majestic

So, I, like, never having played Kingdom Come: Unwoked Incline, just went and looked up Theresa, because @BruceVC has kept mentioning her for a while now. I had certain expectations going into this image search, mostly because the aforementioned poster said that Veilguard did not cater enough to the horny incel core audience of these games. Now, to make this comparison properly, here's one of these character models from Veilguard that doesn't cater to the horny incel core audience. Probably because of her rack size, but that I do not know for sure, because said poster refused to actually tell what it was about that game that made it unappealing for horny incels. This is Neve in her civilian attire, i.e. in non-combat locations. Take not of the lack of anime style giant boobies. Now, before looking up Theresa, here's what I thought I would get: That's how Neve should look, I guess, to make the incels happy? And this is Theresa, apparently. At least according to a quick googling. Imagine my surprise when Theresa turned out to be a plain country bumpkin, completely unremarkable. Normal, one might say. Certainly less catered to horny incels than Neve was. This is so confusing.

Having had some spare time at my hands I re-watched parts of the MCU and ventured bravely forth into the multiverse era, which I so far have avoided. To put it bluntly, I probably should have continued avoiding it. Alas. Films I have rewatched: The Avengers Captain America: The Winter Soldier The Avengers: Age of Ultron Captain America: Civil War Doctor Strange Avengers: Infinity War Avengers: Endgame Rewatching the films did not really change my opinions much, with two exceptions: Doctor Strange I didn't dislike as much as I did when watching it at the theater. The CGI's still terrible and the ending was and always will be utterly predictable and boring, both of which drag the film down immensely. Still, I guess not having to watch all of it at once helps with some films, right? I also disliked Endgame a lot less the second time around, but it is still so much worse than Infinity War. Still not a very enjoyable experience, but being able to ignore the extended CGI battle bonanza at the end because I already watched it once helped. Almost all of the films after The Avengers (except the Doctor Strange origin story, obviously) suffer from a lack of proper setup (watching them back to back makes this even more noticable), with Age of Ultron more or less taking the cake, being a completely incoherent mess of ideas and concepts thrown into a blender, basically the Star Trek: Into Darkness of the MCU. Civil War will always be dreck, but the film cannot really help being based on the comic storyline. Things I watched from the Multiverse: Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness Thor: Love and Thunder Plus some bits of WandaVision and Loki, but I am not finished with the series. I am somewhat willing to ignore the complete lack of sense that the Doctor Strange movie made and simply hope that the ending of WandaVision will explain what the hell happened with Wanda. If it doesn't, then that is another negative. It speaks volumes of what I think of WandaVision that I so far have not managed to finish a nine episode series. That sitcom gimmick became so old so fast that even I stopped watching and moved on (and I sat through all of Rings of Power so far). Eh. Loki's first season was fine, but it left me with no real desire to continue with season two - I'll watch that eventually though, of course, just like WandaVision. Looks like they brought Short Round to Loki, which... I guess could be a plus. Thor: Love and Thunder though, yikes. What the hell. I love surrealist reinterpretations of a series as much as the next guy (the Darin Morgan episodes of X-Files were top notch entertainment), but that just fell completely flat. The goats were fun. Everyting else? Uhm. Nope.

We have always been at war with Eastasia. Incidentially, Natalie Wynn just released a video essay on the abject state of US politics. Sort of.

Arcanum really is in dire need of a remaster. A remaster that makes it playable. I have no idea how you guys can stand "playing" that game.

Finished It Takes Two. We needed ten hours, and it started to drag in the middle. The ending was decently paced. Odd to say that the game started to drag while it was only 10 hours long, but I guess that's partially having to play it with a 12-year-old whose interest is in doing everything but what he's supposed to. On the bright side it wasn't gutter level trash like Human Fall Flat or a sandboxy make your own adventure like Wobbly Life.

All the false penguins listed in a neat video:

I found that the best way to avoid such experiences is to simply mimic their behaviour. Just breathe through your mouth and mutter to yourself while walking around in public and people will avoid you.

Well, more like scientific discoveries note made because of the Annoying Orange.

The 'Murican rah-rah-ing about having guns to oppose tyrannical government instead of shooting up schools is just silly talk. It'll be *crickets* from the gun nuts, or else they'll sign up to help with the invasion. Eh, honestly, order the Rafale from the French, that would be more fun. Also... Yeah, there are also no NSA backdoors in operating systems and American hardware, that's just online misinformation.

So how long until Trump renames Rosa Parks Day to Uppity Bus Rider Day?

That was called Stargate Universe and nobody liked it, so it got cancelled.

Even for those 3%, the actual infection they get if they are exposed to measles post-vaccination is often a lot less problematic. I was one of those kids where the vaccination did not take fully, and I got sick from my brother, who could not be vaccinated due to ongoing and chronic pulminary tract infections as a kid, and brought it home from kindergarten: some unvaccinated child with stable genius parents. He almost died from it too, while I just had the usual rash with a slight itch and super explosive diarrhea. Needs diapers at the age of six because getting to the toilet in time is impossible sort of explosive. Fun fact, measles has a potential side effect in the form of Dawson disease, which is basically a time bomb planted by the measles infection that will go off in your brain, killing you without recourse. Fun disease, don't forget to bring your unvaccinated kids to a measles party. The dumbest thing of it all is though that the distrust of the measles vaccination goes back to faked paper by Andrew Wakefield who wanted to discredit existing measles vaccinations to sell his own. The same sort of idiots who still cling to his disproven lies are the same ones that tell everyone that big pharma is just trying to make us sick for profit, popping sugar placebos with a 10000% price markup in the form of homeopathy. If it weren't for the harm done to kids who are not to blame for their dumb parents, I'd be happy to see RFK stopping vaccinations entirely. The world's way too full of people anyway, and if some of the worst offenders of wasting resources want to off themselves in a terribly painful way, who am I to argue. Just go and die. Alas.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-canada-doubles-tariffs-national-emergency-electricity-rcna195810 I'm beginning to think that it's not RFK who has the brain worm.

Kinda like how Steve is doing TL;DW segments of his videos upfront these days. The TL;DW basically being that it in gaming, it is performing equally to a 9800X3D - which is a bit of a change as last generation's 16 core pards with 3D V-Cache usually had scheduling problems, and in production it is pretty much equivalent to a 9950X, give or a take a couple of percentage points. So, if you're like one of the three people on the planet who do heavier duty production workloads on your personal computer and some gaming on the side and can't live without the best gaming performance possible, this is the best CPU for you. Is it the most optimal? Eh, not really. I mean, it's not like a 9950X or a Core 285K will fail in gaming and still has the same or very similar production power - for much cheaper. Cheapest prices I could find for my region for the 285K was 610€, with the 9950X costing 680€. The 9950X3D's MSRP is set at 750€ (yeah, right ).

One of those days where one realizes that the vast majority of people working in IT are basically naught but trained monkeys.

Steve also said in that video that certain MSRP cards just don't make money, or at least they didn't for EVGA, and that was before inflation and TSMC's monopoly on modern process nodes. It really does stand to reason that AMD doesn't have the clout to do that beyond an initial launch window or with subsidies they probably don't want to afford. Still hoping - probably beyond reason - that Intel can get their heads unstuck from their asses and make their new nodes work. Would be a lot better if someone else than the silly Tangerine in Chief would be at he helm. Not to drag politics into the tech forum, but TSMC is sitting on a powder keg and we have no idea when it will go off. They understandably also said that the newest nodes will remain in Taiwan, which makes sense. It's the one thing stopping Winnie Pooh from bringing them home into the Reich. The Tangerine, meanwhile, doesn't get that setting up tariffs is not going to make factories and fabrication plants appear magically. Not for steel or aluminum or car assembly, and even less so for bleeding edge chips production. We already had a taste of what happens when TSMC stops producing microprocessors for a while, and it was not pretty, and for all their faults, Sleepy Joe and the Democrats at least realized that. Granted, I don't exactly know how effective the Chips Act subsidy was, but The Tangerine and his cronies look at the situation and say: "This is fine, companies should bring their production plants back to America because they have to, not because they're being paid for it!" As it stands, we better hope China doesn't catch up with modern process nodes before someone with a little more strategic foresight is back at the helm in the US, assuming that is at all possible once the Tangerine's done ruining the country. I am somewhat baffled that for all his tech bro advisors, no one seems to have told him yet how much hangs in the balance of his good friend Winnie playing nice.

The North American Economic Union is a part of the NWO agenda (and also includes Mexico, generally), by the way. The conspiracy theory usually goes that this would be done through free trade and negotiations, but adding Canada as the 51st state would work just as well. As we can see Trump is doing NWO work, even though we elected him to oppose the NOW and the Deep State. It is all very frustrating for me. They really rigged the system. Who would have thought that someone who has been part of the elite his entire life isn't fighting against the elites in a way he claimed he would be? I am very disappoint.

Andrea Dworkin might have been onto something when she said the right wing conservatives (men and women alike) define womanhood through the ability to whelp. Since trans women are by definition unable to do so, they're basically a threat to the definition of womanhood, and through that, women - wich means for the conservative men that they threatened their women, who no one else is allowed to threaten their women but themselves. That's a bit like why conservative Christians dislike Muslims even though they basically want the same thing: for the womanfolk to stay at home to cook, whelp and rear their children. Since they cannot deal with the cognitive dissonance, they don't even notice or double down on their viewpoints. Hilariously exemplified in one of the interviews I saw with an avid MAGA cultist who stated, on camera, that he's with President Trump on the Muslim ban, because Muslims don't respect American women. All the while wearing a t-shirt with Hillary Clinton's likeness on it, reading: TRUMP THAT BITCH. Meanwhile anti-trans thought also finds purchase in feminist circles because they're seen as men threatening what they fought for. This is history repeating itself insofar as feminists originally tried to exclude lesbians because they were seen as a bunch of butch dykes and feminists did not want women who look and behave more like men than women to be part of their group. Ultimately, even modern feminists still struggle to define womanhood outside of what tradition dictates. Sure, the more radical elements have their girl bosses, which are basically women who adopted toxic masculinity, which is an incredibly self-defeating solution for a movement of a gender suffering immensely from toxic masculinity, hence the rise of various counter-definitions (including the tradwife, which loops neatly back to traditional role models). Then you have, of course, the elements who chafe under homophobia no longer being acceptable in modern society and simply supplanted theirs with transphobia. That is why you get exactly the same arguments against transgenders as there were against homosexuals (and lesbians). Verbatim, even, at times. They make all our children gay when they're allowed to teach. They pollute the children's minds, making them want to transition. Now that we have accepted homosexuality, there's suddenly so many of them. Now that transgenderism gains acceptance, people identifying transgender suddenly tripled. Now you might want to say: but, but, but @majestic, you only talked about trans women, what about the trans men? Yeah, what about them. They get caught in all the negativity and anti-trans legislation, but let's be real, it's the trans women who are the targets. They tickle fears of being trapped in conservative men, they are visible reminders of the self-loathing of conservative men who wank to shemale porn and are ashamed of it, they're seen as a threat for women and they're the targets of feminists who see them as encroaching on what little they can agree on that defines a woman, and by extension, that also garners the attention of the moderates. I mean, honestly, if a lot of well known women like J.K. Rowling think that trans women are just men wanting access to women's toilets and locker rooms to rape them, there just might be something to it, no? Meanwhile the trans men, they're seen as what? Taking the girl boss a little too far? At worst, they're targets of more radical feminists who see them as traitors to their gender.

I have, uh, on occasion, posted strange music videos in this thread, but what YouTube suggested to me right now is, and this isn't the usual @majestic hyperbole, I would say, like, probably, totally, like... I mean, there's no way around this, this is worse than anything Scooter made. Excuse me while I'm trying to stem the blood flowing out my ears and gouge my eyes out.

No, just proof that the average American is even dumber than our stereotypes make them out to be.

As expected, the 9070 is a nothing more than an upsell card. 14% slower but only 8% cheaper than the 9070 XT. Marginally less useless than the RTX 5070, but that's marginally less useless than a card that shouldn't even exist. In more fun news, the XFX cards seem to have sold out, and local street prices for the RX 9070 XT are now up to 1200€, which means they're now 10% more expensive than the overall (arguably) superior RTX 5070 TI. The RTX 4070 TI Super still costs below 900€, making it by far the best purchase at the price range. If anyone's interested, the RX 9070 is currently about 50€ cheaper than a 4070 TI Super.

Local street prices are in: the one available RX 9070 XT model (the XFX Mercury OC) costs 821€, and while the RTX 5070 TI goes for a significant premium at ~1000€, the RTX 4070 TI Super being available for ~850€ means both of those cards are in a bit of a tough spot with that pricing. Although RTX 4000 series cards are price trending upwards pretty fast right now and the 4070 TI Super is seemingly going out of stock. Dunno if they're generally running low or if people who held out on upgrading for the 5000 series are now buying last gen.

TL;DW: Pure rasterization performance sits, as expected, somewhere between the 4070 TI Super and the 5070 TI, with some outliers where even the 5070 is better and others where it encroaches on nVidia's 80ies models. In RT, at least in titles where RT matters and visually pays off to use, AMD has caught up to, uhm, the 3000 series, posting a pretty good generational improvement. Relative scaling at 4K is hurt by the GDDR6 memory, the 9070 XT tends to proportionally get better the lower the resolutions get. Steve has included FPS per $MSRP charts that don't really mean anything as the 5070 TI can't be found at MSRP and we have no idea if the 9070 XT will be, but the results are generally in favor of AMD, as expected, since they put the 9070 XT at 80% of the RTX 5070 TI's MSRP (for anywhere between 80% to 102% of the 5070 TI's rasterization performance, much less in RT, of course). Yeah, so, uhm, as much es every tech channel seems to like the card, that's probably wishful thinking. I don't think these cards are really going to make a dent in nVidia's market share, but I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

TL;DW: Ballpark of the usual 10-30% faster than the not-super 4070, in line with, well, every other nVidia release this generation. Steve's insinuations throughout the video would put AMD's 9070 XT somewhere in the ballpark of the 9700 XT, right where I "extrapolated" (lol) it to be from AMD's marketing claims. Which, assuming it is available for the MSRP and doesn't die whenever you turn on RT, might be decent value compared to the 5070 TI, but probably not good enough to dissuade anyone from buying nVidia.

You put too much stock in our ability to remove our collective heads from our asses, really. But yeah, would be nice to see.