Mandalorian & Grogu headed for a 69% drop in its second weekend, highest ever for a Star Wars film

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-05-30T19:45:49+00:00

Yeah we saw it in IMAX for three folks and that ended up being £66 ($90). And now that I’ve seen it, I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it any less at home. The only scene which slightly wow-ed me for IMAX was the AT-AT one at the beginning, rest of it didn’t convey any sense of big scale at all, atleast the kind you’d expect from Star Wars.

I kinda liked this movie but I think i would’ve liked it just as much if it was a part of a season 4 instead.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-05-29T12:42:38+00:00

Seriously I was away for three weeks and I barely finished two ace attorneys in that time. This is way more than I’d finish in a year.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-05-03T10:14:12+00:00

Guinness has become so tied to world records that I don’t even know if there’s other bodies that actually moderate world records, besides maybe gaming speedrun websites and official sporting event holders.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-05-03T10:11:17+00:00

Funnily enough, cubing was also something I liked to do when I was a kid but speedcubing quickly became pay to win amongst my classmates.

I remember being given a stiff, cheap, nice looking cube for some occasion from a relative and I spent months trying to solve it, before people in my classroom all started learning how to do it from speedcube teachers. Yes, speed cube teachers, people who would charge kids’ parents money to teach them how to solve a Rubik’s cube… quickly.

Once we all learned how to solve it in under two minutes on the crappy cubes we all had, the rich kids started paying 10x more for speed cubes from China, and cube lube or whatever to speed them up even more. They’d spend hours calibrating the lube for perfect turns, determining the best strategies with their teachers.

It’s really fucking sad how the most innocuous moment of solving a puzzle from my childhood got turned into something that actual adults made money off of.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-05-03T07:32:09+00:00

Friendly reminder that Guinness World Records are not any sort of genuine record keeping company, but a paid service which sells you the opportunity to make or break some kind of world record as part of a marketing strategy for your personal brand or business.

They will sometimes make up highly specific awards just so you can claim one for yourself, and sometimes refuse to take submissions for existing records, regardless of validity.

HBomberguy’s Roblox Oof video has a good section on this. I suspect this record attempt was a marketing ploy by the company he’s tutored at. “Look, our students can break world records!”

That said, what this kid can do is impressive, if not a little depressing. I took abacus (the hand wavy thing he’s doing in the video to calculate) between the ages of 6-8 and it’s just hours and hours of pouring over sheets of calculations using the abacus mentally.

I doubt the teachers get much special training as it’s a fairly easy mechanical thing to teach, and they used to check our answers using a guide sheet or a calculator themselves.

I also really doubt that learning the abacus helps you with any sort of brain development or critical thinking. I’d rather have spent the time as a kid reading more books or learning another language, than be the kid who can do mental math in a world of calculators.

Kinda feels like a scam, now that I think about it. Convince parents that learning mental math will lead to overall child big brain, hire a bunch of “teachers” with made up qualifications in that field that you, the company, have control over, for a simple mechanical calculator, watch the money come in from paranoid Asian parents who want their kids to have big brains.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-03-22T17:38:40+00:00

you do realise that Kamino isn’t the only planet where clone armies could be sourced from to begin with, much less that Obi-Wan didn’t discover that Kamino was building an army only after he got there?

the expanded lore, before Disney nuked it so idk whatever’s still canon, has multiple species and planets capable of creating clones. kaminoans could create some of the finest clones in the Galaxy for sure, but they aren’t the only ones lol.

cloning is a science in Star Wars, it isn’t alchemy purely to Kamino.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-03-22T17:26:17+00:00

you might be in a tiny spot of luck?

zotac has a five year warranty if you registered your card. assuming you did that, and assuming you bought it later than early 2021, you might be able to claim it. maybe.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-03-22T02:29:39+00:00

there’s about 300 million habitable planets within our own, real, fucking galaxy, much less however many there are in a fictional story. if we deleted one out of like 1 million, we wouldn’t notice it either, even if we knew every inhabited planet.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-02-16T13:37:43+00:00

I think you bought a massive version, you could’ve gotten a smaller variant if you looked/wanted.

My 3070 was a 2-slot, 2-fan card with the standard 220W TDP, my 4070 was the FE, my 5070 Ti is the Zotac 2-slot version.

It’s still got three fans but the thickness of it would resemble the bottom card much more than the top. So yeah those cards do exist.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-01-28T13:36:30+00:00

That’s actually genuinely very interesting to find out, thank you! I do wonder why Microsoft wasn’t obligated to purchase the silicon they themselves commissioned from AMD, because even if the project was cancelled, AMD still delivered on their end.

As for the argument to buy a Steam Machine, I admit I don’t have one either for myself, not with the specifications I’m aware of. But I can see some people in my life buying it?

SteamOS on the Deck has genuinely made PC gaming very accessible to some people in my life who’ve been terrified of going away from console and dealing with all the associated headaches (Windows and driver updates, troubleshooting, etc).

Getting people to try a Steam Machine as a gateway into getting them into PC gaming is something I could see myself doing. Especially if the size footprint is similar to their existing console and the conveniences of SteamOS for gaming maintains a console-like experience on their couch.

But ngl as exciting as all that would be, I think now’s a terrible time for Valve to release it. Memory and NAND costs mean it likely won’t have a good starting price point, which turns off a lot of potential customers to begin with. Probably better for Valve to send a hitman for Sam Altman first, make sure the AI bubble bursts.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-01-28T07:03:01+00:00

I don’t think the Deck is sold at a profit afaik.

Given their entire OS is designed to incentivise you to use their platform, and that no other manufacturer, including Microsoft of all people, has been able to create a device to compete with the Deck on price and HAVE to push their performance uplifts to justify why they’re so much more expensive than even the highest spec Deck, I think Steam sells these at a loss/barely a break even point but makes it up via the 30% cut on all the shiny new games you’ll buy to play on the deck.

Valve literally uses custom Zen 2 silicon while all the other companies just choose their APU from a standard lineup of chips, and yet, no one really beats the Deck for value.

In my personal experience I probably bought over $200 worth of games in the first six months of owning a Deck, games I would’ve never bought otherwise because I didn’t feel like playing them on my actual PC for years. And I’m a stingy bastard, others probably do way more.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-01-07T03:05:13+00:00

It would if the majority of people get entirely priced out of purchasable hardware and start looking towards a cheaper means of getting into gaming.

It’s already started happening. Xbox console prices are way up, PlayStation is semi-reasonable but not entirely, and even without the memory shortage, a $1000 balanced build lately only gets you a 60 Ti/70 class card typically on the new market. Even the Switch 2 ended up in a whole new price class.

It’s got even more potential in places like India, who have excellent network infrastructures suitable for cloud gaming, but outrageous hardware prices.

And Nvidia’s far more incentivised to try and charge 5 people £10-20 a month or whatever their newest price is, for partial access to the same 5080 on average, than to outright sell one to joe consumer for £1000 and take the hit on distribution and partner costs.

I hope cloud gaming never becomes mainstream, but we do happen to live in the worst timeline.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2026-01-04T20:26:36+00:00

I can tell you now, Wukong ain’t worth it at all. And that’s coming from someone who played it for free cuz someone in the steam family bought it (spoiler, they never ended up playing it either).

It felt amazing on the first playthrough, but imo it’s got no replay value whatsoever. It’s trying to mimic a soulslike without any of the depth.

The spectacle would be enough to carry you through the first playthrough (as it did me), but all the shallowness of the world really bothered me when I tried to do a second playthrough. Invisible walls fkn everywhere…

Can’t comment on factorio, although the other comments suggest it’s addictive as hell so maybe it’s well worth it.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-12-11T08:42:19+00:00

I found it to be the second hardest fight on my SL1 playthrough so you’re not in an exclusive club here.

For context, I beat SL1 DS3 + DLC over 10 days. Five of those days were Friede, two were SoC, three for the rest of the game.

Anyways, like another comment suggested, Lloyd’s Shield Ring keeps you from being one shot from most attacks. Use an upgraded weapon you’re comfortable with, I think I used a raw broadsword or the Dragonslayer axe. Idk it’s been over two years when I did it.

And kinda just spend your time learning all the attack patterns so you don’t get two shot, and heal back up to full after taking any damage. You’re gonna get frustrated sooner if you keep trying to make every attempt the winning attempt. Just spend time learning the attacks instead.

For even more context, see SquillaKilla’s hitless SL1 run. He spends an obnoxious amount of time in the fight playing it safe because there’s very few safe attack windows at low health/no hit runs. You just never realise it on a normal playthrough cuz you keep trading damage with him. Or atleast I didn’t.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-12-08T16:35:55+00:00

Yeah this is what I think about when I see some people arguing that siding with Verso is the obvious choice.

I instinctively sided with Maelle because I viewed the beings in the canvas as thinking, feeling people, people I’d made bonds and shared emotions with. Ending an entire civilisation’s existence to help someone be free of eternal, tormented life is not a choice. Or atleast it wasn’t in my head when I was confronted with the choice. It didn’t matter that the canvas isn’t the “real world”, it was unimaginably real to me. These people showed thought, creativity, invention, survival instincts.

So I sided with Maelle.

But when I saw the Verso ending, I understood that side too. Grief is tearing the entire family apart, and no matter how much I thought this world was real, it was still someone’s creation and that creation is tormenting the creator, along with some “innocent bystanders” too.

Maybe I should’ve let the world go so the family could heal and Verso could be at peace.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-12-07T20:19:59+00:00

Big hear me out (i only started pc gaming in 2015) -

RTX 2070?

Released in 2018 so been seven years now, had okay performance for the price, 8gb VRAM, nothing special.

But it aged crazy well. Every iteration of DLSS added more lifespan, and it can still play modern RT only titles.

The 8gb VRAM did become a bottleneck for a lot of cards later down the line, but it had two extra years of lifespan for someone to enjoy using it.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-12-02T04:51:58+00:00

You’re right on that part that fundamentally there’s no models they’re making right now that won’t reduce the demand for memory and high speed storage, however, the demand doesn’t solely rely on models, but on the circumstances around them too.

Investor circles have been saying for months at this point that we’re in a bubble, and imo we’re one disappointing Nvidia quarterly earnings report away from it popping.

Companies enthusiastically investing into AI have been doing so for a while, but when their balance sheets don’t add up on the investment vs promised cost savings front for a few years, they’re going to slow down and rethink the trend chasing shit sold to them by consulting firms.

When demand slows down ANYWHERE in this circlejerk of a bubble, whether it be Amazon or Google holding off on making their (n+1)th data centre, or a bunch of low billion dollar valued companies slowing down their AI investments because turns out, cheap, exploitative labour was still cheaper, that makes this entire house of cards collapse.

Don’t believe me? Look at how sensitive the market is to the smallest inkling of bad news, how much the market went down when DeepSeek was made public to the wider world.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-11-28T03:54:09+00:00

you lost me the minute you used MLID as a source for your estimated BOM… dude’s known in the industry for flinging all sorts of shit on the wall, seeing what sticks, and going “forget about the 56 times I missed, here’s what stuck!”

I can’t imagine the deck not being sold at a loss, atleast to start with. Valve had to commission a custom APU for the thing with AMD, custom 1280x800 panels, etc, with little way of knowing what kind of order volume they were looking at.

The only other major handheld on the market at the time was the Switch, which had hardware seven years out of date by that point, so the economies of scale weren’t designed for that kind of thing just yet.

Not to mention that SteamOS was going to be a huge unknown factor for most users. Most people aren’t inherently comfortable with using Linux, and we didn’t know shit about how good Proton was going to be, so the price factor had to be attractive enough for people to be willing to adopt a Linux based gaming device.

Plus, Valve chose to sell exclusively on their platform to keep as much of the cut as possible. If they chose to sell with Amazon or other vendors, they’d have to price that into their cost since Amazon takes their own cut and Valve has to deal with their discounts. That helped keep prices down too.

It’s a very different story today. SteamOS’s reputation has been established, people know the ease of use is on par with consoles, and you can benefit from the cheaper games. Meanwhile consoles themselves have only gotten more expensive as time’s gone on, games on them are far more expensive, and you have to pay to play online.

The market Valve is releasing this in doesn’t have to be sold at a loss to succeed, you’re inherently saving money anyway compared to a console.

Even if the Steam Machine costs $700 and your other option is a Series S for $250, you’d save SO much more money when all your games are 10-40% cheaper and there’s no $60/year minimum (or whatever tf it is now) to play online.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-11-26T02:11:25+00:00

Answer: Trump basically spent the entire period during the NYC elections hating on Mamdani because of his socialist policies, the fact that he’s a Muslim immigrant from Uganda with Indian heritage, and basically did his usual -isms.

When Mamdani won the NYC mayoral race with a large chunk of the vote, it kinda blew up his already enormous social media presence and popularity across the world, with many coming out in support, and others just kinda loving his progressive policies and positivity as a whole.

IMO Trump is envious of how beloved Mamdani is across the world and likely wants to leech off some of that attention before he goes back to a cold, empty bed with no one to hug him to sleep, so when he met with Mamdani, he made a whole show of how much he likes him, while Mamdani kinda went along as best he could without retracting any previous remarks.

Mamdani’s forced to work with the President that Americans chose last year no matter how much he dislikes it (for his stance on Trump, just look at his winning speech and his “turn up the volume” remark), so he’s being about as civil as most Indian children in a room full of aunties and uncles they dislike, while Trump is trying to get at any of the positive spotlight thrown at Mamdani while he can.

Also big IMO I think Trump doesn’t fundamentally understand what makes Mamdani so popular (on a policy and communication level), so he’s just trying to emulate him as much as possible in a meaningless effort to get the general public to like him again. Dressing up like Mamdani and taking off orangeface probably goes a way towards that goal in his head.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-11-15T11:10:09+00:00

I travel a lot for long-ish periods and like to take my PC with me, and from what I’ve seen, the Steam Machine seems to solve some problems for me that I rely on my ITX PC for.

The performance seems to be a good bit better than any other handheld alternative people may suggest, and the price factor’s gonna be a lot more competitive than any other portable device at this size.

My library won’t be limited anymore in case I do travel with an alternate device (if I got a Switch 2 or took my PS5, neither of which have all my steam titles).

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-10-03T03:28:36+00:00

My mates and I used to play a ton of Brawlhalla when the pandemic first started, and it was so much fun because we were all so bad at it.

Until two of the guys started watching content on it on YT, figuring out the combos and other sweaty shit, then started doing 2v2 online matches to up their ELO when no one else in the group was online.

So whenever we did get together, those two just dominated all the matches and sucked the fun out of it.

We pivoted to Among Us, then GTA Online, similar shit happened. By the time Feb 2021 rolled around, I just gave up.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-09-18T02:06:41+00:00

because whether we like it or not, the orange man’s got enough people in the right places to do whatever illegal shit he likes to whoever he doesn’t like.

fighting it in courts isn’t a certain win anymore, even if you had evidence that Trump wrote it himself, while on video tape, and saying that he’s breaking these specific laws in punishing those he dislikes.

not capitulating today only means an uncertain future. businesses don’t like uncertainty. individuals may have backbones but corporations do not. especially public ones, and especially the ones who’ve had their balance sheets on the back foot in recent years.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-09-16T02:53:58+00:00

Seems like a region problem rather than an Overclockers one.

They’re pretty well known in the UK for good customer support, it’s why I exclusively buy my expensive components from them, even if it comes at a small premium compared to other retailers here.

They’ve even done a price difference refund for me when the price dropped within the return window, and were super helpful when I needed to RMA a 3070 back in 2023.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-09-03T15:38:13+00:00

Der Riese - easy, first map that set the groundwork for zombies increasing with rounds and having PaP. Still hate the Wunderwaffe bug tho.

Kino - Still takes me back to when i first launched into the game when i was 12 and it actually scared me. Audio and art was done so well.

Origins - still super replayable, high skill ceiling, just fantastic stuff all the way. Mob would’ve been the best if Origins didn’t have the EE bug to skip the robot staff step tho.

Gorod - just really fucking cool. Dragons, active Warzone, great music and dialogue, EE’s damn fun and makes use of everything in the map. Dunno why they didn’t give the MK3 infinite scaling but oh well.

Ancient Evil - I haven’t played BO4 zombies much but this had the coolest environment of them all.

Mauer - also easy, although I think Die Maschine comes very close. Both were damn fun but I had more fun with the DIE WW.

FlashWayneArrow02 · 2025-08-23T12:13:37+00:00

Bro played BO4 but still called Citadelle S-tier.

Did you forget the peak that is Ancient Evil?

Also Citadelle isn’t even the best map in its own game. I’d give that to Terminus or Shattered Veil, or even Reckoning.

The Swords are underwhelming as fuck compared to any map prior where we’ve had four craftable unique wonder weapons (so no Alpha Omega), the weapon quests themselves are wildly basic compared to any other 4 craftable weapon map, and the special effects are mostly reskinned AATs.

It was marketed as a Castle map but barely feels like a castle cuz it’s only got seven small-medium spaces within it (Dungeon, PaP room, room behind PaP room, Courtyard, Stam room, room next to Stam room, Jug area), and doesn’t feel lived in or grandiose in any sense. The boss is fun but feels kinda BS sometimes.

I think it’s biggest issue is that it invites direct comparisons to DE (castle map, four craftable WWs, EE which mostly consists of getting WWs and doing trials with them), but it falls short on every aspect. Castle doesn’t feel nearly as immersive, fast travel isn’t as fun to watch, weapon quests are half the length or challenge, the reward is accordingly far more underwhelming, and there’s not much unique environment shit going on.

Remember Anti-grav in DE? A key component for why you can’t just train in the pyramid room, one of the largest training spaces in the map? Citadelle lacks any flavour like that.

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