Men and women live in a giant silo underground with several regulations which they believe are in place to protect them from the toxic and ruined world on the surface.(source: IMDB)
I can count on one hand the amount of times that a workmate advised me to watch a TV show that was really good and Silo is one of them. It ticks all the boxes: great ambiance, mystery, no unnecessary drama and, above all, a fantastic casting.
I think that Rebecca Ferguson is one of the most talented actress of this generation. From the mother of Paul Atreides to Juliette Nichols, she’s exceptionnal.
Hugh Howey, on whose books the show is based, was one of the first self-published authors who found success using the then-new Amazon Kindle format and manage to live solely from writing and self-publishing books.
An ancient secret passed down since the dawn of time. A powerful Order sworn to protect it. One man’s vision: to reveal the truth and trigger the greatest evolutionary leap in human history. A dark force hellbent on stopping him. And then there’s Ryder and Sammy, two hapless college grads caught in the middle of it all.
The book uses Occultism in Los Angeles as background for a growing romance between a clueless midwest guy who followed his wanna-be-actor friend to LA and falls in love with a sophisticated cult priestress.
I originally bought this book for our wedding anniversary trip to Rochehault because Diablo 4 had just been released and I wanted to read something dark. Well, the book isn’t really dark. Quite the contrary, actually.
It’s a real page turner and probably the most entertaining book I’ve read in a long time. Definitely, my book of the year.
In the book, the occultist family’s corporation is named Alchymie Publishing, and the book’s publisher is also named Alchymie Publishing. Could all of this be true (please, be true)?
Teenage friends out for beach week get unexpectedly detoured to a isolated motel where a deadly STD virus now runs rampant, turning those infected into the living dead. (source: IMDB)
This is the most disgusting movie that I’ve ever watched! From eating bloody tampons to farting shit in the face of a friend, nothing is spared in the Night of Something Strange. It’s nauseating and it’s beyond stupid but we had a great evening and we laughed a lot.
The casting is… Well, you got to give it to them, it takes a special kind of talent to make such a scenario become a “watchable” movie.
If you watch it, don’t cut the end credits, it’s filled with bloopers and an extensive thank you list that add something to the movie.
Six troubled high schoolers and their leader become lost after their bus crashes during a raging storm. They seeks refuge for the night in an abandoned trailer park, managed by a sexy woman, Norma. (source: IMDB)
We had already watched this movie more than a decade ago but I felt asleep half way through. I only remembered the amazing soundtrack, which we’ve been listening to for years when I still had a car.
I always wanted to watch it again, this time without falling asleep. Unfortunately, I shoudln’t have. The part which I had missed is bad. Even the few gore scenes don’t make it for how tacky the rest of the movie is.
Wouldn’t it be for one of the best soundtrack I’ve ever heard in a movie (among which the fantastic My World by Johnny No Cash), The Trailer Park of Terror would have disappeared into the oblivion of my aging memory.
I just found out that there’s a Trailer Park of Terror comic book. however, even if it looks good, I hesitate a bit about giving it a shot.
After Christopher Robin abandons them for college, Pooh and Piglet embark on a bloody rampage as they search for a new source of food. (source: IMDB)
It could have been good but it wasn’t. I would have preferred a plotless movie where Pooh and Piglet senselessly kill people than this. The rhythm of the movie was horrible and the few good scenes were punctuated by unnecessary slow moments. The cast is bad and the characters annoying. I can’t believe that they’re making a sequel. Well, we’ll probably watch it, so we can tell you not to.
The time has finally come to build our new PCs. Our previous rigs were becoming a bit weak. But, before talking about the new gear, I’d like to salute our retired computers, they were the most stable PCs I’ve ever built. Thank you for the years of funs and the hundreds of hours we enjoyed gaming with you!
I started planning the build almost a year ago. I knew that the build would be made around an RTX 4090 STRIX. I had planned to go for an Intel I7 13700k and that the rest of the parts would be my usual brands: BeQuiet! for the PSU, Noctua for the Cooling and Asus for the motherboard.
For the case, I wanted first to go for a Fractal Torrent. Unfortunately, the PSU being on top of the case, the 12vhpwr cable that comes with the Dark Power Pro 13 was gonna be too short and there was no way that I would go for a custom cable after all the horror stories that I read on Reddit. After many hours of back and forth, I finally decided to pull the trigger on 2 Lian Li Lancool 3 (white and non RGB).
So, I thought that I was set and ready to order the parts. That’s when Reddit and Youtube channels like Gamer’s Nexus had me doubt all my choices. Shouldn’t I go for AMD, they’re easier to cool down? Many people complained about Asus motherboards, should I try something new? And I went through months of hesitations, changing my mind after each new thread written by someone who went through an horrific experience with a brand or another.
The more I watched Gamer’s Nexus, the more I realised that the ones really gaining something out of the doubts around big brands like Nvidia, Intel and Asus were the YouTubers. These times, if you have doubts about something, you go to watch videos, and these guys teach you absolutely nothing!
So, here are my choices:
CPU: Intel I7 13700k. I’ve never been a fan of AMD and I still prefer to buy a better processor over one that uses cache as a trick to keep up.
Motherboard: Asus Maximus Z790 Hero. I always trusted Asus and I always bought their flagship mobo, why change? Also, I love the little details like the latches for the M2 drives or the eject button for the GPU.
GPU: Asus RTX 4090 STRIX OC. There’s never been a debate about that. The king of the hill!
PSU: BeQuiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1300w. It’s powerful enough, it’s platinum and it’s PCIe5 certified and delivered with 2 12vhpwr cables.
RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 64 Go (2 x 32 Go) DDR5 6000 MHz CL30.
Storage: 2 x Samsung SSD 980 PRO M.2 PCIe NVMe 2 To.
PCU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15s Chromax.
Case fans: 4 x Noctua NF-A14 PWM Chromax.
Case: Lian Li Lancool 3 white (non RGB).
OS: Windows 11 Home.
Monitor: LG 27GR96QE-B.
Monitor arm: Ergotron LX Dual Monitor side by side. Yep, first time dual monitors, we might as well do it right.
I just built 2 of them and it was pretty straight forward, except that they both refused to post at the first boot (which almost had me review my life choices). However, the problem was solved after flashing the bios and booting the PC without the GPU. To this day, I still don’t know what was the problem and what solved it.
I didn’t install a contact frame (even though I bought it) because it feels like a scam spread by YouTubers. For the Thermal Paste, I used the 5 dots recommended by Noctua. Then why did I spend so much time reading forums and watching videos if I ended up going for my first choice? Well, I still learned a few things that ended up being pretty useful:
Get 3 USB sticks (gen. 2 max 8gb and formatted in Fat-32). The first contains the latest BIOS properly renamed. The second one is for the latest LAN drivers of the motherboard, Windows 11 won’t complete the setup without internet access. On the last one, place the latest driver of the Intel chipset and the latest firmware (update the driver then the firmware);
If you plan to use an RTX 4090, buy a PCIe5 certified PSU with a 12vhpwr cable, plug it all the way until you hear a “click” and don’t bend that cable too much. It’s a 600w cable, don’t build a resistance or the connector might melt;
If you use a Z790 motherboard, the lanes to the CPU are shared between the first M2 slot and the GPU slot. If you use a gen 5 M2, it will drop the lanes on your GPU from 16 to 8, no matter the brand or the model of the motherboard. However, there will be no problem if you stick to gen 4 M2s;
If you install 2 M2 drives of the same brand and same capacity, it’s hard to know if the drive installed in the m2_slot1 (the one that has direct access to the CPU) will be the one labelled disk 0. However, you want to install your OS on that drive because it’s the one that has direct access to the CPU. The only way to tell during Windows setup would be to match the serial number to the disk #. To do so, open a command prompt and run the following command: wmic diskdrive get DeviceID, SerialNumber. That will tell you which serial number is disk 0 and which is disk 1. Don’t forget to write the serial numbers down before installing the drives! Is there a 50/50 chance that it will use either the top or bottom slot each time I boot the Windows 11 installer and choose Disk 0? With NVMe the chances that the drives will be enumerated in a different order by the BIOS is next to none. Windows assigns disk numbers based on the order presented by BIOS. In the days of spinning HDDs, things such as spin-up time could affect enumeration order. But, if you want to be sure, you can always run the command above. If you want to do it after booting from a Windows 10/11 USB flash drive, press Shift + F10 to open a command prompt and run the command;
Horrific stories on Reddit, and more particularly on /pcmasterrace and /buildapc are written by people who encountered problems, don’t forget that they are an extremely small fraction of the people who bought the same piece of hardware. Happy people almost never share their experience, which easily give the feeling that a brand is not reliable;
YouTubers are not making videos to better the world or to help people, they do it because it is their jobs.
Our annual Halloween tradition is to decorate the apartment with Jack-o’-lanterns, eat pumpkin oven pasta and watch horror movies. This years’ movie line-up was supposed to be Insidious: The Red Door and The Pope’s Exorcist. We changed this last minute to watch the heavily advertised Trick or Treat 1986 on Bloody Disgusting.
A bullied teenage boy is devastated after the death of his heavy metal idol, Sammi Curr. But as Halloween night approaches, he discovers that he may be the only one who can stop Sammi from making a Satanic comeback from beyond the grave. – IMDb
If you like the 80’s, heavy metal, old cassettes,… this movie is an absolute gem. I can’t believe – with all the horror I’ve watched and music I’ve listened to – I’ve never heard about it before.
Both Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne appear in the movie. Simmons was offered the role of Sammi Curr, but he opted the cameo role of Eddie’s friend, rock DJ Nuke, instead. He claimed that he did this as a tribute to famous rock DJ Wolfman Jack, his childhood idol. Osbourne, however, has two scenes as a conservative preacher denouncing rock/metal. It made me laugh that of all people, Ozzy was the one doing these scenes. The irony!
I have to admit that if Sammi Curr (portrayed by Tony Fields) would have been real, I would have been a great fan. The song Trick or Treat by Fastway is a hit, I’ve instantly added it to my playlist. It’s weird to discover “new” things of the 80’s in 2023 while I grew up in that era. Too bad Fastway didn’t release more albums than the OST for Trick or Treat, I would have loved their music.
Such a great discovery! Thanks to Sardoken for checking Bloody Disgusting while I was preparing the pasta. A perfect Halloween themed movie for all the metal heads out there!
A few days ago, we’ve received an email from Blizzard with our statistics from the first season of Diablo 4, it’s a really nice touch and I hope that they’ll continue with the next seasons. We both enjoyed the Season of the Malignant but we didn’t go further than level 80 because we were busy preparing our trip to New-York. We both played a Sever Necromancer and the Malignant hearts were synergising perfectly with it, making our corpse explosions and corpse tendrils auto-casted. We’re now trying different builds for the Season of Blood and we’ve already narrowed it down to Pulverise Druid and Fury/Rapid Fire Rogue.
Each year, the record store Caroline Music (yes, it still exists in Brussels and it has recently expended) publishes its ranking of the year. You can grab a copy for free at the store counter but it’s also available on their blog.
That’s how I found out about the rock band from Nashville, All Them Witches and their splendid Live on the Internet. We really love their psychedelia-blues rock style, it has become one of our most played EP.
Also really cool: The band’s name is taken from a book of witchcraft, All of Them Witches, featured in the 1968 filmRosemary’s baby. (Wikipedia)
2023 was definitely not a prolific year for Spacewocket. However, it is, by far, the year that we did the most in real life. Between the celebration of our 20th wedding anniversary in the Belgian Ardennes, our trip to New-York and the construction of our new gaming rigs we’ve been more busy this year than ever!
Since the big “house in the country move” was a bust, we decided to rain sparkles over our apartment city life. And, oh boy, NYC was perfect for that.
We’ve stayed 10 days and we had a blast from the first minute to the last. Visiting it in September is perfect, the autumn vibe is right around the corner but the temperatures are still very soft and there is left tourists than in summer.
Coney Island beach
My best advice, if you go to New-York, is to plan an entire day for Dumbo, Central Park and Coney Island. These are the places that we’ve loved most and I really think that they deserve an entire day.
Don’t listen to people saying that NYC is dirty, unsafe and filled with hobos, it’s absolutely not true. We felt safe the entire trip and New-York is one of the cleanest city I’ve seen so far. Another myth to debunk is that the food is bad. Of course, if you don’t get prepared and rely only on food trucks, you won’t have a great culinary time. However, there are great places to eat all over the city, you just have to make a little research before your trip because most of those places are hidden.
Coney Island
The best way to enjoy such a gigantic city is to make a list of all you wanna see and group everything by neighbourhoods, so you don’t spend your days travelling from one place to another. For example, you can take the ferry from Manhattan to Dumbo (4$) and spend the day walking around. When the evening comes, have a few beers at the Evil Twin Brewery, then eat a pizza at the infamous Juliana’s. After night fall, walk the Brooklyn Bridge toward the Manhattan skyline, most tourists will be gone.
Walking the Brooklyn Bridge by night
The same goes for Central Park, you can end a good day hanging in the park with a good beer and a burger at the nearby Thompson’s. The place is hidden inside a super chique hotel, don’t be afraid to enter!
We’ll miss New-York as much we’ll miss having such a trip ahead of us. 2023 is definitely a special year, and it’s not over yet!
