Well, it seems to be about that time again to find out what we're all playing and talk about some pseudo-random topics. It's a beautiful Saturday morning and I'm not sure I have a lot planned for the day. Frankly that's okay, it's been a weird week and I would like to have some time for things to normalize. I might even actually get a start on the front end rebuild I have to for my truck this weekend while the weather is still warm. Anyway, let's see what's happening. Read more

Hey everyone, hopefully you all had a great Thanksgiving without much family conflict. Mine was awesome. Relatively small, we only had about 9 people but it was two days for us all eating turkey, ham, prime rib and the usual sides. Weather was great and I have three fire pits so we set up tables outside and lit those fires to sit by while we ate and drank and had a great time. I cooked and that included desserts of which were the ubiquitous pumpkin pies and a pecan pie but also a rum cake. We played a couple of board games and taught my brother-in-law's nephews to throw knives (this happened before the drinking), drank some great beer and wine and had a great time. In a weird a fun twist my sister and I found out through genealogy that we're technically, though very far back in line, the duke and duchess of a castle in Ireland that is now owned by Bono of U2. What a trip that is. Anyway, let's take a look at the WRUP. Read more

I'm exhausted. I've been working my ass off clearing brush around my place. This past week I've thinned out some very overgrown forest on my property to be more fire safe and much healthier, not to mention more aesthetic. In a space of about two thousand square feet I cleared out almost two hundred trees and enough dead and fallen brush and limbs to make three burn piles about ten feet in diameter and more than eight feet high. Even after all that I left around thirty threes in place (still overgrown for that size area) and I have quite a bit more to clean out in the surrounding area. It's a project I've been needing to do for years. I also had a long time friend of mine call about a tree falling on her fence to which I was recruited for repairs. Turned out that the tree that fell was also good wood so I ended up bucking it up and splitting it into fire wood and moving that up a hill by wheelbarrow loads. My body feels like it was in a car wreck and that's a little weird because I'm not unaccustomed to hard work. I've done this stuff most of my life. Today will be fairly chill though, thank goodness - an oil change, some painting before new gutters go up and a leaky shower mix valve to be fixed. But enough about me, let's look at what we're here for. Read more

Good morning everyone, welcome to another WRUP. It's a beautiful weekend here in CA and I hope the weather holds a little while longer. I have some front end work to do on my truck and no garage or covered work space to it in. But I can't do the work until next week at the earliest, I think. Anyway, it's a very lovely day out and I'll likely be cutting and clearing more dead brush away and making burn piles for when the conditions will allow for safe burning. I've actually already been able to burn a significant pile of dead stuff as of last weekend after the rains we had here. Good start at cleaning up. Okay let's look at the WRUP...

Intel has released Alder Lake in the 12900K and 12700K and KF SKU's and performance looks good. Alder Lake uses two different core types "P" cores and "E" cores, that power and efficiency. Windows schedules the use of P cores for demanding programs, like games, and E cores for background programs that remain open while you're gaming, like Steam for instance. The catch is that the scheduler works only with Windows 11. Performance is still great in Windows 10, but much less stable with the P and E cores sometimes handing off work loads that shouldn't be handed off. This is causing issues with both versions of Windows, in fact, and games with DeNuvo (no surprise here) are having major issues with such hand-offs as it appears to recognize the core change as different hardware and trips the protection in the DRM. Performance is still great and Intel seems to have finally been able to get away from the ++++ mode of CPU refreshing and made something more worth looking at. The fixes for DeNuvo games are in the works already for Windows 11 and even though there's no reason at all to keep them away from WIndows 10, that's exactly what's happening as they won't even begin fixing those until at least this coming January.

AMD CPU's are being targeted by miners of a new crypto called Raptoreum. AMD's Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc processors have very large L3 caches and Raptoreum uses CPU's to mine so if you're looking for a new Ryzen chip you'd better get one while you can because if the new crypto takes off then you may as well bet on scalpers and bots snatching all those up as well as our damn GPU's. Luckily for now at least Ryzen 5000 prices have been coming down since Alder Lake's release. Here's a better look from Extremetech

Elden Ring is coming in February. The official game play video from Bandai Namco shows quite a bit of the open world and "dungeons" and things look fairly cool. Here's the video in case you've not seen it yet. It looks like it'll be a kind of cross between Skyrim and Dark Souls showing the exploration while mounted on a fantasy steed encountering dragons in flight and caravans in fields. As a Souls fan I'll definitely play Elden Ring, but as of yet I can't say that I'm seeing anything ground breaking or particularly special to look forward to. Opinions online also seem to be varied from folks saying how great it looks to how they aren't impressed, to complaining about graphics etc. Typical internet. Take that with a grain of salt. There's time yet for more content to be officially released and for the time being let's just temper our expectations. After all, we've learned that the hype doesn't always lead to complete satisfaction, I.E. Cyberpunk 2077 (I still very much enjoyed CP 2077).

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Okay what's on our gaming agendas?

Scrooloose: Deep Rock Galactic has made it's way solidly back into my regimen with the release of the latest update. I've also installed and started a -cute so far- RPG called Pine and I think I'll keep on that a bit. My SnowRunner bones are tingling again as well and I'm ready to get back to the slog that is Amur so I can finally get to the next season.

Greywolfe: i'm being boring and doing game dailies.  so mostly that's just magic:  arena and sometimes tooling around in the crew to earn the last of the money i need for the most expensive car.  i liked that game when i picked it up the first time around and played around in it for a month.  but i also hate it.  the map is pretty cool.  the car handling is very awful.

Trulegendkiller: Man, it's been a long and emotionally draining week. I'm not sure what I'm going to play as my backlog is pretty huge now. Here is some possibilities:Alan Wake: Remastered: I'm still working my way through it and trying to collect all I can in one go so my run through on Nightmare mode will be, sure, intense but more about surviving the story.Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: I had fun playing it a few weeks back but put it down to finish Alan Wake, so I may go back to it.Metroid: Dread: Love having Samus back, just haven't had much time to play it.Monster Hunter Rise: I'm an Amiibo guy. Couple weeks ago at Gamestop they had some Monster Hunter amiibos. One was a Ninja Dog and the other a Ninja Cat... So I was like, I should try out Monster Hunter because I've never done so... Well, maybe I should try it this weekend.God Eater 3: Know nothing about the game but my friend randomly bought it for me on Switch, wants me to try it out.Warframe: A new update is coming and I have some grinding to do, I'll see if a friend wants to grind with me. Sadly, @yoda0vgs is 100% done with the game so I'll miss my time playing with him.I have a way bigger backlog but those are the ones I'll be most likely to get to.

Good morning everyone and here's hoping you're having a good start to the weekend. I pretty much didn't sleep last night so I'm tired AF, but it's a nice morning and I think I'm going to see Eternals today -hopefully that doesn't suck. It should be a nice day for a break though because it's been a busy week. I've been almost exclusively cutting and splitting firewood for the coming cold months. So far I've been lucky with weather being fairly nice so I've gotten a few cords done. I also installed a new fuel pump in my Dad's truck for my folks. Read more

Well, Halloween is nearly here and it's time for another WRUP. Whether you're taking the family out for some candy collection or hopping over to a friend's place for a costume party, we hope you all have a fun and safe weekend at whatever event you may attend.

Now, let's get to it... Read more

Oh boy it's another WRUP written a day late. I was so busy yesterday prepping for this atmospheric river storm that's currently rolling in that I just didn't have time to sit down and write even a quick weekend greeting. But on this early morning Sunday before 7:00am I've got my coffee and a couple of topics to talk about. Read more

Good morning everyone. It's time for another fall weekend WRUP and I'm just the guy to bring it to you on what is hopefully a beautiful, crisp morning for everyone. At least for those of us in the northern Hemisphere. Here's to a lovely weekend. Let's get to the topics. Read more