majestic

One of the pedals of my ergometer broke off. Time to hunt for a replacement. Meanwhile I've found that extended walks are decidedly not a decent alternative. They take longer and remove time from my somewhat cramped days. Eh. Plus that'll set me back some 500€ or more. Yay...

TV setting? You need to fiddle with the image setting something fierce before it stops being weird, unless it comes with a usable film mode, and even those require... adjustments. My least favorite part of modern TVs, telling them that they can stuff all their image enhancing doodads up theirs.

I'd be curious how many girls are at the school I was at nowadays. We had like, don't remember exactly, but maybe 15 (out of 220) in the first year. Only five or six graduated, and one of them wasn't part of the original 15. Although, on average, that makes the girls a good deal smarter* than the boys. 30% graduation rate vs. the ~10 to 15% overall. *Obviously, that statement is factually untrue there are a whole lot of different factors to consider. Teacher bias and the fact that applying for a course like that meant a special interest for any of the applying girls while it was fairly normal for boys (it was 26 years ago, after all), for instance. There's also something else to consider - not many of them ended up working in the field they studied. One of them became a psychiatrist. With a special focus on 'kink awareness' and 'non-traditional' relationships (i.e. polyamory).

Yep. To notice much of a difference you need to have a gigantic screen or sit really close to a regular sized one - the human eye has only so much resolution, and we're pretty close to that with 4k already. The only thing it does is create more screen real eastate for working, if you have a screen to match and the inclination to use one of them. My colleague at work has a gigantic screen rather than two or more separate ones, and he's constantly moving windows back and fro and what not, and it's just making me dizzy. One giant screen where my eyes have to dart from one corner to the next just so I can have four Full-HD sized windows open next to each other at the same time? Yeah, no thanks. That's definitely not for me. 8k is going to be the same sort of voodoo we now have with super expensive (and super not doing anything) speaker cables, outside of a very few special interest applications or theater sized silver screens. Pretty sure you'll also get the same crowd yelling I CAN SEE A DIFFERENCE just like they can HEAR the difference between high quality speaker cables and cables for 4000$ per yard. Sure you "can" hear the difference. I'd hear a difference too if I'd been had like that. Doesn't mean it's there.

No, that's just because they forgot to adjust for the spinning ball Earth lie. I'm sure the placement makes sense on a flat Earth!

How would you rate and compare it to Kill la Kill?

Choosing between Macron and Le Pen is like picking between cholera and dysentery. No matter who you vote for you'll end up sh*ting yourself, but at least one of the options comes without blood in the stool. Not sure what this is going in a separate thread, it's not like the politics one is currently featuring a raging debate that would threaten to drown this subject otherwise.

It only took 600 years, but now those medieval quacks have been vindicated. Turns out apparently there is a way how wet cupping can detox you even without suffering from haemochromatosis. Who would have thought? Just checked, theoretically I could donate blood plasma 50 times per year, i.e. pretty much once per week, and it pays 30€ per donation to boot. Huh. That's a pretty penny and has health benefits. Regular medical checkups and blood testing included. Win-win-win, I guess.

Speaking of cabbage, that made me go dig in my pictures: Eh, also... hungry now. Great.

2200€, all in all, although that varies wildly since graphics cards change prices like some people change underwear. 400€ today, 600€ tomorrow. It's not pre-built but built to order. https://bestware.com/en/ Not sure if they ship to Serbia.

Well, not as fancy, but here goes nothing: Corsair 4000D Airflow black Intel Core i5-12600K ASUS ROG STRIX B660-A 32 GB DDR5-5200 Corsair Vengeance ZOTAC GAMING Twin Edge RTX 3060 2 TB M.2 Samsung 980 PRO be quiet! Dark Rock 4 4x be quiet Pure Wings 2 The 3060 is up for a replacement once the 40s come out and prices have died down a little, but it's more than good enough for all my needs right now, so not really much of a priority upgrade. Quite a deafening silence in the room now. Eery.

No, it's worse. The hell is that supposed to be?

By the way, the game in question is Iron Oath, the trailer was linked recently.

Is there any way I convince this terrible looking operating system to look like Windows 7, or maybe at least like Windows 10? If I wanted a MacOS taskbar, I'd get myself an overpriced piece of crap from Apple. This is... this... why? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, MICROSOFT?

No I did not, will do once everything works. Currently throwing out old hardware. I had two printers and a document scanner under the table that were not used in a while. I do mean a while. Parallel ports and a parallel switch. A Four way parallel switch. Like this only with four ports…

Hardware just arrived. Funny, usually you get a "warranty void if opened" sticker on the case. Not so this time, there's a huge fat sticker on the case that reads: REMOVE TRANSPORT PROTECTION BEFORE TURNING ON. Yeah no wonder, the transport protection is a bag of instant foam. If you'd turn the computer on while the CPU and graphics card are wrapped in hardened material blocking all airflow, you'd get some very expensive and quite crispy trash. Well, time for the not so fun stuff, let's see if it works and set everything up. Now, where did I put my display port cable? Hmmm. Questions, questions.

Okay, maybe not random game news, but it's kinda funny, at least when viewed through the lense of too little sleep and a tiring couple of weeks at work: I suppose it is not entirely impossible to write for a game without using any pronouns at all, but it is most likely going to be a bit of an awkward read. There are languages where the use of pronouns is fairly limited or generally ungendered (as far as I know Hungarian doesn't distinguish between third person based on gender at all, neither does Mandarin), or they are a different class/type of word than what we would understand as such (Japanese pronouns are simply nouns and behave as such and also have different meanings), and there are a handful that have no pronouns as separate words (like the Iroquoian languages, they have pronominal verb endings), but as far as I know every language we have has a way to refer to people in some form or another. Think about it, it would be really strange to have no way to do that. Languages exist to talk to other people. Even if you can leave them out because the context makes it clear and your languages allows for that, they're still implied. They (oh, snap!) of course meant the game has customizable pronouns that replace them in the text when set accordingly, a feature that does not need to be used and defaults back to regular usage when unused. Seems like a trifle to get one's panties in a bunch, but what do I know, maybe it really is possible to catch the gay from a computer game that allows you to pick the pronouns used to address your character.

Now he's just playing Dr. Soong in every incarnation of Star Dreck. Ancestors, lost offspring, who knows what else they'll come up with. Eventually he's going to play a Dr. Soong who cosplays as Data.

A certain 'sharp' poster of the past with a distinctly right wing bent had George Orwell quotes in his signature. They're co-opting any- and everything that fits their worldview. It gave me a chuckle every time I saw it, right next to that picture of Trump.

I already made a full backup of my entire user folder, so yeah, good to know that works too. Kinda hoping that'll work for Thunderbird just as easily, because otherwise that's going to be boring fiddlework. Oh, yeah, funny, I still have a local mailbox because that non-profit can't afford unlimited space. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't analyze my mail traffic to bring me tailored ads. Screw gmail.

Going through the checklist. Item #2, right after creating a Mozilla account to be able to sync my Firefox stuff was finally giving in and start using a Microsoft account for my windows, otherwise I'll run into licensing shenanigans sooner or later (a friend of mine just recently bricked two Windows licenses, better safe than sorry). I was reminded of why I only had a local account until now, Microsoft just stubbornly refuses to create a Microsoft account with my regular mail adress, telling me that I can't use work, school oder university mail addresses for my Microsoft account. I realize why that is there, because these are usually transient. Here's the thing, while my mail account is hosted by a communications non-profit, it is just that. It is a non-profit association under local law, the mailbox is not transient and I've had it for, well, 26 years now. It is probably older than the twerp intern who set up the validation. Halfway through changing my mind and just refusing the delivery. Would save me a pretty penny too. Time to stare at file copy progress bars. edit: I realize that I could also just physically transfer my old hard disk to the new computer for easier access, but that's work I don't want to do. I'd rather stare at a progress bar for the time it takes to copy the relevant 400GB through an external hard disk. Plus it'll make a long overdue backup of the important stuff in the process. *shrug*

That's what they want you to believe. Don't be a fool! #ITISFLAT

Got a shipping notification, my hardware will - any issues aside - arrive on Thursday, so that gives me all of tomorrow to prepare. Not exactly my most favorite part, but I am looking forward to the reduced loadng times.

Why? Watch the Escaflowne film and tell me that doesn't remind you a little of his work. The film would also probably be more your thing than the series.

Yeah, maybe I'm also just alone in getting Kurosawa vibes from Escaflowne. Some of his films are of major film-historical interest, and they were very influential, to say the least. The Magnificent Seven is basically a Westernized (in more than one way, oh ho ho ho ho) The Seven Samurai remake and his oddball goofy film The Hidden Fortress served as an inspiration for Star Wars. As for whether or not to recommend watching the films based on that, now that's something... else. I guess you know that already, anyway. There's a certain melancholy to Kurosawa's movies that is also very present in Escaflowne. Somewhere between 6 and 7/10 seems legit. Perhaps not enough to reach 7/10, there were some things in the film that made preciously little sense and even less if detached from prior knowledge of the series, there certainly was an odd shortcut or two taken in writing. Hard to blame the film for it, as it apparently struggled with funding, and it's fairly easy to see where all the money went - if nothing else, the film is a visual feast that unlike it's late 80ies and early 90ies counterparts holds up much better. I guess, in part, also due to it being more than just visually interesting. Squint a little and one can see that with an extra half an hour of runtime and some changes there'd be a genuinely good film in there. Anyway... It could be argued that the characters and themes weren't put in the garbage bin* as much as they were replaced by a more serious, darker version of something similar. The primary impetus for the resolution of the plot in both the series and the film is Hitomi's arrival changing Van's outlook on fighting. The way they go about it is just completely different, with the film having the two of them fast-forward through depression in an unbelievable manner due to the limited runtime. Rebuild, on the other hand, is just a dumpster fire. If I had to choose, I'd rather rewatch Escaflowne than Rebuild, and that includes the first one, which is arguably the least bad of the bunch, and elements of the last one that were fine for a while - but yeah, in terms of judging Rebuild, I was the meanie zucchini here. I guess I still am. *That may or may not be a garbage bin depending on one's own outlook and interests. It's certainly not wrong to say the film took a giant dump on everything the show was. To me, though, the Escaflowne film still feels less wrong than this Rebuild garbage, but perhaps that's because I already went through the painful process of watching these four dumpster fires, and at least Escaflowne didn't waste my time like Rebuild and it's accumulated total of what feels like twenty hours of screentime.