efaardvark

Welcome! Humor is in the mind of the beholder but my comedy quick-list (besides the ones previously listed) would include: Acchi Kocchi Nichijou Kotoura-san Bokura wa Minna Kawai-sou Aharen-san wa Hakarenai K-On! Azumanga Daioh hth

Some really evil ones.... What do evil cows say? Moo ha ha. What do you call evil duck rituals? Fowl practices. Why don’t vampires feel bad about the evil things they do? They’re incapable of reflection.

"Only" 2 years and still buggy. This is a big reason why I don't pre-order. When a company releases a game I like for a price I like then I'll buy it. But I buy a game to play it, not be an unpaid beta-tester and wait 2 years for bug fixes. Never mind release day. Half the time all the bugs aren't even fixed by the time the company execs decide they've wasted enough resources and drop support to move on to the next big money-grab. Pre-orders enable this egregious behavior. As for the stock-holders. I honestly could not care less about their profits. They aren't complaining about the game having bugs, just that they didn't get the money they were told they'd get. That's another big problem with the industry. As an aside, there's a similar - though much more serious - problem in the chinese real estate market. It seems that a lot of people gave some shady developers a lot of money up front for a product that didn't meet expectations. Sometimes a product wasn't produced at all. Sound familiar? Pre-orders are a Bad Idea. Wait until the product is released. If it does what you want for a price that you're willing to pay then you can buy it.

Did a quick test of my new gfx card in KSP today. Well, quick for me. All I was planning to do was a check of FPS and look for things like driver or other issues. The card seemed to work fine. 3 hours in the VAB later I looked at the clock and remembered that I had other adulting things to do. Hate it when that happens.

Not me but I do know someone who is. Very. The amusing(?) thing is that she's a career Marine brat.. even to the point of being a Parris Island instructor for a while. I half expect to one day see her on the evening news for freaking out and killing some Bozo for offering her a balloon.

ikr.. I had it on double-speed while paying bills yesterday but that's still like 3+ anime episodes worth of time! (Then again I probably wasn't paying it the attention I would have if I'd been watching anime either, but still...) Not to mention all the time the youtubers themselves put into the production side of it. Not sure if this applies here but it reminds me of that Pascal quote, "I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter".

Decided to follow one of those woodland mansion maps and ... I think I found myself a new base.

I have no idea where to put this one but I had to share this 'tubie discussing anime ships.

Gamers Nexus has a close-up look at AMD's reference-design RX 7900XTX. I like that the physical form is a lot more reasonable than the 4090. The 4090 is a freekin' 4-slot card! At $1600 and given the electrical power requirements the 4090 is simply out of bounds for most builds (and pocketbooks). AMD said one of their design goals for their new cards was for people to take out their old card, put in the new one, and power the system back up. No rebuilds. No motherboard or power supply upgrades required. Just plug it in and go. The new card does require 300W, but 200+ cards are already out there. This can use the existing power supplies & connectors and the form factor is a much more reasonable 2-slot size.

Just queued up Shakugan no Shana. A personal favorite. I really liked it when it came out and I've rewatched it a couple/few times since. The whole series is a bit long for me - I prefer the 12/24 episode-and-done format - so I tend to resist starting it but so far every time I've done so I've finished it.. and happy to have done so.

Death by umbrella in the first episode.. yeah, you could say that.

Got a few minutes just now to test my new gfx card in minecraft. I'll (hopefully) have some more time later this weekend to mess with both minecraft and KSP but I just had to get in there and try a couple things that my old card had trouble with, like dealing with water and reflections. The old card could do a decent job if I was willing to put up with single-digit frame rates. Unfortunately if I turned the quality down enough to make it playable it looked horrible. The new card can do a decent job AND still give me a playable frame rate. Seems about on par with an RTX 3060 from that other company.

I’ve long suspected that I exist only as a plaything of the gods. It doesn’t really matter though. These cards are higher-end with MSRPs of $1000 and $900. Not exactly in my price range. Even at half that price I wouldn’t be buying either one at this point. That said I’m really interested in seeing performance benchmarks and I’m intrigued by how much memory and video bandwidth these cards have. 96FPS in Assassin’s Creed on an 8K monitor at 60hz is impressive. Not sure I see the point of even 4K in practical terms but specs-wise that’s a lot of pixel-pushing. And number-crunching. I wonder what the 64-bit math throughput is like on these cards?

So of course now that I've bought my new gfx card, AMD announces their RDNA3 cards. That's ok. I really did need a new card. The connectors on the old one were failing and I just could not wait any longer. If the old card had actually failed then I would have been without a functional computer for some period of time. That was simply not an option for me. Anyway, the new cards do look nice. They're definitely going to make NVIDIA reconsider their 4090 pricing if nothing else. The top end card, the 7900 XTX has lower power requirements, more memory, lower price, and likely (pending actual reviews/benchmarking) better performance than the 4080. They don't even require that funky new 12VHPWR power connector that keeps melting. I'll not be replacing my new 6600XT with either of these new cards just yet but by the time I get around to building my new AM5/DDR5/PCI5 system these will probably be "old" and dropping in price so I'll definitely be looking into these cards for that build.

Yeah, I’ll also be skipping this particular bit of kit. Hopefully by the time my original Mark-1 eyes go completely they’ll have fully bionic replacements because contacts give me the creeps as well.

How about augmented reality built into a contact lens?

Went a bit crazy at the company store today. Honestly I just went there to get a new cap to replace my "InSight" cap. I've had that one since EDL (landing day) and it has served me well for the last few covid years but it is looking a bit shabby and worn these days. However, when I got there I found out they'd just got a bunch of new stock in. Stuff tends to go quick and sometimes items don't come back so I took advantage of the opportunity. Final damage: 4 new T-shirts, 3 pins, a sticker, and 2 caps. (And yes that's a Kerbal coffee mug behind the Europa Clipper cap. Mug sold separately.)

AI and Ozzy. What was it the professor said? "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."

Welcome!

Kakushigoto

I do that all the time, and not only with anime. Horror movies, news programs, "reality" shows...

Got on a KSP2 'tubie thread while munching on lunch today. Real info is pretty scarce and it's all subject to change anyway by the time release day comes so you have to take most of it with a grain of salt. But I'm a KSP junkie so .. I gotta.

That guy who wears jet engines on his arms is still at it...

I got my new gfx card installed and yes, it actually works! It was an "open box" + low(ish) price thing so there was some question there. However, since it passed the "smoke test" I thought I'd take a minute to revisit some of the shaders & textures that I've got installed in my minecraft client. I dug out a screenshot taken while trying the SEUS PTGI "raytracing" shader that I had marginal results with before on my old card and duplicated the scene on the new one. The old card (RX 480 "POLARIS10") gave me a questionable 21FPS. That's low enough that things like multi-mob combat would be difficult and really isn't good for much more than wandering around taking screenshots. The new card (RX 6600XT "DIMGREY_CAVEFISH") gives a more playable 48FPS. SEUS PTGI is a "ray tracing" shader and this card is not exactly a high-end beast so that's something of an unrealistic test but I'm pleased with the results nevertheless. Using my usual Sildur's shaders I get just over 100FPS with vsync off. With Sildurs and vsync on the game play is noticeably smoother than on the old card even in zombie hack-a-thons. I also get Iris's GPU usage indicator hovering around 90%, whereas with the old card it was always maxed out. The 100fps that I get with Sildur's is very close to what I get with just Iris too. i.e. no shaders. Of course in the no-shader case the GPU usage is down around 20%, but it is another indication that my GPU is keeping up with the game even with shaders active. Might even be an indication that it is time to start thinking about a CPU upgrade? (Already thinking along those lines for other reasons besides minecraft but I'm trying to hold off until AM5 socket and DDR5 memory goes mainstream so I can upgrade my whole system.) Anyway, I don't have time today to do a more in-depth investigation but the ballpark estimate is that the new card is maybe a bit more than twice as fast as the old one in terms of minecraft frame rates. It is also noticeably faster in some other respects such as initializing the game. I'll have to experiment a bit more to see if I can get to the point that minecraft is playable using the more resource-demanding packs like SEUS and high-resolution textures. I'm actually fairly happy with these initial results. I may have to back off on some of the settings to make it playable even in the more demanding game situations but if I can manage to do that it would be pretty cool.