#however not all our mods are awake at the current moment

[mltea]

this is in reply to the anon in our inbox ! 

PLEASE NOTE THIS GETS LONG ! SO IT IS UNDER A READMORE UWU !

the flirting thing is something i see a lot - and i can see both sides on this. on one hand he does actually stop when she asks him too. we’ve seen this in canon and we’ve also seen her getting upset over him no longer flirting with her we’ve also of course seen her get mad at the flirting. so to each their own with this one? 

for the date episode: i’m 90% sure ladybug didn’t flat out turn him down. though i could be wrong. however i do know that he wasn’t really mad at her for not turning up - but he got mad when she said ‘” we have to act like a couple “ - he has a crush on her. she isn’t taking that seriously. he’s allowed to be upset over that in my personal opinion. 

syren episode , this one i see a lot. i think he’s pretty valid. ladybug is suppose to be the person he can trust the most. and then finds out she’s keeping secrets from him - he gets upset and he’s valid in that. though in my opinion? MASTER FU IS AT FAULT he treats ladybug better than chat noir when they’re suppose to be equals. 

he doesn’t enable lila. he threatens lila to keep away from marinette lets not forget this. he just isn’t actively out there fighting with lila. he has a reputation to uphold , lila is close with his father, and we’ve seen what happens when marinette goes after lila. 

chloe is a p difficult subject because we don’t see them interact much in canon??? so i’d have to go back and watch to comment on this but mod petal probably can give a better answer if she wants to later !

the flirting banter thing - i’ve actually talked about this. i feel like its a conversation they need to really have but it’s also a trope that’s used in a lot of superhero stuff? where they flirt during battles. not even just superheroes it happens in a lot of tv shows and movies as  well. i just...don’t think its handled well via this show tbh.

i don’t remember much from copycat other than an actual adult has a crush on ladybug which grosses me out so another mod will have to take care of that one.

plagg. convinces him to go to america , so if we’re gonna talk about that you have to add plagg into the mix there.

AEON WAS AN ACCIDENT , THEY WERE FIGHTING. HE DIDN’T DO IT ON PURPOSE. you yourself said you haven’t watched it so - please do to get the whole story on that. they were fighting an akuma. he got twisted around and it happened on complete accident.

marinette is at fault with the aspik situation and i will not step down from this. she wasn’t able to focus at all ini that episode knowing that adrien was the one under the mask. she also knew it wasn’t a good idea to give him the miraculous but she did so anyway. that wasn’t his fault - he wasn’t fit for that miraculous. marinette should have been smarter and not given it to her crush just bc he was her crush.

i can’t remember the balcony scene i’m sorry fdsaijkl another mod might be able to comment ???

something we can say about the chat blanc episode is : adrien seems really blinded by his crush on ladybug - and vise versa with marinette’s crush on adrien. it’s kinda something that happens irl sometimes? just not handled very well. 

as for the volpina episode.... i’m p sure he would have given her the book if stuff hadn’t gone like it had gone. but you never know ig?

[marveloverthinker]

Space Orcs- Music

Nevis Stordarn hadn’t seen what all the fuss was, honestly. Oh, he was aware of humanities prowess in battle, everyone was. But where others called them barely civilized thugs good only for crushing armies and taming untameable worlds, Nevis knew them to be true artists, musicians the likes of which the Galaxy had never seen. His fascination had begun on one trip when he and a group of others had been brought to Earth to sample their culture. Ambassadors had carefully taken them around the planet, and they had viewed art, examined architecture, sampled cuisine (carefully) and had finished it all with a concert. And what a concert! Nevis had stared in awe as hundreds of the creatures assembled on a stage, with so many assorted instruments he didn’t think he could have cataloged them all in one sitting. The initial noise (there was no other word for it) had appalled him, but after his guide had assured him that this was merely tuning, which had to be done after sitting, the music had begun, a piece crafted by a long gone maestro named Beethoven, and Nevis had been moved profoundly by the piece. Wasn’t that just like humanity, though? All of their chaos and diversity, when brought together under a masterfully held baton, bore harmony the rest of the universe couldn’t even fathom. He’d applauded louder than anyone when the show had finished, and had returned to his post at home encouraging everyone to partake in their marvelous symphonies. “If they are barbaric,” he had argued in the debate halls of every university that would host him, “then our cultures should hope to achieve such barbarism. That had been a few cycles ago, however. Humanities formal alliance with the Federation (an action Nevis liked to believe he could take some credit for) had led to the re-eruption of war with with the Athalan Empire, when transports could not spare space for cultural researchers what with all the soldiers that had to get moved. Now the war was over, though, he had hoped to make another such trip, and had begun inquiring after how to get it funded, when excellent news reached his desk. An entire Battalion of Human Soldiers were currently taking R+R right here, on his home planet, and a group of musicians, called a band, had been brought out to entertain them. Some research revealed that a band, while still using diverse instruments, was significantly smaller than an orchestra, and so there was not likely to be any Beethoven played. However, while Beethoven’s music was quite old and established, this “Band,” bearing the name of Star Riot, was apparently quite new and was “at  the top of the charts,” which Nevis interpreted as meaning they were considered quite good. He received some odd looks at the Human embassy at the request, but eventually they granted him a single ticket. He wouldn’t stand with the soliders, but he would have seats on a nearby heliopad. When he arrived, the crowd was already a writhing mass of humanity. That seemed odd... they had been quite organized entering for the orchestra, but these were soldiers, after all. Perhaps there was something to their reputation. The Band members came out, picked up their instruments, and Nevis was prepared this time for the awful racket. These were not instruments he recognized, but they apparently needed to be tuned. Then the singer, (imagine an organic voice that could be tuned and played like a musical instrument! Truly, these creatures were musical marvels,) stepped up to the amplification device. Nevis wondered, for a moment, if she was perhaps a slave, or chattel of some kind, or from an area on Earth that had been subjected to Athalan bombardment. There had to be some reason she couldn’t afford the fine clothes the orchestra had worn, or at least something not ripped and stained. But making a mental note to to see what funds were available for emancipation or at least aid after the show, he leaned forward as she spoke. “Before we begin...” the roar of the crowd quieted, if only barely, “I have a very special message. This one goes out to the Emperor of the Athalan...” Oh, dear. She was in no state to make a diplomatic message. Did they not understand that such matters were to be handled by ambassadors? Were musicians the peacemakers of their world, what an amazing species to take their gifted artists and make them... “...FUCK YOU!” As the crowd burst into a roar that surely the gods themselves would have fled, the band released a sound louder and more horrible than the tuning could ever have been. A manic beat emanated from the drums, screeching reverberations seemed to fill the air all around, and Nevis fell to the floor in Agony. An usher, noting this, called for an evac, and as he felt powerful human hands lifting him up, Nevis’ nervous system surrendered under the assault as he passed out. Weeks later he was still in recovery as his auditory and nervous systems were requiring a complete overhaul, even with some cybernetic enhancements to reverse some scarring that could never heal. He could barely handle sounds above a whisper, and it wasn’t for days after awaking that he bothered to speak himself. He was under care of a human nurse on rotation in the hospital, who had been truly lovely and caring while tending to his wounds. “So,” the large man said with a smile, what’s with all the new hardware?” Nevis swallowed hard, then endeavored to speak. “I was at the Star Riot concert, and...” “Awww, mosh pit got a bit rough? Still, I gotta hand it to you. Most non-humans just woulda stayed away. Not only did you go, but you PARTIED, and now you’re getting modded so you can handle it better. If you don’t mind me being old-fashioned, that is so totally METAL.” He grinned. “I got a t-shirt signed, I’ll show it to you sometime. You’re good people, Nevis. You get us.” Nevis could only weakly smile as the nurse walked out. No, he didn’t. The same species that produced Beethoven had also produced that... noise. He didn’t get them. He began to wonder if anyone ever would.

[krakenator]

Chapter 17 aka “Dune”

SPOILERS are sprinkled around extremely liberally for The Property of Hate

Masterpost here

RGB: oh fuck

That’s… that’s actually really neat. We get confirmation soon that everything in this world has color as blood, not just RGB. So, you can actually see it in this tree stump- idk if that’s how sap actually works but it’s a cool as hell visual

That’s a neat way to highlight how FUCKING UNNERVED AND AFRAID RGB IS SEEING THIS BULLSHIT

Oh fuck. Oh that is really not good. Oh no. oh god it’s a domino effect. No trees means nothing is holding up the sea which means the darkness can’t do anything on its own. This is gonna ripple back to the market isn’t it. Oh god

With the sea collapsing like this, Click may get released from his watery grave quicker than imagined…

YIKES

Ok, at least it stopped and stabilized. For now. buuuut that particular exit is completely unusable now

HEY WAIT A MINUTE *rewinds a few pages* YEAH REMEMBER THAT HUGE SCHISM CRACK FROM REALIZING RGB’S MURDERED MANY HEROES AND BEING TOLD TO SHOOT HIM? Yeah that shits GONE now

How the fuck? That hasn’t happened before. Hero’s had to sleep to heal her schism in the past.

AND ITS COMING BACK? One page after they’re out of the darkness and that schism is starting to think about making a reappearance. WHY THO

CONSIDER THIS: darkness ALSO has healing properties? Whereas total Light will burn, scorch, and white you out from existence, total Dark will hide, conceal, and heal you.

Then again, Hero’s schism didn’t heal on her first journey through darkness to get to the Market

So... more likely it was something to do with their bonding in the last chapter, or- or even though the Nightmare gave her a bad scare, it is still technically a DREAM, and dreams whether they are nice or scary will still heal you up a bit? Interesting if true. Alternatively, the sheer proximity to that literal blockade of dreams was just so, many and potent that Hero didnt even need to be asleep for them to work a little magic on her

I still think I’m onto something about Darkness also having healing effects, however! Consider the evidence:

RGB was fucking WRECKED right before Negative come out to play way back in chapter 6. Just utterly destroyed. He was COVERED IN BURNS from being PUNCHED ACROSS A FIELD and then his circuits got ELECTROCUTED. But Negative doesn’t have any of those injuries, and neither does RGB once Negative has finished his job. Negative, confirmed to be Made of Darkness, heals RGB from whatever dumb-fuck nonsense he’s gotten into to make Negative have to step in

EVIDENCE #2: that black residue Hero leaves from being impaled on the sick tree. Just because RGB believes nothing they did contributed to the tree’s revival doesn’t mean that’s entirely true. If Hero somehow left behind a lil bit o’ Darkness in the tree, then maybe it might have thawed a little/slower on its own even without the Butterfly also melting away the [—–]

One last, slightly off-topic thing before we get back to continuing the actual chapter, people produce soft lights and flowers when they sleep, right? and those flowers fade away once they wake up. RGB’s never done that, but Negative spawns blue roses that break apart when he’s done his business. My point being... RGB doesn’t dream. If he only ever actually asleep when Negative is awake?

RGB’s overabundance of color comes into play once again

“this sand is stained by the blood of dead trees” wow I did not remember this section of comic being as metal as it is

Wait the fuck a minute. Hold on. Hold- hold on

RGB IS A FUCKING COLOR BLEED PUN

RGB’s explanation is great for why this place is littered with husks of vehicles, but let’s think about what else probably ends up here, all those objects of sentimental affection and names- laptops, favorite pens. stuffed animals! The Sands are like a junk yard. and things occasionally get washed into the Sea, or the Sea washes them up here... just a cool cycle overall

SPECTACULAR TEAMWORK LOVELIES KEEP IT UP

back on the schism- its definitely much better than when they left the Market, but worse for having exited the Darkness. its more of an impression of a dip that a gaping wound right now

OH. So, yeah the sun piece will probably run into its brother whilst in the ocean, but RGB’s right- it probably went there in order to be hidden over other reasons

BUSTED

RGB: you did WHAT? You SOLD your FINGERS? Without TELLING ME? What made you think you could go and do that, I would’ve handled it!!

Hero, remembering that time she saw RGB rip his whole hand off and give it to an owl he met 2 seconds ago: I mean…

Yo can we… talk about RGB’s entire train of thought (LMAO) here? That he’s upset about Hero trading away parts of herself but doesn’t really give a fig about doing the same to himself? He’ll sell off buttons or an entire hand, but Hero gives away two fingers for a friend and he’s upset that she didn’t let him know, because he’d have handled it? On one hand it’s very “adults being horrified at children having to take on responsibilities and experiences they shouldn’t have to” which I am always about, yet on the other hand I’m getting a “RGB really doesn’t value himself much at all does he” vibe and yikes my heart

Like, between the self-worth issues touched on here and “maintain illusion of control and confidence by saying big words smartly”- same fucking hat. RGB needs to stop being relatable

“saying HUGE words, just INCOMPREHENSIBLE LETTERS when angry” is also. Yup. That’s uh. That’s me. goddammit

...... for me, this is what i would personally call the Nightmare Scenario

YOWCH that looks like it hurt. At least the good news is RGB will be able to recolor himself over a bit of time. Not sure if he’s also able to regenerate indelible lineart, so… better just not have to find out

also; that’s literally a train of thought. Why’s it colored like Negative, though? Is this a train made of Darkness?

YUP it’s a Darkness-cloaked train- how fucking weird must this look on Hate’s side?

Fdhafjk I forgot, they have NO IDEA what happened to Click. Amazing

what.... in the fresh hell is going on in this panel

BUT, super interesting implication that Hate can’t LEAVE this place, and that without Dial to get audio, or him/the Butterfly to go out and interact with things, Hate is very hands-off

but honestly wtf is the slanted speechbox? “this side of the script”??? i love it but what does this mean

RGB points out that charging through the sands like this should be destroying it, yet it remains perfectly intact throughout all of this, even when BURROWING INTO THE LITERAL ERASING SANDS. Interesting implication that Darkness can’t be erased. Interesting implication that Negative would be entirely unaffected by sand as well

IS DIAL EATING POPCORN? HOW

Who wants to bet this is gonna be an inkwell

AND DIAL IS LET OUT OF HIS CAGE!

Who the fuck would be the third party that’s sent this hell-train out to scoop up and deliver our heroes to them? 

The idea that the kidnapper has at least once before been a kidnapee is just so funny to me. HOW DOES IT FEEL RGB??

(war flashbacks to THIS MORNING when RGB: broke into song, rocketed himself across the market via explosion and a slingshot, and wouldn’t stop making puns the entire time) my man is a ball of stress but damn if he isn’t able to react in the moment

The good news is RGB’s color regen process is pretty slick- his back’s already back to normal

Your humansona’s a real Jackie Chan madman isn’t he RGB. a real Tom Cruise motherfucker. Some Buster Keaton level shit.

I SHOULD SINCERELY HOPE SO, you’re wearing like TWO lucky objects on your person currently. If that can’t give you even a smidgen of stat-boosting...

now CHECK THIS OUT: it seems like RGB starts running into weirdness BEFORE he charges directly into the dream-infested car. A film-reel overlay effect, and lookit his hat-  negative stripes of shadow

Chiaroscuro: “the effect of contrasted light and shadow” created by light shining in weird ways and directions. interesting chapter title to use, uncle mod, on a chapter which has got the pure whites of the erased desert/Hate’s realm directly contrasted with tree stumps and this weird, darkness train

Don’t you hate it when you run directly into a gas cloud of dreams

So we got a jewel (a box?), white and black hands, the iron again, a teardrop shape, what might be RGB’s Mystery Button, all with film reels

And speaking of that iron, we also get the fiery sharp shapes again… which morph into S’s. it’s a sound. a SSSSSSSSSSS

I just had to go look up what an iron actually sounds like and… yeah. It makes an SSSS sound

Human RGB is… unfairly handsome. Of course he is. AND I SEE THAT TV IN ON THE LEFT MOD

Hey wait a minute

That’s not my bastard man

NOBODY in this comic has spoken in ANYTHING other than black or white colored text. and now here is this ancient MEMORY MAN speaking in ORANGE?

well actually the ‘co-worker’ is speaking in like really dark maroon? BUT STILL

“we split” has returned, 15 chapters later

The duality of these two title pages is really something- past and present getting whacked awake, the similar position present RGB has fallen to mirror past-human-guy, going from the Light of the memory to the Darkness of the train

ACTUALLY, RGB didn’t even LAND like that. he fall on the floor like THIS. he’s SHIFTED to reflect the decayed, old, deteriotated and fragile memory currently playing out in his head

AND CHECK OUT THOSE NEGATIVE-STRIPE GLITCHES! WOWIE! Lots and lots of foreshadowing to the upcoming Neggy appearance coming very soon to a screen near you!

[componentplanet]

Enthusiast Claims His Power Plan Boosts AMD Ryzen Performance. We Investigate.

An enthusiast is claiming that his own homemade power efficiency algorithm can dramatically improve performance on AMD Ryzen CPUs, over and above the default algorithms AMD has itself distributed.

The idea of unlocking hidden performance with a quick software mod is intrinsically attractive. Moreover, the enthusiast side of the PC industry has a long history of uncovering useful tricks and tips like this. From third-party utilities that offer access to various GPU features like Nvidia Inspector, to the old third-party utility Rain that enthusiasts could use to lower CPU temperatures and reduce power consumption, ordinary PC users have often created projects that extended or improved the capabilities of various products.

The 1usmus Power Plan

Ryzen enthusiast 1usmus has written an article at TechPowerUp claiming to improve the performance of AMD’s CPUs through a little manual adjustment to the company’s power plans.

When I reached out to AMD, however, the company representatives we spoke to were uncertain this type of manipulation could pay dividends. AMD’s perspective is similar to my own. I’ve taken a few cracks at trying to boost Ryzen performance through UEFI adjustments and have generally found the effort not to be worth it. Overclocking headroom on Ryzen is very limited and the CPU has generally seemed to perform best if left to its own devices.

But the entire point of a site like this is to explore what kinds of performance might be available at the cutting edge. I fired up the Ryzen 9 3900X on our MSI X570 Godlike with the 7C34v16 UEFI, a fresh, fully patched installation of Windows 10 1903, the latest AMD drivers (1.9.27.1033), and a Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360 cooler. While this cooler is from 2017, it’s a large radiator design with space for three 120mm fans. We’ve relied on it for multiple generations of Threadripper and Intel HEDT testing, and it can stand up to a 12-core Ryzen 3950X with no problem. Maximum reported CPU temperature from the 12-core was 67C in Ryzen Master under sustained load during the Blender 1.0 Beta 2 benchmark.

The Windows 10 scheduler has some known shortcomings with regards to how it treats CPUs with multiple NUMA nodes (we’ve discussed some of these with relation to the 2990WX, which is severely affected in some workloads). 1usmus spends some time cataloging various issues with the Windows 10 scheduler, some of which he believes his own power plan can solve.

1usmus claims:

My approach to solve this deficit in the Windows Scheduler is to use a customized power profile that provides better guidance to the scheduler on how to distribute loads among cores. This should put load on the best cores (which clock higher) and result in higher and smoother FPS because workloads will no longer bounce between cores.

This should be a fairly straightforward set of improvements to test. He claims gains of up to 200MHz in highest observed CPU frequency. He claims an improvement of ~1.03X in Cinebench R15 multi-threaded based on actual benchmark results and writes:

Whilst AMD tried to address deficiencies in Precision Boost behavior by dialing up maximum boost frequencies by roughly 50-100 MHz with AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABBA, this modification has managed to increase maximum observed core frequencies by 200 MHz on average, which should result in higher performance across the board, especially for less-parallelized workloads.

The Test

1usmus writes that the following settings must be changed in order for his power plan to work properly:

Global C-state Control = Enabled

Power Supply Idle Control = Low Current Idle

CPPC = Enabled

CPPC Preferred Cores = Enabled

AMD Cool’n’Quiet = Enabled

PPC Adjustment = PState 0

We performed these modifications and fired up the test platform. They definitely change the behavior of the CPU, but it’s not clear they do so in a helpful manner.

Under AMD’s default power plan, most CPU cores remain awake while the chip is running a workload like Cinebench, though they remain at low clocks.

Default core behavior, Ryzen 9 3900X.

Under 1usmus’ plan, these cores mostly sleep. There’s a definite trade-off here between system responsiveness and lowest-possible power state. Putting 10-11 of the other CPU cores to sleep during a workload does allow for full power to be diverted to a single CPU core. We do, in fact, see some evidence that this allows the CPU to hit very slightly higher boost clocks in single-threaded workloads.

The 1usmus power plan. Note the number of cores asleep.

In Cinebench R20, for example, Core 05 of our 3900X tends to run at ~4.46GHz when using AMD’s Ryzen Balanced Plan. Under 1usmus’ plan, that CPU core tends to run very slightly higher, at around 4.53GHz. This represents roughly 1.5 percent more clock speed than previously available.

The moment of handoff between C04 and C05. C05 is still the preferred core for ST workloads even under the 1usmus plan.

1usmus also states that his power plan results in workloads being matched more frequently to the highest-overclocking core as identified by Ryzen Master. We saw no evidence of this. Windows 10 clearly prefers running workloads on our Ryzen’s C05 core (as identified in Ryzen Master). If anything, it preferred this core more strongly when running 1usmus’ power plan than the AMD default.

Cinebench R15 performance did not improve in multi-threaded and only increased by 1.5 percent at most in single-threaded. Maximum clock speed recorded increased from 4.49GHz to 4.6GHz, but the actual degree of performance improvement was a fraction of this. Single-threaded performance improved from a score of 209 to 2012.

Cinebench R20 multi-threaded performance did not improve at all. Single-threaded performance improved by roughly 3 percent, from 512 to 526.

Finally, we ran the Barbershop_Interior benchmark from the Blender 1.0Beta2 benchmark. This is a sustained all-core test that gives the CPU more time to show the impact of any performance improvements or subtle clock changes. Barbershop_Interior render times improved from 13.35 minutes to 13.26 minutes, a gain of 0.04 percent, or indistinguishable from random error and noise.

Results

1usmus’ power plan does not appear to increase performance in any way we can separate from a margin of error, though there may be a very small (1.5 percent – 3 percent) improvement in single-threaded tests. I typically assume a 2.5 – 3 percent margin of error for any benchmark, however, and the best ST gains we measured were in 3 percent territory. There’s no sign of any improved core parking behavior; C05 is the preferred core for single-threaded workloads over time, and the 1usmus plan does nothing to change this. It appears that whatever performance the power plan secured comes from shutting down the rest of the chip more aggressively. It takes longer to wake cores from deep sleep, so there’ll be trade-offs in any case.

The truth is, as power consumption and schedulers continue to both become more complex, the chances that an end-user will magically stumble on a combination of settings that magically boost performance are low. The 1usmus’ plan does hit superficially faster clocks, but it doesn’t translate them into sustained improved performance.

ExtremeTech’s guidance is to stick with AMD defaults in all regards as it relates to power management and CPU clocking. I’ve yet to test any combination of motherboard settings that delivers consistently higher performance that didn’t amount to just overclocking the CPU — and even then, frankly, I haven’t seen OC results impressive enough to justify the effort on top-notch chips. AMD has gotten very good at squeezing out all available performance from its silicon.

Now Read:

AMD’s 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, 32-core Threadripper 3970X Available November 25

MLPerf Releases First Results From AI Inferencing Benchmark

Ryzen Roars: AMD Posts Best Quarterly Revenue Since 2005

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/301733-enthusiast-power-management-boosts-amd-ryzen-performance from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2019/11/enthusiast-claims-his-power-plan-boosts.html