majestic

So, a YouTube channel I made the mistake of watching a video or two of (it happens) just announced that laptops with Ada Lovelace are basically dead on arrival because "European manufacturer XMG" confirmed to him that their RTX 4090 based laptops will cost over 4000€, and nobody's going to buy them in this market. Perhaps, but it betrays a certain lack of knowledge. XMG is a premium manufacturer where you get built to order computers (it's where I got mine). They only let you select from a handful of carefully picked components, and there's no compromise on quality (except perhaps on desktop AIB cards where they generally allow you to pick whatever is available at the moment, but that was not always the case), their products are assembled to order (each of them has a two to three weeks delivery time if components are readily available at the time of ordering) and go through rigorous QC (tested twice by different employees), and they come with a three year warranty for desktops and a two year warranty for laptops, and if indeed something goes wrong, then they offer top notch service. In other words, whoever wants an XMG notebook with an RTX 4090 in it will pay that premium because they want to. That might just be a very small, select clientel, but that's their business model. Heck, they offer calibrated 4K IPS 100% AdobeRGB LCD panels in some configurations, that panel alone costs more than some lower end laptops as a whole. Of course, tech companies are in for reduced revenue, and Nvidia's pricing is by far and large to dump existing Ampere stock, which by all accounts works pretty well, and it is entirely possible that nobody's going to buy mass manufactured notebooks with 40-series GPUs, but basing an estimation of future sales for products that aren't even available yet on what amounts to premium, assembled-to-order notebook models is perhaps not the best of ideas. By the way, their website offers a decent clue as to why RTX 4070 Tis are selling pretty well in Central Yurop, in case you've seen the tweet from one of the German retailers and wondered what the hell is going on: Pick a system that comes with an RTX 3080 as base configuration and make it cheaper by adding a faster and more power efficient card? Gee, makes you wonder how that happens that such cards sell well. You'd have to be one ginormous dunderhead to order a 3080.

I did, because at the time I could play through Origin Access - EA Play nowadays. Anthem, at release, was l ike a tech demo that promised a fun game once completed, which is a truly sorry state for a multiplayer experience to launch in. When it worked and you got a decent group to play with, it was pretty good. The flying worked well and the combat was much better than in Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: Inquisition. It was everything else that was the problem, from the disjointed story to the technical aspects that led to the game's loading screens being longer than some of the missions, to a grindy and repetitive endgame with way too little variety in everything. Loot was boring, it was always the same handful of missions, and the loot was boring. Did I mention that everything that is supposed to keep one playing through an end-game grind in a co-op multiplayer experience with RPG elements was boring? Particularily the loot and the mission variety. Forcing Bioware to adopt Frostbite for everything turned out to be a wonderful decision, and when they were close to actually making it work EA pulled the plug. Not that the decision was not understandable, Anthem hat preciously little to show for its enormous development time.

I saw them live once, before the dark times. Before the lockdowns. As Sonata Arctica support. Pretty sure they had a different singer back then though. That one sounds like a discount Fabio Lione.

Every time you eat something like that, God kills a kitten.

Macaroni is a type of noodle... It is entirely possible that there's a different export recipe, all I know is that Felix is a damned sight better than Heinz, but I have noticed similar discrepancies with other food. For instance, a lot of people I interacted with told me that McDonald's food is vile. Now, while their fries aren't great and the food is, well, McDonald's, it is a far cry from being vile. The patties are regularily overcooked and therefore a little on the dry side, but you can't reasonably expect properly medium grilled patties at a McDonald's. I never really understood that until I visited a McDonald's on Malta, and that was indeed vile. From YouTube I learned that McDonald's in Germany is much better than in the US, and while I don't know if that applies to the chain across the entire US, McDonald's in Germany is - while better than in Malta, at least - still a far cry below what we get from them here in terms of taste and ingredient quality. Oh, also, that is only true for the regular ketchup. The Felix hot varieties aren't good. The seasonal varieties are miss and hit, although I don't know if you actually get any of them. The onion one is not particularily great, but onion and garlic is good enough for red meat. The weirdest one was ketchup and plum, which tasted pretty good on its own, but did not mesh particularily well with any meat.

Whoever made your meatball image clearly has ketchup on... well, pasta. Ugh. What are you dissing Felix ketchup for, it's the only edible ketchup there is (the sugar reduced variety, at that, less sweet). Hela is okay in a pinch. Heinz is vile.

So much pain this thread. Tongue in cheek part: First: please, for the love of god, keep ketchup away from pasta. I love me my good ketchup, really, but noodles? What savage puts ketchup on noodles? But, well, let's never say that Scandinavians know anything about good food. Second: putting ketchup on eggs isn't any better. That is, at best, an acceptable side effect of eating pan-fried or grilled knacker (kinda like baloney) with sunny side ups. Third: Eating mayo with fries is borderline criminal, but something I sometimes induldge in too. Mixing it with ketchup, or even buying one of those dreadful pre-mixed disgusting sludges that are sometimes sold is a crime against humanity and should be prosecuted accordingly. Yuck. Fourth: Käsespätzle > Mac'n'Cheese, but it is close. Lastly: Milk is perfectly fine for making savory dishes and that goodly bechamel sauce, but it's not fine to insult the god of sausages by throwing milk on them after cookng them in a pan. Real talk: For @Keyrock (image repost): We've given up on making our rouladen into rouladen shape. Why? Because we just make a beef "pouch" to hold as many pickles, mustard and onions as you can possibly stuff into it. Yeah, it's that good. For the record, I also don't have any issue with cream based sauces or gravy. They should just not be put on beautiful, crispy meatballs. It is acceptable to eat condiments with them, perhaps even decent ketchup (which means not Heinz). I also stand by them having to be properly deep fried in clarified butter. For anything else? Just make meatloaf.

The banner is five times larger on the desktop browser (in 1920x1080, on Firefox, that is) than it is on mobile. The banner is fine on my phone. It is still there and isn't nearly as obtrusive as the deskopt variety is.

I'm just going to leave this here: I managed to live four decades without seeing an image of Swedish meatballs by the way, and now I wish I had managed for longer. Needless to say, I also never ate at an IKEA store, and after looking it up, I certainly am not going to. Repost: There there, don't you worry none, we'll never add cream based gravy to you. Or any gravy, for that matter. Hush now. Off you go, into my mouth.

Finished watching the film. It is fine. The first thirty minutes are good, as are the last thirty minutes, the main problem, for me, is that hour in between that goes nowhere, or rather, it does go somewhere, but it is both obvious and unnecessary long, and hence as dull and dreary as life on Inisherin. If that was the point, then it is well executed. Now, it is not nearly as dull or overly long in the setup as some series I have watched who had preciously little to show for 26 episodes, like the recently watched Noir, but that cannot possibly be the yardstick against which to compare a self-indulgent film that otherwise had exquisite mastery of filmcraft lovingly applied to its making, including fantastic performances from almost everyone involved. Except the priest. Screw that guy. Pretty sure Colm was right, he does have impure thoughts about men. So, basically, this has the exact same issue as Everything Everywhere All At Once had, just with darker and much less whacky humor. Beyond that, do I have much of an opinion about it? Not really, other than perhaps mentioning that in times past I have had my fair share of Padraics that I luckily managed to phase out of my life without becoming am Irish civil war analogy, a conflict I admittedly do not know enough about to find deeper meaning in what is depicted in The Banshees of Inisherin, but I doubt it would have led me to greater appreciation. As far as there being any comedic (under)tones, I have laughed three times, which is actually not that bad: I also once knew a Dominic, someone who ended up on my team during my (not brief enough) stint in the armed forces. I could write a whole essay about how much fun acting out the Full Metal Jacket boot camp in real life is, but what would be the point, just go watch the boot camp part of Full Metal Jacket. We ended up carting him to an fro at the weekends, because his parents could not be bothered. They would have left him at the barracks. Hell, they probably intended for him to be left there just to have a couple more days without the guy around them. Not entirely sure how he passed the psych/mental ability eval. He was much more limited than Dominic, really, barely capable of even remembering the ranks. He kept calling the corporals corpo-rats, and the NCOs sub-officers, which was hilarious in some ways, and decidedly less in others. Never managed to properly unload his assault rifle either. He also kept folding up his used shirts and putting them back into his locker for inspection, because he was told that all the shirts in the locker needed to be folded perfectly. Except, of course, the ones that should be in the laundry. Sigh. Well, that is that. As with EEAAO, the world is once again safe from any impending apocalypse, at least as far as breaking the laws of physics to the point where reality unravels goes. Indeed. There is a time and place for everything, and I do not mind slow burning movies or even series. Not that I would need to state this so explicitly, as my past posts on the subject and on really slow material (Violet Evergarden comes to mind, but also the initial seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica series), but it bears repeating. The problem I had with The Banshees of Inisherin was that after 31 minutes I felt like the setup of the film had run its course, but instead of moving on, it basically kept showing the same things over and over again to really drive home the point that Colm was trying to make to Padraic. It was enough to make me feel Colm's pain. Then I looked at the time elapsed, and it was 36 minutes. At this point I was ready to post "I hate myself" in this thread, and almost did, but then I just sat through the rest, at least until I noticed that Padraic's beer kept moving around in the same shot, depending on the camera angle. Three separate configurations in ten seconds, I have no idea how that was not caught. Well: The film did catch my attention early on though. It did so rather well, it just completely turned sour at around the thirty minutes mark, and then it go progressively worse until just before the second round of Colm throwing stuff at Padraic's door. Funny, I had almost said that after that the film picks up some pace at the time, but it really does not. It just stops telling me that life on Inisherin is dreadfully dull. It felt like sitting through a work meeting or a seminar where someone keeps asking the same questions, and they are getting everything patiently explained over and over again until they finally understand it, while meanwhile I contemplate how to best resist my personal urge for self-harm in such situations. Alan Rickman was awesome in Dogma, but I was talking about Christopher Walken. I think you clearly need to go and watch The Prophecy. The film very clearly proves that most film critics are simply hacks, because they could not appreciate its greatness - at least it became a cult hit. Avoid the sequels though, they have something in common with the Starship Trooper sequels. You can watch them, of course, but only if you can appreciate them for what they are. The Prophecy also had the best portrayal of Lucifer. Only appears for a very short time, but Viggo Mortensen steals everyone's show, and that is hard to do next to Christopher Walken.

Cynical take: Either the US promised to not replace Leopard 2s with the Abrams or Sleepy Joe is perhaps walking back on his odd bit of Trumpist US car industry protectionism. It was not very popular with German car manufactures, and they pretty much run the country.

It is always a good sign when you notice the little things in movies, yes? Particularily the little things that were not intentional. Like the curious case of Padraic's moving pint: It really is a MYSTARY.

Well, as you all probably know, I sometimes can't help myself and go against my own good judgement, especially when I already posted about not wanting to go against my own good judgement, and so, of course, I just watched the first thirty minutes of The Banshees of Inisherin. 31:29, according to the player, minus the length of the SEARCHLIGHT intro sequence. Okay, so why am I stopping and bloody postin' 'bout it? First, and on the very bright side, the film gave me a hearty laugh when Siobhan said to Colm that her brother's always been dull, and I like watching Alastor Moody, so there's at least that. Colin Farrell is another matter, but this role seems to be made for him, as he's really convincing in it. I suppose that is... not exactly an endorsement of his acting skills as much as an insult, although I did like Phone Booth, and thought critics were overly harsh on it. I also really enjoyed Martin McDonagh's 7 Psychopaths, but that too was a film where Colin Farrell just worked by being himself. It was also carried by everyone else and it's incredibly funny meta commentary aspect, also a film that had Crewman #6 in it, and the archangel Gabriel*, and when was he not great in a movie? So, that still doesn't explain why I am posting now instead of watching the rest of the film before doing that. I feel like I've seen the entire movie by now. There's still over an hour left. An hour and twenty minutes, give or take ten minutes of credits. Why? Why is this so long for what little content it has? Is the film trying to make me sympathize with Colm even more than I already am? Please stop with the feckin' repetitions already, or I'll start rowin'. Bloody hell. Jesus. I'm going to call it a day, as we're creeping up on it being 1:30 am. I'll finish watching tomorrow. Well, today, more like, so. *The Prophecy's Gabriel, not Constantine's Tilda Swinton.

Epistory, the current free game on Epic. For those of you who don't know, it is a typing action adventure game, and that really is all there is to it. Words pop up on your screen, and you type them in to make them disappear. It features an adaptive difficulty, whatever that means. I suppose that means people who type less quickly will not be getting the really hard to type 'big' words to contend with. It does feature some more mechanics, you can and at times have to change the elements of your typed words, which has added special effects. Fire burns the next word after a while, ice freezes enemies, wind blows them away and lightning does area of effect damage, making the use of lightning whenever it is possible a slight no-brainer. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis showing up? Well, zap the enemy next to it reading BUT, that's quicker. Okay, granted, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis shows up as a solo enemy and you have to type that in before it kills you, but you get the general idea. Also, yes, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is totally a word in the game that shows up. Not joking. Hilariously enough, for English speaking folk, the game has two difficulty modes. American and British English, so pick if you want extra vowels in your words or not. Anyway, doesn't really matter, as long as you're an avery typer you're not going to break any sweat. The words per minute calculation of the game is a little wonky, but it is a game, not a typing simulator, so there's downtime between words, some spawns are easier than others, and some go much faster down than others too, depending on your character upgrades and available elements. All in all it was a fun experience. Took me six hours to complete, and that's with running around the island several times to make sure I did not miss anything and looking for all the treasure, which was really pointless because there's a hard level cap you can easily reach without finding all overworld treasure chests. Game is perhaps a little bit to long for what it offers. It looks nice enough, and it's hard to argue with the price Epic's asking.

Well, looking at the track record of what you all agreed on being great and my reaction to it, I think I'll pass for now.

Episode 17 was probably the weakest of the series so far. Usagi is so heartbroken over Mamoru's whatever-she-will-turn-out-to-be ladyfriend* that she just forgets to go and help Rei with a fight, Makoto has nothing better to do than be off-screen afterwards and Ami is somewhere lost along the way, and all of this to force Minako to transform into Sailor Venus as part of this big reveal that I thought the girls were already aware of after Sailor V officially met them as Venus... I am a little confused here, but maybe the issue was the subtitles of the earlier episodes - we're talking fan translation here (I think, at least)**. PGSM does PGSM's version of the distracted boyfriend meme: Well, to be fair to the series, the series was shot in the years 2003 and 2004, and the stock photo the meme is based on is from 2015. On the bright side, Minako's transformation sequence is bloody bonkers. Pretty sure Rei figured out that Minako is terminally ill in this one. Oh, right, big spoiler. Woops. Sue me. I also found myself feeling bad for Usagi being all heartbroken and forlorn. Good job show, I just wish you did that with a better episode. *I spoilered myself: Yeah, so that is, uhm, dumb. **When Sailor V reveals herself to the other Sailor Guardians as Sailor Venus and their long lost princess, which we all know she is not, Usagi remarks in the next episode that they can all see Minako more often now, to which Luna says that she told them that she wants to continue to work alone. It is entirely possible, and quite likely given the setup, that Usagi was talking about Sailor V, not Minako, and the translator just put the wrong character name in the subtitles, or I got the wrong idea from the way they were written. Yeah, I am unsure of how much time and money they had for the casting of the series. As with everything else, that was probably "not much", why else would they have a really, really terrible plush Luna. I should also take into account that the girls were really young when they made this series (about their actual age in the manga, so 14 or 15). The problem is that bad direction can be directly observed by Usagi being pretty good in some scenes and wretched in others, while Ami is almost always Ami. On the other hand, the fighting scenes were probably choreographed and directed by someone else, and Ami is generally fine in those.

Sometimes I dream of having to go to my finals while not being prepared at all. I wake up, then confusedly think to myself that I better begin to study lest that nightmare becomes reality, before slowly realizing that I already took them a long time ago. The really silly part about these nightmares? I took the exams unprepared, and I was not scared at the time. Why would my brain tell me to be now, over two decades later? Sounds like too much BRUNO. Appropriately, this post was eaten by the void. Less appropriately, it came back into being even without saving it first.

I don't think so. Naru doesn't interact much with anyone but Usagi in the anime. The idea isn't bad, actually, as Ami is envious of Naru's seemingly effortless way to be friends with Usagi, but Ami's actress is really limited, either by the direction or her ability (probably both), Usagi only works if she's not told to overexaggerate her expressions and mannerisms in an anime-esque manner, which she sadly always is when she's with Naru, and Naru's acting is about as limited as Ami's, but her expressions are a tad better. I can't really fault the writing (unlike when Mamoru suddenly shows up with a girl to hurt Usagi with no prior setup, and since he's an orphan with no relatives, he can't well have a sister - and even if she is his sister, it's still bad writing). The setup is there, from the episode where Ami spends time with Naru and Usagi, to the way she does not want Naru to see the effects of Kunzite's attack on Usagi, it also makes sense that Ami would be envious of Usagi's other friends for how easy it all seems to be for them. Basically, it is not working as well as it should because it is an anime adapation, the direction is not good for these scenes and the actresses involved seem to not be up to the material they are given. It is not made better by the constant reminder that Sailor Moon S's episode where Ami feels like she's not really part of the team is one of the top episodes of the original anime. I'm not sure I should be complaining about the acting in a shoestring budget TV show, but the biggest issue is that none of the three are able to properly sell it. I don't know if the episodes have different directors, but there are things that work really well. Usagi and Makoto work when paired together, as does Minako, as long as one likes super serious Minako - although to be fair, Usagi manages to bring out Minako's silly side, but Minako was in something like three episodes so far.

PGSM is currently trying to add some conflict between Naru and Ami, and it's not really working too well. I wonder if that is what will cause Ami to become DARK MERCURY. In other news, I've been playing Wolcen instead of watching anything. Edit: Uh, apparently not, and Mamoru suddenly has a girlfriend. This is going places with no real setup for dramatic effect. Nope. You can do that better, show. Try harder next time.

Aaaaaaaaaand this is why one does not simply buy cards from Moria:

Well that is better than what it the forum software usually did in that case. Not post, kill your text and call it a day. The prime reason why I CTRL + A; CTRL + C every post. Even the shorter ones nowadays.

Hello, this is customer service, how can I help you?

Found a bunch of bold faced lies on Wikipedia:

Is there a trailer? There was a teaser like a year ago, and it broke me. Please tell me it's just the teaser, not an actual trail... never mind. IT IS GOING TO BE JUST LIKE JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK APOKOLIPS! Well, somewhere in the afterlife, Seiya's original voice actress is facepalming. Well, at least the trailer is absolutely gorgeous... not. And, supreme lol at the fandom gobbling up two movie releases within a month to rake in some extra sweet cash. Can it get any more cashgrabby than that? At least Anno spent years working on his terrible remake/soft reboot/alternate timeline versions of NGE. This here? Animated one movie, sell it as two. Well, f*ck you too.