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).
This time we got some merch. One of these is a bootleg.
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. The new PC is an ASRock DeskMini X300 running an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G. I also added an APC UPS for added piece of mind. We have backups so data loss wasn’t an issue. After a fresh OS installation and restoring her home directory, all is well again.
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. The soundtrack is a download alongside the game available within the Steam client. There’s no DRM (great) and you can easily copy the files over somewhere else if you want to. While this would have certainly been the cheaper option overall, I wanted a physical copy so now I needed a new console.
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. I just needed something because my Xeon CPU didn’t have an integrated GPU. I’ve noticed how Linux friendly AMD has been in recent years, so I decided I’d switch at some point and that time is now.
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:
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.
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. Maybe I just haven’t listened to the right album yet. Dream Theater’s setlist was a bit disappointing. With a shorter set time compared to “an evening with” show, it was only 9 songs and I only really enjoyed 3: The Alien, Answering the Call, and The Count of Tuscany. The rest are either too slow or I’ve already heard them a thousand times.
