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I think it's time to update the title of this thread to Binge-Watching shows - 2024 Edition  .

Just finished Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Really enjoyed it. It follows two storylines and the one that involves the younger adults can be a bit sloggish to get through but the finale and the other storyline completely made the watch worth it.

If you enjoy the latest Godzilla/King Kong movies and subscribe to Apple TV+, I highly recommend it.

@BLUEVOODU I haven't asked about it and haven't seen any thoughts from them.

There is this video from Digital Foundry. They did a review on it. I did see a report that these sold out in a few places after 2 days. Seems there are a lot of people who find this convenient.

TLDR - I thought AM4 CPUs worked in all AM4 motherboards. Guess that statement comes with a * now. Will be playing with a heat gun and something to straighten pins tomorrow...

Yep, unfortunately updating the bios has always been the case when updating to a new CPU on an older board. I did it way back when I went from an Sandy Bridge i5 to an Ivy Bridge i7 and then had to do it when I upgraded my Ryzen 5 3600X to a 5600X.

I still remember the massive backlash that AMD got caught in when they decided before the 5000 series CPUs released that they were not going to support 3xx motherboards. They eventually conceded and motherboard manufacturers put out bios updates to support them. Well, almost all of them, there are some boards that I believe did get left behind.

I'm glad your board was able to be updated. That would've sucked.

My cooler also got stuck on my 3600X and when I got it off I dropped it and that bent some pins. I fixed them and I'm using it right now but that could've been a lot worse. I wish you luck and hold on to that CPU tight.

I also recommend keeping an eye on the stability of the PC. That CPU is a 105W CPU and that motherboard supports up to that but sometimes the VRMs aren't up to the task even if they say it supports that wattage. From the pictures on Asrock's site, it doesn't look like they have heatsinks on them. It'll probably be fine but if you notice instability this could be why.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I only have a couple, simple resolutions. Finish more games (I'm going to see if I can at least beat 10) and drink more water. I love soda so I have to cut down on that. Way too much sugar.

Steam is another one.  I have several Steam games that you can no longer procure.  They have been canned for one reason or another.  However, they're AT LEAST still available on my account to play.

That's where GOG comes in. Unfortunately not everything is available there but that seems to be changing. Even Sony published games like God of War, Uncharted, Days Gone and Horizon Zero Dawn are on there. They just need to bring Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank. I still get games on Steam but I'll double dip (or only get them on GOG) if it's a game I want to preserve myself.

What a great finale. Tom Hiddleston was just perfect casting for Loki. Can't believe all these movies over the years finally lead to this.

I look forward to Phase 5.

This is one of the reasons why I'm such an advocate for emulation and archiving games digitally. Will it ever be the same as playing with cart on a CRT? No. But for me that's okay. I just care that I can still play it because I already paid for it.

There are emulation projects out there that are trying to preserve PS3/360 games and beyond. That's really the only way to do this. Switch already has a decent amount of games that have been dumped. It makes no sense to leave these games behind just because they are digital.

I hope more gamers jump on the archiving train.

I've read that Best Buy clarified this does not include physical games, so they should still be there. It's just physical movies they're phasing out.

Either way, this is not surprising. People who still want physical media are a rare people these days. If Best Buy wants to continue as a business, then they can't be spending money holding on to media that doesn't sell anymore.

It sucks, I still collect blu-rays and I do like to get my favorite games on physical, but it's unfortunately what it is.

Physical games have resale value.

I mean, kind of. It's definitely a limited time value these days. A lot of these newer games need patches to be complete, or in some cases, functional. Eventually servers get shut down. Sure, you do at least have most of the data there but it's generally an inferior experience. Not to mention there are now consoles that have no disc drives and they are fairly popular. Physical games have no value to those who own these consoles.

Also, with digital taking over, the demand for even used physical copies will drop and game stores that take trade-ins might not be able to do it anymore. It's a crappy cycle. In order for the used game market to thrive, there needs to be new physical games sold in the first place.

It's mainly just Nintendo 1st party games these days that generally come complete. They'll probably be the games that hold their value the most.

Caught up on Episode 2 and ya'll were right, it delivered.

I think what's making this stand out more than the other series is that it feels a lot more self-contained with potential nuggets for other shows/movies to tie in.

I think that's what made Captain America: Winter Soldier so good. It can stand on its own without relying on the overall Thanos narrative to intrude but still had major implications to it.

I am just hoping that at some point, Sabine, Bo-Katan, Boba Fett, and Din Jarin get to be on screen together. We have already seen that these stories are happening around the same time period. Sabine has worked with Bo-Katan before; they had some long history with the Dark Saber.

I'm 99% sure that'll happen. Probably all get together to take out Thrawn.

I have a couple of friends who have already pre-ordered it. The demand might not be high but it'll probably sell decently.

The remote streaming works really well. I use my Steam Deck for that purpose and the picture is pretty clean. It'll probably sell quite a bit when it eventually goes on sale.

Finally saw the first episode and it was a great start. It felt more like a Season Finale than a Season Premiere.

I'm really hoping that by the end it ties into one of the movies properly.

@BLUEVOODU I don't think there are plans to have an Anakin show and in all honesty I don't think there should be. Not sure what more of his story there is to tell. He seems better showing up as a side character like in Ahsoka.

I've also haven't really followed Anaking/Vader past the movies and some of the Clone Wars animation. So I would be interested in hearing what could still be explored for him.

Semi-binged Castlevania:Nocturne on Netflix. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's another decent adaption of the video games. Neither of the Castlevania shows follow the games exactly but I think what they came up with works. I do recommend it.

Finished this show and it was pretty good overall. I think it was a good thing it wasn't so Ahsoka focused because they didn't write her character well. Way too stoic for my taste.

There were some pretty good fight scenes and Baylan Skoll was an interesting character. I really hope that the actor's death doesn't stop from his story continuing. It was refreshing to see a different take on Jedi that weren't necessarily imperial or part of the order.

Wish there was more Anakin though.

So I'm now caught up with all of the episodes. I'm definitely digging it. Overall it feels a tad hollow but there's still enough meat on the bone to make it worthwhile.

The

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Anaking scenes

were the highlight for me so far. The flashbacks were really cool. Seeing that stuff visualized in live action was nice.

Finished the Twisted Metal show and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Season 1 is only 10 episodes but there didn't seem to be much filler. I do recommend it if anyone wants something to jump into but don't want to watch multiple seasons.

I've only seen episode 1 so far. I'm interested in Sabine and what will happen there but the dialogue seems very wooden to me. Just finished watching other shows so I'll jump back in soon.

No additional thoughts. I guess I'm just waiting for Loki S2 at this point. Seems to be one of those shows where Marvel will make it more relevant down the line but on the surface doesn't seem to bring much to the table.

They definitely should've made this into a movie. My tin foil hat guess would be Disney+ needed more content so they converted this into a show.

The last episode was decent and introduces another villain that will probably culminate in Secret Wars.

With Marvel cutting down on production in general, I wonder how it's all going to turn out. Hopefully more focused.

Happy Birthday!!

Episode was pretty intriguing and Olivia Colman is doing a great acting job, in my opinion. Seems like a lot of the story was going through the motions to get to these final two episodes. I hope they at least have a serviceable ending.

Of course they ended the episode with...

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Fury getting his spy gear and calling in a special favor from someone. Not going to lie, they got me somewhat excited to see who they exactly get for the cameo.

No one had a chance to check this out?  Did anyone check out the 1st spider-verse ?

Going to be another streaming movie for me. Didn't get a chance to watch it in theaters, and in all honesty, I'm not missing that experience. But that's another topic.

LOVED the first spider-verse. The art style, the story, everything was awesome. I can't wait for the sequel to pop up already.

If this series has only six episodes, I would have to say,"failure" at this point.

I'm not sure if I would go that far yet. Episode 2 felt really strong. Episode 3 was so-so but had some good moments. I do think it's opening itself up to a lot of continuity errors with the backstory they're filling in.

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Here I see an old man who has given up, weak has been. He is alone, mostly. He is literally crawling out of the shadows of what seems like despair? I thought that Captain Marvel flew out in front of the spaceship to find these aliens a home at the end of her first movie. What happened with that? And now we have over a million of these guys on earth? You would think that there would be more activity in recruiting on their part instead of being a two man team. Really, what good could they do?

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I'm not sure if I see someone who has given up. If anything, he's desperate because he doesn't know who to trust anymore. Which makes sense. He screwed up by not being on Earth and keeping tabs on the Skrulls.

As for the recruiting, I think it goes back to not knowing who you can trust anymore. They already showed his wife has defecting to Gravik and he caught that. So he probably doesn't want to advertise too much that he's hunting Skrulls. It already got Maria Hill killed, which at this point, looks to be permanent.

As for what happened in the Captain Marvel movie, I'm hoping they fill that in during the sequel.

Anyone watch the Hulu show The Bear?

It's about an award winning chef taking over his dead brother's sandwich shop. The premise sounds basic but it's a really entertaining show and well acted. The characters are great. I definitely recommend this show. All episodes of seasons 1 and 2 are up.

I completely forgot about this show until I started seeing articles for reviews pop up about 2 weeks ago. I watched episode 1 and so far it's intriguing. They got a lot of big actors for this show which is nice.

Although, not a fan of...

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Killing Maria Hill. Or at least, the possibility of her being dead. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a fake-out and she shows up later. If that is the case, I hope it's done well.

It's been really difficult lately to get to the theater. Just been working and then not feeling like going out from being mentally spent. Looks like this will be another Disney+ watch for me.

@retro junkie You sound like me back when I took the full plunge to Linux a year and a half ago. It has since become my daily driver computer.

You're seriously piquing the tinkerer in me and I really want to get a chromebook now, lol. I  started looking into them more and stumbled across this website - Chrome Unboxed. Check it out if you haven't already.

Just finished watching Mrs. Davis. The trailers were intriguing but after reading on other forums how good it was, decided to give it a watch. This show is not what I expected and it's currently my favorite new show of 2023.

Also finished Ted Lasso and although it's generally a good show with lots of positivity, it got a bit disjointed in the last season. Seemed to be all over the place and lots of story happened outside of the camera. There were many times where all of a sudden characters would have a change of heart but you never see why exactly. It's sad because it started out so great.

@BLUEVOODU Season 2 is pretty strong. Season 3 can be a bit of a slog but Season 4 is where it truly becomes great and doesn't really let up. I hope you enjoy the show.

This topic has been really tempting me to get one. I actually needed a new budget laptop for work purposes and unfortunately need Windows for VPN software. Settled for an Acer Aspire 5.

I plan to kind of treat it as a chromebook. Do everything through the Google Suite and leave the internal storage clear of files as much as I can. I love Google Sheets. It's gotten to the point that Microsoft Excel (although much more powerful) feels bloated to me.

@retro junkie Let us know how the Wacom works. Would be good to see a cheaper alternative to an iPad/iPad Pro.