The API shit happened alongside one of the worst arguments I’ve ever gotten on the internet from Reddit. I realized those people lost the plot. I deleted my account.

Black Lanterns in disguise.

Never heard of that site. One quick visit tells me it’s Canadian. Arc B580 is listed at $359.99 and it’s out of stock. In fact the three models they do have are all out of stock.

Because it has risen in price and availability is so sparse. Intel is playing under the same rules of scarcity as everybody else. There’s simply less of these cards to go around as well. There’s not a huge market available.

Base model has been sold out for a while. My closest Microcenter hasn’t had them since last year. You could actually get them at MSPR($250) for a while too. The next cheapest version is a 3rd party model that has been siting at $290-$310 for most of the year now. Then there are these $500+ models that are basically collectors items at that price. Ebay is the wild west of prices and they’re all $100 past where they’re reasonable. Ebay’s not a super trustable source either. Everything on NewEgg that is sitting at $250 is refurbished. The one new base model they have is almost $600. It makes no sense.

I’ve been in the market for one of these cards to replace my 5700xt. It’s been a wild year keeping track of these prices. At times it is the best card available, and at other times you’re playing a guessing game with older but stronger AMD stock. The kicker is the 12GB of VRAM. There’s nothing in the price range of the Arc with that much VRAM. But there’s also cards with less VRAM that are supposed to be more performant. As much as I want one, I’m probably gonna wait till the holiday season to see availability and sales. That’s been the game since last year.

Whitechapel - Devolver - I’m actually surprised no one has used it for any type of entrance anywhere. It’s got the little splash of sound in the beginning. You get two measures of this chugging guitar, then Phil kicks in and it’s perfect. It’s a fast song. The lyrics are the opposite of motivational but if you’re a heel it doesn’t matter. I would use this for baseball. I would use this for Football. It’s practically made for wrestling.

I feel like Stranger Things went from must watch tv to not even sure I’ll ever watch the finale simply by word of mouth. Is the final season really that bad? I was excited for it at the end of season 4, then it seemed like the season came out and it cratered the show in 2 days.

They’re not targeting me and you. They’re targeting kids. Their whole thing is be kid friendly enough to take advantage of that lane while still being horrible people. Kids have always had a crazy “don’t to this at home” type of influence in life. Evel Knieval. Pro Wrestling. Jackass. Now it’s these guys. They’re more insidious because their reach is way larger and easier to get. A smart person looks at them and goes ‘this is shit.’ What if you don’t know any better? What group is that? Kids.

I’ve been waiting 35 years to go to a game on my birthday. Games have been played on my birthday before but never at home. This year is it. The cheapest ticket I can find is $230 Standing Room Only. Nosebleed seats are all $280. Everything else is an arm and a leg. I guess I’ll just watch from home and save the money for food.

Go Birds!

Cloud Strife… 7/16 experience I guess.

IT’S MAHVEL BABY!

That thing wouldn’t pass Chantry Questioning if it ever got the chance. Fucking Demonaic right there.

I chose Arch as my first and only distro 13 years ago. Only had system breaking problems a handful of times in that span. They were all because I fucked something up playing with files I shouldn’t have. These are all tired memes from old reputations. Pay attention to what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.

The real teenage behavior starts when you figure out if they all planned to take a shit in the woods to see how big they can make the pile. Or if they didn’t do that, they come back and start recounting how they destroyed their toilets and made Mom and Pop angry.

Yeah I tried them all. None of them come close to the magic of SimCity 4. They’re all scaled wrong, more like settlement builders or incorrect numbers representing population or worker counts. Janky like Workers and Resources. Songs of Syx is great but crawls to a halt on my system due to a memory leak after 30 minutes. The Transport Fever series is excellent but they’re not city builders. Some of them are food. Great even. None of them can fill the hole left behind by SimCity 4.

Cities Skylines 2. I’ve got thousands of hours in the SimCity franchise. Over 500 hours in the original Cities Skylines. CS2 is a fucking mess of a game. It actually ran pretty decently on my PC when it first came out but you could tell it was an incomplete mess right away. The simulation was non-existent. The game looked like dog shit. The only way to get it to run decently was to turn everything down to low and medium. Somehow I squeaked out 75 hours in that first 3 month release window. For a working adult with responsibilities, that’s a lot of time for me now. I install it occasionally and see if it’s any better. It’s not. I did this last week and it actually runs worse on the same PC than it did at launch which is counter to what most people are experiencing.

Mods through the Paradox launcher is a necessary evil for the game to function. I can barely get it to run stable without mods, I don’t think tricking out the game is gonna help the situation. It’s such a sad case of a game killing a whole genre. Especially when it’s my genre. I love city building games and no game has hurt more than Sim City 2013. I didn’t even play SC2013. I watched my favorite franchise die and made probably the smartest decision of my gaming life by saying fuck no to that mess. Fucking Cities Skylines 2 is right there with it, but I made the opposite choice. I gave it a chance and it stings all the time.

What’s even worse is how such a staple of my childhood has turned into an almost impossible task to recreate. I’ll never understand how gaming went from being able to produce 4 generational city building titles in ~10 years to not being able to get one to function at the same level at all in 20. You can count CS1 sure, but even that game was missing something compared to SC4. CS1 is not even close to the same level of SC4. Even now when the game is hard to run on modern hardware.

What’s even more killer is we see other examples of Maxis era staples getting second life in new franchises all the time. Planet Zoo 1 and 2. Transport Fever for Transport Tycoon. Planet Coaster taking it’s place next to Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hell even the Jurassic World Evolution series fills a gap from the old Jurassic Park Genesis game. But the modern city building attempts are all backwards attempts.

They all focus on the wrong thing. Agents. They all want to be able to simulate every living being and everything they do. It never works. It’s why the newest Citystate is such an intriguing project. They’re not doing every individual agent. And the dev finally decided to focus on modernizing the engine to work with fully 3d spaces. There’s a couple contenders out there that are a year or two away. Citystate, Metro 1998 even though that’s more of a throwback. City Masterplan. If just one of these games hit, we’re back in business. Until then I’ve watched my favorite genre die twice. Hopefully the third time is the charm in terms of longevity.

Those cucumbers are fucking purple and blue. You need to throw them out ASAP. You don’t want salmonella.

That’s refreshing to hear. I really got tired of messing with my nvim config all the time. I’m in that state with Emacs right now but I hope that once I’m done it’s a set it and forget it experience.

I’m honestly torn between Nvim and Emacs right now. I’m a long time vim user and been on Nvim for 10+ years. The rate at which they change config methods kinda drives me nuts. The change from vimscript to lua, and then a new mixup of lua to another syntax of lua, NEED TO CHANGE THE LUA!!! It’s too much. I really did a yearly config rewrite for a while because the plugin ecosystem moves lightning fast. Now most of the time I feel like I’m using a half baked config solution even on a new from scratch setup.

Emacs feels like a breath of fresh air. I’m still working out the kinks but it feels like it just works when I tell it to do something. I’m not using evil mode. I dove head first into vanilla and it’s been really nice. ELisp is wild. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing with it, but it all seems to be working. The fact that it took me 3 days to get my Emacs setup to where I am with Nvim and beyond was a great start to the switch. I’m really enjoying Emacs and there’s definitely a past version of me going ‘What the fuck’ right now.

I spent a couple days in Chicago last year. Roughed it out in a park overnight. Went to the beach the next day. Spent more time on Amtrak than I did in Chicago for the whole trip. My body felt like death the whole time, but I had the best mental high I’ve had in years. My whole life goal is to move there now.