The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming

This post is brought to you by someone who needs more practice

Played a little HL2DM tonight for the first time in ages. I seem to do a better job wielding the crossbow or the revolver than I do with the shotgun or the assault rifles. I did get in a good couple of gravity gun kills though, so that’s something. I only played one match (and I think I joined the server in progress, everyone was nice. Every time I’ve gone to this server I’ve never had trouble. Everyone is too busy fragging to talk shit, there were also some lol’s, oops’ and other shit being thrown around in game chat from time to time, reminds me of a more innocent time for gaming on teh interwebz.

HL2DM is simplistic in design, but somehow its nice to just come back to from time to time.

Food/Drink

Combining different parts of the world for one meal

After the holidays we’ve been having issues eating properly around the homestead due to work fatigue and everyone’s busy schedules. My stomach can only take so much emergency food, though finally we have managed to get somewhat back on track for prepping actual meals. The above is what I made for dinner last night. I took a chicken breast, cut it up and cooked it in caramelized onions and garlic, then added them to some rice cooked in butter and oil and homemade chicken broth with peas and carrots. I also have a salad with Russian dressing on the side with a little touch of chipotle, so it’s more of a Mexi-Russiantalian meal. I got the idea to make this meal from a Russian cookbook that I picked up years ago as part of Time Life’s Foods Of The World Series, and was inspired by a Lamb Pilaf recipe. But I don’t care much for lamb, so opted for chicken instead. The recipe also called for raw carrot and onion, but I opted for caramelized onions, carrots and peas for added flavor and color. For additional flavor I threw in some Italian influence by cooking the grains in butter and oil first, the rice is jasmine, giving it a little boost of flavor and overall aromatic goodness, and much more welcoming to my stomach.

It was either going to be this or panko crusted chicken breasts with fries, but we’ve had too much potato substance recently and needed a severe break (something I’d never thought I would say). Tonight we’re going to have pizza, it’s cold outside and it’s definitely a good night to either bake or get baked.

Computing / Technology

The future is Chromium based

Ever have that feeling where you wake up from a nap, or from a good night’s sleep and feel like you entered another dimension? I think I can add this to my top 10 WTF did I wake up to moments.

For the past few years, Microsoft has meaningfully increased participation in the open source software (OSS) community, becoming one of the world’s largest supporters of OSS projects. Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.

Translation: Our browser has sucked since the day of its conception, fuck it let’s go open source!

As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices.

Extend, Embrace, Extinguish, EXTERMINATE!

Working with open source is not new for Microsoft Edge. Our mobile browser has been based on open source from its beginnings over a year ago.

Shorter Microsoft: We’ve been lazy longer than you think.

Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences. People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all web sites,

Shorter Microsoft: Our browser will offer you the greatest things that you’re already able to do on almost any browser that isn’t currently ours. INNOVATIVE!

Not that I care… I’m Waterfox master race.

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.