Lojcs

I've been on and off playing witcher 3 the last couple months. Just got to the skelliga main quest where Yennefer tells Geralt to get out of his armor and wear something nice to some social event (which btw doesn't make sense, my armor is way better looking than the tunic options). It reminded me of the quest where Triss asked the same thing so I decided to check online if doing so would ruin my Triss romance.

Only to learn that I had already failed the Triss romance because I picked "We can try again" instead of "I love you" when she was at the harbor. Up until that point the vibes between Geralt and Triss has been "we had a thing in the past but it's no more" so I thought that option was right for getting them together again. I had assumed that had no immediate effect but was just one of many dialogues that eventually lead to romancing Triss but nope, that was it apparently. Much discourse online about how there used to be a bug that let you romance with "We can try again" but nobody's talking about how that's the more reasonable option.

And also I'm just now realizing that Novigrad was the Triss area and Skelliga is the Yennefer area and there will be many quests there to get to know Yen, which makes me think did I do Now or Never too early? But like, once you go to the party with Triss the city is just in chaos so I felt obligated to follow that questline to the end. Also there's the relative low levels of those quests and the way Geralt seemingly gets stranded in Skelliga when he travels there that made me think everything that's not a red skull on novigrad comes before Skelliga story-wise.

When I first heard that you need to choose between Triss and Yennefer in this game choosing Triss felt like a no brainer since she's been around the last 2 games and declares she'll never leave Geralt's side in the last one. And it rubs me the wrong way how Geralt acts all hot around Yennefer unprompted but doesn't act warm around Triss even if you try to. I get that Yennefer was his wife or whatever in the books but like the last 2 games still happened and in the beginning even Yennefer says Geralt and Triss had a nice thing going.

So do I go back to end of now or never and change the answer? Do I go back further and leave novigrad when it was in chaos? Even further before the questline began?

But also also while looking up how to not fuck up romance I read that apparently Yennefer's endgame quest is amazing and Triss's is an afterthought.. and I do want to play the good quest instead of the bad one..

It also connects to discord, supposed to be blocked since more than a week. No other device or browser I have connects to YouTube, they all get ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED, and only a fresh Vivaldi profile on the same pc also connects to Discord, everything else get ERR_CONNECTION_RESET.

I've tried disabling all extensions, it still connects. Checked its IP address and DNS server and they're the same as other devices/browsers. Any idea what could be going on?

Cross posted from https://lemm.ee/post/45606568 to reach as many people before they unblock it and the chance to investigate is gone

24m edit: Discord just started working on some other chromium browsers including on another device.

80m edit: Another chromium browser just also connected. After deleting browser data it stopped

edit 3: found that if I add this to the servers section of a Network Persistent State file associated with a chromium browser profile (while the browser is closed), it can connect to youtube. Can't explain why. (anonymization says https://www.youtube.com in base64):
{"alternative_service":[{"advertised_alpns":["h3"],"expiration":"13376788973168704","port":443,"protocol_str":"quic"}],"anonymization":["GAAAABMAAABodHRwczovL3lvdXR1YmUuY29tAA==",false],"server":"https://www.youtube.com","supports_spdy":true}

Edit 4: The block is over

Without other usb devices the keyboard works immediately. With them it takes 5 ish seconds for it to start responding. This is regardless of which device is discovered first (which I can manipulate), it seems to just wait for all of them. Is there a way to make it not do that?

Edit: This is specifically about linux boot. It otherwise works fine in bios / bootloader

Since KDE plasma 6 with hdr support came out recently, I decided to check how some of the hdr tagged movies I'd watched previously look with that. I was surprised to see that they are rather dark, even in scenes under direct sunlight. I 'tested' the brightness by opening the movie in hdr and sdr at the same time and manually changing the sdr brightness to compare.

Most scenes, including those outside and in sunlight seem equivalent to 200 nits in sdr. Only highlights (like sky if the sky isn't a large part of the shot, or glimpses of outside in indoor scenes) seem to reach 700-800 nits. I thought there was some kind of a baked in abl in the files, but then I found a scene (starkiller base firing in swtfa) that got ~~more bright than the sdr brightness slider goes~~ (while covering half the screen too), so that's not it (Edit: I think this is an hdr to sdr mapping caused error. In some frames the laser becomes gray thus much darker in sdr versus hdr. In other frames 800-1000 nits seem right. Still the brightest scene I could find.). There seems to be a conscious decision to keep most scenes the same brightness

Are movies supposed to be like that? I'd think the cameras would capture the brightness accurately and that would be what you see with minimal modifications to it. What's the point of hdr if there isn't a brightness difference between a sunny scene and a cloudy scene? I mean, the highlights have a lot more detail instead of crush and that's good.. I'm pretty sure those that I've seen in the theather were not this dark in most scenes tho.

I've tried a few web-dls and blurays. They all seem to have this issue.

Increasing contrast from the player seems to work and I guess I'll just find a good default for that and forget about it eventually, unless you have a suggestion. Expected more from the fabled hdr tho

Sorry if this doesn't fit here

Edit: Bit the bullet and booted windows to analyse the files. They are indeed dim for my taste (due to having low max brightness and/or baked in abl), with high brightnesses only being used in highlights and the rest are 400-200 nits. Took some screenshots (they're badly blooming since they're sdr screenshots of hdr). The cursor is positioned on the sky in most and in a bright area in the rest:

I took another right before this shot while they're still in the ship but forgot to save it. The tiny bit of visible sky was 600 nits in that shot, so I think this file does have baked in abl.

Star wars turned out to be pretty good with a 1000 nit target in general, but the desert is still dim for some reason (below 50 nits in this scene!)

Also tried spiderverse on suggestion. It wasn't that bright but I think that's fine for animation.

I recently had to use windows for stuff and after a year of using Linux, it made me realise how janky windows is in comparison. Even on a top spec pc unminimized (or resized) windows flash white before their contents appear. Super-d to minimize/maximize doesn't bring all windows back up or in the same order. And these are greatly amplified when the computer isn't that powerful, so much so that you can see individual regions of some programs render one by one. In addition, moving the kde connect window sometimes made the screen stutter and flicker (???) and at some point my mouse stopped working (touchpad was fine), I tried reinstalling drivers and stuff but ultimately I had to reboot for it to work again.

Brings back memories of my laptop loudly booting up in the middle of the night for no apparent cause or reason and mouse cursor going invisible upon random boots that made me save a file in the middle of the desktop about how to fix it.

It's incredible how Linux is both free and a more stable experience, even as a nvidia+wayland user.