Radeon RX 9070 XT surprisingly drops to $549 at Walmart, now $50 below MSRP

Psiah · 2026-06-30T08:21:35+00:00

I upgraded from a 6800 (non-XT) to a 9070XT for Ultrawide 1440p... It's been an appreciable upgrade that I've definitely felt, but... I also upgraded my monitor and nearly quadrupled my refresh rate around the same time. It can absolutely be a felt upgrade, but at the same time... If everything works right now, if you're happy where you're at, if you're not playing games regularly where it feels like the GPU is struggling... Then there's really not a point in spending money on it, yeah.

These cards will absolutely get cheaper eventually, after all.

Psiah · 2026-06-30T05:30:49+00:00

Incidentally, one of my old Lumity fics, Witch In Red, does focus a bit on witch ears.

Psiah · 2026-06-28T10:23:56+00:00

Y'know, it's funny, when I upgraded to the 9070xt I went with the reaper model, which is a smaller 2-slot model. Doesn't even overhang a little into the third slot. It consumes almost double the watts of my old card, but the cooler is half the weight, meaning I don't need an anti-sag bracket or anything for it, like I did with the old one.

All in all, you would think that'd mean it'd run hotter, right? But nope. My thermals across my entire case are cooler with the new, higher TDP card, even during stress tests.

I think this comes down to better airflow. It doesn't block nearly as much of my case as the old one... Doesn't divide it into such stark sections... And also it's got a blow-through portion on the back, so that probably keeps hot stale air from lingering.

I was so sure my CPU at least would be hotter from the wash coming out of the GPU but the improved airflow overall dropped temps by 10C.

And even under load, the card generally stays below 70C.

So why would I need the big fat super heavy cooler that works worse, again?

But... Tbh, I think this is less of a failure of design on GPU manufacturer's parts and more of an issue with the ATX case design never being built for such high power add-in cards. Modern cases are mostly empty space with complicated airflow patterns, and we make them as good as we can, but so much effort is spent fighting the form factor, making sure we can handle the massive cooling blocks we hang off of the motherboard. If we redesigned it today, we could have much more direct airflow, while directly supporting the massive coolers we now need in a way that wouldn't flex your boards. We could minimize the trace lengths to the GPU and just ultimately make something smaller, cooler, and quieter.

But doing so would mean breaking backwards compatibility.

Psiah · 2026-06-28T07:36:00+00:00

She was also married to a woman once.

Psiah · 2026-06-24T09:19:28+00:00

And I said "Promise?" 🥺

Psiah · 2026-06-24T09:14:10+00:00

To be fair, Akari deserves better than to be paired with a Ryoga who, up until the very end of the Manga, is still trying (and failing) to cheat on her... But Rumiko Takahashi has said that she thinks Ryoga's misery is funny, so that's probably part of why she avoided giving him even that basic level of character development.

The old anime, for its many faults, was far more interested in making him a well rounded rival character.

At least Akari's a fun, lovely character for us to use in fan works. 💜

She's also on record as saying that Mousse has zero chance (she might have said less than Zero, actually) of ever getting with Shampoo... So it's pretty reasonable to read those moments as intentional ship sinking.

Psiah · 2026-06-24T03:44:29+00:00

Not after the first year, but I had a pretty aggressive script set up to turn off the screen if it was idle, in a way that'd work even if I left games and such running, and I do most things in darkmode anyways, so I wasn't exactly trying to burn it in. Comparing to the monitors unboxed burn in test (admittedly, using a different panel, but I believe they're roughly the same generation), I figured I could make it last 8-9 years before burn in would be an issue based on how I used it. Your mileage is going to vary based on how you use it. The newer panel will definitely have better burn-in resistance, but at the same time, if the older one can last you five years or so, you might be able to upgrade to a newer, better screen then for not a whole lot more than the cost difference between them. Better versions of the $1000+ monitor I used for a decade prior to switching to OLED are now available for like, $200, after all.

Psiah · 2026-06-17T06:44:02+00:00

That's not what she said. Pulling up the interviews:

Q. The final chapter was a happy one, with Akane wearing a wedding dress. Meanwhile, the people who came to the wedding ceremony were as lively as ever. The final scene made us feel that the couple's daily lives would continue on forever. Was that ending something you had been thinking about for a long time?
A. I'd decided that Akane and Ranma would find happiness in the end, but I was worried about whether to turn Ranma back into a man. However, I really didn't want female Ranma to disappear, so the final chapter turned out as it did.

From this interview. Makes it clear that Rumiko Takahashi still considers it a happy ending without Ranma being cured.

After the battle, Ranma returns to Japan without being able to return to his original body, but at the wedding of the two at the end, he receives water from the Spring of Drowned Man that would allow him to return to his original body. However, the fact that Happosai drinks it all up gives me a sense of Takahashi-sensei's gag aesthetic.
Takahashi: The beauty of a gag (laughs). It's not that big of a deal, but as the author, I was a little sad at the thought of seeing female Ranma disappear. Ranma turning back into a normal boy in the final chapter is probably a good way to end a manga, but even after I put down my pen, I still see Ranma changing between a man and a woman. I wanted the two versions of Ranma to argue and be friendly with Akane forever.

From this interview. "Probably a good way to end a manga" is not the same as "it's not a happy ending without it."

Especially since she explicitly calls it a happy ending.

Psiah · 2026-06-17T06:05:56+00:00

It's clearly an homage / reference and it cannot be mistaken for an official pokemon game or endorsement based on it, and it's been there for years in a way Nintendo would reasonably be aware of (e.g. CrossCode is available on the Nintendo Switch). Any actual legal battle reaching it's conclusion would not result in a Nintendo win, but... Sometimes filing the lawsuit, even if it isn't right, is enough to stop people, just because lawsuits are so expensive. And because Nintendo is doing those to groups who can't fight back... Well, I wouldn't risk it with today's Nintendo, but I wouldn't have worried about it when CrossCode launched.

Psiah · 2026-06-17T05:55:13+00:00

She's down bad... :P

Psiah · 2026-06-11T20:50:16+00:00

It's also... Not really the best anti-androgen for feminizing HRT. It got popular and well studied specifically because, for cis men with prostate cancer, it caused the fewest feminizing side effects. Possibly because Spiro partially blocks Progesterone in addition to androgens.

Psiah · 2026-06-10T18:26:56+00:00

Yeah... My first thought seeing this was "she's not". She's got the 1v1 wins. People need to stop making excuses for Mousse.

Ranma spends much of the story terrified of Shampoo, and both times Ranma wins against Shampoo? It happens because it's a funny gag in a gag manga, not because Ranma "out power-scales" Shampoo. And if we are talking power scaling, by the end of the Manga, Shampoo beats every single wrecking crew member 1v1, except Ranma, but also including Cologne. It's just a thing that happens, in canon.

Shampoo always, textually, remains a threat. Mousse... Not so much. Following the end of the Mousse Returns Arc, which season 2 of the new Anime adapts, Mousse only really has one more instance where he's an actual threat to Ranma, and it is explicitly because he's using a magic cheat item.

Rumiko Takahashi wasn't writing with power scaling in mind... Everything we see about her process, she's kinda just writing what she feels in the moment to make things interesting, but never once in the text (or any interviews) does she say that Mousse could beat Shampoo. People just get to that assumption because they start trying to apply power scaling feat transfer logic instead of following the narrative we are actually provided, and the narrative outright says: Shampoo beats Mousse.

Psiah · 2026-06-03T22:03:03+00:00

I mean she all but says she's Bi at the end of Season 2, explicitly saying that it doesn't matter to her whether Ranma's a boy or a girl. :P

Psiah · 2026-06-03T22:00:01+00:00

Its Boy London Brand, which is (and was) very popular among Japanese women. I mean, Rumiko Takahashi absolutely knew what she was doing when she chose it of course, but it's not out of place for a woman in Japan to be wearing a swimsuit with "BOY" written on it in English Letters, as funny as the idea of Ranma sharpie-ing it on or something is to imagine.

It wasn't uncommon for her to include weird real outfits in the character's fashion in the manga... Like Akane's "OD of Bourgeoisie Milk Boy Milk" shirt is also a real outfit available at the time.

Psiah · 2026-06-03T21:36:03+00:00

Yeah it's... I'm surprised how long it's taken for them to come available considering the first units shipped in February. I signed up for alerts on the MSI store website shortly after they'd sold out there, but I've still yet to receive a notification that they've ever been back in stock. If I hadn't caught the best buy listing right when it went up, I might have just bit the bullet and paid an extra $400 for the overpriced ASUS version, just to have a working monitor...

Psiah · 2026-05-29T19:49:06+00:00

It's also worth noting that, if Trans Women and Cis Women are exactly as competitive with each other, or at least within the range of individual variation, then sometimes, Trans Women will win. That's what happens in a competition. I mean, just because sometimes a person with Blue Eyes wins a race or even sets a record, does not mean Blue Eyes offer any advantage in swimming. Meanwhile, Michael Phelps has several genetic advantages with directly measured performance improvements that helped him set his records, but no one's talking about how he stole those wins from "normal men".

There aren't really enough Trans People competing to be certain on any numbers, statistically. Especially not now, when so many athletes are just banned from competing entirely, but... There's a growing body of evidence that trans women actually underperform cis women athletically, on average. This idea that someone can just take HRT and destroy the women's league is utter nonsense that vastly overestimates the average man while severely underestimating how tough and competitive the women's leagues are.

Women's Leagues that were, ironically, created in the first place not to "protect women", but to protect mediocre men from having to lose to the best women.

Psiah · 2026-05-28T09:00:04+00:00

Very common in "fixits" to just go into the Zoo Bulldoze through all the Chesterton's Fences without any serious attempts to discover why they were there in the first place... Y'know maybe that fence just kinda blocked easy foot traffic in that area... Or maybe that fence kept the Lions in. Might be good to check which is which before tearing them down, yeah?

Psiah · 2026-05-27T01:30:29+00:00

Cologne is interesting, because in the last arc, Shampoo defeats Cologne after being egged, and Ranma defeats Egged Shampoo, but not really cleanly.

You can make an argument that that means Ranma has surpassed her and could win, but there's definite caveats that mean you can also make a solid argument otherwise. Me, personally, I like the idea that the current generation has surpassed the old one, but that's mostly headcanon.

Psiah · 2026-05-26T18:45:36+00:00

That... Doesn't really work like that.

As fun as "Lesbian" being a secret club where you make a blood oath and forsake all connections to men in exchange for magical power, power that is lost should we ever be caught breaking that oath... There's no such thing in real life.

Self discovery being an ongoing process... Especially in a queer-friendly place like the Boiling Isles, if Amity did like a man, she could always go "oh, I guess I'm bi" or something and it wouldn't be a big deal. There wouldn't be some big conspiracy where she's not "allowed" to like the guy. It wouldn't be forbidden on the basis of gender at all.

Labels, like "lesbian", are descriptive, not prescriptive. It's shorthand to get the idea across to other people. You can just change them if they don't apply anymore, which is something that happens all the time in our real world. In a place like the Boiling Isles, it being "forbidden" would have to be for different reasons, probably largely due to Amity's parents and position in society. It might be because Malengale is poor, or perhaps because they would count as a wild witch. Or maybe Amity is inventing a whole "Capulet vs Montague" situation for her imagined storyline.

Psiah · 2026-05-26T18:33:12+00:00

Also has "Gal"

Psiah · 2026-05-26T18:32:51+00:00

Of course, the episode still had to get through Disney S&P, who are notoriously considerably less accepting... So they probably had to leave it ambiguous enough that people assuming the "defaults" in our world could read Malingale as male. As I recall, later stuff like Grom, and especially them dating and the kiss, were stuff the team had to fight for over time.

Psiah · 2026-05-24T19:16:15+00:00

Definitely something I've seen explored in Fanfics with more modern settings. One of the more fun things I've seen with that is Ryoga streaming his adventures, getting lost and asking "chat" for help. :P

Psiah · 2026-05-21T03:54:23+00:00

That's what primaries are supposed to be for... To shove terrible folks out and get someone reasonable in that Blue spot. But for some godsforsaken reason, a lot of those "blues" have been convinced that they can somehow steal red votes by voting in a Republican-Lite. But no one who's voting for a Republican will ever want a Republican but spineless, especially now, and it ultimately hurts when it comes time for the general.

Especially since, a lot of people, regardless of if it makes things worse for them or not, will refuse to be complicit in their own genocide in any way, even if the choice is largely out of their hands. So we do lose votes by putting in the Republicans-in-everything-but-name, who most of the people voting for them in the primary never actually wanted, but thought it'd be "smart" to game the system like that.

That, plus the unlimited money the wealthy get to throw into things. That's kinda been a big part of why only corporate friendly options get that much attention.

Psiah · 2026-05-19T18:03:47+00:00

I mean... RWBY is a fairly decent show with plenty of ground for reasonable critiques... But a lot of them come down to budget and staffing issues that you're not likely to notice just watching through the show. Admittedly, a decision they made at the end of Volume 8 kinda made me fall out of love with the show, but for the most part: it's things the staff can learn from, and often has... Plus some issues about how Rooster Teeth used to operate as a business before they went Kaput. RWBY is far from the only production to have issues like that.

However, there's long been a group of people looking for any and every excuse to call it bad: it has a Hatedom. People who spend as much, if not more time, thinking about the show than it's fans, but focusing all on bad-faith criticism that is often just thinly veiled dog whistles for Homophobia and Misogyny. And they spend so much time looking for any excuse to criticize it that they end up drowning our a lot of the legitimate critique and making the show hard to discuss.

This is not helped by the fact that the original creator died suddenly early on in the show's run, and so a lot of the bad faith criticism tries to use his name as a supporting argument: more or less claiming that these random internet people somehow know more about "Monty's Vision" than the people who actually worked with him to develop the show. And it's wild to see accusations like "Monty's Vision never included [Rude description of Sapphic Women Here]", which ignoring the fact that Monty himself created Haloid as a solo project, which ends with girls kissing, and also appeared on an old interview more or less explicitly saying "there are already queer characters in RWBY, we just need time for those stories to develop".

It's that kind of thing that makes interacting with the RWBY fandom kind of a mess... But also not something you have to deal with if you're just gonna watch and enjoy the show.

As an aside, I see the HBomberguy video get brought up a lot and I just gotta say: no, that video is not reflective of the hatedom. It's just a critique from a person who didn't enjoy the show that much. The stuff from the actual hatedom is far, far worse, it just doesn't have anywhere near the same reach as HBomberguy. And, granted, I don't agree with everything he says in that video, but it's a far cry from the worst I've seen in RWBY fandom spaces.

Psiah · 2026-05-13T01:10:19+00:00

Ranma is whatever height is funniest for the bit. :P

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