LadyCrimson

"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. >.>

Clicking to move Xan over and over to hear him say "Our quest is vain" 50x, laughing like a loon the whole time. ...I don't really have "best gaming moments." It's mostly those sudden, inexplicable and wholly random times where I can't stop laughing for some reason that I remember most in terms of years later. Not that I haven't had satisfying moments of beating a boss or finding an item or liking a chr. arc or whatnot. But none of those compares to a good bout of hysterical laughter.

1 Necromancer (stun bone spikes primary with all legendary gear and Cubed powers) 7 skeleton minions (super fast attacking) 16+ skeleton mages (unique ring effect to double them, also mega speed) Corpse explosion spam everywhere A zillion monsters filling the entire screen screen doing their own effects things ....it sort of brings the PS4-Pro to its knees. I'm surprised it does as well as it does. But it stutters/lags here and there during the busiest moments. With the relative easy of difficulty in D3 now, all classes are OP'd in their own ways, but the Necro is something special in that regard, even for a minion class. imo. It's hilarious really. Edit: also, bone spikes can attack through walls a lot of the time (if there's no ceiling to them like in many dungeons). Meaning you can kill stuff without opening doors or them being able to fight back. How silly.

Best thing in that cpt marvel trailer is Sam and cat. the Avengers trailer makes me feel like I never saw the last one (no clue what's up in trailer in other words) but I'm pretty sure I did....

5 million quatloos on mid summer, aka June-Aug.

That was not the reason for it, Bethesda fallouts did not use shooting mechanics like "you point, you hit" it was more if your stats say you will miss, you will miss even if you are 1inch away from the enemy. NewVegas added actual aiming and using sights, so they are capable of doing it properly even when using ****ty engine I don't think that was true outside of vats. I seem to recall skills affecting damage but not whether you could hit your target or not. Or perhaps that was just in New Vegas. In any case, the aiming mechanics for third person shouldn't be the same as for first person. Allowing for the two should impact the design significantly. I played Fallout:NV without using VATS just fine (I don't like VATS at all), the shooting mechanics were ok without it. I mean, it wasn't true fps shooter smooth, but it worked fine/wasn't a problem. But yeah that's not the same thing as 3rd person combat visual design/mechanics. I remember when people wanted Borderlands in 3rd person. You could force it using some dev commands or something (I don't remember exactly) but while it sorta worked, it looked and felt awkward (aiming was off by a mile) and was obviously "unfinished"/not meant to be played that way. The indie survival alpha game 7 Days to Die also had a crude 3rd person that they tried to test but it was barely functional and they've never tried to improve it so hardly anyone uses it. It would definitely impact time/work to make both 1st and 3rd feel and behave "right". Could they do both? Yes, if they felt it was worth their time and the way they've set up gameplay would work with both. No idea if they will, however. As to viewing your character - I only care about that if they make fashion a big deal in the game. Why bother with collectable funny wizard hats or recoloring clothing (as example) if I can't see it. Especially if it's not even MP where at least you're dressing up for other players. Might've been ok in the paper-doll only days but not so much now, for me. That said, an idle/non-combat vanity-camera would be fine.

Did the TC mean quick save (press one key to save while in-game) or manual save (go into a menu to save)? I can live without a quick save (almost never use that actually), but yeah, manual saving of some sort is important ... even on a console version. Console games these days do often have manual save systems, y'know, if it's not an enforced linear story chapt. movement (some jrpg's come to mind) or online game. Also, if not unlimited save slots, please don't limit me to 8 manual save slots like FFXV did (where Square's lazy butts kept it to 8 even on the PC version). At least 20, ok?

Heh, yeah, open bnet was lulz back then in terms of item hacking. "50 Zod runes for trade!" pfft. I played Closed bnet and didn't hack, hence the irritating way of multiple account muling. :D I did use an offline mod that incorporated the later closed bnet online features into offline-SP for a while tho. The super Diablo or whatever that was.