LadyCrimson

Me: "Hm, haven't tried Path of Exile for a while, maybe I'll check it out today." **Run client** **Checking Resources 'client bar'** ...15 minutes later... **Allocating Space 'client bar'** ...10 minutes later, that bar isn't even 1/3 full... "I'll check their website while I'm waiting." **There now seems to be a "Cloudflare" captcha intro page that isn't working for me and won't let me into their actual website to check news or anything.** **Client still Allocating Space** Me: F this noise. **goes back to Diablo1**

I've been the same way for a while now. It's not that I think their shows are low quality, they just have not captured my personal interest enough for me to get past a few episodes. I really only super-loved the first season of Rome - 1st season of GoT was all right too, stopped watching not long after. Showtime shows, the same. Which is why I didn't mind giving up cableTV sub.

Everything I've read about it was around a year or so old and indicated you couldn't separate the new gameplay features from the HD. Could've changed tho, ofc. This has made me curious however so I found this mod: https://github.com/qndel/Infernity (zipfile download link is in the description stuff below the file name table) It has a HD resolution picker, run in town (and in dungeon if you want, when not in combat), 4 tabs of inventory, other stuff. Some options you can (supposedly) turn on/off via a config file it includes. No gameplay changes except for a new/hard difficulty that has items with a 3rd stat and maybe other things (saves from being in that mode are then not non-mod/lower difficulty compatible), which I'm not clear if it adds it or replaces the original Hell difficulty. So far I've found two caveats (on Win7-64/my rig anyway) - when I exit, the game closes but the infernity.exe you use to run the game (it's put into the Diablo install directory) doesn't close and I have to Task Manager/End Process to make it do so. Also, if you want HD but don't want wide "widescreen" the mod settings don't stick and I have to change them again. Not sure, felt wonky. If you want widescreen tho it seems to work ok? But everything gets really tiny tho, chr, enemies, etc, not sure I like that. I have to fiddle/play with it more. (clickable thumbnails)

Never heard of that before. Looked it up. The HD part I'd like but eh, I don't like total rework mods myself, although it looks good, just not to my taste. I saw posts from 2016 that said it worked fine, no clue tho. I remember playing Hellfire (still have that disc too) but it had zero of the original games appeal - eg I just like the base original game. Except Hellfire's fast walking in town was nice. Although, I've noticed on my current rig that the walking in town doesn't feel all that slow anymore vs. on the ancient pc's. Heh. I force it via gpu to play in 4:3-ish at around 1400x1050 resolution (doesn't change my actual desktop res that way and game fills the screen vertically) so it's not widescreen stretched out (which isn't that awesome w/original disc) when I play. Looks ok that way.

doubleposting, I know, I'm evil : After much hunting through several boxes and "disc holding folders" I found my D1 disc (such is why I'll never build a PC without at least a cheap CD player in it). Fired it up - what's with all the wonky colors. Oh yeah, on Windows7/later you had to use a plain color (like black) desktop + have the windows Resolution setting window open/active while you play, to make that go away. What a strange fix. At any rate ... it now looks perfect and I'm about to enter the dungeon to the strains of that awesome original music. Glancing through those discs, there's a bunch of other old ones I should play again, too.

Interesting. I'd checked on Mon. or Tues via PS4 and Amazon's FireTV unit. Black Panther was no longer in my Watchlist and search for Avengers didn't show it. I fired up Netflix via PC browser and they're there. Interesting. (edit - I'd read articles that such were disappearing soon at any rate, I guess it's happening faster on non-pc methods?)

After deciding I was done with D3/console, I learned Jan. was when they did some D1-old Tristram event. Looked it up and had to run it. It's a set of dungeon levels made to kind of resemble the first game - desaturated colors, pixely, D1 dungeon quests and items as novelty low level drops (Ring of Truth, Veil of Steel, Arkaine's Valor armor, staff of Apocalypse etc). It was quite amusing when you've never done it before. Best thing about it was the Butcher cosmetic pet you get for completing it with a new character, and the fact they made your chr. walk in that stiff-shouldered/leg way of D1 - although they didn't force you to walk at a snail's pace, alas. It basically made me want to play the story-quest version of D1 again (I usually played the MP version of D1, that didn't have the quests). I have it installed somewhere, I think I'll fire it up today. Edit: first I have to find my D1 disc...discs, how quaint)

"TV" related maybe - guess I missed my chance to see Avengers via Netflix with their Disney relationship over. And The Black Panther, although I had little interest in that one. I could rent it via Amazon but eh. And...I will agree that 80's music makes for great soundtracks! Some 70's music, too.

@Hurlshot - I would generally go for option 1 as well. But if that just feels like an absolute no option to the others, then... ...to me it would depend on several things: how much does your mother in law drive outside of driving the kids around, will she feel too "trapped" without it (could she drive the truck, for example?), how old is she (is she getting closer and closer to where she may not be able to drive safely - my mom had her license probably 2 years too long, she scared me at times, hah), are you sure the truck won't become a "money pit" where it seems like it just needs a few major repairs but every year it needs some more, vs. trying to pay the loan off as fast as possible to save interest, etc. Tough decision tho, no matter which, especially if money is super tight.

For freebies, last I knew, Audacity, noise reduction feature. It likely won't be perfect (too much can make the other sounds wonky) but it may reduce it enough for you to tolerate it. I haven't fiddled with that stuff very much tho, so I'm not an expert. The general concept is to extract the audio from the video as a .wav, you have to find a short example of just the noise (a segment without any of the actual game noises in it) so Audacity has a reference point to run an auto filter. Or you can just try to manually choose some settings. When you're done, put the audiotrack back/replace the original track via a video editor. There's probably tutorials on YouTube or other, somewhere. Through my "pc speakers" your video isn't that bad - eg the game noises can be easily heard at a lower volume setting where the white noise feedback sound isn't really that audible. But I'd guess headphones is where it's very noticeable even at low volumes.

You know your laziness meter has reached a peak when you realize you've put the X key where the C key should be and vice versa, and you can't be bothered to pop them off again to "fix" it. I know what keys they're supposed to be, what's it matter, right? It's a chilly, partly cloudy but still rather lovely day. Put on a sweatshirt, took a walk, did a little yardwork. Hubby's tomato plants are still going, which is surprising, I thought they'd be dead by now. We keep thinking about removing half the lawn and installing more rows of gardening spots and maybe a small greenhouse. Tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, beans, who knows what else. I picture myself sitting in the greenhouse in winter while it's raining, drinking hot chocolate.

So, Biomutant is supposed to come out some point this year, right? From the looks of it, I need this game. Hurry up.

Yeah, I'm not hating on it either. I do think, vs. the original release, they've made D3 more casual fun in certain ways and I can see the broader appeal in that sense. But it's like after the many original release complaints they went so far in the opposite direction it's become overly generic with some MMO-ishness on top, heh. I did like having a mini-cow for a cosmetic pet, tho. That was pretty funny. I also was in a Greater Rift that had a "Ghost of Cow King" encounter and every enemy was a cow. Nowhere near as charming/funny as D2's cow level and all the "moomoo,moomoommoo" but a nice callback.

One day I may reinstall TW3 and try and get farther than an hour past the intro. I was still occasionally having "casual fun" with light/short sessions of Diablo3 on console, farming those Greater Rifts to see if I can find any slightly better gear (I'm not using any uber-build-guide builds, doing my own thing). Until the 2nd ring of a 2-ring Set dropped. I put it on and the Set bonus increased my (and my necro pets) damage about 1000%. Critical hit numbers are hundreds of millions. For two pieces of gear vs. the more typical 3-5 for a Set. So now I'm blowing through Torment10-13 like butter, where Legendaries drop 2-5 every single map level and you just destroy them for materials. I sense total imbalance. Not that 2018 Diablo3 is balanced to begin with but whatever. Anyway, no (gameplay) reason to item hunt much more really (collector-wise already have most of what I cared about), so bored of that. Old Diablo games lasted me years hunting for elusive unique rng items. 2018-D3 is like ... a month? bwhaha. What to do now, what to do....

I had no patience to go over the many "paths" except where forced to when I picked a dead-end one I guess, but the underlying story was ok. I liked the dark humor of the chr. commenting how he wasn't in control etc. As a novelty it's kind of cool I suppose, but not sure I'd want films to become live-action virtual novels very often.

Korean styled bulgogi over rice. Yup, I will always love my marinated beef dishes. ...went to CostCo and they had a package of smaller size premade naan bread. I utterly love that stuff/brand toasted with a little butter. Froze half, the other half one piece at a time in the morning all last week along with a bosc pear (also Costco bought). Yum.

My condolences as well, Hurlshot. And I don't think that your plan for his ashes sounds silly at all. It sounds inspired and appropriate.

I swear, the last couple years it's been like this (every month): ComcastTV: "You didn't pay enough last month, you owe us more money this month." Me: "Fine." **tosses them a bunch of money** ComcastTV: "You were short last month, you owe us more money/you're late." Me: "--cusswords--" **tosses them more money** Finally: Us: "Cable box broke, we never use it anyway, finally time to cancel." ComcastTV: "Are you sure, we'll miss you." Us: "Yes." ComcastTV: (week later by mail) "You paid us too much money, we owe you $273, check's in the mail." :disguise:

Hubby will spray noxious chemicals into car engines with his face crammed in there, or other projects, and smoke cancer-sticks, but balk re bug bombs in the attic space because it might get to the dishes in the cabinets on the other side of the house. We don't even have air-heating duct vents, mind. He can be so weird sometimes.

I check this thread now and then .... thanks for all the cat ones this round (and some of the non-cat ones too). I lol'd.

Went back this morning and watched the other two episodes of Watership Down on Netflix. Overall I think it became worse. Best of the 3rd and 4th: Woundwort, the bridge, and Keehar sequence. Worst: inspirational "speech" by Hazel in the vein of ID4's president speech+turning the start of warren fight into, I dunno, almost LotR battles flavor? Also ... Fiver in the car. Argh. Guess they thought he didn't have enough to do originally.

Belated Happy Holidays to everyone, and to cover myself, Happy New Year as well. ...can't believe it'll be 2019, almost 2020 (I can picture the 20/20 news series jokes...). Remember when that was a futuristic date in sci-fi movies? Ha.Ha.

Watched 2 episodes of the new Watership Down ... Netflix auto-started the 3rd episode but I paused it after 7 minutes and not sure I'll return to it. I also couldn't quite get past the horrible CGI face and hindquarters animations of the rabbits. I mean it looks ok/fine when they're sitting still, but they're rabbits and they don't sit still for long. The novel is one of my all time favorite reads (I re-read it periodically to this day). That 70's animated film, I didn't love it at first but it grew on me and now I like it quite a lot. This series changes so many details - particularly in the timing/placement of certain events - that along with the poor CGI rabbits and feeling like the personality and culture lore of them is almost lost (Bigwig and Keehar in the film was most excellent), the book-nerd in me finally rebelled and I couldn't take it. If one hasn't read the book and can overlook the CGI, I suppose it's passable. Maybe if I try watching it again 10 years from now I'll have a better reaction. I do give it points for trying to make a longer adaptation tho. It's not like it's a total quickie/no-love-apparent attempt.

I noticed that, and it made me realize that I hadn't seen it yet. So no wonder I had no clue what that next movie trailer was about. Tried to watch Bird Box (Netflix, Sandra Bullock). Tried being the operative word. I didn't get past the 30-40 minute mark and that with some ffwding. For taking itself so seriously, it was too ludicrous (The Happening came to my mind a couple times) and while I generally like Sandra all right, I thought she wasn't good in this role at all. But YMMV. And no, haven't read the book/novel/whatever.

That's Blizzard's crappy optimization for ya, that's exactly why I'm more partial to just stick to exclusives on consoles. It shows how well the console can do with people who actually know what to do with given hardware instead of just releasing bad ports Actually D3 seems to be quite a good port to console, imo. The massive corpse explosion spam+minions (and it is massive when I do it) is the only thing that causes the stutter and one can live with that I suppose - slightly annoying but it doesn't make it unplayable or unusable. I notice a lot of Necro's on YouTube not using minions at all so maybe that helps. Reminds me of the D2 bnet days when everyone complained about Firewall sorcies or skeleton Necros etc killing frame rates back then, too. Other than that the performance on the Pro has been quite good. I don't know what the frame rate is, I'd guess 30+ (I'm playing on the 4k TV). That said, I don't know how corpse explosion spam does on a non-Pro. Or a lower end PC or laptop (middling/high end pc's are fine I'm sure). And I'll agree Blizzard (well, a lot of companies these days) tends to overdo enemy numbers or effects/not seem to realize (or doesn't care) certain ones are just performance killers. I think arpg's often had problems like that in the past (on PC's) tho, sometimes there's just too much going on screen vs. other genres - PC's have caught up but consoles hardware hasn't. (edit - I recall bringing old RTS games to knees on PC too when I overdid "units" and battles, lol) I was surprised Path of Exile was going to console now ... they used to say they didn't think they could get performance to par or something (some of their effects also caused fps loss in the past). Guess they changed their minds. 2nd edit: D3 fps on Pro may be a bit higher, I have no way of knowing, but I'd doubt it's any higher than 40ish. Which is the problem. On PC's that can do 60/120 fps brief 15-20fps drops wouldn't be bad at all, is all. The same thing was true in FFXV - and that game also had constant frame pacing issues on top. Which they didn't entirely fix for the PC port. >.>