LadyCrimson

Currently watching "Metal Tornado." Where these people ... ...stand around in control room with dramatic expressions while in the outside world, people are terrified by tornadoes with magnetic properties. Pulling guns out of holsters, pulling cars off the ground etc. in awesome CGI scenes! ...mostly, between occasional guffaws, I keep thinking ... Greg Evigan? Lou Diamond Phillips? Grab that paycheck! Good for them.

Not a MMO but online - Diablo2/Diablo3 releases, anyone? Hahahaha. They often do that ... underestimate the load. Either that or tech problems in general. Even NW:online has mild issues still, during peak times. Mostly with connecting to their servers or getting bumped off. Must be difficult because you don't want to spend more than really needed on servers/techs etc. but that likely sometimes means you end up with problems at peak times or during unexpected sudden surges. And you don't know if the increased load will remain long enough to be worth spending more.

Was bored, so ordered Showtime, because they have a few original series I've been wanting to check out (not Dexter, seen that before on DVDs). First few episodes of Shameless (the US version). It wasn't quite what I was expecting ... I thought it was going to be broader comedy ... but it seems pretty decent. I love William H. Macy and the rest of the cast are mostly good, especially the two older sons. They have every episode available VoD so guess we'll be watching a couple a night for a while. The original (UK?) series has been on Netflix too, I might watch it later.

Thanks for all the notes about the "cards." Much clearer. I don't think I'd be personally interested at all, but it's still interesting. For some reason, my Steam isn't doing this, but my husband's is. We both D/L the BL2 DLC at the same time, and Steam seemed to do some updating then. Later when we actually played the DLC, hub's PC/Steam downloaded something (offline mode). But mine hasn't. It does say "Downloads disabled" in the offline mode greet screen now, I don't think it did before. We can still play BL2 together so there doesn't seem to be any version conflict. It's odd that mine hasn't done anything tho...wonder why. I don't have Steam set to run on bootup (edit: nvm, thinking of something else disabled it in msconfig actually) and I have the "Enable Steam Community-In-Game" option unchecked...but I'm pretty sure I did the latter on hubby's Steam too (because it seemed to get around the issue of Steam not really wanting to allow offline mode at all that occurred to me recently). And all that's just to say ... I don't like it either. They really seem to be desirous of moving away from having offline mode be a ... viable? useful? ... option. Even if the games don't require being online just to run, eventually Steam itself might. Bah.

At this point I just find it easier to take those hundreds of thousands of AD's I can make and sell them for Zen. One wonders, however, if there will come a point where hardly anyone is buying Zen for people to buy. Still probably some months away before that happens to a game-stopping point, I bet. Hopefully by then I'll have lots of Zen stocked up for whenever they push out new kitty things, haha. In 2-3 weeks I'll finally get to see what 8 chrs. all firmly concentrating on bringing in as much AD as possible can really do. Depends partially on markets and how dedicated I am. The last being the biggest factor.

Downloading Planet Explorer's .605. Didn't realize it was out, so I'm behind. From what I"m hearing tho, it's much improved ... at least on the durability and digging front. So I'm likely to like this version much better. Alas I have to wait until tomorrow...much too late for me to start it now (plus the D/L is another hour to boot...).

So somewhere in this thread I saw that the cards were maybe worth real money. Are y'all collecting cards for a chance at cash and prizes, or for Steam achievements or "just because?" I confess I don't understand the cards...outside of the fact they seem incentives to buy more games?

Agreed. People often seem to want something fresh and innovative, but then if it strays too far into the unfamiliar.... I can't really think of anything to say at this point... I needz moah info first. I definitely understand being used to/liking the stat/ability methods of old, but on the other hand, I did often find them a bit restricting and/or nowhere near as flexible as they might sound on the surface. So something different might be interesting. Depends on what the execution really ends up meaning, especially in relation to any/all other chr. game mechanics, vs. a single interview quote. As they say ... we shall see!

And another famous woman: I liked her without the well-known short blonde hair-do. ..ok, I'll get out of the man-thread for now.

In terms of modelling, Crystal Renn is an interesting story. Pressured to be thin to be a model, bouts of anorexia, then gained weight and became an inspirational "plus size" model/spokesperson (even tho she really wasn't that big), then recently lost tons of weight again to become pretty thin once more. ...in terms of famous women, I've always liked Catherine Zeta-Jones. She goes up and down in weight a bit but I think she's very pretty. Or other women I think are attractive: Michelle Yeoh, Queen Latifah, and Halle Berry. All very different body types, all very attractive, imo.

They all kinda start to look the same (oby's pics). Pretty soon we'll start cloning people. Especially the attractive ones. ...it is (generally speaking) true tho, that in glamor photos, sometimes to get that sharp high cheekbone look (on camera) one has to be extra thin elsewhere. Cameras can be unkind. Most women I've known who were that model-thin of face, however ... in person when you see them, they are walking bone sticks. Not all of them - some people are actually naturally very skinny/bony in shape. But a lot basically starve themselves to stay like that. Like my almost 6' cousin, when she was trying to be a model and they wanted her to be something like 120-125 pounds. She quit in a year.

I've reached lvl 19 in Leadership! According to my calculations, if I filled all 7 slots with Leadership tasks, and if I was an auto-bot who never had to sleep so I could change tasks every 2 hours and 40 minutes, I'd have lvl 20 in about 5 days. But sadly, I am not an auto-bot, so this means it's most likely going to take closer to ... 12-14 days.

That's the real reason why I have so many alts. (Eventually) a different mount/companion for every one!

Went socializing, enjoying a mild and pleasant day (80F ). Hubby has one of his poker nights so on the way home I grabbed some food for me. Got home, stuffed my face full of Chinese BBQ pork and fried rice and now I'm going to ... uh ... I'm not sure, haven't thought that far yet.

Hey! Did you steal my spatula?? ...I don't use them that much, but when I do want one it's because I'm flipping pancakes, fried eggs, or a big slice of meat, and I want a big, roundish one that goes under and supports those things. I also tend to use non-stick pans, so plastic for me. Otherwise I stick to wooden spoons. Also...ever since clumping cat litter made its appearance, I'll never look at the smaller metal spatulas in quite the same way.

I'd like a new/remodeled kitchen, too. It's not very big, but it could use some rearranging, like a window removed, the stove moved to a different wall (the one with the window....), which means the dishwasher would be moved to another spot, etc. One of the worst kitchen layouts ever. Don't care about granite countertops or fancy appliances/pantries...it's the inefficient layout that drives me insane.

I had fun with Risen2, but then I must have become distracted by something else because I never finished it. Oh well....happens to me a lot. Today I dug holes in Planet Explorers and spent time pressing "refresh" on the auction house of NW:Online until I got what I wanted. Tomorrow I will dig more holes in Planet Explorers. I am going to turn the land into swiss cheese, until all the enemy animal spawns will fall down all the holes as soon as they spawn, unable to climb back out to bother me. Well, ok, not really, the world is too big, but if I had the time...

NW:Online - tiger mount and the new healer companion. I named her (companion) Uhura. Actually, I named her something else first, but then she played her harp and went "hmhmhm," which for some reason made me think of ST.

2 to 3 more days later... BUT ... at least ... ...someone put one on the AH for 1.4 million AD (instead of 2-5 million) and I snatched it up. Also gave up trying to be a cheapskate on the AD to Zen exchange, so I have my tiger mount now, too. Left me with like 150k AD, heh. So I sold some col. wards and other things and back up to 700k AD. I love MMO-economics.

Cute face, but that hipbone sticking so far out kinda makes me want to feed her a sandwich.

They sure know how to time new things to keep that zen/diamond exchange high. ...the purple healing companion is going to be desirable, but a random chance from a prof. pack is annoying. It is tempting, however ... especially since the one you get for praying takes a year (or 292 more days, in my case). Ghost companion ... meh. They're never going to release those "level up companion" tomes, are they? Also ... lol, they heard me. Mass ore/resource gathering option now in professions. heh

Isn't that basically what most entertainment/mass products become, tho? I mean, at one time you could hardly turn around but stumble on the big splashy musical/dance film, with the same stars (when stars were under restrictive studio-exclusive contracts), until audiences finally grew tired of them and they stopped being profitable. Or the gangster movie. Or the Western movie. Or the WWII movie. And if you didn't like those things or those actors, too bad, you had to hunt around for the few things that weren't that. I suppose it's a bit different in terms of who the main pusher is (investors, studio owners/partners, whatever) but movies go in cycles - I don't really see a big difference. They're just not in a cycle that I like at the moment. Altho, the issue of the changing way many like to consume movies (audience has many choices) vs. traditional methods (audience had only one choice - the theater) had and still is having a large impact. I don't think studios have figured out how to deal with/work with that effectively yet, so they just keep on looking for the "theater blockbusters."

It's like the floating, magical-cast sword ... only it's a flashlight! What's it hovering over? A pile of mule puke?

Anyone else actually read Dianetics, the book? It's sorta interesting in a weird way. But it's hard to see it forming the basis for some cult like "religion." It's not that interesting.

The only thing I know about Scientology as an organized group is that when I was 17, I walked into a small, newly opened local office of theirs out of curiosity (I'd read the book recently, then). Just some books and some people at desks, boring. I was there 5 minutes. But I did the mistake of putting myself on a mailing list ... I can't remember why. I used my parents address. I'm now going on 45 and their mailings (constant, often huge and fortune-costing packages to mail I'm sure) have followed me the entire time, from address to address, with occasional breaks as someone forgets to check up on my change-of-address filings, I suppose. This indicates to me a level of obsession that I find rather scary. And a friend's mother was harassed by live people for several years. So ... if the internet helps curtail some of their cult-like habits via them not being able to effectively hide/mask their semi-strong arm tactics anymore, then I'm all for it.