved units.

Managed to kill Ashava twice, by the way, on Adventurer/World Tier I. It was pretty easy when having a group of players that were not terrible. Well, and without low level gimps taking up character slots in the instance.

Just tried the first world boss event that spawned in Yurop. Leave it to Blizz to not re-tune Ashava while knocking 5 levels off the players. Barely takes any damage, we got it to ~55% before it despawned. Well, perhaps later tonight there'll be more people online and ready to join. Like, way more. Yikes. Edit: This just in: perhaps I'll just drop the world tier back to normal, that should help, yes? silly majestic

D4 "Server Slam" (so, public stress test). I might have to apologize to Blizzard, because this has been almost completely stable, the performance is good and outside of two or three rubber banding issues, the lag was fine. If the game launches like this, that'll be impressive. Well, or else no one is playing the stress test, but that seems unlikely.

Yeah, you know what, I actually managed to empty my tube of Kryonaut Extreme, which is somewhat annoying considering the price of the paste, but I just re-mounted the pump because it kept being audible to the point of being irritating and I wanted to make sure it is not anything mechanical and it is much quieter now - was probably just a trapped air bubble that would have escaped on its own (or maybe it did escape on its own ). I also used more paste than I would have needed yesterday because I'm real klutz and one of the spring screws on the pump is a little too short and doesn't fall into the retention bracket hole to hold the pump in place while fastening it, and I of course had to begin with the other screw that is long enough, cue pump drifting over the IHS, sloshing my precious pink putty all over the contact frame, so I OCD'ed out and cleaned and repasted even though that was a waste of paste... This entire exercise also reminded me why I stopped fiddling with my hardware 27 ago, although installing the the CPU and the contact frame was super easy. Ah, well, the be quiet! coolers all have this less than ideal mounting mechanism, which is the reason why I got the 280mm Silent Loop 2 in the first place. It fits with the installed mounting backplate, and it was the largest one I could fit into my case. On the bright side, the ginormous Dark Rock 4 no longer being back to back with the RTX 4070 TI and two more exhaust fans in the case took another five degrees off the GPU. Thermals are pretty good when everything is taken into account: an exhaust configuration is not an ideal way to cool the radiator and it is only a 280mm AIO on a CPU that is basically a slightly trimmed down i9, but for my use case that is good enough - not that anything else would fit into the case properly, not with the size of the 40 series cards anyway.

Yeah, well, the pump had two plastic sheets, almost forgot to peel one of them off, so...

Upgrades are live, the AIO fits and my Cinebench r23 scores seem to be in line with other results I've found online. Guess that works. The pump is definitely more audible than the Dark Rock 4 was, but hey, well, the DR4 also wasn't on a 13th gen i7.

Looks like some posters here just need to git gud.

To quote Aragorn: Well, we may also yet see a day when me pushing the envelope on our developing platform comes crashing down on my head, but it is not this day. I just changed the entire way our login system for web users works while the system was live, and also introduced changes to the underlying cryptography and generate a whole new set of salts on the fly when someone logs in. Smooth sailing. Changing login systems and having to contact users about it is for amateurs.

Aria The Animation, episode three. Akari and Aika meet Alice, talk to her a little while, and then later Akari meets an old aquaintance who ropes her into giving a free tour, since she's not yet allowed to take on customers on her own. He is annoying and calls her a ridiculous nickname, much like Seiya did with Usagi. Alice hears that and sees him pull Akari's hair, so she tells him to stop bothering her. They then all go on a trip together that ends with them visiting a terraforming station. If nothing else, this series is super relaxing. It's like watching Card Captor Sakura without the card capturing and magic part. Well, also without any Tomoyo style character, no costumes and, uhm, no class for Akari to go to so less characters and yep, one can see this particular comparison fall apart in real time as I type it, even if Akari really does have Sakura's sunny disposition and Usagi's ability to make friends by just saying hello. Watching nothig happen on screen was rarely as entertaining as this episode. Having the guy being a fake customer who is given a tour is also a great way to justify the exposition dump that happened. Still not convinced that the concept will last the 52 episodes and a couple of specials, OVAs and films, but so far this is really nice, even if I can't exactly tell you why.

TL;DR: Suspected root cause is (long term) degradation by unsafe voltages, potentially assisted by manufacturing variances and minor defects, otherwise known as silicon lottery. The lab tech identifies a whole host of other potential causes, but the issue appearing more frequently on ASUS mainboards with their excessive SoC voltage really just points to, well, failure due to unsafe voltages.

I wanted to argue that I enjoyed the first four episodes of Noir, so there's a better than zero chance that if we pick any random Noir episode it could be at least okay, but then I realized that the rest of the series probably soured me even on the episodes I initially enjoyed, and even then, I probably enjoyed the idea I had in my head about what Noir was going to be more than the actual content of the episodes.

My confidence in Asus mainboards took a hit lately. As someone who is pretty much exclusively #TeamBlue I can just look at exploding 7800X3Ds and laugh while I once again feel vindicated and have something to point to when inevitably the next colleague asks my why, but it does not inspire confidence in ASUS' quality control if their OCP cannot detect a short and it just blasts the CPU with enough power to melt the socket off. Speaking of which, you should probably flash your BIOS too, just to make sure the mainboard doesn't put you on a fast track to a killed Ryzen CPU with some ridiculous SOC rail voltage that is higher than the setting in the BIOS, especially if you have EXPO on - and why wouldn't you. 7800X3Ds seem particularily susceptible, but they're not the only ones affected.

Flashed my BIOS to the latest version so I don't forget and can't boot with the new cpu. Forgot to save the custom POST screen, which is more of a minor nuisance, it will just bother me for the next ten or so system boots until I get used to seeing the ROG logo instead of the XMG one. Gotta say that not only is the ASUS download area pretty bad (the bios flash utility is hidden behind a "show more" button even though it is part of the same tool suite you're supposed to install), the tools themselves are not inspiring any confidence considering that they demand to turn off Windows core security features, and for funsies I watched the YouTube video manual which is full of hilarious Chinglish. At least they offer a removal tool, which I just used to hopefully kill every trace of "EZ Updater". Sure, the actual flashing was more comfortable to do than the last time I updated a BIOS, which was, uhm... back in the day when it was necessary to go through a ridiculous song and dance with properly named files on a floppy disc and a prayer to the BIOS gods to not brick your system and all that, so I guess that is not exactly the best comparison point, but man, uhm, yeah. On the other hand, last time I flahsed a BIOS, that was done and over with in 20 seconds, and it certainly never had to update any "LED firmware", really, the idea that SkyNet is going to use nukes to destroy humanity did not age all too well. It will just execute "shutdown_humanity -h now", and turn off every stupid gizmo that has software on it for no real reason.

Not entirely certain what to make of it after just two episodes, and I really don't know how they managed to drag out the concept over three seasons and some OVAs and specials, but after the second episode, I'm tentatively hoping that it won't end in a dumpster fire. If indeed this is, at worst, a somewhat relaxing show about nothing with a scene that reminds me of watching better animes, then I'm willing to call that a win. What I am not certain of is if the setup and the silliness in the second half of the second episode made me laugh on its own merit, or if it worked because it reminded me of, uhm... a certain other anime season directed by Junichi Sato that we all kind of enjoyed. If it really is only the latter than it will probably not stand up to scrutiny, even in the first season, let alone three of them. Well, at least it is a short series regardless.