majestic

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.

One other piece of advice: save once you have created your character and just give yourself enough skill points to pass every check in the game. It's but one little action, but it will have tremendous impact on your enjoyment of the game. It is just not worth interacting with the skill system. Do not think of it as cheating, but merely removing a needlessly time consuming and frustrating part of the game.

Huh. Get home, turn on computer, see YouTube telling me that one of the channels I subscribed to released a new video, which is a rare enough occasion. Then get overly excited to see it's from Joseph Anderson. Could it really be? Could it finally be here? Yeah, nah. It's about Shadow of the Erdtree. God dammit Joe.

I don't think you need the first part of the message, and it is entirely possible that it is the entire message. That's a biking lane and it reads "for 1.5°C", which is a reference to the Paris Climate Accords and its 1.5° C target.

She, uh, becomes a Repentia even if you are as fanatical as you can get with her. Or perhaps that was a bug I ran into. I thought she was supposed to "fail" in her quest by design and that she can never acquire what she's after because of her hubris. If that is not the case I guess I gave Owlcat too much credit.

You rang? So, I actually sat down and watched Rebel Moon Chapter One: Chalice of Blood. That name is a mouthful, and it is the Director's Cut version of A Child of Fire, which I have not seen. Bear that in mind. I have heard a lot of things about Zack Snyder's most recent film, and none of them good, so I went into watching this with a few expectations in place, the biggest of which would be that it looks like a Zack Snyder film - and that it does. Oh boy does it look like a Zack Snyder film, and lo, Snyder's trademark color grading and desaturation is in place, in full force. That man could film a set created in various shades of pink and make it look somber and brooding (actually, that is a bad example, as the original Addam's Family show was shot in black and white on a set in various shades of pink, and the result looked appropriate for an Addam's Family show). The other expectation was that I am going to be miserable and hate the film, after all, many of the criticisms I heard from and read of arise from issues that I have harped on over and over and over again, and then some. Imagine my surprise when that did not happen. I get all critcisms, like the space Amish people plowing and tilling and seeding their fields by oxen and their bare hands while still having houses with automated doors and other modern amenities, or how most of the characters in the film are flat non-starters (only Kora, Noble, Jimmy and Gunnar are developed characters, and of those only Gunnar has an actual character arc, to the point where one could think Gunnar's the main character instead of Kora), that all the scenes with Jimmy are weirdly disjointed and do not fit into the film, that is spends an inordinate amount of time introducing a character who does nothing (although that is apparently just in the Director's Cut). It just did not really matter. For a film with a runtime of three hours and twentyfive minutes it was surprisingly engaging. The sheer length meant I could not sit down and watch it in one go because I am a little pressed to find so much free time at the moment, but if I had I would not have turned the film off. That is not to say that I do not have issues with the film. More than once I thought that this movie feels like a video game adaptation. In fact, it would probably work better as a video game. Arguably it did work better as a video game, because it is by far and large Mass Effect 2, just with an obvious betrayal shortly before the suicide mission (which did not materialize, but somehow suspect it still will, in the second chapter, what with the ending of the first one). There's also too much of Snyder's trademark slow motion violence. Lastly, there's also way too much copying from existing sources to create a film that is basically a sci-fi The Seven Samurai, and while something like Mass Effect's setting is charming in being a love letter to every sci-fi setting ever created, Snyder's version is a little too much of a mix and a little too unfocused to be really interesting. On the one hand you have your peaceful farming village in what could be a version of Warhammer 40k's Imperium of Man and all the implications that this brings, and on the other hand you have a warrior prince from a conquered world becoming Toruk Makto by riding Buckbeak. For those that have not seen the film, I kid you not. Tarak the Warrior Prince, one of the film's flattest characters, talks to Buckbeak the hippogriff, then kneels in front of it, and mounts it for a ride. This being grimdark it then proceeds to gut Draco instead of just hurting him, but somehow that is both expected as one can see it coming from a mile away, and hilariously gratifying. Then there's the sequence with Nemesis and the sentient spider creature that I am pretty sure I have seen before somewhere, I just cannot remember where at the moment. There's all the references to Star Wars (including a cantina full of scum). Noble has a tentacle hentai scene and ends up being hooked up to The Matrix. There's not a single original thought in this, I think, and yet... yet I did not hate it, and I actually found myself just enjoying the ride. These things happen every now and then. I mean, by all accounts, Rebel Moon Chapter One: Chalice of Blood is not a good film. Still, for whatever that is worth, I enjoyed watching it. Normally I would blame this on my mind being broken by Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jar Jar Abrams, but I, uh, also liked Sucker Punch, and my liking Sucker Punch predates the new Star Wars trilogy and all of nuTrek except Star Trek 2009. Yeah, I am about as surprised as you all are.

Found a creepy crawly on my neighbor's door. It looks like this (not the one from the door, but the same species). Things have been everywhere lately.

Looks like Windows 11 24H2 will bring a nice performance boost for Ryzen processors. Relative performance of Zen 4 to Zen 5 is not really improved though, it's similar gains for every generation, even Ryzen 3. It's more like a free boost for everyone who has Windows 11. Also massively game dependent. Gears 5 sees a chunky increase (even on the one Intel CPU tested for three games, although to a lesser degree) while Baldur's Gate 3 sees a much smaller difference, borderding on tolerance levels. So much for AMD's claims that the much improved branch prediction of Zen 5 depends on a Windows update not out yet, but it will certainly give Arrow Lake a harder time now. The boost is in the ballpark of projected, leaked and expected IPC gains for Arrow Lake over the 14900KS. Altough we've just seen what leaks and performance expectations are worth, so yeah, all we can do is wait. Either way, it's going to be hard to compete with Zen 4's current pricing for Intel - and ironically, for AMD just as much (sales of Zen 5 seem to be abysmal). If the 5800X3D was AMD's 1080 Ti moment, well, then maybe Windows 11 24H2 will extend that to Zen 4.

27° C outside at five minutes to midnight. FML.

@Gorth I think what Bruce is trying to ask here is how much time you will spend partaking in the joys of the Reeperbahn. /scrn

Done with season 5 in Diablo IV. Time to wait for the expansion pack.

Surgery with local anaesthesia is great, especially when the dosage was off and the effect's fading while the surgeon's still rummaging around your insides and doesn't believe you. I can also recommend stapling highly sensitive parts of your body back together while the numbing effect is all but completely gone. Good times. Well, granted, that was like almost thirty years ago, I'm sure medical tech has improved a lot, but once bitten and all that.

But... why?

Some videos in the interwebs from channels that claim to have "sources" inside of tech companies did not age all to well. Like this one from MLID: Well, what do you know. Manufacturing defect/microcode bug in voltage control/stability issues aside, the 13900K rebrand turned out to be a much better Zen 5 competitor than expected. *snort*

Please, for the love of god, do not use the Admin account unless you really have to (hint: if you would, you would know - just forget it even exists). Getting ten frames per second more is definitely not a use case. Love how much work the tech channels have to put into these videos simply because the DIY tech bubble can't get over the fact that Zen 5 isn't a good product outside of some productivity workloads. Fair enough, I mainly used the NSA as an example because of their confirmed supply chain attacks.

Watching Abba: In Concert (1979) in a live stream of our national public broadcaster. It being a somewhat strangely cut documentary style concert movie nonwithstanding, ABBA sure was a great group for mainstream music. Then again, back in the 70ies and 80ies mainstream music wasn't as awful as it is today. edit: they streamed (and, well, broadcast) a number of concerts today, including Bruce Springsteen and the Bee Gees. Pretty nice for running in the background.

Sinkclose exploit allows potentially unseen and night unremovable malware to be carried by virtually all AMD CPUs of the past decades. Well, AMD's right in saying that in order to exploit this on a CPU in the field you already need so much access that it doesn't matter any more. It's a good thing supply chain attacks don't happen and that there's no precedent with the NSA installing backdoors in intercepted Cisco shipments. One could start to wonder, in such a case.

The 9600X that Gamers Nexus has not tested yet because theirs was faulty showed a 1% increase in performance over the 7600X: At a 40% premium over 7600X street prices.

This is far better than my wildest dreams. To quote Steve: "It's the Skylake stagnation all over again." Well, and the memory stability problems of early AM5 are back with a vengeance. Steve found two positive things in his review: 1. It is really efficient 2. It is not from Intel Love the (admittedly few, but existing) benchmarks where the 9700X is behind the 7700X. Edit: Guess I was wrong, ey?

Nice going at the stock markets, good thing I dumped my tech investments a month ago. I thought I was playing it super safe by leaving this early, but apparently not. Hindsight says nigh perfect timing.

Doesn't bode too well for consumer graphics, more than anything else. Something tells me Pat Gelsinger will have a hard time convincing shareholders that Arc is worthwhile in the face of that earnings call. Who knows, perhaps I'm wrong and Lunar Lake is going to be so good that it encroaches on AMD's SoC monopoly. Meteor Lake sure didn't when you look at The Claw's performance. I want to be wrong because really, we need some competition in the consumer graphics space, but eight ball says outlook not good.

Obligatory link to the Epic NPC Man Breastplate video: