33882 replies to this topic

[pokari]

Nope *hugs* >w<

Well, maybe to the extent that there's a lot to unpack from different angles, so I thought about how to reply instead of replying.

18

But there's other weird stuff at play: My older sister came home after visiting somewhere else a few weeks, and so she was quarantining within one room and bathroom in the house until she got virus tests back as a precaution.

Which meant I wasn't using that bathroom as part of nightly tooth-brushing routine which meant as part of doing things differently I didn't, say, wander around the house while brushing my teeth and looking here on my phone as I often might (...I don't know what this says about me, this description probably isn't fully accurate anyway, just know my habits are weird, as one's at-home habits often are, and were disrupted ~w~ )

This is probably more explanation that was needed but it's 3:30 in the morning so some incoherent rambling from my personage is to be expected. :'3

[PItiful Boar]

19 where would your sister go in the middle of a pandemic? owo 

[pokari]

20

Visiting people. I didn't say it was wise, though she is doing it cautiously, inasmuch as that can be an operative word here. It is what it is.

This is not the sister I usually talk about, mind, this is the elder edition who normally doesn't live here.

[PItiful Boar]

21 nothing against visiting people as I would like to do the same as well but no restaurants are open 

And maybe some attractions 

I really can’t tell how open people are to going to places 

and I wonder where the people are catching these things 

[pokari]

22

Well, we know that stuff spreads from, for instance, weddings and political rallies, so anything without both masks and social distancing is a huge problem, even if the duration is relatively short.

How open people are to going out varies widely, at the moment, it seems, from "I guess it's mostly okay now" on one end to "yeah I'm staying indoors and quarantining my groceries" on the other. We're more the latter group.

Problem is partially that some of the federal agencies that should be figuring this stuff out (California doesn't really have an equivalent of the CDC, on its own), are either phoning it in at best or deliberately lying to appease the orangutan-in-cheif at worst. We're left to make our own judgement calls.

Edited by pokari, 03 September 2020 - 06:34 AM.

[PItiful Boar]

23 so i finished tomb raider, from 2013, one of the few games that I went to the very end. ... how did Lara destroy the evil undead japanese queen at the end, burning stake right through the heart, like you know, traditional vampire killer tactics. Seriously? an undead can survive through anything but just not through a stake to the heart I guess  

[pokari]

24

I thought it might be particularly because she was vulnerable because she was mid-transfer-ceremony, though that might just be me filling in with tropes from other fiction.

A stake through the heart does kill most things, to be fair. Pretty much only zombies are normally exempt. And in general the undead in that game seemed ageless and perhaps supernaturally enhanced, but perhaps not immortal in the strictly invulnerable sense (e.g. vulnerable to shotguns and the like, not prone to standing back up after going down).

[PItiful Boar]

25 i was actually hoping she would finish the transfer so we have a final final boss, but nuuu ... 

 

but I'm not sure how the mechanics for that would work... maybe like climb columns and platforming or something ... and you have to push her over the ledge while avoiding the obstacles all the way...

anyways it was a good game, even though i have to play in a tiny little window to keep me from going dizzy. I even measured the frame rates with steam, and i was getting decent 60 fps, so I shouldn't be dizzy, but I am. The only thing I didn't like was the death scenes. I'd rather not see her get impaled all the time. It was more like ... again?  

 

Anyways... there's the sequel but I'll hold off until some other time. 

btw how u like them batman games? worth it?

[PItiful Boar]

26 weather's too hot

[pokari]

Yes, it is. x.x I went outside today and it was oppressive. Reminded me of certain parts of Texas except instead of being hot and humid it was just that hot straight-up.

27

I haven't played any of the Batman games, somehow. I hear some of them are quite good, but...

The only thing I didn't like was the death scenes. I'd rather not see her get impaled all the time. It was more like ... again?

I remember thinking it was a bit much the first time I saw it played back in college (honestly unpleasant sometimes—like, is this really necessary?).

By the time I played myself it had started to feel almost like a running joke ("Ah yes, Laura has died. There are of course many ways to die tumbling down a river, but I see that today again, against all odds, the only option is getting impaled by a ten foot iron spike.")

[PItiful Boar]

28 yipe

man i open the browser and i'm flooded with news like - "one dead from protest shooting... hit and run victim identified... man kills wife because she refuses sex..." etc.

[pokari]

29

Why do you see news when you open the browser? o_o; That sounds painful.

If the news is just making you depressed, it might also be best to find a different news source ("someone killed someone for horrible reasons" isn't really news in and of itself, and news sources needlessly full of that stuff are awful). The broad strokes of the news are available in lots of different forms—there was a period where I was absorbing most of my news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and that went... surprisingly well, all things considered. One should of course be careful about finding something too biased, though.

During the Obama era I was mostly on NPR and BBC radio. They at least don't do generic clickbait-y "look someone died horribly" stuff, though they often do talk about horrible systemic stuff going on at length, which can be just as harrowing. But when the orangutan took the throne, hearing the news delivered straight just became too stressful.

I have taken as of late to absorbing my news from wise-cracking pugilistic lawyers on Twitter, which has been an experience, although not necessarily one I would whole-heartedly recommend.

And it's always okay to retreat into one's shell for a bit and ignore the news. <3 There's no point in knowing all that's going on the world if you're not in a place where you can cope with it.

*hugs*

[pokari]

I bought a new ssd because it was getting harder and harder to find more stuff to shuffle off my C drive.

I decided to be fancy and get an M.2 connector SSD using PCIE lanes, since my motherboard has slots for it and supports it. I did not know what I was getting in to.

If I had known I was starting down a path that would lead me to try to rebuild my boot sectors from scratch (not because I broke anything as such; the original drive I'm working out of is in fact untouched; it's the cloned drive I'm playing at surgeon with, to try to get it to do UEFI boot instead of MBR), I might not have gone down this path.

Heck, I still don't know if this is going to work at the end.

30

There have been satisfying intermediate victories, though. Like the working windows recovery environment for Windows 7 that I cobbled together from the original install disk (with drivers for another motherboard), from which I cloned an .iso (what is this, 2006?) to use in making a recovery USB stick, from whence I could modify the recovery-environment's drivers on said stick so that—unlike with the original install disk meant for a certain Dell motherboard—I could use my mouse and keyboard, and, y'know, do anything.

This so I could create UEFI-style boot sectors, clone the old C partition over, and try to populate the UEFI boot data appropriately.

This is like the super abridged version of what's going on... in the current attempt. If I tried to list everything that's gone wrong in the past four days of this it would be a whole saga, as is typical for this type of adventure XD

...By the way, if anything I've just said seems like total nonsense, that's fine. uwu

[PItiful Boar]

31 um I think I should default my home page to bing or some other clean search website... 

 

M2 drives are not particularly big but they are fast, but I'm not sure why you would trade speed for size if that's what you're doing. Personally I would have just gotten a NAS drive, like the WD My Cloud, which I have, and you can expand on it if need be. The drives are ok but they do occasionally wake up and make noises. I've gotten use to it though. 

Pretty sure you should just install a clean version of windows 10. Windows don't like to be cloned. I've done something similar in the past, playing with all sorts of boot loaders and tools trying to hackintosh working on my laptop. It worked for a while, but I gave up eventually and reverted back.

 

Happy adventuring nonetheless. 

[pokari]

M.2 drives... not big...? What? Well, I'm not sure what scale you're going by. My choices for this one were 1TB or 2TB. I think of those as totally normal sizes for HDDs, let alone SSDs? Certainly reasonable sizes for a C: drive. Some big stuff can go on other internal/external drives, sure.

And a NAS is high-latency big data storage. It serves a totally different purpose from an internal SSD? In my head anyway.

Well, okay... I'm at risk of over-generalizing to some extent maybe... But even if I felt up to the task of figuring out how to ensure a super-low-latency high-request-bandwidth NAS, to the extent that that's possible (which I don't feel like figuring out, and I feel like that might involve motherboard changes to get the right i/o setup but I'm not sure, and I'd still need SSDs), I still wouldn't be able to put the Windows installation itself on the drive (since Windows abhors not being attached to the motherboard in question. I think basically as a DRM thing...? But, for instance, making Windows run off a USB stick is quite difficult and janky, I say as someone who's done it before).

But I haven't even used all the SATA ports inside my machine anyway so what would a NAS really get me? XD

32

As for the speed/size trade-offs, of course there are times when having a smaller faster thing is better? Not enough to justify PCIE/M.2 drives, but I want to have my system files and swap on an SSD at the very least—that difference is, without exaggeration, one of night and day (especially when memory starts running a little low). That's a moreso a matter of random-access memory vs. hard-drive-head-seek thrashing, mind. M.2 isn't really necessary—but it turns out they're pretty much the same price as equivalent SATA SSDs now (which was a surprise), so why not get the faster thing? (I did not know then that it would take most of a week to get it working as I wanted, mind XD)

Also, you must understand my raw determination to keep this installation alive and well. XD My computer is my baby. It may undergo some brain transplants now and then, and it has an upsetting transmogrification into Windows 10 somewhere in its future. I will do what is necessary to nurse it through these things. u.u

...having said that >w< I got it working this morning X3 I get a level-up for this, right? :'D

[PItiful Boar]

33 good job, to think m2 SSD running windows 7.... that's just ... (don't have the word for it) 

[PItiful Boar]

nice sky color

Edited by Feishy Pit Boar, 09 September 2020 - 07:04 PM.

[pokari]

Welcome to Mars, my friend.

34

[pokari]

I did have to reinstall one driver, for the sound card, that was acting up (being way too loud—like so loud that at 20-30%-ish the sound would start dipping on any louder sounds because it was requesting stuff so loud it just couldn't do it.

Makes me wonder (all I should have been able to bork would be things loaded at boot time? Does that include sound somehow?)

35

Also had to install the manufacturer's own nvme driver for hibernation to work (man, the chain of support needed for these things XD)

As always at times like these, one wonders what else is broken. But I haven't had any remarkable problems running games or anything like that (even VR).

[PItiful Boar]

36 wow vr 

What’s the state of vr these days 

 was so tired yesterday that I was basically a zombie.... slept at eleven and woke up at nine today, which is like ten hours of sleep... I do feel recharged though which is good 

Also went for some comfort food aka Burger King burgers last night.