LadyCrimson

The Proposal was terrible. I was expecting at least a passable romantic-comedy with the always (to me) endearing Ms. Bullock, but no. No chemistry between her and the male lead and the romance aspect was so mildly developed that the inevitable coming together was unbelievable, even for a romantic movie. Rewatched Music & Lyrics and While You Were Sleeping, which are two romantic comedies that work. Much better.

The offline mode does work once you have the game installed...but I still need Steam to run it. Also, here's another issue that I have (maybe there's a solution I'm unaware of?)...if you play in offline mode and there's a patch, you go online and it'll patch things automatically, correct? But what if you don't like the patch? Either because of gameplay changes you personally dislike or because your hardware for some reason doesn't like the patched aspects. You can't downgrade the patch on Steam. If you uninstall and reinstall, Steam will install the latest version w/the patch, and thus you can never get back to the original version again. Has this changed?

On torchlight itself: Played some before I took another "nap." Very much like Fate except with Diablo-ish inventory and such. I love the better looking cat/dog pets, the shared stash and sending the pet to town. Very nice. Started on Normal and as noted, it's been too easy, so I'm going to restart on Hard. Altho, if you end up choosing to continue the 'endless' dungeon grinding w/a chr once finished w/the quest/plot, it could get harder. It did in Fate, a little. So far my only minor quibble is I sometimes have a hard time clicking on the monsters to attack. I wave the cursor over a clump of baddies and either my pc is so fast it doesn't pick up on them or there's lag and it doesn't pick up on them. Also, my 1st chr., the guy (Bink?) you find in the dungeon to help, he followed my chr...in the 2nd, he acted like I didn't accept the quest and ignored me. Bug I assume... Oh? Is that still in there? You could do that in Fate, too. Interesting.

No...it's because I need Steam, a 3rd party, to run it. If I don't have Steam installed, the games don't work. If Steam goes belly up one day, it won't work. If I don't have online access for some reason, at the time I want to play a game, it won't work. I'm renting the ability to play the game on Steam. I don't mind (too much...) paying online, downloading a digital .exe file to my hard drive and clicking on it to install vs. inserting a DVD disk in a drive. I mind a company controlling how and when I can use what I've paid for. And despite what the more hardcore gamer community might think, retail sales of games still far far far beat out pure digital, so I don't think I'm alone.

I gave up and made a paypal account just to buy the game. As much as I dislike PayPal, I dislike Steam even more. Either way, it's another place where I have to dole out the money info for an internet 'service' I'll likely never use again and forget I even have one years later. At least I don't feel like I'm renting, lesser of two evils. Even if it's only $20, I better like this game at least as much as I enjoyed Fate. :D Off to play.

Don't have a Paypal account either. Altho looking at the buy-torchlight link, maybe I don't need an actual PP account to just buy the game. Maybe. Sigh.

Since I built my own instead of buying prebuilt I'll list it here I guess. ASUS p6T motherboard Intel i7-920 6GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 RAM (bought 6 for when I get around to a 64 bit OS) GeForce GTX 275 (decided it'd do until the new geforce comes out/I install Win7 etc) Corsair TX750W power supply 500GB SATA 7200 HD (too cheap to do SSD yet..for the core pc parts, yes...for a HD..no) SB X-Fi extreme audio (it was cheap...) Some big blue neon fan case (whirlwind or something) Maybe I'll get some more cooling later. These new gpu's certainly run hot, even w/6 fans. The last PC I built was over 4 years ago, and this new one better last at least as long. Minus the video card & other minor pieces. I expect to buy new vid cards/drives once a while. ...still have my old Pentium 4/AGP/always XP system as my backup/storage and for crunching/running multiple older programs/internet while gaming on the new pc at same time. That's important, you know. It allows me to pretend I'm intelligently multi-tasking instead of just wasting time playing silly games. Plus, I'm not sure Dungeon Keeper would even run on Windows7, once I get that.

Maybe the problem is there was no Bruce Campbell and the cheese was not over the top cheesy enough, nor satirical enough to amuse me. The gypsy slobbery gumming just made me go "ewwww" and feel slightly queasy. Not funny.

K, thanks. I went to their forums and did a bunch of reading myself. It does sound a lot like Fate, only refined. for 20 bucks, that seems acceptable. Still can't make myself buy from Steam tho...changed my mind, making a Google checkout account. Edit: After reading icky stories about Google's checkout I'll skip on that, too. Guess it's Steam after all. :/ One thing about Steam I don't like is it really makes me feel like I'm renting a bloody game, not buying it. Ah well, again, for $20 I can live with it. Once I stop playing Torchlight I'll probably never play it again and can uninstall Steam again. heh

Too much wind = too many allergy pills = too much sleep. Even the non-sleepy antihistamines can make me sleepy if I have to take them a lot...so now it's 1am, I just woke up, and I'll be awake all night. My sleep schedule is messed up again. Oh yeah, my mom had a car accident last weekend. She has chest bruising but is ok, and it wasn't her 'fault', but it does make me nervous. She's becoming old and slow-reaction enough that I'm worried about her driving at all.

Heh, yeah, I know the feeling. Since I no longer care about CSI...it's House, Glee, Lie to Me, & Mentalist. But Lie to Me isn't great and none of those are sci-fi.

So after reading this thread and waffling between signing up for PayPal, Google account, or Steam, I installed Steam again (when I told hubby he said "That virus?" haha, he's a card)...but I haven't bought the game yet. I bought Fate back when, and had a lot of addictive fun with it for a few weeks but it was soooo simplistic & very repetitive even for, y'know, a hack n slash, so replay value wasn't terribly high. Does Torchlight use the same wildtangent thingie? Are the levels never-ending like in Fate or is there an actual 'endgame' & then you start all over? Also, does it have any outdoor areas or is all dungeon, ala Diablo1? That was something else that got annoying w/Fate after a while...no outdoor areas. Titan Quest wasn't the most superb game, but I did love its outdoor stuff. Endless spiraling dungeon levels don't quite cut it anymore. Edit: Oh and also...is the Steam version the SP only version? I'm unclear about it?

I agree. A game playing like that would be really funny...

That would help, yes, but even with that the WS might often be in mid-late Oct. I don't know how they'd do it w/the way they do things now, but imo the WS should be over within the 1st week of October. Edit: They used to do more double-headers, which shortened regular season...but have slowly eliminated them over time until the current none at all.

K...so any objection is usually about principle? I can understand that...but still wouldn't personally stop me if I wanted the game bad enough. :D I tried Steam briefly when I had to use it to install Half-Life/Portal. I couldn't stand it. That was a bit ago tho and I hear they've improved a lot since then, but ... meh. I won't deny that at some point I might pick one (and only one) of the online game places, but it's unlikely it'll be any time soon, or that I'd use it very often even if I had it. I don't play multiplayer all that often, and am told because of that it wouldn't likely be that great for me, anyway.

Agreed. I still like some of the characters, but this is reminding me a little too much of Voyager...in that I like the premise and some chrs, but the actual week to week plots are dull, unadventurous, and usually not about exploration. The problem is that so far the ship controls where they go, when they stop, etc...unless they change that, any exploration factor is going to be, imo, unsatisfying. But I'll probably still watch, because hubby will probably still watch. Even if he doesn't think it's very good, for some reason he keeps on watching anything with SG in the title, long after I've given up.

If there was cheese, it didn't seem very intentional. Except the goat...I'll admit that. But 1 goat scene doesn't a cheese horror-comedy make, for me. All I know is for 99% of the movie, I sat with a neutral, bored expression that never wavered.

I don't like buying things online, digital or otherwise, because I'm an old fart who can't get with the online-shopping times or something. The day I can't buy games, hardware, etc off a shelf is the day we'll suddenly have lots of excess cash and we'll be off frolicking in the Caribbean all the time instead. Probably won't be too long now... ...on another topic...what gets censored when they censor, anyway? Just the violent graphics or something? If a game seems good enough, I'm not sure that would stop me. If the gameplay itself was somehow radically different, that would be something else, tho.

The later the WS is held, the more likely this will be so. It's almost an argument for all covered stadiums.

Drag Me to Hell Considering all the buzz and decent reviews, plus the fact I usually like Sam Raimi...this was a very pedestrian horror movie. Not scary, either psychologically or visually, terrible acting-the vapid main gal was not sympathetic and bad acting that has no 'cheese' value is just bad. Completely predictable and largely boring. There were a few mildly entertaining scenes and I did like the male fortune teller chr. but overall....zzzzzzzz. Mr. Raimi, I'm disappointed in you.

Considering Walsh mentions filling up a 300GB HD I'd guess spending thousands for 500GB+ of SSD drives wouldn't be high on his list priorities. It certainly wouldn't be one of mine, at least. But yea, you could have a SSD for the OS HD and a high capcity SATA for the storage, perhaps. My personal opinion is I'll wait for SSD to 1-come down in price per GB and 2-improves upon it's longevity and other potential windfalls, first. I know they already have improved a lot, but not nearly enough for me to rush out and get one or three.

As said, if you're fine w/your current card for a while, I'd wait, too. There's always a latest and greatest card. I even decided to buy the cheaper geForce 275, in case 6-12 months from now I'm using Win7 & wanted the brand new ge. Plus I read the 285 wasn't really all that better for the price point. The 275 is more than enough card for me right now, especially considering I'm using XP/can't use all the hardware's power atm, too. Har.

Is what a decent a hard drive? I see nothing. How big is your current, full drive - ie, how much more do you need for it to last you a while? How much of it has to be on your main computer, vs. either backed up and/or just accessible occasionally? There's a few main ways I deal with storage issues. 1-external drives you know about. You buy one or two, dump everything you want to transfer on it, buy the new HD, and when you have it all ready w/the OS etc. you dump everything back on to it. 2-Buy a 2nd (and 3rd, if you want) hard drive, install it on your PC and use it as a data drive. That way you don't have to transfer anything or reformat initially. Just plug in the new 2nd drive and dump your space-hogging data onto it. Your main HD/OS programs can see & access data on the extra drives, so you don't need to have anything but the actual running programs on your "main" HD. My "C" drives are relatively empty most of the time. Thus if I need to reformat the OS HD, there isn't tons of stuff on it to worry about in the 1st place, because it's all on the data drives. Just backup bookmarks, email files, that sort of stuff before a reformat. 3-if you have more than one computer w/a LAN, you can temporarily dump data onto it, then dump it back to your pc. If you're concerned about trying to transfer programs wholesale onto a newly installed/formatted HD, so you can have all your settings, mods, etc back in one shot, that's a crapshoot. Sometimes it works to install the basic program then copy everything from the old, backed up Program Files folder into the new install folder & overwrite and it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Cleaned up my desk area and got rid of the unorganized tangle of wires near my chair that seemed to magically appear over the last year and which I kept tripping over. Rearranged where all the tech things sit (to get rid of the wires), and put a good dent into a lot of paper filing work I needed to do. Plus tossed out more old VHS videos and other boxed junk I no longer need to hang onto. A couple new shelves so more things can be out of boxes (from moving 1.5 yrs ago...). A lot of those little things that pile up over a year or so until you finally get off your butt and do them. It took hours and hours. Now time to relax before bed.

Based only on what was said in your first post, it feels to me like you over-reacted a little bit to her decision to share her feelings about media violence (what you quoted didn't seem particularly judgmental on a personal level, ie directly at you), but then she turned around and over-reacted at your response. I don't know her so you'd know far better her possible hidden meanings behind actions, but sometimes people just like to...explain *why* they don't like (or like) something, even when not asked. A way of sharing who they are, perhaps. Dunno. Still, her being initially miffed, ok, but deleting from facebook and complaining to other family members...that's a bit much. She could've at least waited for a few more rounds of possibly escalating emails/posts.