majestic

You know, for a moment I thought you're talking about something like this: https://hopfenhöhle.de/en/

Well, and then you benchmark a bunch of games, and factoring in the also existing - but less pronounced - gains on Intel CPUs, and Zen 5 CPUs catch up by ~2%. Of course there are outliers, but they exist on Intel too, whatever the update does, it certainly boosts Jedi Survivor performance by a lot. Funny how that goes. Anyway, nothing really new to see here. The 7800X3D remains the top pick for a gaming CPU. I'm really interested in the upcoming 9800X3D's performance, the larger cache will show if there's a bottleneck situation that is holding Zen 5 performance back.

Rings of Power, season two, episode five. This episode is a microcosm of the lore problems this series has and their effect on how much one can enjoy the series, at least from the point of view of someone like me who enjoyed reading The Silmarillion and generelly likes Tolkien's world building more than his actual writing. The episode itself was not bad, although the ongoing storyline with Galadriel is somewhat silly, but at least it is no longer mind-bendingly terrible like it was in the first season. Charlie Vickers is doing a good job as Sauron Annatar.

I think that might have been the second Taylor Swift song that I have listened to, after Shake It Off. Goes to show perfectly just how ignorant of pop music I have become in the past 15 years, which is pretty much exactly when I joined a new team at work and no longer had any colleagues who listen to the radio while working. At a first listen I do not particularily care for Blank Space, then again, it is also rather far from what I usually listen to, so that is not entirely unexpected.

Well, you're in Houston. I mean... not to downlplay your hot summers, but your summers were always much hotter than ours. I'm on the same latitude as Victoria, BC (well, almost, at least). Now, it's a bit warmer on average than in British Columbia thanks to a bunch of fun climate factors like the Gulf Stream and Sirocco, but a month with 30+°C almost every day followed by a 30° drop in temperature within a week is not what I signed up for.

The weather's been "fun" these past few days. Last week we still had a record heat wave and a ridiculous (for September) 35+° in the shade, now much of the country looks like this: Lower regions run the risk of being flooded. The region where I live is going to be fine as the Danube is unlikely to rise a lot, while there are significant rainfalls (read "significant" as in three times the amount of precipitation of a normal September - over a single weekend), all the major tributaries are in alpine regions. While the snow's causing havoc on the trees and bogs down traffic, at least its a lot of water that is not immediately added to the rivers and lakes. No, nothing wrong with the climate, nothing to see here. Fake news!

Well, uhm, this might be one for the "so bad it's good" category.

It does not really help to be aware that you can parry everything that does not show you a red kanji warning on screen, you have to fully accept it or you will not have fun for the entire time you're playing Sekiro. The game is not designed to be played like Dark Souls, and for the most part, dodging attacks and waiting for openings to strike not only takes much longer, but it is also not fun and in plenty of instances flat out impossible. In Sekiro you have one viable way to play the game, so engage it on its terms: stick close to the enemies, attack them relentlessly and when they counter-attack, parry. If they do a perilous attack, counter that as appropriate. If they try to get away from you, chase them down. Isshin doesn't tell you that hesitation is defeat for no reason. Everything else in the game is meant as support. It is fine to use the fireworks to stun beast type enemies, that is what it is meant to be used for, but it should not be your winning strategy for the entire fight. Sekiro has the arguably tightest controls of any of the FromSoftware games, and you can even smoothly cancel your attacks into a parry if you find you have overextended yourself. Compare and contrast that to the lumbering but yet floaty behemoth you play in Dreck Souls 2. The actual problem of Sekiro's combat, and that is certainly a valid argument if one values variety and options in combat more than refinement of its chosen core aspect, is that the game expects you to play it in one specific way, and if you do not, you will just be miserable. The Guardian Ape is also one of the best animated bosses in all the 3D games I have played, and its second phase is world class trolling, unless you got spoiled ahead of fighting it. I am also always rather surprised that people have trouble fighting it after getting past Genichiro(, Way of Tomoe), but my experiences with these type of games is always vastly different than those of most other players.

Rings of Power, season two, episodes 1 to 4: Anyone who has read my posts know what I thought about the first season: a train wreck in every way. Terrible acting (and really weird casting choices), terrible dialogue, terrible dialogue delivery, boring shots, badly paced, ludicrous action scenes and no respect for the source material. The latter in particular was pretty bad, putting in all sorts of fanservice that should not have been there (Hobbits, Gandalf arriving almost 3000 years too early) as well as heavily compressing the timeline, as the reign of Ar-Pharazôn was 1600 years after the creation of the rings and the Elven rings were not the first crafted. Anyway, in the first four episodes of the second season only two of these problems seem to be left over. The action scenes are still ludicrous, but at least they were short so far, and it is impossible to fix the timeline in Rings of Power. Everything else is much improved. I can't say that I enjoyed watching the episodes too much, but at least I no longer want to claw my eyes out and pierce my eardrums while watching the show, outside of a few scenes with Elrond. Which is an impressive improvement. The showrunners and writers are still the same, after all. It is not enough to make it worth watching for anyone who isn't @Hurlshort , and it will forever remain built on a rotten foundation. But, as strange as that is, I at least no longer hate watching it. So far. It has still plenty of episodes left to completely fall apart.

The "problem" with the thrusting swords in Dreck Souls 2 is that the the Stone Ring adds flat additional poise damage per attack. Sure, any ultra greatsword has 50 poise damage, and a rapier for instance deals only 10. But the rapier can hit 5 times while not expending much of your stamina in the time span it takes to swing your sword, for the 50 poise damage alone, never mind the additional 150 poise damage from the ring. Only weapons that can knock down enemies are more useful in shutting them down (i.e. great hammers). Then there's the flat bonus of the Ring of Blades per hit and the Leo Ring's increased counter attack damage. It's silly that a rapier does 500+ damage per hit on a boss without having the time commitment problem that come with the slower attacks of larger weapons, meaning you can be more aggressive, can get way more hits in, and the attacks barely cost any stamina. For some extra fun you can use a poison infused Black Scorpion Stinger with Sanctum Knight Gauntlet and the Rat Crest Ring. It's enough to poison anything that is not poison immune in four hits. One-handed you can get your enemies poisoned in a second and a half. It also does good overall damage. Lastly, there's a reason most invaders you still see active in the game carry buffed Ice Rapiers. Although I have no idea how people could possibly enjoy pvp in these games, but apparently they do.

I, too, was playing a game someone else in this thread is. Luckily for me, I'm already done. I am talking about Dreck Souls 2: Scholar of the First Suck Edition. Joseph Anderson, in one of his videos, came up with the concept of Gary, a fictional game developer responsible for everything in a game that is only designed to waste the players time. A prominent member of the German World of Warcraft community did the same earlier, he called the developer Malte. Since Malte is a much worse name than Gary, I'll be using Malte in this post. Steam says that I have played the game for 149 hours, with a lot of that time spent on dealing with Malte's contribution to the game. And I mean a lot. Brave Undead, but why didst thou adventure on this much? Well, because I cannot help myself, and I wanted to finish the game before ranting about it. I know that it Dreck Souls 2 considered to be the black sheep of the family and that it is slightly disliked even in the toxic wasteland that the FromSoftware fandumb is, but with them being how they are, one is better safe than sorry. But seriously, screw this game, I am never going to touch it again. From what I have gathered, Scholar of the First Suck is like a Kaizo variant of the original Dark Souls 2, which apparently has much better enemy placement, and also features a lot less enemies. Alas, as that is only one minor part of the whirlwind of misery that playing Dreck Souls 2 is, I cannot see the original being much improved - eh, or rather, the Kaizo edition much worsened - by throwing more enemies at you. But, luckily, not all was bad. I appreciated the intro sequence that explained a bit about the lore of Drangleic and gives your character a personal stake in proceeding, something which the first Dark Souls sorely lacked. I never found it in myself to give a rat's ass about the Undead Pilgrimage in the first game and still enjoyed the game based solely on the combat and other gameplay elements, as well as the level and world design. It could have been better, because the game opens with the promise of a cure for the Undead Curse, which simply does not exist, and never will exist - cannot exist, considering what the curse is implied to be - and as a recurring player your character's motivation is suspect right from the start. However, well, at least your character cannot know that, so, well, there is that. Sadly, that is about the only thing that is better than the original Dark Souls. Do not mistake that for thinking that the storyline of the game is good, because it is not. It is a retread of Dark Souls, with the exception of adding a character that acts almost as a villain in the form of Nashandra, Queen of Drangleic, the woman at the heart of many of Drangleic's woes (because it is always them wimmin who corrupt the pure hearts of men ). Like in many such games, I bemoan the fact that I could not give her what she wanted. Having the Abyss corrupt the last embers of the First Flame would have elevated the ending of the game to a point where I would have liked it. Alas. I would be remiss to mention that it gave me one of the heartiest laughs this year in the form of Aldia's dialogue. Indeed. As your character has zero agency in anything that transpires and is basically just a puppet for whoever comes along and needs something, it was rather funny that Aldia would be so blunt. Instead of writing an essay about an old game where everything has been said already, my biggest problems with the game are the systems Malte designed, which seem to be all of them. The changed controls from the first game (turning feels much stranger, locked on attacking in different directions, the frequent misses in combat when an enemy is between the seemingly eight ways your characters can face), the encounter and enemy moveset design where there is basically only one difference between the enemy types, which boilts down to dragons and everything else. Just look at the bosses and regular enemies. They all have the exact same moveset, with slightly different animations. The most prevalent of which are the double swing with an optional third attack and the forward lunge. Whether it is the Pursuer, the Smelter Demon, Fume Knight, Aava or Vendrick, really, that is not one of the dragon bosses in the game (and the Royal Rat Authority which plays like a dragon encounter, just without the breath attacks). The only standouts here are the otherwise ludicrously easy Covetous Demon encounters and in part the Duke's Dear Freja, although even that is more often than not a two attack combination with her legs, and a forward lunge. Some enemies shoot projectiles or beams at you, but that is it for variety. It meant that I was able to defeat most boss fights first try (I played NG without summons, as evidenced by Lucatiel's and Benhart's achievements being almost the last ones to unlock, outside of the spells sold at Drangleic Castle in NG++), the longest of which took like five, which was, funnily enough, the blue Smelter Demon. It went down after I switched my equipment, which, ah, well, is something that I do not like to do in these type of games. Continuing with the worst issues is that with the reworked stamina, and the silly adaptability changes (Malte's brilliant idea to make the base dodge roll in the game have less i-frames than the fat roll in the original game unless one invests in adaptibiity was a fantastic change, *chef's kiss*), the game turned into a third person action adventure game with turn based combat. Bait enemy attack, dogde, parry of tank with shield, hit back while you can. Rinse, wash, and repeat. The turning controls seem to have gotten worse, locking onto enemies makes it sometimes impossible to hit them as your character appears to able to face only in eight directions. Being locked on, one has to let go of the thumbstick to get a somewhat tracking attack out of it, or manually aim in the direction the enemy is standing, for no real reason. If you want to create some distance between you and the enemy, it is necessary to let go from the stick long enough, otherwise your character will just whack in whatever direction you were going. Maybe that's the reason why the dodge roll with lower equipment loads is so long. To make sure you're far enough away from the enemy to have to step back, so you can hit. Only Malte knows. The controls are floaty and sluggish, and felt much better in Dark Souls, which I played on the Switch (and that has only 30fps, compared to DS2's 60). Then the game has no built-in offline mode, which is just baffling, and the scripted invasion encounters are ridiculous to the point where I just began carrying a great club to repeatedly stun lock them with the heavy two-handed attack. I guess it would be possible to approach those like actual pvp against cheaters (as they all have unlimited stamina, spell casts and equipment load), but why bother if you can just stunlock them dead. Weapon balance is also something that seems to be a lot worse, but perhaps I never noticed these issues in the original games. But when your oversized ultra greatsword +10 takes five seconds to wind up an attack, eats up half your stamina bar and then deals 20% more damage than the one second attack animation of a rapier (at a much, much lower stamina cost) then something's seriously wrong. I played most of the game with the uchigatana sold by McDuff, which was a nice weapon to use, with a decent balance between speed and damage, and a rapier. I wanted to like (ultra)greatswords, or great axes, or anything large, but... wrestling with Malte's gameplay decisions is bad enough without gimping yourself. Good riddance, Dreck Souls 2. I shan't be installing you again. Upgrade a great club to +10 (you can infuse it, if you want, but it is not necessary). Unlock the Brightstone Cove Tseldora campsite bonfire and join the Covenant of Champions. Equip the Symbol of Avarice (Jester's Cap if you don't have the Symbol), the Gold Covetous Ring +2, the Sanctum Knight Leggings, the Watchdragon Parma and the Prisoner's Tatters. Start from the bonfire, go to the right and behind the tent in front of it, enter the first tent of the enemy camp. There's an enemy standing inside. Walk up to him, back"stab" with your great club, which should kill him. Another one comes running into the tent, smash him with the heavy attack until he's dead. Leave the tent the way you came in, go right to the fire where an enemy is standing. Backstab that one too, and one other comes running. That is four enemies killed in the span of a minute or so. Go back to the bonfire. Once you're comfortable doing that and can pull it off without dying, pop a rusted coin every five minutes. Grind until you have your 30 sunlight medals, which will take a long while. Do not attack the enemy by the fire first, the one from the tent will come running. Enemy aggro is weird in this game. That route avoids all the archers, and at worst you might pull a pig, which just dies all the same, and you're never in danger of dying, as long as your heavy two-handed attacks connect. It is so not worth trying to set up the archers in a way that you can kill them too. They'll be dealing silly amounts of damage and can shoot through tents. Sell excess Falconer armors to Gavlan at leisure, or just throw them away. Worst grind in the game, really, the Mad Warriors were farmed much faster in comparison (with the Unveil miracle).

Yes. In the same presentation.

It sure looks like it. I don't trust the development yet, but this is him, outside, today. On Monday he tried to get up and fell down a couple of times, and looked so miserable we wanted to have him put down to spare him needless suffering. He's still old, has poor vision and pretty poor hearing (or else pretends not to hear any orders ), but he looks fine and happy. Talked to a couple of other pet owners and they sometimes experiences similar things with old pets, cats and dogs. Refusing to eat for a couple of days, shutting down, being weak and then suddenly get better as if nothing happened. Not as extreme as your story about your cat though, of course, but that was from a serious infection. Almost all of them ended with the pets being active normally and then one day just painlessly dying after going to sleep normally. Seems somewhat unlikely that we will get to experience that, what with his cancer, but fingers crossed. You might, so that's good. The experience certainly sounds a lot worse than what we went through, and it was pretty bad on Sunday and Monday. Must have been terrible. I even took some time off work because I couldn't get anything done properly.

Update on the situation with the little bugger that is our dog. Indeed, is. Because, get this, while he was in a torpor on Sunday when I posted, refusing to eat and being lethargic and all, on Monday he was unable to even get up and move, so we put a water bowl right next to him. He'd wake up every now and then, drink a little, and would fall back asleep. We already called the vet, because it was clear that he was suffering, and we all expected him to die, so why not put him out of his misery? Yesterday morning he just got up from the mattress we put him on and walked to his water bowl, drank, then walked around, growled at us as usual because he wanted to be put back on the mattress. He ate a bunch of treats like nothing happened, although he still doesn't wolf down his regular food like he used to. When my wife's sister came to visit he went and greeted her. Not as energetically as he used to, but still, he basically moved more than in the past few days combined. He's also sleeping soundly, with his usual relaxed expression, instead of sleeping fitfully. We put a wet towel on him to help him cool down as it's been ghastly hot these past few weeks, almost never cooling down for more than a couple of hours, with annoyingly hot nights. So, yeah, no idea what is going on, but it doesn't look like the acute organ failure through metastasis that we expected it to be, because if so he would not have improved and probably died by now. We honestly thought the tumors had progressed to the point of organ failure. We're still going to lose him soon - I mean the tumor is not going anywhere, obviously, but perhaps not right now. Or even if he ends up dying really soon, at least he seems to be content instead of suffering. Which is more than we thought he would get.

I feel vindicated.

Back at the end of May Wolcen Studios announced that come September, they will shut down the multiplayer functionality for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, citing unsolvable issues with their current technology and codebase as a reason that they cannot keep supporting the game. That, and probably also because they never added any microtransactions to the game, meaning there never really was a steady stream of income from the multiplayer part, and the game costs 25€ on Steam. They have extended that deadline to September 17th now. Dawn's Healing is an achievement yout get for reviving a fallen party member. They're actually still working on finding a replacement for the achievement so players can complete them all even when multiplayer no longer exists. I'm pretty sure they're honest about the reasons for the shutdown being more a technical quagmire than a financial one. First of all Wolcen Studios is a tiny developer, small enough to be called an indie studio, and they financed the development through Kickstarter. I backed the game at a tier that allowed me to play the early versions, which were incredibly different from the final product (also used to be called Umbra, not Wolcen). The game used to have this enormous open world to run around in, just without much content, and the final release version had much smaller corridor-style levels, more akin to what Diablo 2 did in its third act. Still, those early versions had a fun charm to them that was lost with the more professional official release. Right at the end of the tutorial area before accessing the open world in the alpha builds you found a spell that shoots lightning, called "Unlimited Power" - it was just hilarious. Anyway, what I want to say is that from that development alone it seems like they ran into issues with their intended game design and changed it. It also took them so long to develop that the neat ideas they had for the then somewhat lacking ARGP genre were just, you know, not that novel any more when it finally came out. it is also a game that I think really shows the pitfalls of Kickstarted campaigns taking off and being more successful than initially planned. They raised double the amount of money they wanted for their original vision, and, just like the Pillars of Eternity campaign, they scrambled to come up with stretch goals, one of them being the multiplayer part. I am convinced that it was that stretch goal that ultimately killed the open world aspect of the game they promised. So what they eventually released was a decent ARPG for a small studio, with some fun mechanics and okay gameplay. I should probably replay the game now that the final story elements are out. I played it for a while, but the final chapter of the campaign released sometime afterwards.

You should ask Eldar, do you really think it is a coincidence that he resurfaced and even wrote a blog post right after Gromnir disappeared?

There are two main things that more often than not put me off when it comes to American cartoons. I mean I know you already know that, but it bears repeating in case someone else reads these posts too. These are their art style and their unwillingness to engage the target audience at eye level, instead often treating them like blathering idiots. That is not to say that I did not enjoy some when I was a kid. I watched, like any other kid my age, I suspect, the Tom and Jerry short films, The Flintstones and Looney Tunes, The Real Ghostbusters, and so on. The one thing most of these have in common is that they are pretty old. I did not try to rewatch most of them after the fiasco of getting the Galaxy Rangers boxed set - and that was a show animated in Japan. My nephew also watched The Real Ghostbusters on Netflix for a while so I caught the occasional episode, and that was also disappointing. That series was not nearly as entertaining as it was when I was like seven or eight when it first aired. I guess I can be as unfair or unwilling to meet things half way when I am put off by the art style, which is a huge drawback for many cartoons I could imagine would otherwise be quite interesting to me. King of the Hill being one such example. It is also possible that the smaller selection of available animated series on TV back in the 80ies and early 90ies colored my perception too much. I outright hated series like Animaniacs or Beetlejuice. Ugh.

Rebel Moon Chapter One: Curse of Forgiveness So this clocks in at a lot less runtime than the director's cut of the first chapter. I started watching the film Saturday night, and to my surprise, I found myself watching it all in one sitting. It was close to midnight when I began watching, so it was half past two already. The film is basically two halves, somewhat neatly split at half the runtime, although with a 15 minutes credit sequence the first part has a bit more than half of the actual film. The first half is actually fantastic. The second half is also somewhat good for such an extended action sequence, but it does drag on after a while, and the film sadly uses up much of the tension in the first like 30 minutes of the action sequence (that runs for over an hour total). Bad action pacing aside, I really liked it, except this time I am less surprised at it than I was when enjoying the first part. Afer all, some minor flashbacks aside, the film spends almost 90 minutes on bringing in the seaon's harvest and preparing the defenses for the action sequence. This isn't much of a spoiler because nothing much happens, but that nothing much is exactly what was necessary to create some actual stakes in the fight. It is much easier to care for a group of flat characters risking their lives if they get to interact with the villagers and help bring in the harvest and train them for the length of a regular movie. There's the occasional weak point because of the setting's disjointed and mishmashed nature, but who gives a damn. This is a film that's not afraid to spend over 50 minutes on showing characters cutting corn and thrashing it while interacting with the townsfolk, eating and sining and dancing the nights away with them while toiling hard during the day. That alone made it worth for me. Not very surprised that I have read critics write that parts of the movie are deathly boring. No, they're not, we just seem to have lost the ability to appreciate a slow buildup to raise the stakes in a future confrontation. Before action sequences turned into nightmarish CGI spectacles of insane length, that was actually normal. Except perhaps for 80ies trash cinema, but that's something else entirely and lovable in its own right. Also, uh, and that is something I forgot to mention in my post about the first chapter, there's something meta-hilarious about having both actors that played Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones in the same film. Kora is still a mixed bag of a main character, and I am unsure how good of an idea it was to show her character growth with two overly long sex scenes. Zack Snyder could have spent the time on better showing her growth and perhaps add a little more to her miniature arc. As it stands it is only visible in her ability to have a romance and in comparing the differences between the sex scenes. It sort of works if you pay attention, but I suspect not many people will while they can stare at Sofia Boutella's and Michiel Huisman's naked bodies.

You mean the 1951 film? Yeah well, dunno... edit: 'tis a joke, just to make it completely clear.

I think they might have, uhm, you know, like, made fun of you if that's actually the date they've given you.

Finished The Blacklist, season nine. It took me a while to get through, not because the season was bad, in fact, it was much better than it realistically has any right to be, being the ninth season of a series whose concept felt ludicrous and stretched after three seasons. It took me a while because while watching an episode, I was thinking to myself "this is great to watch" and when the episode was over, I rarely felt the urge to watch the next one. Much of my enjoyment of the series comes down to two things: James Spader just being the most affably evil mastermind on TV, and, well, James Spader being in the series. Most of the episodes are about catching a villain of the week while James Spader comes up with some ridiculously convoluted way to stay one step ahead of the people he's a confidential informant for, something that would probably make anyone who works in law enforcement feel the same sort of cringe I do when I see Abby and McGee typing furiously on the same keyboard trying to counteract a hacking attempt. The plotlines of the seasons have started out as fine enough in the first two seasons, and later became full Cris Carter kudzu gardens. There are so many twists and turns in the storyline that were added beause the series kept getting renewed, not because they were planned. Luckily, there's another factor in the episodes that just makes me ignore the plot problems in the same way I can for other series. They just don't really matter. Watching an episode is like watching a group of people you have been watching for years now, all with their own quirks, ups and downs, and smaller plotlines that are really enjoyable. It's, well, like How I Met Your Mother, insofar as one really has to ignore that the series should be about Ted finding the mother of his children and is really just about anything but that for it to stay enjoyable beyond two or three seasons. Yeah, and Ted's an idiot. Which is, funnily enough, like with the main character of The Blacklist (Elizabeth Keen). Most of the episodes are fun in that way. You see familiar characters being themselves and trying their best to make something of the situations they're put in, and the writers coming up with silly, nigh deus ex machinae style ways for James Spader to be at his best. It should not work in the ninth season, but somehow it does. The series does one other thin better than everything else except perhaps Guardians of the Galaxy, and that's the use of songs in the episodes. They're almost always perfect to underscore what is going on, fit the mood of the scene and are used to great effect. Will probably take a break for season ten now.

Looks like we're in for a rather rough couple of days or weeks, perhaps. Our dog's grown really old (14 now) and he's been diagnosed with lymphoma four months ago. We refused chemotherapy as it provides no chance at healing and really, he's already two years over the average life span of his breed. He's grown somewhat more lethargic than usual (he's really old, after all) recently and now refuses to eat, which is what the vet said would indicate that the tumors progressed to a point where they will become lethal. Might lose a treasured family member really, really soon. Dammit.