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Tuesday, May 20, 2025

cancer and other random trains of thought

 Republicans are quick to smear biden and cancer. 
If you read up on history, you'll find Roosevelt and his wheelchair, and how he tried to hide that he had polio (or is that another republican myth)

We've never had a woman, a Jewish or anyone disabled as president.
McCain would have made a good president despite his hand they kept going on about on news shows.

Bah. I was stuck for an intro. There.

My topic tonight is all those cooking shows cooking seafood, it's as if they were paid to push fish and other creepy crawly things.
Fine, but how do you test your seafood for Arsenic, Lead, mercury and / or DDT?

You for example buy seafood from a fancy place, from a ports-o-call, from Kroger, fresh or frozen.
Which is the least deadly?



I'd love to get all stereotypical and lump nationalities and regions together, but that would only piss you off. 

Some people eat more seafood than others, Some eat seafoody things you wouldn't.

Do they (statistically) have higher rates of cancer or is there an immunity?
Just wondering (Trains beget trains of thought)


generally lower, unless you count "Stomach cancer" geez, how diplomatic of you.

Let's just ask about the elephant in the room:

Does Seafood cause cancer?

It depends.


One last train: They decided (I don't know when or how) to make sauces from fish.
They ferment it, add other sauces, and sell it as "Fish sauce," "Patis" or whatever name.

It would be pretty easy to buy a bottle or two, 
and send them away to be tested by some lab.

I doubt it would be economical or even feasible to send an actual fish.
This train was brought to you by another train, "How to test for poisons in fish"
but I'm afraid to google it, there being too many poisons to talk about.
Googling separately might be better.
"How to test for arsenic"
"How to test for Mercury"
Etc.









Sunday, May 18, 2025

manque

 One of the very last waking-dream messages I got today was the definition of the word "Manque" which the dream said was a different way of tweaking something (Like TV pixels.)

Manque with something enough and it gets adjusted, or something.
Well, the dream was wrong, as I know you're just busting out to write.

But what does it really mean?
I manque'd with the toast and it turned black?
My so-called manque life?



I'm a "maintenance engineer" and a pilot manque.
Pilot manque



I think I heard the word on a game show when the host asked what the contestant did.

There are no reasons I can think of to write the word, 
and examples come to mind that quickly beg for synonyms.
Wannabe, also-ran, frustrated-(cushy job title)


---------
This next bit sounds convincingly sane until you remember that Maelle is a kind of a fantasy and unreal.


It reminds me of propaganda in my youth. *
How could you argue with it, without knowing more facts??
Fact 1: Maelle isn't real.
Fact 2: Verso dies saving Alicia.
Fact (ok forget the list)
They're blaming Maelle. In a dream sequence starring Alicia and her dad. Why??
And (For gosh sake) what's with the fire, who started it (in real life) and was it an accident or purposeful??

Alicia's sister Clea gives more clues later on in the game (Way later.)
Alicia's naivete started the whole disaster.
And someone somewhere (I forget where) says, Clea is in a solitary war against the writers.
So, algebra enthusiasts say it's the Writer's fault.
Way too dense math for me to follow.
Believing the story as gospel, it's Maelle's fault, only she never remembers why, not even at the end.

*Illuminati, Rothschild, "Replacement theory", separate but equal, Hitler wasn't bad, not really.




Friday, May 2, 2025

Lumiere etc

Louis Vuitton yada whatever

 


I don't know any french, and I don't understand any of the moves yet.

Insert clever phrase here, translate it into french and Chiaroscuro.

Nihilism. "Nihilisme"


fil de pensée
Train of thought


(hmm)


Dad vs "Curator" (Dad vs Dad?)


https://expedition33.wiki.fextralife.com/Skills You can learn up the butt but when it counts, only the wimpiest moves are available, the rest are too expensive to use.
I'm doing my homework now (this game has to last until next month)

-----


Gee, *thanks*, google 
"High Contrast" is so low class, so great-unwashed, so crude
FURIO



Some evil huntress lurks.
Will I need "WeMod"?
https://www.reddit.com/r/expedition33/comments/1kcsr5x/i_believe_in_esquie_supremacy/
No one name-dropped Kafka yet.
But they're name-bombing another game I need to google, "FFX"
Yeah, OK.




Anyway I'm stuck totally in a giant aquarium filled with nightmarish boogeymen.
If they respawn that would totally suck.
They've taken away my compass and I'm slowly going in circles.
The game takes its cues from those endless-walk games in which you get lost a lot.
Then you google it. (Ble?)
But I suck at puzzles....
Counting sand looks more promising.
A map, *something

They dole out knowledge like typical elitists: Eventually and occasionally you'll get a map, and the map says (mostly) go north, which is impossible without a compass. Didn't the french invent Mazes for rich people to have fun?
The guy with no face, yeah.
But you (the game) never mentions that, I'm supposed to just soak it in (I guess)
We're at camp, no way to upgrade weapons (yet,) now I know why.
Thanks,, google (grrrrrrrrr) 


The money-grubbing fools in walkthroughs have you travelling zig-zag fashion to obtain useless crap instead of plotting a route (mostly, north and east.)
When that doesn't work, you find the rock to go under or whatever.
Ahhh!!!


Anyway in typical game-style there are two biggie bosses to kill and some cryptic lore to follow.
"I am your Father!"
"Noooooo!!"
etc.
Pâtisserie, boulangerie, and viennoiserie
(we're supposed to know what a viennoiserie is...)
I looked it up and I still don't know.
"Between French pastry and french bread"
Bullshit, I wanna say. They could have translated it (croissant) and stuck a "w" in the croissant, but no.
Fine! (deaux nutte does not exist but should)"boutique de beignets" ( bo-teek duh ben-yay)
Krispy Kremes aren't doughnuts, they're candy-coated tooth killers (just saying)
REAL doughnuts have disappeared through a black hole, IDK.
Someone make ben yays, please.
Putain. See, they all talk perfect English but switch to french at pretentious moments.



No one goes on about petites fromages (yet.)
Creamerie Restaurant Fromagerie
(if the picture is too dark to see)


I want to edit in (a week later) that Critics must be falling over themselves praising this game, with its black-and-white and french phrases. "Astounding, Incredible" Holocaust-level depression, it'll be the game of the year somewhere.
"La vie est nulle !" Merveilleux !" (pardon my French)
(link)

I don't read "Kafka" or ever utter his name, but I know the reputation he has.
So I googled his name and "Expedition 33" and sure enough.
There are games, movies and philosophers I'll never read or experience, but when you-all name-drop them, I look them up.
(e.g., "Inception" which sounds a LOT like "Dreamscape")
No one waxes bombastic on the mimes yet....


I don't know how to get to the goal of this chapter and the link is very unhelpful.
A large woman dances in the bottom-middle, and her minions
but I'm totally lost.
 I'm stuck on one of the upper levels, or paragraph-1000 of the walkthrough.


OK, after we escaped her lair, I don't know how, 
We meet the paintress' sign eventually.
We shoot the sign (Hologram, whatever) and nothing happens (duh)
I haven't loaded up on skills throughout the game, I just shoot the target with my really big gun.
O well. Morituri Salutamus te. Bonum est hodie mori.

Fromage!




Odd choice. 
The "Main" Character dies and for what? 
Dramatic effect?
But the question is important, assuming you've been careful to build up little defensive points and abilities.
It won't matter, everyone is doomed. His *sister* is the protagonist you've been ignoring for most of the story, so bulk her up.

My regret, if I want to get immersive, 
is that all those little prizes you get after battles, clothes and colored things, lay useless in my inventory.
I have no idea what they are for.
The really bad guy is dead, and now we are to meet the crazy lady who lost her family in some accident.
They dole out details like elitists, and I don't know what the accident was or who died and why people keep coming back from the dead.
My guess,
It's all a dream, a twisted fantasy, And "we" don't exist.
I'm writing this knowing I'll keep playing and replaying like a rat memorizing a maze to get the fromage.
(How depressing)

OMG, it's not done??!!!

Quelle Bombastique


My wake-up dream today: I'm an actor in a sitcom wondering what I'm doing there (playing the part of an underling in a school) alongside the main actors Gerald McRaney and Delta Burke.
Some of the characters in the game serve no purpose at all, except to add a more realistic effect.

Is there a theme? I mean, with all the corpses and broken buildings?



Life is pointless, we're all pawns in someone else's play, and try as we might, we'll die.
Or maybe, don't get too attached.

Uplifting, this isn't.

They explain the plot at the very-very end, sort of, but it's dragged out and I start thinking of food or whatever.
I shall seek a plot summary to explain the "Epilogue"

https://www.ign.com/wikis/clair-obscur-expedition-33/All_Endings_and_How_to_Get_Them

And this entry, compact and succinct, almost tempts me to play until the conclusion,
But it's hard developing an imaginary relationship with these characters.
Who do we root for?
Who is the bad guy?
No, I'll restart.
The real villains are only referred to. "The writers." 
And the major catalyst, a horrific fatal fire, is almost never spoken of (until the epilogue? IDK)




The story of the game changes a lot.
Somewhere towards the end, Alicia tells her dad that she's hidden the canvas, where her Mom will never find it.
Oh, you mean that 6-foot wide, twelve foot tall canvas that
your mother's hypnotized body is sitting in front of?
But let's ignore that, obviously there IS a hidden canvas somewhere.
Mom finds it pretty damn quick when Dad needs her help.

A male child  is seen painting the canvas. 
Verso pleads with him to stop painting.
Alicia-Maelle realizes who the painter is but stops short of saying his name.
There are no author's cliff notes, only wrong-headed reddit posts and the blog entry I just found.
https://www.thegamer.com/clair-obcsur-expedition-33-plot-holes-make-no-sense/
In other words, until the commercial ridden TV show comes out or rich people can watch it on Netflix, some stuff will remain a mystery.
I only know a couple obvious inconsistencies.
Who are the mimes and why does the game author hate them?
The "Monsters" (Nevrons?) sit around like security guards waiting to kill someone.
Some are fired-up, gung-ho, and some go through the motions like they don't get paid enough or they're getting too old for this shit.
"Gustav" should not have died, and in the end, he is resurrected. Both him and his girlfriend.
Now that you already know they're copies of the fake-originals, it all seems so pointless.
In fact, you could argue that the plot gets a lot weaker after Gustav gets sliced up.
We discover (too late) that "Maelle" is really "Alicia" but with amnesia.



The whole journal-writing-thing makes the story meaningful and then meaningless (The brat with the big head drops it on the ground)
I just read a professional page that says that writing in the journal means something, because you get a skill later on (that is prolly too expensive to use, so nevermind)
Also the semi-ghosts scattered throughout the game, utter a few pithy phrases, mostly of memories or of regret, and these too are useless.
They're vague and eventually, after three or so phrases, become silent.
Don't waste time talking to anyone.
Don't help anyone (It's pointless, and I'm thinking of You, white blob with a torch)
Don't misinterpret this blog entry to turn into a republican, I'm only parroting the f'ng game, you gossipers.
Uh, (Ooh, that got my heart going) yeah, waste of time talking to anyone to try to be immersive,
Unless you like little points and gold stars.


Without the amnesia Maelle wouldn't have cared as much.
A reddit post wrongly states (inmho) that Dad (Renoir) shows a picture of a woman on the floor coughing and gasping for air, as the mother.
I just assumed it was the for-real Alicia, not her mom with COPD, but you'd have to read the very long reddit post.





Bloggy stuff I usually add for my imaginary two-or-three readers gets erased a lot, and lately it's too terrible to enter into my journal.
Does my life really have to go down the tubes every few years?
Shouldn't I crawl away into fantasies of my own and forget about the real world?
In the game, the fantasy is godawful, and the player has to decide whether reality or fantasy is worse.




Monday, April 21, 2025

Arnold Vosloo and friend

 I wrote long-long ago that I don't know who you are unless you're in your official role (as _____.)
So outside the job you have at the store or the bank, the doctor's office or the IRS, you're anonymous to me.







It's enormously difficult to lay out photos here side by side, but anyway, 
"Vin Diesel" has a doppelganger who works in our town. Funny story, that.... 
How people look dictates how they act,
 (or which movies they star in) but that's a different train-of-thought.







Different guy but my vague description confused google.
He works alongside the other doppelganger in the town.
Uh, Short hair, gravelly voice, looks a lot like the above guy (but that isn't him)



















The cartoon character "Calivan" in Veilguard could be "Ozzy Osbourne" but I have no pictures, yet.
Ozzy got older and cartoons don't age.


They let you choose the type of stories you want, after the obligatory Trump news.
One of my choices was Television (I think). 
I might edit out that choice...because I never know what they're talking about.
These supermarket shoppers or billionaires would be meaningless faces.

99c store shoppers, Limousine passengers, it wouldn't matter.

(rambling mode) My Doctor (one of them) looked exactly like Joey Zasa 

Joe Mantegna

But Mr. Mantegna at the dollar store would be incognito, to me.


This guy could be in a Lawyer commercial:

It isn't who you are that matters, but what you look like.
Who you could pass for.














Saturday, April 19, 2025

veilguard impressions (sort of)


A guy wonders why Veilguard crashes so much, then NOT AT ALL, then crashes often.
And you can't see what the picture below didn't capture, 
the intro-page "Glitter" flashing by every few seconds. A special-effect or a glitch???

"I'm a social worker and I'm ok..."
There's a much older song I was thinking of, but it's too old (1962)

 
No one anywhere asked why these are black but shiny.
I worry.
Is it me and my settings, or is it an art statement??

This entry might grow, or not.

DXGI errors always blame the video-card and ignore the sound. I think I proved, at least on this PC, that sound settings and extra drivers have an enormous effect on crashes.
"Nahimic" is anathema, or at least my settings were.

Restoring pre-nahimic banished the crashes, for a while.
I'm suspecting (overall and generally) it's a timing issue.
Something deep in the code of the game is very demanding even when nothing much is happening, and any tweak in latency pisses it off. 
"Witness my wrath!!" it screams and throws an error.

The PCIE card that is my wifi shares a slot (I swear I wrote this already) and maybe it's a little too brave to advertise itself as a PCIE 3.0 card.
Reducing the speed to PCIE 2 would also slow down the video-card (to PCIE-2)
Unless I also make the pcie slot the wifi card is in,
 run at 4x4.
Doing this leaves the video-card at 4.0.
WHY am I doing this??
On a hunch I disabled ALL internet and ran the game for around an hour.
THEN I enabled ethernet instead of Wifi, and that crashed after close to an hour.
Question to be edited in later: Does setting wifi to PCIE 2 help,
 or is the whole system unfit for veilguard?

The Wi-Fi settings may have been a good thing, but they didn't make any difference.

No, the real difference was in not loading "Wemod" although what specifically makes Wemod a bad influence is unclear.
Were my settings too high? 
Without "wemod" being loaded means that the already tedious game is extra work. 
Winning without it is an impossibility for me.
Shoot a fat monster ten times vs instant annihilation.
But the trainer has little advertising videos that might throw off the timing just enough to kill the game (but that is a BIGGIE guess, and a possible incentive to pay for the ad-free version.)
Not that I could afford it.
Sorry, wemod.


---------

What does NOT work, what makes things worse, is easy, but what makes it happy and puts DXGI to sleep, is still unknown.
Let's assume (because I proved it on my end) that it isn't a video-card driver but maybe a setting.
Please include sound-stuff in your research.
---------

Meanwhile (this is an edit) the kids who played Skyrim IV now have kids, and they are happy to pay full price for the "New" skyrim IV. 
I um, wonder.
I played it, back in 2013 or so. I must have liked it, but I don't remember much.
Was that the one with the escaping King who ends up dying and you get blamed?
My point was, do I buy it yet again, or is this like Disney re-releasing an old movie on some trendy format?
Should I look harder for a game?
I think I should spend a little effort seeking an unknown game instead of a rerun I don't remember as being remarkable.

A PBS french news show (where the accents are thick) wants me to buy a game I can't remember
Clair Obscur something-something. ("Expedition 33")
It's very french, says the show.
I guess that's ok, ?
I still don't know WHY the kid was whispering something...
And what was all that about a red balloon?


No Francophile here. But it beats skyrim (I hope)
BTW the 10-second preview showed a woman/girl walking away from the camera and wearing a Beret.
Does anyone wear berets in France or is that symbolic too?



This has been edited down, and it's still too bombastic (and prolly, repetitive)
I'll edit more tomorrow.


Of the ten-zillion conspiracy theories in my "Veilguard" head is the notion that msedge might be affecting it, depending upon the settings. "Efficiency mode" on off? Hardware GPU acceleration?
Polling incessantly (am I here? am I relevant? Whatcha doin??)
Whether or not that is true is up to some doctoral student researching it, to find out.
"Am I satisfied", no! It's creepy as hell, like watching a six-year-old for a neighbor, who can't sit still.
also,

*Something* was crashing veilguard before, and less (lots less) now. 
Someone commented that a setting does not work.
The AI in my brain says not to use this setting.
Maybe it helped?
I get super-paranoid about sysmain and other "Helpful" programs that monitor what you do, but it's so entrenched that disabling it (see link) might be a bad idea.
A good idea is a log of everything I turn off or tweak, but I haven't done that (it's one of the many guilt-ridden things floating around in my head.)
Microsoft does not want to grant "local activation permission," then blabs about it.
People have figured a way around it (very complicated), so it DOES have "local activation permission,"
But the official-guru response is that the errors can be safely ignored.
Either suppress the error or eliminate the reason for it!
But they never will, nevernevernever.
Things running like shadows in the background:
Telemetry (they want to know what you're doing)
Caching whatever it is you're doing (see "telemetry")
and making sure MSEdge (the browser, being updated whenever you log on
watches what you do and caches it.
All during a game.
(which you can throttle/disable, with possible unpleasant results)
"Disable BITS" (Background intelligent transfer aka secretive download)
Is a great example. 
"Windows update (they say) will stop working.
"Stop working" completely or just in the background?
Tons of people, concerned their game is slow or (like me) concerned that the disk is being accessed every couple seconds, might want to disable it, but...
Cache, monitor, report.
Have you recited your loyalty-oath today??
Official representative monitoring programs, or ???
The above picture, if you see it, is about a controller for a remote PC, 
and the streaming audio is too, I guess.
Fine, but can they be misused for nefarious purposes? ICE,DEA, random hackers and the like?
Just wondering.
People pretended shock and dismay when they found out Google was listening in on their random conversations, so I would not be surprised. 
The whole reason a crash defender runs is to detect a crash and report it to someone somewhere, but what if they changed it so it monitors any phrase or communication to a specific place?
Just wondering also.

They can capture whatever they want, and feed it to their AI machine.
But that's just one company, with presumably one purpose.
Everyone else has their own reasons and purposes.



The maybe-point is, a game cannot ignore all the other apps, like some 300lb fat person sitting on a Chippendale chair.


Friday, April 18, 2025

"data link feature exchange" uh....

 I might erase this quickly, like I erase lots of half-baked entries...
"Data Link Feature exchange" now that my ssd is (PCIE) 4.0, my video card is 4.0, and I am not sure about my Wi-Fi-card but I'll look it up.
um, Veilguard crashes for random reasons, I think I wrote that already, which is why the BIOS selection is on my mind at all.
Veilguard hasn't crashed in hours, but I had it Turned OFF. 
The internet forums are evenly split on the subject, since I don't think most people, including me, knows what it does.
For example, it MIGHT be a power management-thing, or it MIGHT be a sort of an "overdrive" thing. 
Whatever it is, I hope to play for a couple of hours and see if it crashes more. 




I'm still editing...but it sure looks like Wi-Fi is pcie-3 and the video is pcie-4.
If I had unlimited bandwidth, I could maybe download a large file and play a game.
For the moment, it doesn't seem to matter with the network card mostly idle.
I don't know if shared slots can run at different speeds or not, but if I have problems later, I'll consider lowering bus speed or removing the data link feature.
PS 
The below is confusing because they don't stick to one topic.
"Sharing Lanes" and "Sharing SLOTS" (with the lanes split up) are different, but this article crams both in there.
I don't exactly share lanes, they're split between the video and the Wi-Fi, and the article says that it is possible. 
Yeah I know, I'm doing it, but 
...uh, 
"Data link"-yada blah is there too.

So, What do I know?
PCIE bus is being used at different version-speeds (3.0 and 4.0)
and Data-link-feature-exchange doesn't seem to mind (yet)


We know (kind of) that Trump exempts brands he likes, and apparently Asus is on his naughty list.
What did Apple and Dell offer, to quell their tariffs?
I don't have six lawyers and any references I point to would be decried as "Fake" so nevermind. 
I'm hoping like hell this old thing lasts four more years.