efaardvark

I'm not huge on romance. I also don't really get into "favorites" as my interests tend to change. That said, here's a few that come to mind. In no particular order... The Ancient Magus' Bride Spice and Wolf Itazura na Kiss Clannad: After Story Lovely★Complex The World is Still Beautiful Ok, so I can't count. (I could actually name a few more "favorites".) If you're looking for general-audience stuff to use to introduce normies to anime then you might try things like Kimi ni Todoke or Toradora!, though those are a bit too diabetes-inducing for my tastes, especially KnT.

Played a bit of minecraft with relatives in Wisconsin. Building a large fortified town or some sort of bastide around a village we found. Carcassonne comes to mind, though the design of the walls is straight from the imagination of my SIL. My brother and I were building shops and homes for the villagers inside while she worked on the walls. Going to have probably a couple dozen villagers when we're done. (That's if the lag doesn't get us first. ) Once we get all of them placed and leveled up this is going to be a lively place. We're not strapping the villagers down like you seen in most "trading hall" designs on youtube or twitch either. We're trying to build sectors within the town where the villagers are free to wander and mingle a bit while still keeping the villagers confined enough to not lose track of their beds or profession blocks. Kind of a tricky balance given minecraft village mechanics, but it'll be cool if we can pull it off. There's a trial chamber right underneath where I was standing to take this screenshot too, so there's a "dungeon" to go adventuring in nearby.

OMG.. DDR5 memory is so freeking expensive!

Congrats on the vacation. Going to try to do that 2-week vacation thing myself at the end of the year. For me a vacation isn't a vacation unless it's so long that I forget my work password. I haven't been able to do that for years due to work schedule but it looks like this time it might work.

I liked that one too. I do agree that Ruri was a bit noisy, but I think the other characters were a lot quieter and that helped balance her out, especially Nagi.

With That Particular Shopping Day coming up I thought I'd take a few minutes to update my AM5 build list. I decided this would be a good opportunity to see how X's Grok performs as well. I'd already done the hard work - well except the part about funding the build - so I knew most of the answers. I just wanted to see if Grok could actually be helpful for something like this. I think the answer is "yes".. though with reservations. As usual with AI you don't really know what's going on in there. Is it really considering all the options? Did it not present any information that I might have found relevant or useful? It seemed to be in a hurry to take me shopping too. Could that be a 4th directive creeping in? Anyway, it gave me a link to the Q&A session so you can check it out yourself, if you've a mind to.... https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_24c912e8-5d78-4cae-8b56-96534a9a9e9b It's a nice build too, though quite expensive compared to what I've done in the past. Like double what I've ever spent on any of my builds to date. For reasons, including inflation. But... gak! This is basically why I haven't upgraded my system in about 6 years. Always hoping the price will come down. (Spoiler.. it doesn't.) If anyone does check it out please let me know what you think. I've also updated the page I've been maintaining for the build over on pcpartpicker if you don't care about the AI stuff.

Broke a tooth a couple days ago so today I had to go to the dentist. Q: What time is it when you go to the dentist? A: Toothurty Maybe I shoulda posted that to the dad jokes thread?

I've been into astronomy for a long time as well. I have a nice 10" CAT but I too live in a light-polluted urban area and don't use it much anymore. In theory I could jump to the other side of the mountains where there's mostly uninhabited desert to get away from it, but the 'scope weighs a ton and I'm not getting any younger! (I'm also a bit nervous about actually using it or transporting it anywhere. Now that Orion and Meade have gone out of business if something breaks I don't know how I would get it fixed.) I've made myself a career doing space however, and I'm still really interested in anything and everything to do with the topic(s). Some of that stuff coming from James Webb for instance is quite amazing and intriguing. I've sat through hours of HD video from LRO in low orbit around the moon. Then there's Juno and all those pics of Jupiter, Europa Clipper to look forward to, the 2 Mars rovers that are still functioning, etc. People are still studying all the data that came back from Cassini before that mission ended. At work we're doing testing for Artemis II and Blue Origin's "Mark 1" lunar lander going up in a couple months.

Same here. One of the few where the characters are adults and not high/middle school, but the story isn't too serious or overly dramatic in spite of that. The pacing is casual and in places it's almost more slice-of-life than romcom. Being older myself IMHO it'd be better if it were more josei and less shoujo but I'm not going to complain too loudly. This was actually a rewatch for me. It isn't one I've watched very often but it appeared in my feed and seemed worth it.

This morning I decided that I needed to play Rimworld. I haven't played it in a while and thought it sounded like fun. About 2 hours in I decided that I was wrong. More a me problem than with the game. I've played it before and usually enjoy it a lot. But Rimwold is one of those games that requires planning and keeping track of a lot of details at once and for some reason my brain did not want to engage today. I kept having to scramble to deal with events that I should have been more prepared for. Maybe I should have tried a lower difficulty level. Or gone with something simple like Stardew Valley.

Just finished Wotakoi this morning.

Welcome!

Gamers Nexus has a good overview of Valve's new Frame headset. Looks like it's primarily aimed at streaming, but it's actually a decent Steam machine itself. It's running a modern Snapdragon ARM processor and has 16GB/8GB RAM/VRAM so it's a bit underpowered compared to consoles or desktop PCs but it's actually a step above the Steam Deck in some aspects. If a game isn't especially hardware-hungry the headset can run ARM or x86 executables on the headset alone. Of course, being a Steam machine means it can also be used to play a Steam game on a PC, using the headset's hardware to interact with the the game remotely. And wirelessly! This is where it got my attention. Yes, the Frame and hand controllers are wireless. You don't even have to set up a "lighthouse" setup for tracking. The Frame has dedicated outward-facing cameras and IR illumination to enable inside-out tracking for the headset and controllers. It also has a low-latency 6Ghz link for communication with a PC. For me this wireless aspect combined with the SteamOS's remote play capability could be a game-changer. No word on pricing yet but the GN piece reports that the desktop unit will be "priced like an entry-level PC, not a console". Nothing special there. It's basically a SFF PC running SteamOS so that's not surprising. It runs at about 200W overall power draw so nothing too crazy going on inside. Maybe around a Ryzen 7600 level of performance using basically overclocked laptop-spec parts with a desktop-spec cooling system to compensate. The main drawback that I noticed is that the CPU and memory seem to be soldered on so it's not upgradable. It does have a full-length M.2 slot and a microSD slot. I see no reason to buy the desktop if you already have a decent PC. OTOH, I see no real reason to avoid it either. It is compact and should fit unobtrusively into an entertainment setup for streaming and playing games if you don't already have something along those lines filling that role. (But I do want to see the price.) The headset "will not cost more than an index". That's good because an Index and a set of controllers will set you back nearly $2k last I checked. Hopefully the Frame will be quite a bit less than that. If a Frame + a set of controllers is over $1lk then I don't think this will be something that many people will buy. However, if it is less than that then I might very well get one myself.

Looking at a couple new gaming-related news stories as I go into the weekend.. First is the latest Steam hardware lineup looks pretty solid. I will definitely be looking forward to reviews, especially of the headset. (Edit: I've already found one.) No word on prices yet. Second is the "playable" alpha release of Kitten Space Agency. I was (and still am) a big fan of the original Kerbal Space Program so I'm definitely going to check this out if I can. Unfortunately it doesn't run on linux and it reportedly has issues with AMD GPUs so I won't be running it on my Linux/Radeon system. It's also a demo of an alpha at this point. But at least they're giving fans something to fiddle with. I'm sure there will be plenty of 'Tubies to look at.