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"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government only when it deserves it" Samuel Clemens "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Teddy Roosevelt

Wild carrots are white. He's just gone into a shop and bought that trophy!

Y U lie? Roofles Beimg critical of our foreign affairs has nothing to do with love of country. Recognizing the hypocrisy of calling a Iranian General evil for killing Americans when the US kills people all over the world is not unpatriotic.

I did it the other way round: 6 days without gym and have been drinking alcohol 3 times. I'm pretty sure I can sustain this all year if I must...

I never thought I'd write this on a public forum, but my game of the decade is Red Dead Redemption 2 (best RPG since Fallout New Vegas, and yes it's an RPG, although not in the traditional sense). I don't want to go into spoilers, but the amount of choice and consequences in RDR2 is staggering. but it's also a very beautiful game. but it's also a very detailed world. I love everything about it, even the detailed animations. it's like a love child between The Witcher 3 and DayZ, I can't praise it enough. at 17 USD on the Epic Store it's a steal.

It might eventually, if Intel sticks with it. Drivers and no (? presumably, certainly the AMD agreement is CPU only) patent cross licensing is going to be a big problem. Larrabee was surprisingly decent but it was a fair while ago now. They do have a lot of talent working on them and unlike at AMD Raja is likely to be well funded. It's a pretty awful time for Intel to be trying to launch non core products though, since their fabs are a mess.

^But he's not holding up a vegan.

This made a lot of sense to me:

I've recently created a new character in Pillars of Eternity. Being an avid roleplayer, I've written a profile and backstory. I'm posting it here to show it, and I'd love to hear what people think! Alendra Davar Full name: Alendra Eleanna Davar. Birthdate: 2808 AI. Age: 15-16. Titles: The Watcher. Race: Meadow Folk. Class: Cipher. Culture: Aedyr, Living Lands. Background: Aristocrat bastard (originally), Colonist. Backstory: The bastard daughter of Lord Santach of House Anuasal - an Aedyran noble family - and Gwreiddyn, a housemaid who died giving birth to her, Alendra was raised amongst the nobility for the first decade of her life. However, as she was a bastard, she did not receive her father’s noble name, taking her mother’s given surname of Davar instead. Alendra’s maternal grandfather, Caillte, was a Glanfathan tribal who, in the year 2784 AI, had been forced into indentured servitude in House Anuasal for reasons unknown. At the age of 10, it came to light that Alendra had the mental abilities of a Cipher, and a powerful one at that. Filled with prejudice and fear of her abilities, Alendra’s “noble” father had her, without warning, unceremoniously thrown out of the house and onto the street one rainy autumn morning. Alendra was forced to survive for weeks and months, begging and stealing for food. Almost a year after she had been cast out, Alendra was found by a man named Anam Cara, a member of her grandfather’s Glanfathan tribe who had come in search of his long-lost kin, but found Alendra instead. Anam Cara was a Glanfathan warrior and a Cipher like Alendra herself, and he took Alendra under his wing to foster her, teach her and train her in the ways of the Cipher as well as physical combat. With the help of an animancer, they also discovered that Alendra and her mother were essentially the same person; upon death during childbirth, Gwreiddyn's soul had immediately reincarnated into her daughter. However, Alendra does not possess any memories of her previous life. Due to ignorant persecution of Ciphers, the two had to leave the heart of the Aedyr Empire. As Anam Cara did not wish to return to his tribe, they signed up with a group of colonists and travelled to the Living Lands while keeping their Cipher abilities a secret. Alas, a few years after arriving at the colony, they were found out. The colonists proved to be far more ignorant and fearful than even Lord Anuasal, and they gathered a mob, complete with pitchforks and torches, to lynch them. Anam Cara sacrificed himself, staying behind so that Alendra could escape. After these harrowing events, Alendra travelled the world aimlessly, with no destination in mind...that is, until she joined a caravan heading to the Dyrwood under the leadership of Caravan Master Odema. Name etymology: Santach; Gaelic word that means “selfish, greedy”. Anuasal; a Gaelic word that means “lowborn, ignoble”. Gwreiddyn; a Gaelic word that means “root, origin”. Caillte; a Gaelic word that means “lost”. Anam Cara; a Celtic phrase meaning “soul friend”. Credits: Sathynae, for the image.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7858201/US-led-military-coalition-says-WITHDRAW-Iraq-parliament-voted-troops-leave.html Jesus this administration is a s--t show

Theres no Cant;s grin icon... in there, so I seriously doubt it.

Couldn't agree more. Also, the benefits of full VO are kind of hard to see; after all, you can give the gist of any given character with a relatively small number of voiced lines (see BG2 for example: I don't think any of the characters call for more voiced lines, everyone is perfectly satisfactory as is). Not only may full VO break the bank, but it also ties the developer's hands in a very significant sense: there is essentially no room for rewrites or even any kind of edits, even if you do get good ideas later on in the production. I would say that full VO is simply a bad idea, unless you have positively huge amounts of money to burn. I have not finished Disco Elysium yet, in fact I'm in day two at the moment. But boy it's good.

I just finished Disco Elysium and it is frankly amazing what you can do with dialogue when you don't have to pay for full VO. Yes, I am going to harp on this a lot, I think a lot of compromises we see in Deadfire is a result of full VO breaking the bank and tightening the development schedule.

I stick with my initial prediction. There will be a lot of noise and press and hoopla over this but in the end nothing will come of it.

Caution, might make you cry like a little girl.

Bo - thank you for generosity and wisdom!!! Now the only difficulty is deciding between those two awesome builds. A few quick notes: first build reminds me of an unarmed Barb build that you made work for Pillars 1 ! You must enjoy this sort of thing (I love finding ways to make fists work in this game and in others Concelhaut's touch is awesome - im finishing up a run in Forgotten Sanctum right now and Fassina has been conjuring that with a phantom and the two of them have been punching people's faces off. love that trick. wasn't aware of the grimoire swap trick! Fighting with fists - do you not get the bonuses of items taht say 'get X with weapons' - like belt of magran's chosen - +3% damage dealt as burn with weapons ? i've ALWAYS gone spirit tornado on barbs, excited to try out blood storm Again thanks for this! Excited to play an evil bastard this go around and see some of the reactivity for being a famous cannibal. If my companions or crew piss me off i'll probably eat them too. will report back and let you know how it goes!

Oh, by the way, in case someone doesn't know, RLM has not only one, but two episodes of Best of the Worst dedicated to the Star Wars Holiday Special:

And here I am with my three weeks of PTO banked up for just that occasion .

I haven't upgraded to the newest drivers yet as the big December updates are always a bit shambolic- and it seems pretty dumb to me doing them in December when there's not a lot of time to fix the inevitable bugs so I'm still on a November driver. I had similar symptoms a few months ago though, and it was windows update randomly insisting on installing year old drivers over new ones.

I've got a Vega64 as well and don't regret buying it even slightly. It's been stable, faster than a 1080 after tweaking and despite being a Strix was cheaper too. The power draw is higher but that's my least concern. Since RDNA2 is meant to be the iteration going into the consoles I'd suspect that power efficiency will have been a big factor in its development and differentiation from RDNA1. RDNA1 got a good 'IPC' boost over Polaris/ Vega but to get to a '2080 level' Navi GPU, based on RDNA1's power efficiency, looks practically impossible without big efficiency gains even if the 2080 were the MaxQ variant.

Sure, sure. He was known in political circles as "white dove" or sometimes "Ghandi". Isn't eliminating threat to your country reasonable action nowadays? It's funny because for years now Trump was critiqued by not listening and acting based on US intelligence. Now that he did he is criticized again? I have no doubt based on history that he might have something planned that US wanted to stop.

How about actually demanding reasonable actions from state leaders rather than "pick sides"? It's not a tolkienesque fantasy land of good/bad guys as you yourself say.

I have started well... i went a whopping 4 days without beer. I have been to the gym 3 times. If only I can sustain this all year.

Hey I started work on this, but quickly realised it was going to be a lot more daunting a task than I had anticipated. It's not a complicated mod to write for someone with a lot of knowledge of the game's different skills (Which is something I don't really have) to make, as all the coding that is really required is changing the same line ("HideFromCombatTooltip":) from "false" to "true" for every status effect that needs to be hidden. To that end, here's a template of the code needed to hide an effect from appearing in the tooltip: { "$type": "Game.GameData.StatusEffectGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Template", "ID": "EFFECT_ID", "Components": [{ "$type": "Game.GameData.StatusEffectComponent, Assembly-CSharp", "HideFromCombatTooltip": "true", } ] } You'll need to find the ID & DebugName for each effect that you want hidden. This can be found by searching part of the name of the boon/effect (ctrl+f, or ⌘+f for a Mac) in statuseffects.gamedatabundle (dlc effects will likely be located in a .gamedatabundle file with a name like lax*_statuseffects), or in Spiritual Successor's status effects section if you want to avoid the step of setting the file to JSON formatting. This will take you to the DebugName & the ID will be right below it, or if you use Spiritual Successor it'll in the right hand tab once you have clicked the name. Hopefully that makes sense but just in case here is an example of how this would be used to create a mod that hides the Paladin's Zealous Charge: Hope this is in someway helpful.

That will probably have reversed if you're buying after Zen3 is out though, per below. Given the number of security problems Intel has it's certainly difficult to label them as the 'safe' option. I'd also add cooling and their constant socket changes to Intel's costs, generational upgrades require a new mobo and to get the better performance out of a k series you have to buy a good cooler. To be fair, Zen3 will probably be the last Zen on AM4 too, but that is after a good run. There is meant to be a significant price cut with whatever lake (comet?) the 10000 series is and they are meant to have HT turned on which should make Intel at least a bit better price/ performance wise, and at least against the 3000 series. OTOH IPC is actually meant to have regressed slightly but measurably due to security mitigations which is likely to counter any marginal overclocking increases while Zen3 is meant to have a decent IPC increase and should have a small frequency boost too if history is any guide.

Vegan hunting pics:

I was under the impression AMD pretty much ****s all over Intel right now and in the short term. Look at price brackets. Include MoBo prices and it looks even worse. So much that enthusiast sales are heavily biased towards Zen 2.

Probably because the starting island has a rather absurd difficulty cliff that makes it hard to recommend to people who aren't already into the genre (YMMV). Also, I don't know if there's much demand from NotD&D:PiratesoftheCaribbean.

I find it rather perplexing that in a culture where the armed services are held in such high esteem, and where even rear echelon service is widely seen as prestigious, the possibility of a draft can cause a "scare". One would think people would be honored to be asked to die for their country, no? Heh.

Thanks, mate. From what I've gathered so far, there ain't going to be a war. A lot of people in Iran benefited from Soleimani's death since he refused to sign a deal regarding money laundering. Some high ranking members weep in front of the camera but they are celebrating behind the scenes. Trust me folks, it's all a business deal gone wrong. Maybe his death was just a way for Iran to start renegotiating deals with the west since he didn't allow a lot of things to happen. I hope all goes well.

Glad to see you are OK what with everything going on.

Anyone else, who wants ultrawide-support for The Outer Worlds? Am I the only one? Hey Obsidian, its 2020 right now!

I don't. I just superobjectively know it's the best videogame ever made.

I still remember seeing him live in Melbourne last year. A fantastic experience.(warning -profanity in the video lyrics)

Rented John Wick 3. That early knife fight scene had me rolling. The rest of the film could have sucked and I wouldn't have minded because of that scene. Luckily, the rest of the film didn't suck. The first film is probably still the best one but at least this 3rd entry had great fight sequences and some moments of hilarity (not much plot or sense but...). And Fishburne's little speech at one point? Top cheese, man, top cheese. (edit - can't wait for the 4th to see Fishburne and Reeves take down "the Table" - give me more cheese!)

They aren't in competition, so just enjoy them both.

Insult to injury is that adding 21:9 support is simple. For the games that I have that don't have 21:9 support in cinematic sequences all that is required is changing two lines of code with a hex editor (Assassins Creed: Odyssey). It's not complicated, we are literally talking about 30 minutes of work tops. That they don't do it, that's a nice big fat "**** you" to anyone without a 16:9 panel. Them releasing a game that only works with a 16:9 panel is like a dev team making a game that only works with a 4:3 display in ~2005 when the Xbox 360 and PS3 were released and all games were then being made in 16:9 format up from 4:3 format. Everyone who can afford to do so is moving from 16:9 to 21:9, it's the next logical format evolution. Games look amazing and can now be pushed at 1440p 21:9 with current GPU hardware, ultrawide format movies fill up the entire display with no black bars, I could go on. This is where everyone is going who can afford to do so. That Obsidian release a near AAA game in 2019-2020 only in 16:9, seriously, clueless and I will never buy this game until it has proper ultrawide aspect ratio support. I don't support lazy devs and I never will. This game isnt worth $10 during a deep sale if the cut-scenes are 16:9 with black bars, stretched 16:9 and / or the gameplay is simply zoomed in 16:9 with the top and bottom missing, i.e. Overwatch, another game I don't own and apparently never will. Here's what I've been enjoying all recent titles from 2017 onward on, Destiny 2, Forza Horizon 4, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, The Witcher 3, Resident Evil 2 remake, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry 5, and now the Division 2 just to name a few. Everything looks absolutely stunning in curved 21:9 and I'm never going back, not for The Outer Worlds or any other game. If it doesn't have 21:9 support I simply wont play it. I have too many amazing games still on the back-burner that I've yet to get to. The Division 2 16:9 vs 21:9

2019 My list of games finished this year. Only one is from 2019 though (technically ) And currently playing Pillars of Eternity, but I do not think, that I will be able to finish it before New Year Eve, so this might be complete list. 11 games – 8 GoG games, 1 PS3 game and 2 PS4 games 1 - January 3, 23:30 – My first game finished in 2019 became Xenonauts from GOG, after long break I've taken, when I've moved to my new place, two years ago. The game is excellent tribute to original Xcom games, and I've enjoyed it, despite some of the missions with Reapers were frustrating, because even if I ended my turn with lot of TUs saved for "overwatch" shots, most of my agents in most cases started to shoot at them, after they killed someone already. And that was actually the main reason, why I took such a long break from the game 2 - March 8, 23:30 – I have finished my first blind playthrough of Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition on PS4. I have been waiting for this game more than 5 years to be released in the West, on one of my platforms, after I've found out that Tales of series exist, and is awesome. The long wait was really worth it. It will definitely not be my favourite Tales of game, like for many other people, because I am bad at combat in this game but I've enjoyed the story and the characters, so I hope Namco Bandai will bring more of the Japan only Tales of games to the West. 3 - April 16, 20:00 – I have just finished Earthlock. A Norwegian made jRPG. The game is nice in the combat area, but the writing is not the best point of the game. Still, not bad, and I have enjoyed the game more than enough to recommend it further. I was also able to get 100% of achievements on GOG Galaxy, and it took me 40 hours in total. 4 - May 22, 22:45 – After many, many years, I have finally finished Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator from GOG. I played it for the first time around year 2000, but I've never finished it. The story is pretty solid, with the exception of the ending, but in the last 20 hours of the game, the combat gets very tedious, and there is to much of it. It kind of spoiled my enjoyment of the game as a whole, and then the ending nailed it down little bit further 5 - June 20, 14:15 – Having it pretty long time on my backlog, I've finished Hyperdimension Neptunia VII on PS4 today. My first playthrough ended with the most common Ascension Ending. The game is IMO much better than all previous installments. Cut-scenes are shorter, gameplay is more refined, sending out scouts is more user friendly. Can't wait for the release of Super Neptunia RPG in few days. 6 - August 8, 22:00 – I have finished my second playthrough of Tales of Symponia on PS3. I had not enough Grade to get bonus XP nor to transfer my earned Gald for New Game+, so I had to play it the classic way. With little bit of grinding for equipment and consumables for boss fights . I was able to finish every single sidequest and minigame, with the exception of Zelos' Gigolo title (because I've picked Kratos at the end of the game), which was a mistake during my planning phase for this playthrough. I've tried to achieve as much Titles as possible, with Kratos getting all of them, so the Platinum Trophy road is now at 54%. Game is still solid gold, with very good storyline, but it has not as enjoyable combat for me as other Tales of... titles I've played. 7 - September 24, 0:00 – After 3 years long break, I have finaly finished my Grand Campaign of Crusader Kings Complete from GOG. In 2015, I have started as one of the smallest counties in Kingdom of Hungary, as a Count of Gemer. Due to carefull planning of marriages, I have became 31 years later the new Duke of Nyitra, and 6 more years later in 1105, the almighty King of Hungary. After that, I have slowly expanded my realm to the east and south, with occasional special marriages, to get the possibility for my children to inherit other Counties and Dukedoms. 347 years later, after I've defeated Golden Horde, Bulgars and other heathens, and had few struggles with infidels of Byzantium, I had became King of another 7 countries. I've became King of Hungary, Bohemia, Khazaria, Burgundy, Croatia, Georgia, Sicily and Rus and was once crowned as Holy Roman Emperor. My kingdom had 102 direct vassals and 197 counts, dukes, bishops, and archbishops under my command. Some of them rebelious some of them loyal, but the Kingdom overcame few of their revolts and had a potential to grow more but the end of the game in 1452 came faster than I thought 8 - November 4, 0:00 – I have purchased STASIS: Deluxe Edition in this years Halloween sale on GOG, and I have to say, this was one of the best gaming deals this year. The atmosphere was really tense during the whole 10 hours of gameplay and the ending was unexpected. Some item puzzles were harder to crack, but 90% of the time, they were intuitive to solve. I have enjoyed the game so much, that I have purchased the deluxe content for the developers second game in the same universe called Cayne. This one, will be my next game to play for sure. 9 - November 9, 21:45 – Another game from Stasis universe finished today: CAYNE: Deluxe Edition. It was as good as previous, although much shorter. The puzzles were less complicated, although few of them gave me headaches, while trying to solve them . The ending was this time much more predictable, but it did not spoiled my enjoyment of the game. 10 - November 17, 16:00 – I have finished story of Reynard de la Foret in Celestian Tales: Old North as my first playthrough of this game. It's short but enjoyable game in a style of JRPG, which has some interesting plot twists for player to experience. The most surprising thing for me was, that it is one of very few games, where you do not play the hero, which has to save the world, but you play a squire, who with other pupils, helps the big generals with small tasks in the background of the comming war against a threat from The North. 11 - November 20, 16:45 – Just few days later, I have finished the Celestian Tales: Old North – Howl of the Ravager, DLC prequel to the original game. The gameplay is the same, but you play as one of the young lords of Old North, introduced in the base game. It's little bit shorter than the base game, but last two areas were for me tedious, which little bit worsened my impressions.

Kyfla and Idward > I think you're doing the same mistake as me ; I actaully thought thant the quest trigger was the hidden room entrance, but it actually isn't. To validate the quest, you need to observe the wall in the bottom of the room (check the screenshots to see what I mean). I lost several hours to redo the quest 'cause I didn't see this... But it allowed me to optimize my game a bit, so I don't regret it^^

Well, that tempted fate. Dead as a dodo. Though I have to put some blame on Gigabyte's motherboard design, SATA sockets, m2, everything they could cram in expansion wise is next to PCIe x16 and inaccessible even with a short single slot graphics card, and a V64 ain't either. Having the m2 there in particular is stupid, why put something heat sensitive under the hottest part of the computer where it won't get any air flow? It's had to be removed about a dozen times and this time the fans didn't spin up afterwards. Under warranty, though I doubt they'll approve an RMA and say I mishandled it.

Recent changes at work has me seriously thinking about my life and career. To say that it (my career) did not go as planned would be the mildest of understatements. Some up, some down. Some successes, lots of setbacks. But the latest one has me contemplating how we all get where we end up. How every step we take seems right and well considered in the moment but the errors so glaring in retrospect. That is how life is I guess. You get the test first and the lesson after.