LadyCrimson

Age 48 (about 5:05) Age 68 (about 4:35) Keep rocking forever, Pat.

I've been to Vegas once. All I remember is the (early) 3D theater IMAX we saw (these heavy duty headpiece/glasses you had to wear), this cheap hotel we were in (we weren't "well off" then) and that hubby fell sick with a bad flu while there. Maybe we went to some show but I can't remember. I think we liked the outlying desert areas more than the city itself. Not surprising with who we are. I do like slot machines tho. Well, the ones before they turned digital and all of that, anyway. And the nickel, maybe quarter ones at max, so you didn't lose a fortune in 5 minutes. I'll stick to slots in something like Borderlands, it's cheaper.

I gave in and finally made an account/resubbed to HBO/Max after they stopped letting me do it through Prime. >.> Which means I finally get to watch that whole Noblesse anime series someone made. I'm about half way through and what I read on the 'net is correct - it's not very good. It has moments that aren't too bad but overall it matches neither the manga or that much shorter animated start/short episode (test episode? no clue) that came long before this "full" series. Frankenstein is still tops tho. Also: is Bungo Stray Dogs - assuming one likes it at all initially ofc - worth trying to cram-watch it, before HBO removes it a few weeks from now? I mean it looks sorta like something I might like but time and attention span constraints....

Death Stranding Game Logic: -Rain/Timefall, even the smallest drop, ages your skin/self! Stay unprotected in it for even a short time and you'll look like a 100 year old mummy! ---but apparently wearing a poncho type hood without a mask (or maybe just some sunglasses on) etc. protects your face 100% enough even in the wind or driving a motorbike at high speed. -Rain/Timefall damages cargo containers and gear with megaspeed deterioration. ---but apparently they can make clothing material/shoes etc that is not only "waterproof" but "Timefall effect proof" - it doesn't deteriorate. So why not make cargo containers or rucksacks out of that stuff? Wrap the cargo in your pants? Hm?

Fed the squirrels. Fed myself. (Edit: cauliflower, broccoli, mushroom, onions, sausage/hamburger crumbled mix, chicken stock/sour cream sauce/cheese) Boredom breeds vanity selfies. Although less vanity and more "should I cut my hair off again and F it's so grey now". Some people pay a lot of money for thin highlight streaking. When you age, you get it for free! Edit: and yes, while you can barely tell, that's another cat nightshirt.

There's a desktop mode? *looks...hmm..."Javascript exception rule"...hmm..."loads a lot slower/laggy..."* I guess that works (I just use Chrome on mobile). Is there a way to prevent Android from then sticking a "play this file" shortcut/bar on the power-on/clock phone initial screen if you leave that page open when you turn the phone off? I have phone in Power-Saving/limited mode (only way to get more than 10-15 hours of standby...), not sure why it's saving/tossing that up.

Searched "Musical" in Netflix, saw something called Julie and the Phantoms. Typical teenage song and dance short series but with a ghost-y flair so eh why not. I FFWD'd through some non-music dialogues/scenes but overall by halfway through I was enjoying it a fair bit, especially the music numbers. Talented relative unknown cast that worked well together, the sort who you're initially a little iffy about but they really grow on you. Guess that teenager of mine is still in there somewhere... unfortunately the series leaves a lot of unanswered questions - what is the unfinished business, what would that 4th band member who's old now do (not to mention a mega "villain ghost" cliffhanger type last few seconds) but Netflix isn't making a 2nd season. Oh well, that's the US for ya (not just Netflix). I liked it a lot better than any of the High School Musical's, at least. Probably a little more akin to something like the 1st season of Glee except focused only on one student and the 3 ghost band member chrs.

Apologies, doubt anyone here would be interested, just posting so I can bypass YouTube's "you can't loop/repeat on your mobile/phone".

Death Stranding - using a couple cheats so I can say screw it and just get some road sections built before doing much in the main quests. Those first sections crossing rivers make life a lot easier even if you stay on foot - the rest are only sorta needed for some late mega-truck-load cargo orders if you bother with them. It's interesting how extra empty the world is before doing all those main story quests, since more and more "lost cargo" and other materials dots the landscape as you make friends with each delivery post and get them on the tech grid. Before that forward areas remains empty wasteland with nothing to pick up outside of the MULE camps. I also noticed those floating exploding balloon bag BT's in the air above a couple fringe edge map spots where they didn't exist before on console. Dunno if they were always there since early PC release or what, but I found that interesting. I just gotta get to Mama, where I can start building ziplines. Because to me, ziplines is where it's at. Edit: designing their routes/placing them is half the fun of the game.

Even in a sorta post-apocalypse where most stay underground, there are rubber duckies in random surface ponds, because of course there are.

Majestic's spider would not bother me at all, even in the house. The one Gorth posted would not bother me at all and I would find it quite interesting ... but from over there. If I saw one in the house it'd be broom swept into a giant glass jar and tossed outside with a stern warning to never come back inside. >.>

We rented/saw Moonfall. We had a lot of fun snorting, catcalling, and poking fun at Moonfall. The space scenes looked great on 4k/OLED. The actors tried their best. It didn't have cheesy otp Will Smith like lines (took itself a little too seriously in its own universe vs. say, ID4). There was mayhem, but yet not enough mayhem. There was no Apple computer, but there was plenty of looney stuff and "science". M-O-O-N! That spells moon! I would not recommend Moonfall, unless like us, you occasionally just like watching bad movies while kicking back on a warm Sunday evening.

After 5-starring a few "cities", I reached the spot in Death Stranding where as soon as I run outside it's the first boss fight. Which is a good spot to copy the save directory elsewhere as a "if I ever restart, saves me some hours, save." But...while a few new missions are always nice I guess, about the only thing I was seriously interested in re: Director's Cut is the ability to use zip lines with the luggage sleds. That would have saved a lot of trips back and forth. OTOH, there was something peaceful about traveling across miles dragging those hover sleds behind me. ...but not like that's the biggest motivation, so now watch, I won't want to play it any further for weeks. >.> ...oh wait, look, a cheat mod that removes weight limit (height limit still in effect tho, my funny bone was disappointed not to be able to have a stack 300 feet high on Sam's back...) and enemy detection status (MULES just stand there jittering in place like they've had 10 gallons of coffee/don't fight back, BT's and heavier rain graphics don't show up at all). Maybe I will keep (re)playing after all! ...maybe. There was also a super-speed run cheat but that one caused Sam to fall through the ground into empty void-space a couple times so I crossed that one off the usable list. >.>

^ I'm not an IT but I can say it was very freeing to tell my parents/family to essentially stuff it years ago. This is me, I do not need "fixing", accept it or fluff off. Humanity is just a bunch of ranting 3 year olds who want candy.

Death Stranding - I hate the Wind Farm - at least the first time you do it. It's not terrible later. Now I have to decide if I'm going to fart around in the starter area for a long time to get ahead on Order sequences or push ahead to the more open, main game world area. I'll be looking to do/get all 500 (or whatever it is now) LoL deliveries again. It'd be better to push ahead and get some of that gear that helps out and go back, but then again it's not as challenging that way.

I played for about an hour and a half (40% of that time was cutscenes or inventory/order menus or admiring scenery). I saved the game manually twice, but this is how many it creates in total: There is "AutoSave", "Checkpoint Save" and "Manual Save" - you have a certain number allowed of each type/and in total, and then it cycles through again, meaning earlier saves are written over etc. Every single time you access a terminal (which you will do a lot) or any other thing it autosaves. meaning that cycle-over point is rapidly reached. You cannot delete saves from within the game nor turn auto-saving off. On console I could go into "save game management" system setting and delete individual ones from there. On the PC I have to dig through a mixed web of multiple-named save folders in the AppData folder trying to figure out by timestamp which saves I want delete. Utterly horrendous. Edit: I remember console players complaining about how many MB they rapidly ate up.

Yeah, that was a great little manual, full of details and stats. I still have it in a box somewhere. I do see more digital games with digital manuals, but it's not the same at all. Especially if one doesn't have multiple monitors to be able to view them without disrupting the game being onscreen. Plus a lot of them are just a few pages and not in-depth. I think even the small Dungeon Keeper 1 booklet was more in-depth than most "manuals" today. And then there's the occasional game like Death Stranding that goes a tad overboard with in-game "help/tips/game lore" menus. Not just because of length but because of organization. Seriously, I never read all that crap.

After seeing some of RLM'd video on the film Moonfall, I felt a sudden urge to see it, because I'm in the mood for an utterly mindless, ridiculous, zero logic disaster movie that you can laugh at. Sadly, last I looked it was buy only still, not rent. Wasn't there some Star Trek episode with a quote about the more complex the mind, the greater the need for simplicity of play? Judging from my entertainment desires as of late, I must have the most complex mind in the world then.

Made more soup. Ate more orange dark chocolate. Sat on the rickety rocking/slider porch bench (came with the house...) watching the squirrels. Gamed. Slept. Hubby: "Do you want to go back to the other house this weekend again to get more stuff?" Me: "If we don't miss any of that stuff that's still there, do we really need it?" ...I guess even with a few larger pieces left, I feel fully "moved" and don't want to budge anymore. ...hubby still has tons of "stuff" tho. All that garage/handyman type odds and ends. I think he has a Home Depot's worth of a spare odds/ends woodpile he brought up last time. Pfft.

That trailer for Vendir: any RPG that lets your chr/party run that fast across a map gets a bonus star from me. ...are there any upcoming visual fests coming this year? That aren't souls-like or online or the same basic survival tropes. ...I could use a Death Stranding 2, to be honest. For all its weirdness and faults, it was at least different.

I am pretty sure Death Stranding didn't used to have a "Very Hard" setting - it only went up to Hard. So that is what I am using, as well as staying in Offline playmode for a while (I might turn Online on about midway thru the game for some road building "help"). As I recall "Hard" largely made the rainfall more damaging to gear/structures and package containers, with enemies being slightly more spongey but I could still stun grenade and punch them into submission no problem. Very Hard seems to increase that package container damage speed even more, and just trekking 40 meters in the rain feels like I'm getting the red "YOUR CONTAINER, LADDER, PCC IS RUINED" message constantly. It's awesome! I wonder if I'll have to do something besides punch (or occasionally, sneak or lasso) the bandits, now. I don't think I ever used a gun type weapon at all, before.

Y'know, Death Stranding does look a little better on PC, especially if you have a good TV. It has a bit more of that "wow" factor at times, with all the darkish/moody scenes. But the PS4 version was still very good. The main difference is cutscenes on console have that slightly softer focus plus forced depth of field/vignetting, so only the center is in hard focus. So because of that you'll see more/sharper textures edge to edge, human wrinkles/pores etc. on PC throughout. The rest is quality of one's hardware/TV and the color/contrast and better graphic lighting differences such entrails. I mean I have direct screenshot comparisons and it's pretty close in some respects. I did the first trainer quest in the game, sat through cutscenes, the next trainer quest, sat through cutscenes. I forgot how long it takes time wise to actually reach the point where the initial long and frequent cutscenes stop and the game (you feel like you have more control) begins. >.> Of course I could've skipped them but it's been long enough I felt like watching them again as a reminder, plus to just see graphics. Apparently I still remember the paths/methods to entirely avoid all BT encounters tho. Like the first body furnace, if you sneak and go up to the roof of the building and go around, you can avoid having to try to run past them. And I remember there was a few big bad encounters in the game (big bizarre lion things) where I figured out if you ran to one side over some obstacles and got out of the "zone" really fast you didn't have to fight them. That was one reason I liked the game ... combat was usually optional. And why I didn't like those combat specific war scenarios. Anyway, I might be able to get into the game again. It's probably going to take a long time to finish it tho since I'll likely only play it an hour or two each time vs. all day long. Edit: oh, also, after the very start of the game felt slightly choppy in Director's Cut, I changed an nvidia setting - Low Latency Mode to Ultra - and the performance/fps seemed to smooth out. Not sure what that was about but it worked and it's holding 60fps native 98% of the time now, like before, vs. drifting constantly from 50-60. *shrug*

Speaking of 4k and TV's, hubby's 55" Samsung ...Q90 I think? (which they don't make anymore) that he uses as a work desktop survived the move to the new house. And then he broke it by accidentally mis-reaching/side-swiping a small plastic volume control box (about 2x2 inches) into the bottom of the TV's skinny frame. Where the thing made contact, a giant fat black line appeared, and the bottom inch or so of the screen is all funky too, making a taskbar unreadable. He was bummed for days. So, note, don't put volume controls (or remotes or anything of that nature) half a foot away from the bottom of a modern TV, in a spot where you may want to move it around a lot. Alternatively, don't have your TV on a floor stand that puts the bottom directly level with/practically sitting on the surface of your desk. Apparently those "near invisible" plastic frames (let alone the screen, ofc) can't handle any impact at all.

I randomly came across an episode of that Star Trek: Continues webseries. I had completely forgotten about it. I remember watching the first episode and sorta liking it, so I watched a few more episodes. Apparently there were ... 11 eventually made? I still sorta like it - it definitely is more in line with ToS then any "new" Treks have been and the cast/sets all look pretty good. The plots aren't bad either. And yet it's still just a little too weird without the original cast. I'm still of the mind that if I want a brief nostalgic dose of original Trek, I'll just watch ... the original Trek. I guess I'm one of those that doesn't really feel a need for constant new stories in the same 'verse forever and ever. In fact usually most series/IP's run on way too long. Hence why I'm not a fanfic writer.