Gyokuyoutama

So... apparently youtube just completely died? I mean I guess technically the sites still there, but every video seems to be down (checking with multiple browsers just to be sure). (Makes the youtube thread particularly amusing.)

Plague of Gripes taking almost an hour: to make essentially the same points of the end of a five minute video:

What I mean is that everything is done so much more ineffeciently that the gains in technology don't mean as much as you might expect. One big example of this is the tendency to import tons of libraries of pre-existing functions (often redundant ones) rather than making something that is the most efficient for your specific application. I get why this is done; it means that we don't have to constantly keep reinventing the wheel and it makes it easier to update a process everywhere in the project at once, but a natural consequence of it is that memory is used in an extremely wasteful fashion. So for example it wasn't too long ago that 4 gigs of RAM was considered to be more than you would need, but now it's easy for a web browser to use .2 gigs per tab, especially if you've left something open for a while or have a particularly inefficient browser. Then factor in how many people have lots of unnecessary plugins and the total memory use just gets higher, until we get to the point where its perfectly feasible to use 4 gigs just on web browsing. Similarly even though we have extremely powerful processors, including the ability to do parallel operations very efficiently, programming techniques have stressed using operations efficiently less and less, so the effective speed of most programs is lower than the hardware would suggest. You especially see this in indie games. Just look at all the retro games which are trying to mimick an aesthetic from 10-20 years ago, and which often don't do much that computers/consoles of that time wouldn't be able to do, but which can't run on a computer that's more than a few years old. Or if you think that is unfair, look at AAA gaming. Other than minor graphical improvements, what really separates the games from today from the games from five years ago? I haven't seen much in the way of impressive AI or other hardware intensive features, outside of graphics. But the hardware specs continue to be more and more demanding anyway.

If they are going to release a major update at any point they will do it at Halloween, even if it isn't a Halloween update. I mean, that's what happened with the pyro update last year. At this point I just hope that they turn on the Halloween maps and revert back to the old style gift drops instead of the broken contracts.

Not intended to be that serious, but just something kicking around in my brain for a while. Basically I realized that a lot of popular internet songs came from a variety of places throughout Europe, but were often divorced from that context when people saw them. So I compiled a list of top two songs per European country that matter. (Well, all the ones that matter except Poland. I really really tried to get some songs from there, but the closest I came up with were from Sabaton, which can't count. I suppose I could go with Chopin, but as my standard elsewhere was not to use two songs from the same band that still doesn't get me to two.) This isn't intended to be definitive, since I had to stretch for a few countries. So please bitch about my choices. No really, please do that, I probably made suboptimal picks all over the place. ENGLAND:

Sometimes I feel like we've reached the peak of what computer technology is going to do, because new inefficiencies and bugs are increasing at the same rate or faster than the ability of hardware to make these problems irrelevant.

Didn't really pay attention to Neverwinter Nights Enhanced when it went on Steam, but now that it's on gog I looked through the features. Here's what you get for your extra ten bucks (so, not counting the stuff which was in the diamond edition): -Minor new display options -Better ability to play multiplayer (since the enhanced edition isn't compatible in mutliplayer with the old one and no one can buy the old one, meaning that existing servers are now sol.) -Ability to buy artbook and soundtrack (which you have to pay extra for and which were included in the gog release of the diamond edition) -Ability to buy the extra premium modules not included in the Diamond edition (not included in the base price of $20, but since these versions of the premium modules are apparently only compatible with the enhanced edition you have to buy the enhanced edition to have the privilege of buying the remaining modules as DLC) -Backwards compatibility with old saves and modules from the Diamond edition (obviously not an issue if you have the diamond edition) Sasuga beamdog.

Also back to English on my end. Probably I just had a fit of temporary insanity.

For some reason when I go to the GoG storepage for Heroes of Might and Magic III, it's in Chinese, despite literally everything else on the site (include pages for other products) being in English. Someone please check to see if this happens to you to or if I'm just insane.

Microsoft has done weird things to the documents and programs directory, such as screwing with user permissions, since Windows Vista. It's rarely been this bad, but you're generally better off putting everything in your own directories. At least they are decent about letting you update later on in the day, rather than shutting down your computer right now (unless you mess with admin settings). But it's not really a good trade-off for forcing minimally tested updates on you.

For the record, I think we can all agree that this is number one for the US: Not as sure about number two. Maybe Africa. I have a soft spot for Psychosocial memes though.

Some countries, like Sweden, England or Germany, could probably have a top 10. ABBA would definitely show up there for Sweden. I also spent some time thinking about non-European countries. Some with a lot of songs (like the US) are still pretty easy to figure out. Some (like South Korea) were so dominated only by one thing that it's also easy to figure out. Hardest country to narrow down to two is probably Japan.

You have 1 day to buy Neverwinter Nights if you don't want to pay double for the "enhanced" edition.

SPUF's formatting automatically does this to me when I use multiple spoiler tags in the same post. The spoiler tag codes end before the next one begins, but that's not what got posted. If I knew how to make it separate the spoiler tags I would.

If this isn't an example of Virtual Youtuber Crimes, I don't know what is:

Speaking of MMA goofiness: Too bad the cut out the part immediately after this, where he invites Joe Rogan to smoke weed with him.

Not moving his forces to stop his opponents from committing an atrocity, followed by using evidence of that atrocity to further drive public sentiment against his opponents.

GoG just released yet another yuri novel. They are going to ride this train for as long as they can. EDIT: Wait, this one came out on steam too. I assumed they were on this kick just to hammer in the point "if Valve won't do it, we will," since the first few weren't on Steam. Release Umineko damn it. You already released Higurashi so I don't see why that shouldn't be possible.

Apparently MTG Arena rigs hands. Specifically, it draws two opening hands and keeps the one that has a land/nonland ratio closest to the land/nonland ratio of your deck. People crunched things out and determined that the optimal number of lands is 22 or 26 because of this. There's also speculation that the algorithm will give the worse of two hands if you are on a winning streak, but I haven't seen proof of this (not that I would put it past Wizards). Of course what really pisses me off about this is that they added official MTG: Arena forums, but they didn't bring back the official MTG forums, nor did they allow you to comment on Gatherer again.

That's how you reach the Korea meme barrel.

I finally reached the bottom of the Japanese Youtube meme barrel

I'd say that I'm glad that the community voted the right way, but this time there wasn't really any other option.

When I started reading Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I said that Reinhard von Lohengramm did nothing wrong as a joke. But now I'm six books in and he's only done one thing that might have been wrong.