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.

veilguard impressions (sort of)

"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.

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,

https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/c8iq9o/dont_disable_sysmain_previously_known_as/

*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??

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

"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.

neonazi

 I don't know the non-political word for people who get bothered by stuff they shouldn't care about, but "Neonazi" (non-political) sort of covers it.
Well here. YOU judge. (because you're so good at judging others)

This section of "Reddit" must be in english, not have "example answers"(????)

Or a body textbox.
What the hell is a "body textbox"?

I avoid most forums like the measles, but they are fun to read. I prolly happened upon an authoritarian section, IDK

This is funny, unless it's a commercial (I wouldn't know)

I learned stuff too

train of thought (DXGI, Veilguard)

 Now that I reinstalled windows and for 90 minutes used the default AMD (no adrenalin) driver,

did stuff work?

Yes.
But I should use the lastest AMD driver(s), right?
And make my customary tweaks.
So I did.
Veilguard crashed in around 60 seconds.
I thought maybe to roll back the driver, but that seemed too drastic.
I got rid of my settings ("chill" and the frame limiter)
And stuff seems to work (famous last words).
But for now, right this exact second, I'll posit that frame limiting within the AMD adrenalin settings is a bad idea.
DXGI has its own frame-limiting program, which I don't know how to use, but if the game is tweaking it, I must be messing it up. 
This sounds great until it crashes again, so OK.

This next bit belonged to a more wordy blog, but I erased it.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/motherboards/i-know-tariff-related-price-increases-are-a-thing-right-now-but-a-usd1-371-motherboard-might-be-pushing-it-even-if-it-is-extreme/

My style of DIY PC might be too pricey these days. 

---

The gossip around forums says that T-Mobile saves on their electric bill by turning the internet speed down nightly.
Whether or not that's true I wouldn't know, because T-Mobile never mentions it, just blames you.

Without touching anything, speed returns on the cellphone and the modem.
The only thing is that speedtest eats into the usage-allotment, but
Wild guesses are my specialty.
Are they hobbling hackers who work their magic at night when they wear their little hoodies?
Is it "Peak time" when most people are on and I've eaten through my allotment because of my reinstall?
I vote "allotment" but even when I roll over next month I'll be afraid to use speedtest.
If only there was a more tiny test that only checked a few hundred bytes.
Anyway (the rumor says) it's from midnight to 6AM, but I really would not know.

judgmental (Crystaldiskinfo)

 The last time I talked about "crystaldiskinfo" a woman railed against depicting girls,
And let's just get that out of the way: without reading the entire site I don't know why but maybe they're his kids, although they'd be all grown up now.
Maybe it's the whole anime (insert Japanese phrase here) craze.
It doesn't matter.
The program is mostly unreadable, and only idle people without a lot to do, *guess* at the values.
Here are two examples. one of them is a demo picture, and one is mine.
There is no way you could possibly translate the hex number into something readable, unless you own the book on inscrutable numbers and numerology (numberitude)

13d and 145, and both are supposed to be fine.
Mine sits waiting so I'm not getting an accurate reading when it works, but people say it could be on the hotter edge of "70" and still be fine.
Yeah, now tell me how to translate "44c" into "13d" (It's kelvin, see below)
It sits blanketed by my enormous and fat video card. It has a retail heatsink.
I honestly don't know,
if it lasts a year and doesn't melt or burn up, I guess it's fine.

Plus, it (the reading) Always seems to be "44" which makes me think it's decorative or something.
"Vendor-specific," say some, meaning that whether to add a sensor is up to vendors.

Temp is in Kelvins (oooooh.)

A utility (a typical one) might not differentiate between ATA and "NVME", like western Digital does (different numbers for different types)
And they actually have their own (prolly unreadable) utility.

Critical warning! (But it's in Greek)
Length 1 (1-what? byte?) 

the above picture (the 00x00) rivals Wikipedia in opaqueness, which is odd considering it's a critical warning.
Bit 00 (left to right or right to left? Binary or hex?) (why the double zero's?) 
0010 (Guessing) means at some point the drive got too hot.
Maybe they mean four bits, each of which can mean a different dire warning.
Save whales, conserve space!  

"13d" is 317k is 43.8C, but it hasn't changed so it might be for show.

winre (Brain-deadness)

Random terms that might mean nothing:
DXGI-Flip: it's the greatest thing since the light bulb.
Tessellation ( See "Flip")

Disable both and see.

The video shares the Wifi slot.
IS it remotely possible...?
I'm forcing "pcie-3.0" just 2b shure.
But that means I have to reinstall the pariah POS game.
(Because I uninstalled it, don't be thick)

No! 

It's a useless endeavor.
Everything on "low," underclocked bus, and anyway, let me edit in here that "Avowed," the near-equivalent game, runs fine, cheats and all.

I'll totally guess here that Veilguard is just a tad too biased towards Nvidia graphics. Which could mean that someone somewhere knows the AMD-equivalent settings, besides "Low" and "Off" and "Unworthy"

I get the whole lack of confidence in my hardware, but I shouldn't, it performs well.
No, it's a setting, a pissant of a setting with movie-star charisma.
I just haven't found it.
I'm seriously considering ripping out my M.2's and replacing them with 990-pro's, but that could just be performance anxiety (plus I love to buy stuff.)
Will Korean tariffs fuck up prices, should I buy now, knowing that sandisk mostly sucks? (or whatever US brand ("Crucial"?) I'm thinking about that fails reliably after a few months)

I chose a different way. (IDK) 
It's not the money, not really, it's how reviewers kept carping about their defective 990.
I have a 970 and a WD black (770? 850) 
The 970(pro) is methuselah, and the 850 is just hoary.

Who knew names had celebrity status...I forgot. 
Well, I bought an 850x, God have mercy on my PC.

I'm as flabbergasted as you
that I bought the same thing
 only newer and bigger.

Unfortunately for me, I, uhm, have very little experience combining multiple drives into multiple partitions on a single drive, and google is reassuring (after it tries to sell me on partition software) but I have doubts, questions.
WILL the new drive be aligned?
OMG
Will it even work with the freebie windows-image software, or will it kick back an error message?
Do I need to format the new drive or do I let "image restore" do it?
Omg, Omg...

It's gonna ask me, do I want to use the original Partition table, I just know it...o crap. I'm not sure, OK?? Maybe "no" because I'm not cloning anything.
It's free space is huge, compared to the old ones, and maybe not-quite twice as big.
Well fucket, damn the torpedoes and etc, I'm sure I'll be editing this tomorrow evening (or so)

But for now, it's nice to know if a drive has to be prepared.
The guys explaining this in forums usually cuss out the questioner and give different answers, depending upon the forum.
*Usually* people recommend a different software package besides windows.
I actually own "PartedMagic" but I can't remember why or if I need it, 

on the dvd-rom (which isn't hooked up.)
It would be fantastic if windows would know what a blank SSD looks like, but I get the feeling that it does not.
At minimum, a disk needs to be MBR or GPT, and this is the part (in theory, so far) I'm stuck on.
Plus, two 1tb ssd's might not fit normally onto a 2tb ssd, because the numbers don't really jive. 1024, 1000 or 996? 
Once this system is down, I'll rely on my phone for answers, and hopefully that will be enough.

---

Those Liar

First, The new drive says it is 

1800 gigs. 900*2.

Second, windows won't use the image because it says that I don't have enough drives!

It also says I'm short of space.

Buying another drive to make windows happy, seems wasteful. So ok, I'm up a creek for now.

Force a d: partition maybe?

Clonezilla only reads clonezilla.

But a bright sunshiny page claims that you can mount and read VHD things, which are what image uses, I think.

If it's so obvious someone else would have brought it up.
Windows gets suspicious behind all that sparkly goodness, someone watches closely.
So it died trying to copy to my C: drive, and it's doing slightly better on the D: drive.
But the problem is, the registry is gone, like an attractive girl with a lobotomy.
I wonder if it will help "veilguard" run better?
Point being, everything must be reinstalled, redownloaded.
Don't use windows backup, save yourselves.
But my most important files exist, or most of them, anyway.

OK this won't make any sense, because if it did, I would not write it.
"Windows recovery Partition" is voodoo straight from a black book.
the ID for a recovery partition is umpteen digits long,
And the type of partition is too.

...

tourist-y

OK there are two news stories today so far.

One is,

 Trump yanked some of the tariffs, and people guess why.
Was it to manipulate stocks? Was the war he was promised postponed?
I know next to nothing about fishing or training dogs, but yeah, tease the dog with treats until he sits up, pull on your fishing line to attract predators.

The other story is way more hyped, they're trolling the Hudson for bodies after a helicopter crashed.
Wait, I need evidence of what I'm about to state:

But this accident was New york, and it was a flying accident, so it's juicier.

All accidents are bad, all deaths should be mourned, but some sell more news than others.

Anyway.

A picture from the helicopter accident shows guys on a boat and in a raft.
One guy is doing something.
The others sit, bend over intently, crouch or hold cans watching him.
The blurry blob in the middle of the picture is the star.
But what is it??

---

Now if I write random crap it might seem disrespectful, until you realize that ALL these entries are random. They wonder about stuff.
Like OK, a lady told me she'd send a link to where I should send my rent.
I keep thinking I should be wary of links emailed to me, and actually she never sent anything.
But an email that WAS there talked about HDMI 4.9 on sale.
HDMI is 4.9??

No, says google, that's the length.
So what is HDMI now?
I lost interest knowing (now) as I do that the max-speed should fit into a cable called "HDMI 2.1"

And people are there to quickly obfuscate the situation.
"You don't need 2.1, please don't buy it"
But you may remember years ago I wrote what a crappy experience I had with my new videocard and HDMI or DisplayPort cables.
"Whaaaattt?" yes, I had problems because my HDMI was too old, and my DisplayPort flickered. 
"Flickered?" "Did you reinstall, send donations, pray?"
I bought an expensive "Active" DisplayPort cable and all problems went away.

I didn't think about it til now.
I asked what "Active" meant back then and no one really knew.
I was especially interested in the very wide price difference.
"Active is active," a bombastic debater seemed to want to state.
Yeahbutt...why the price difference?
"Active is active" OK,OK, nevermind.
 

sudetenland (and stuff)

 

There apparently is a reason I remember the word "Sudetenland" after waking up.
Where it was and who wanted it can be googled.
Anyway, theoretically speaking, what makes a despot's day and what makes him an admired figure worshipped by milllllions, is a big-assed "glorious" war.
You get extraordinary powers, you can suspend the day-to-day laws,
and become a supreme commander.

---

Round up the yada-whoever's and kick them from your country.

(and stuff (To Be Continued)

Random republican nut:
A fox news graduate, a troll or ???

 https://www.post-journal.com/life/viewpoints/2017/08/beware-the-boogeyman/

"Whatever you believe or can conceive" googled results.
I'd have more but I don't think pithy thoughts I can google easily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1j4vz8a/watch_the_exact_moment_john_roberts_realizes_he/

---

stalking the sun

 https://www.space.com/the-universe/sun/nasas-daredevil-solar-spacecraft-survives-2nd-close-flyby-of-our-sun

There were no "face of God" revelations, and the only thing they said they could determine was the temperature.
Pre-and post-makeup.

It's like you're driving by the ex's house, to catch a glimpse, and you can't drive too slow or you'll get burned.
"Nevermind me, I'm just driving by to look at...houses," you carefully rehearse to yourself.
But the sun goes from ridiculously hot on the surface, to insanely hot on the corona.
They can't build a thermometer to withstand the heat, so they totally guess using telescopes and prisms and AI.
The surface plus the Corona add to the overall effect, which (inmho) is why the corona SEEMS hotter. How could you subtract one from the other to get an accurate reading?
Spend ten zillion to make a drive-by vehicle, and lay on the BS.

Or make up stories in your head... if the sun were your ex girlfriend, and the corona was her dad, Who would be more pissed if they saw you?
She still likes you but her dad is livid.
Seen from a distance, they're both mad.

"The elves don't need to be immortal to salve your conscience" 

(^%$#!!)
In the game in case you're hanging on the edge of your seat wondering,
the british type says "SaLv" (no "ae") 

if "Ae" sounds like "a" (so, the caet in the haet with a baet)

WHY fuck it up with non-essential letters??

One of etymologists' biggest cop-outs is how our English, 

our "official language," came from so many other languages, 

and we just misspelled the words.

shit. This game is a neverending infomercial for poor people in Casablanca (wherever.)
It's time to bury it, learn from my mistakes (never EVER go swimming)
and don't get lost (omg, it's a freaking labyrinth)
And if I find that I die too much, I'll press "restart."
Everyone is a god or was a god or will be a god, and I suppose I'll be invited into Godhood or be a curator of a magical library, at least.

There's a story for kids when I was very little, about a guy making bread so big it would give fragrance to the neighborhood and make everyone happy.
But he wasn't a very good cook and tripled the heat and the cooking times, on a guess.
The bread burned, and people smelled the smoke and panicked.

This game is a lot like that story. "More is better" or "you all get paid by the chapter" or something, and bits are fantastic.
The rest is like a comic streeetching out a lame joke.
The ending should have ended by now, I still have to fight Mr. Big, after dying and coming back from the dead.
Haven't I done enough?
(Can you get PTSD from video games?) 
If this game wasn't so long, like some of those WWII movies, it would be very good.