As mentioned last time, I’m back. It was mostly the same setlist but with 5 different songs subbed in: Policy of Truth, My Favourite Stranger, Strangelove (Acoustic), Black Celebration, and Waiting for the Night (Acoustic). Merch This time we got some merch. One of these is a bootleg. Audio The audio bootleg is up here. This one’s off the new album in MP3 format: Your browser does not support the audio element.

Last month, we had a power outage that killed the SSD in my wife’s PC. After a lengthy fsck, the drive had numerous bad sectors and was no longer something I’d trust to keep running. It was a 2.5" Crucial MX500 that was purchased in 2019 and still within the 5 year warranty period. The PC was a cheap pre-built Lenovo tower from 2015. I also wouldn’t trust whatever power supply was in there anymore so we decided to just replace it entirely.

I’ve been wanting to play Shredder’s Revenge for over a year now. It’s available on Linux via Steam so I looked into it. You can’t buy a physical copy and what’s “sold” is a license. They also have a bundle with a soundtrack. I’m interested. Is that a physical CD? Or a file download? MP3? FLAC? What do you get? I get no answers from the product listing. I have to go to the Steam forum or subreddit to find out how this works.

Recently, the fan on my GTX 750 Ti started to make a consistent noise so I used that as the excuse to finally replace it. I probably could have just replaced the fan… but eh, I’ve had it since 2015 so it had a good run. Back then, I just got Nvidia because that was the name I thought of when shopping for a graphics card. I don’t game much on desktop.

Image quality, detail, and dynamic range is a clear improvement. The G3 looks very fuzzy by comparison. Audio on the G4 is better albeit a little too sensitive in some situations. Indoors it has clipped badly on sudden dog barks. Maybe that will be improved in a firmware update. Conversely, the G3’s audio is very quiet. I’m selling the G3’s but while I have them, I mounted them side by side for a quick shootout:

Tickets My tickets were about $125 each. Parking $45. This makes my 10th Dream Theater show since 2005 and my first time at the YouTube Theater. Nice venue. Dreamsonic This was promoted as a “festival” but didn’t really feel like one. It also felt like they were trying to recreate the Progressive Nation concept from ‘08/‘09, which I think was better. The lineup was ok. Animals as Leaders is cool, but Devin Townsend has never done anything for me.