“Beautiful Desolation”
Nikon F60, AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D, Agfa APX 100
Speaking of PoE 2, if you have issues with it crashing and hard locking your PC (especially on the latest Windows 11 version, 24H2) you might want to tweak the affinity of the PoE process. To do this, go to the “Details” tab of the Task Manager (which you can call up by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete) and search for the game’s process — in my case that is PathOfExileSteam.exe. Right click on it and choose “Set affinity”, then remove a processor core or two so that the process doesn’t use all of your CPU’s cores.
That way, only the game will lock up instead of the whole machine with you needing to reboot. This only happens when loading maps, so you won’t lose any game progress and you can simply restart the game again (not forgetting to tweak the affinity every time). I also set my renderer to Vulkan, but I don’t know if that is needed to make this work.
After almost exactly 4 days playtime in the game, and 208 deaths, I have just finished the Early Access portion of Path of Exile 2. That is, I finished acts one to three of the game, killed every boss and fully explored all maps — with a Solo Self Fund character. You can redo those acts at a higher difficulty and then enter the endgame mode, but I am not sure I want to do that right now. I’d rather start a new character in a new class and replay the content I have already explored.
In any case: What a great game! I’ve been loving every minute of this so far.
I explain why I am leaving YouTube for the time being.
Donald Trump’s Second Term
When it comes to anything related to Donald Trump, you simply can’t trust a word the corporate media says. You must judge him by his actions yourself.
It’s starting to look like Jeju 2216 went down because of a double bird strike.
Investigators found bird feathers and blood in both engines of the Jeju Air jet that crashed in South Korea last month, killing 179 people, a person familiar with the probe told Reuters on Friday.
With both engines being out and the APU being offline, there would be only (very minimal) standby power available to the aircraft. Which is why the microphones for the cockpit voice recorder didn’t work.
The bird strikes might have happened very close to each other. Probably a flock of large birds from one of the nearby nesting areas. While two separate bird strikes are pretty rare, double strikes due to bird flocks seem to happen once in a while and are often devastating. It is not impossible to land a plane successfully after such an accident, however. Both US Airways 1549 and Ural Airlines 178 were struck by a flock of birds after takeoff and ditched without fatalities. You’ve got to have nerves of steel to pull something like that off, though.
Fabian A. Scherschel in reply to :
Re: “we don’t really know what to look for when searching for civilization more advanced that ours”
I like Babylon 5’s concept of elder races in this regard. As G’Kar explains in S1, E6 “Mind War”:
There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They’re vast, timeless, and if they’re aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants, and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know, we’ve tried, and we’ve learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on.
I feel like this is what NHI would look like to us. It would probably look like gods. I am also with Hawking: We probably don’t want to come across alien life. The best case scenario is that it doesn’t care about us. Or we might get stepped on, like G’Kar suggests. Worse case, they just come and eat us. Or strip mine our solar system.
Fabian A. Scherschel in reply to :
This is a really peculiar crash. They actually do not have data on the cockpit voice recorder for the final four minutes of the flight, because it seems that both engines were out and the plane had no power, so there was no way for the microphones in the cockpit to work. It is a total mystery how the pilots kept the plane in the air for four minutes at that altitude and why they didn't engage the APU to gain emergency power to extend the flaps and landing gear.
On Jan 13th 2025 South Korea’s Ministry of Transport further detailed, that the CVR stopped recording at 08:58:49L before the crew declared emergency at 08:59L. The ministry further reported that structures endangering flight safety like concrete mounds for ILS antenna will be replaced or removed. Three more airports in South Korea with such structures have been identified.
This is a really good analysis of the Jeju Air flight 7C-2216 disaster:
For more information, see The AV Herald:
News stories I’ve read recently and found interesting:
- Facebook Has Admitted Its Error, But Its ‘Fact Checkers’ Are Still Complicit In Censorship — Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn over a new leaf on the social media censorship — but some in the media don’t seem happy about giving up the power to silence people. — The Federalist
- On Mark Zuckerberg’s Speech Announcement — The Meta chief’s surprising public address on free speech hints at a coming battle between the U.S. and the rest of the world — Racket News
- Exodus, the new game being led by BioWare veteran James Ohlen, finally reveals some gameplay, and boy it sure looks like Mass Effect — Today we got our first look at some actual Exodus gameplay, and I hate to say it but I’m back to feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing, which to my eye looks like nothing so much as an alt-universe Mass Effect. — PC Gamer
- Diablo 1 and 2 devs secure $4.5 million for a new ARPG: ‘We’re going back to what made those early Diablo games feel so awesome but taking them in some cool, fresh directions’ — According to a press release announcing the studio’s seed funding success, Moon Beast is “exploring an alternate trajectory for action RPGs,” and based on its founders’ histories I suspect they have a pretty strong sense of where the genre has room to grow. — PC Gamer
Now this is really funny. Apparently, the original director of AARO, Sean M. Kirkpatrick, used Reddit to come up with the organisation’s motto vita nostra est quod cogitationes nostra facere est.
Can someone translate this quote to latin for me please?
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
I still have no idea what is going on with the drones — or whatever they are — in New Jersey, but I do agree with Matt Taibbi in that, whatever is happening, the public is being lied to. Being lied to by people in power. Anyone interested in a functioning democracy and the rule of law should be outraged about this. The government and the military don’t know what’s going on? And they can’t find out? Despite having all this power, all this technology and despite getting billions of taxpayer money thrown at them every year? And we shouldn’t worry about it? In a global geopolitical situation that’s more inflamed and closer to World War III as probably ever before? That’s fucking ridiculous! These are the people that presume to tell us how to run our lives and what’s good for the planet? They’re either lying to us or they are clueless. Either way, they can’t be trusted with running things, it seems.
And much closer to home for me, I’m probably even more outraged that German journalists don’t seem to cover this topic at all. I guess they are only interested in US-based journalism when the story makes Donald Trump look bad? What a joke.
- Gaslit Nation — From drones to terrorists, authorities are having a laugh at the public’s expense — Racket News
Fabian A. Scherschel in reply to :
Good point. Brian Cox pointed out in the aforementioned podcast that their space probes could be as small as iPhones with a similar energy output. They could be in orbit around earth and we wouldn't be able to detect them.
I do still feel that, most probably, the distances involved are the bigger factor, though. Even if we assume that every single civilisation sooner or later gets to a point where they emit radio waves (which we’ve been actively looking for for a couple of decades now), then those only travel at the speed of light and might take tens or hundereds of thousands of years to get to us. And that is also assuming that we actually would detect them. I feel like radio waves from a civilisation could easily get lost in all the other stuff out there that’s emitting similar radiation. Especially when we’re talking the half of the galaxy we can’t really look at well. I think in some respects it would probably be easier to monitor other galaxies than it would be to figure out what’s going on in parts of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.
As far as Dyson spheres are concerned, I always thought that was a stupid theory. I have a feeling what we are seeing there is a natural phenomenon we can’t explain. Probably to do with dark matter or dark energy (it makes up 95% of the stuff out there, after all). I have always felt that if you were sufficiently advanced to build a Dyson sphere, you’d easily find smaller, more subtler and — most importantly — more efficient ways of generating energy. It’s like Ian M. Banks and his Culture orbitals … why not just colonise a few planets and save yourself all that work? Even if you have AI and robots to do it, it’s just tremendously wasteful and inefficient to build things that look like planets in space when you might as well use the actual planets that are there. These things feel like too much like ’70s sci-fi ideas inspired by utopianism / communism to me. They’re neat ideas, but I am not convinced anyone would actually go through the trouble instead of just building something smaller and more elegant. Looking at actual history, humans never actually behave that way. And since I have no other reference point, I must assume that NHIs would behave similarly.
Love the snowflakes on your blog, BTW. That made me laugh. 
Thoughts on the Fermi Paradox
Joe Rogan, Brian Cox and why I think we haven’t found signs of intelligent life out there. And probably never will.
Wishing all readers of this blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2025! I hope you have a relaxing time during the holidays and enjoy yourselves as much as you can. I myself will take some time off from writing now. I’ll see you in the coming year.
But let’s stop talking about bad games — and I think The Veilguard has definitely been established as such by now — and start looking at good ones. My recent favourite is Path of Exile 2, which is in Early Access now and already a masterpiece. Even in its current state it beats Diablo IV hands down and is probably my favourite game since Elden Ring already. It actually takes a lot of cues from that game, including an invincibility dodge roll (an ARPG innovation, as far as I know) and the fact that it is a very hard game. Much harder than its predecessor. I’ve been playing it a lot recently and it’s been massive fun. I really hope they keep going in the direction they set out in the Early Access version. It’s a late entry, but it’s my game of the year for 2024, even in its unfinished state.
Bioware discounting The Veilguard after about 2 1/2 months is a clear admission that the launch of this game was a disaster. Especially since 35% is a very significant discount. Baldur’s Gate 3, a game that’s over a year older (and a success, compared to The Veilguard), has never been discounted that much. The gaming press is now starting to catch on to this game being a flop. Even EA people are now kinda admitting as much. Of course, the most fatuous do-gooders are still clinging to their lost cause, but I think it’s time to admit that most of the audience is tired of this woke bullshit and all the condescending messaging and just wants a good game instead.