The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming2

Back in business

The power supply is in my system, safe and sound. No magic smoke has escaped my case and my system seems to be running perfectly again. To celebrate I played a game, or should I say attempted to play a game.

I’ve only played Nights Into Dreams a few times. It’s a Sega game made for the Saturn in 1996. I never knew anyone who owned that particular console, so I didn’t know much about this game until it released on Steam with a bunch of other selections from Sega’s catalog. I’ve been going into this game blind as a bat trying to figure out what to do without having to look anything up. Here is my description of the game without having done any research first:

You’re a floating gay clown that goes around stealing children from within their dreams and eats floating balls and stars, while also destroying glass crab fixtures and traveling through onion rings that were made with anal beads (what is it with Sega and rings?).

Am I right? Let us consult Wikipedia:

The story follows teenagers Claris and Elliot, who enter Nightopia, a dream world where all dreams take place. With the help of Nights, an exiled “Nightmaren”, they begin a journey to stop the evil ruler Wizeman from destroying Nightopia and consequently the real world. Players control Nights flying through Claris and Elliot’s dreams to gather enough energy to defeat Wizeman and save Nightopia.

 

Well I was close.

I’ve made it to what I think is the first boss? It’s a giant clown sperm fish snake thing I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to get through that point. I’ll attempt it again sometime, but if I can’t progress I may have to consult the Youtube’s to see wtf I have to do. Feels kinda silly to need to do that so soon on what is basically the first level… Other than that I really like the game! It’s fun zipping through the air, flying across bright colorful worlds and taking in the sights. The controls are a little wonky when moving as the children, mainly the camera… that might be curable with the Steam Controller though. Perhaps I’ll contemplate this in my dreams… they have better graphics but sometimes the controls are also pretty wonked out. I can fly in my dreams too, but I don’t dress like that. 😛 At least not yet…

All in an Overlord's day

Baking and kitties

Managed to snap a couple quick pix of Stewie and Morty early in the morning chillaxin’ in their natural habitats.

Also did a little baking today to heat up the house AND have something to snack on.

Every year around this time of year I buy whole fresh cranberries to make muffins with. Unfortunately all I had on hand were dried ones, but those are still nice in their own way. I also modified the recipe a bit to include pecans and holiday spices. Would of loved to have made an orange glaze to top them off, but no oranges…

My power supply arrived today. I should be back running normal tomorrow, just in time to start another work week! Ugh…

Technology

A Game Of Musical Hard Drives

I’ve been playing with 8TB of disc space today. I’ve been transferring my primary Steam drive since early this morning in alphabetical segments. I have almost every single part of my library installed on Windows (which makes it equally handy to just copy games over for quick Proton tests, life’s good being your own Steam game repository for other computers on the network) and it takes awhile to move 2TB of shit into a 4TB space, currently on the letter T as I write this.

I’m going to do a little digital house keeping and rearrange my drive structure, take out two of my 1TB drives and replace them with two 4TB’s, and just use 1TB drives for hot swapping or OS tests, any other mad act of science I can think of…

The rest of my day has been pretty quiet and mundane, the weather has been keeping me indoors sipping tea poured from my flowering teapot. Been awhile since I’ve had a flowering tea, its creme brulee green tea, highly recommend it.

Also would like to mention that I think I’ve confirmed that my crashing issues are the power supply. We plugged my Vega into my Dad’s gaming setup and it ran with flying colors. Played for well over an hour without a single crash or screen tear. He was happy for more than that reason though. He’s still on an x58 chipset and my RX Vega64 ran in his system without choking, apparently it is possible depending on the motherboard and BIOS you’re using. He updated his BIOS recently and it gave him UEFI support, which I think made it possible to run my GPU in his system. Yesterday was a good day all around, and it’ll be better when that damned power supply shows up, here’s to tomorrow I guess.

I also got some more of my Christmas shopping done. I’m thinking all that’s left will be gifts of the digital variety…

 

News

Don’t pay Newegg for fast shipping

I recently wrote that I ordered a power supply from Newegg, and that I paid a little extra for it to arrive early. Unfortunately it hasn’t arrived yet, though I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised. Ever since Newegg was sold off to the Chinese market they just haven’t been the same quality. One of the largest complaints that I read about was paying for fast delivery and still getting it later, late enough that they should of just stuck with the cheap or free shipping. At the same time I also heard other people claim that they’ve gotten their packages on time, sometimes earlier than expected… so it’s more of a gamble if you think about it, which isn’t exactly a great business model to have when your competition offers better shipping service.

I’m pissed to have paid for the additional service and not get my item on time, but at least I’m more privy to how Newegg conducts their business, and will be less likely to use their website anymore. it looks like from now on if I need to order an emergency item I’ll have to depend on Amazon Prime or a really good Ebay seller. I used to use Newegg constantly when ordering parts, now I’ll only use them if they have the cheapest deal and I’m not in any hurry to get it.

All in an Overlord's day

Personal Stuff Open Thread

Did a little holiday shopping today after getting off work. Just need to pick a few things up online and I should be good. Also paid a few hundred dollars in medical bills, and this was all before noon! Ended up falling into an unintentional coma. Got more video editing done today too. Should have quite a lot of content to release come January. If I have time tomorrow I’ll go through my edits and refine things further, and take notes for additional elements to add to the video… like if any of them call for Cigarette Snake.

Chances are though that I’ll be busy tomorrow if my power supply arrives on time… determine once and for all if it’s a power related issue or a faulty GPU causing my system to die whenever I put the pedal to the metal. Fortunately editing and rendering video game pornography doesn’t cause that to happen.

All in an Overlord's day / Computing

The Damage Report Thus Far

After further testing it turns out I may either have a problem with my power supply, or graphics card. The power supply is about 7 or 8 years old, though it seems to be running fine. Being this is the oldest piece of hardware in my current setup I’ve taken the liberty of purchasing a newer platinum grade power supply (my current one is bronze grade). It should arrive on Friday… hopefully. If the black screens continue after the fact that tells me it was the graphics card…. and as new as it is I really hope it isn’t the cause of my problems. I’d really hate to RMA the damn thing, though I’ve heard ASUS is better about dealing with RMA’s than MSI. Hopefully it’s just the power supply though, unfortunately I don’t have another system to plug my graphics card into. All the other computers in the house are going to either have an older hardware that won’t support my GPU, or they have power supplies that won’t even turn my card halfway on.

Ugh.

All in an Overlord's day / Computing / Gaming

Down the digital rabbit hole of issues

My weekend started out peaceful… I treated myself to an omelette and some toast, made up some green tea and worked on some recent Left 4 Dead footage. Wow… Normally when I edit video footage I have to do a lot of trimming. Like trimming down two and a half hours of Serious Sam footage into two minutes… with our most recent game of Left 4 Dead though? It’s an hour and thirty minutes in length and so far I have about 15 minutes worth of footage with more territory to cover. I believe this could be its own miniseries.

After awhile I finally decided to give myself a break and head into Windows… Just when I thought I made it clear out of Windows Update hell I came across an issue with my microphone. It was recognized by Windows but not a single program acknowledged its existence. After some web searching I found out that if you blanket disable all apps from having access to your mic it’ll completely cut you off (despite that little message on the right telling you that it won’t block the mic from Windows). After fixing that problem I launched Steam and discovered that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider needed an update. Then I changed my mind and settled on Quantum Break instead… that’s when I ran into another problem. After playing for a few minutes my monitors would go black. This happened again at the exact same point in the game. Tomb Raider finished updating and I launched it, same problem. I updated my drivers to the latest ones (because somehow during Windows Update Microsoft oh so kindly installed an older one) and the problem still persists even on the latest beta drivers. I tried Skyrim and that seemed to remain stable, but DOOM 2016 choked just like Quantum Break and Tomb Raider.

That was last night. Today/tonight I ran more diagnostics; turns out it actually wasn’t Windows 10 in this particular case, because upon further testing I could replicate the same issue under Linux. I’ve tried clean installs of Windows and a couple other tricks but merit the same result. The only other thing that’s been done recently is a bios update. I’ll save that for tomorrow, I’ve been bashing my head against this long enough…

I’ll nibble on some clouds and I’ll lay my weary head to rest.

Gaming

Raiding for nothin’, tombs for free

Remember when Lara didn’t complain every other scene or hold your hand during particular moments during the game? Pepperidge Farm remembers…

After this week of holiday slavery, I decided to kick off my weekend by having a bit of playtime instead of tearing back into video production… I think I’ve earned it. I pulled out my controller and continued playing Tomb Raider III under Proton. Running it under Linux out of the box with only cutscenes being a real issue. It actually gives me fewer problems under Linux than under Windows, though there is a way to get it working properly under there too, its just that there’s more work involved.

Tomb Raider III was a hard one for me to obtain when it first came out. I couldn’t find it locally, there was no way for me to obtain it over the internet unless I pirated it, and places like Steam and GOG didn’t exist yet. So my only option for playing the game was to either go over to a friend’s house and watch them play it, or stick in one of my Pizza Hut CD’s into my PS1 and play the demo through to fruition. Technical issues prevented me from investing as much time into it as I have with its predecessors, and now I can at least enjoy the game play aspect until I decide to go under Windows and patch the game to run on a newer version of Direct3D so that I can have proper support for my Steam Controller (and take sweet screenshots).

I’ve left off at level three. I remember with each release of a Tomb Raider game they always added new features and obstacles to keep things interesting. This was the first game to introduce crouching and sprinting, tiny baboons that will slowly rape your ankles, random green crystals that give you health (and save points on the PS1 version), and you can get poisoned by darts and snakes… oh god the fucking snakes. I forgot all about them until tonight, managed to get poisoned a few times and had to backtrack. I was kinda surprised when the baboons turned into little ankle fuckers in level two; I went the entire first level being careful not to shoot any of them, then suddenly they wanted to get intimate with my lower parts, but not those lower parts. :v:

Speaking of legs, mine feel like jello right now… this was a rough week. I came home yesterday and basically read for awhile and inevitably passed out in bed basically until my alarm went off this morning. I never ate yesterday, in fact I still haven’t… well, an actual meal. I’ve just snacked here or there. I just haven’t had much of an appetite for anything since Thanksgiving, and its not like I’m bored of Turkey and the trimmings on the third day… I just can’t put my finger on it.

All in an Overlord's day

Actual Thanksgiving Open Thread

Work was surprisingly nice today. Everyone got free grande sized drinks from Starbucks (I had their new Praline Latte or whatever), work traffic wasn’t that bad AND we had full staffing for a change. Reminded me of the good times when there were more than just one or two of us at a time dealing with the masses. Now I’m loading up on Turkey before I enter my cocoon this early evening. I want to get a good night’s sleep, and I believe the Turkey will help with that, among other elements of relaxation.

The weather has been rather balmy these last few days, today and yesterday we got a well deserved amount of rain with the possibility of more to come. I might have to get under the covers and play a GPU demanding game just to get some heat into the room. 😛

I leave you with this disturbing video to commemorate the holiday:

Work

Updated and still minty fresh

Managed to upgrade my version of Windows 10 without anything hazardous taking place, though I did have to reinstall grub2 to get back into Mint. Leave it to Microsoft to snuff out any operating system that isn’t its own… It didn’t take too long, but between fixing the boot loader and taking care of other things around the homestead I didn’t have time to really do much else. I almost went back into Windows to play some Quantum Break, but ended up zoning out instead.

As expected work has been busier, so busy in fact that I had to wait in line to leave the damned building… I’m going to hate the next couple of days with a passion. I get the feeling I’ll need to load something violent and nonsensical onto my laptop to get through the day(s). It was mellow enough for me to chill in Sonic Mania for my lunch today. Amazing how well it runs, though for some reason on my Desktop the audio has been known to randomly distort itself upon launch.

I’ll have even less time tomorrow, but I’m not entirely too butthurt about it. I have to work on Black Friday at two in the morning, and while some may see that as horrific (which my face can look horrifying at 2am) I’m ok with getting away from there as soon as possible and return home to a sweet leaf.