LadyCrimson

Hahahah! I love it. Re: using compressed air to dust...I guess if you have 'dust covers' on your fans, that would help, but be cautious when using that method...I farked up my power-supply and video card fans once, because the huge clouds of flying dust got into the fan bearings or something. First they made noise, then they ground to a halt. If you can find a good one for pc's, a vacuum works a lot better, especially if you have months or years of dust collected.

It's icky hot here, we no longer have a swimming pool since we moved, my street is blocked off from the city slurry-tarring the road so I can't drive anywhere for a while, and the WoW beta is shutdown for the afternoon. But ... I can always sit in a bathtub full of cold water and I can walk to the nearest mini-mart for some ice cream. Mmm...ice cream.

The load on the pc from all that video-info can be immense...especially w/older pcs. Definitely get more RAM. But even with that, some games will drop their frame rate by quite a lot when you turn Fraps on. It's just something that has to be accepted and lived with, at the moment.

Dead Calm. A 'psychotic stranger' on-a-small-boat suspense movie that missed the 'classic' mark by a little bit, but is still a fun piece. I like how it essentially has just three people in the whole movie, plus its gorgeous cinematography. Also the first movie where I really "noticed" Sam Neill & Billy Zane.

I just got into the WoW WotLK beta, so I'll be playing that for a while. At least, after they finish with a 7 hour server thingie that, of course, was started 10 minutes after my first login. First major beta-play I've ever been in...they're really changing everything...this will be interesting.

Tell me where I actually said that a game plot itself is 100's of hours long. Maybe I'm unusual, but every game I've really liked I've played for 100's of hours. Which is why I don't like shooters much - they're not typically very replayable imo.

I might have minded the movie-ending slightly less if it hadn't had one of those "NOOOOOOOOOOOO" type moments. With 'what if" stories like The Mist, I like ambiguous endings that leave the reader/viewer with something to muse on.

Can you actually play the game? Is the character speech-text also garbled, or is just those main menus? Tried different drivers etc? Sounds strange...

Relatively useless as a party member (why use him when others were so much better) but had a few amusing lines. But I didn't find him interesting or compelling, no. Mostly, the large, round, death-star wanna-be just got in my way visually so I told him to take a hike.

I took a shower.

The ending was left very ambiguous - no big conclusion, but w/a very slight sense of (yet unlikely) hope. He doesn't shoot anyone, no army to the rescue.

Or in the majority of cases, worse. I have to admire your optimism, though. After all the rehashed stuff that the EU has been making even worse time and time again, Ive grown pretty pessimistic about the whole deal altogether. The only things of EU that interest me now are KOTOR(Both the games and the comics) and the Legacy comics, though the bad art on the KOTOR comics really isn't helping... Agree about the usually worse trend. And I try to be optimistic about everything, because now and then rehash/sequel can end up being as good, and even more rarely, better, than previous attempts...yet I'm not so optimistic where I'll rush out and buy - I have friends/reviewers be the guinea pigs before I spend my money on it. *wink

Stephen King has nothing to do with In the Mouth of Madness....Carpenter paid tribute to him via the Sutter Cane character (King & Carpenter are supposedly friends), but that's the only connection. I've never even heard of a King mini-series called "The Fort." Was it based on one of his books or was it some "King original-for-TV?" And don't get me started on The Mist...I have read the story (it's really more of a short novella rather than a true novel, imo), and while it wasn't anywhere near King's best, it was a lot better than the movie. I loathed the changed ending. Most movies based on King's books are terrible.

I think they eventually will be able to, as well...but that time is not now. I'm not sure I really want games that look like actual live-actor movies. For one thing, then the constant violence aspect becomes more ... well ... creepy ... to me personally. 90-100 minutes of horror movie is fun, but I'm not sure I could stomach 100's of hours of such whilst playing a game. I'm a wimp, I know.

Re: BG2 - I liked that game well enough, and can easily admit it outclasses BG1 in a few ways, but I never became emotionally fond of it like I did w/BG1 so it's not on my list.

I don't care how great they can make CGI humans look in stills or freckles or skin wrinkles etc. They still can never get the speaking-mouth movements right, and that ruins the whole effect in terms of "realism'...for me at least.

My list from the last top-10 thread: At the moment I'd probably replace Overlord with WoW/Burning Crusade...simply because Overlord has very little replay value for me and WoW-BC has sucked up way more hours than Overlord. Something about BC that is a lot more fun than pre-BC WoW. If you're level 70 at least.

"If I Had $1,000,000" - Barenaked Ladies. I don't think there's a single song of theirs that I don't at least like.

I could be out at the park with my camera, but today I'm waiting for the cableTV guy. I hope he won't turn out to be a psychotic stalker.

I'm going to have to agree w/this. He doesn't look morbidly obese in that picture, certainly. Ridiculous defense argument no matter how you serve it up. Haha. If you're for the death penalty in the first place, I don't see any rational objection to gun or even guillotine vs. lethal injection. *shrug*

Doesn't really look like my kind of series, but I'll have to watch the premiere at least, because hey, Ron Perlman and the Married w/Children wife Katey Sagal are in it. They're cool.

@ babydol - I saw the ads for the new Mummy movie and it's not one I'm going to go see in the theater. I loved the first two movies too and even bought them on DVD. They had flaws but were great light adventure entertainment w/a fun sense of humor. I agree with your "Let's just drop the whole "Mummy" franchise, and call this something new, why don't we?" assessment. I mean, I can see wanting to have a new bad guy because how many times can you "kill" Vosloo's mummy, but the rest....meh.

Since I've neither seen or heard of either of those before - not surprising in my case, heh - I wouldn't know. And everything has been "done before" - but you can always do it better.

Tent-camping is great (and necessary) if you're backpacking around the wilderness. But we've also found that as you get older, if all you're really doing is "car camping" (never going far from the main roads/hot spots/gas stations), after a while you start wanting to sleep more comfortably, have a hot shower, and so on. Plus we became tired of lugging around a car full of camping equipment. Seemed like every year there was more equipment that we had to have with us, heheh! Pain in the arse. We just stay in cheap motels or vacation rentals near where we want to explore and then take day-cruises/hikes/eat at cheap diners. A small RV or fixed-up van/truck/camper might be cool someday, but I don't think a huge RV would be for us...for one thing, hubby wouldn't want to drive it. :D

I see it as a strong-arm profit-oriented-cult of mental-health-empowerment psychology which actually leads to mental instability.... They still follow me around via mailings. We moved, and not 2 weeks later their mail was coming to our address - without the yellow "forwarding' P.O. sticker. I guess they have a whole department dedicated to keeping track of when people post mail-forwards and immediately change their mailing list.