I’m not a console gamer, so the day Horizon Zero Dawn was released, I bought Mass Effect: Andromeda. It was meh.

When Horizon came to PC and I played through it for the first time, I was stunned: the graphics, story, and gameplay were so much better than Andromeda’s. I’m still not a console gamer, but Horizon had me considering a PS4 (and later 5) for a while there.

Linux Mint. If my 85-year-old dad can get used to it after over 30 years of Windows, you’ll be fine.

/edit Also Firefox comes with pretty much every Linux distribution, but if you need something Chromium-based, I’m partial to Vivaldi.

…but I thought performance was fine, why would something fine be their top priority? Pitchford couldn’t possibly have been talking out of his ass, could he?

Video editing. I record 4k, 10-bit, 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, and the first nvidia consumer GPU that supports decoding that in hardware is the 5000-series. I have a 4090 and no desire to jump to a 5090. Swapping from a 7800X3D on a B650 board to a 9950X3D on an X870E and chucking an Arc A380 on there for encode/decode cost less than half of a 5090.

That makes sense. I’m just sore because I had to upgrade to a somewhat unstable X870E board to get 4 slots for my main GPU, capture card, storage controller, and secondary GPU.

…and still only two PCIe slots. Do you remember when you could slot four cards into your mainboard without going to a “Pro” or HEDT platform? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Nice! I started it 3 or 4 times but got distracted. Having a much easier time staying focused now, so I’m playing through Ultimate Edition. I don’t plan on doing the rest, though - will go to Baldur’s Gate 3 after this one.

Dragon Age: Origins. Never got around to finishing it before.

TL;DR: Asus pulls the same crap with warranties today that they pulled 22+ years ago. They should be avoided at all costs.

I’ve spent the past few days building a thermal propulsion rocket factory. I’ve never built one like it before. It’s absolutely enormous so far, I lost track after it hit 40x50. Inside, it’s split up into rooms with one or two simple outputs each. The outputs are carried to other rooms on conveyors or in pipes on the second floor, completely hidden from view. Need to perfect the lighting and interior navigation, but I generally don’t care what the upstairs hallways look like.

It’s intense. I’m like 500 hours in.

Yep, 1Password for the win. The private and shared vaults are nice, and the built-in “haveibeenpwned” checker is a great feature. Only improvement I can think of is a username generator, but not a totally random one like Bitwarden’s.

Speaking of…I’m thinking of switching to Bitwarden because their paid tier is dirt cheap and I love open source.

Generally I’m on a 3-5 year delay, unless it’s a franchise I like. Then, I buy it when the price drops on Steam. Currently waiting for Horizon Forbidden West to come to PC, but until then it’s Powerwash Simulator and Satisfactory.