Humanoid

Depends on whether 'not planning to' is the same as 'strictly will not do'. Saving the money is fair enough in the latter case, but a 1GHz overclock, even if you don't do it anytime soon, might add a year or more to the effective lifetime of the machine before you need to upgrade again. But yeah, the K series is now the only overclockable variety of Intel CPU - unlike in the past, you can't do it at all with any other models.

Depends how far you want to go and what the rest of your setup is like. In terms of platform, with Haswell Intel has finally managed to get 23.976Hz playback right, so there's no longer any reason to go for a discrete graphics solution. The basic system is easy enough: any Haswell system will do great as a HTPC, assuming a TV or AVR less than a decade old. With that in mind, unless you want to potentially turn it into a hybrid gaming machine, an i3 will be plenty. An SSD definitely helps, because even more than a normal PC, you probably want to have your HTPC sleep and wake up as quickly as possible. Naturally you still want a spindle drive for the actual recordings though, file size for HDTV recordings will balloon pretty quickly. Other considerations: - Remote control. Even cases marketed as HTPC cases tend not to come with IR receivers, and those that do often come with crappy proprietary ones that are difficult to configure to use with anything but the bundled remote. You can pick up a USB IR receiver and Media Centre remote from eBay for about $20, the most ubiquitous being the HP branded ones. If you have a universal remote such as a Logitech Harmony, then just use the receiver and toss the MCE remote. - Software. Microsoft did a very cynical thing by stripping out Media Centre out of Windows 8 and selling it as an add-on instead. Even worse, the add-on requires the Pro version of Win8, so it's a flat-out rip-off. Win7 Home Premium has Media Centre out of the box, so there's no reason to use anything else for a Windows-based HTPC. Alternatively, XBMC is the popular open source alternative and runs on Linux as well as Windows. The tradeoff when building a Linux-based HTPC though is extremely limited Blu-ray support (and of course the whole games thing). Not that Blu-ray support on Windows is a thing either - you'll be dependent commercial products for at least one of ripping and playback of Blu-ray discs, but at least that software actually exists. - It's tempting to go for a mini-ITX build for a minimalist HTPC, but a nice micro-ATX case probably is a better idea. USB TV tuners generally are only single-tuner devices, so if you want to watch or record more than one thing at once, it's a pain. A HTPC can support as many tuners as you can fit into the machine, so with say, two dual-tuner cards, you can watch one thing while recording three others. With this in mind, consider how many PCI-E vs old PCI slots your motherboard of choice has.

The CPU just won't cut it, the DDR2 would be a waste of money (if you can even find any for sale). Unless it's near-free as a hand-me-down or something like that. Consider going for a Z97 and 4690K instead, if nothing else it'll delay the time before you need to make another 'what to upgrade' post.

I thought they unofficially cancelled it a while back. Didn't they start moving people back to WoW? Or am I remembering the opposite? They rebooted development, so true in a way: last year they scrapped development to date and went back to the drawing board. So despite the headline, it's really just scrapping the work since that news, so a year or so lost instead of the seven quoted.

They sent me two D:OS T-shirts instead of one of each design. Odd too, well over a month between the first one and the second one being delivered.

I have chronic non-starter syndrome - the character creation has completely paralysed me. I can design one, maybe two characters well enough, but four and the possible permutations of roles has had me stuck for hours (by which I mean I stare at the numbers a while, then tab out in despair for half an hour, repeat).

Don't even need fan art, Wasteland 2 is very open-minded.

Missing the high heels.

Long but nowhere near that long. ~10-15 min maybe? Oh, I installed to an SSD though. And from an SSD (a different one).

Download is ~10GB, installed size is a little over double that. Not sure how different the Steam version would be.

Not on my home PC so not actually downloading it, but the GOG download links are up and working now as well, so no D:OS style launch issues.

In terms of being able to get the actual keys, both the Wasteland 2 and Torment backer sites have the GOG option live now (and have been live for a couple of days), and I've been able to redeem the key on GOG immediately. I imagine it's just the PoE backer site that's behind here (understandably so being a third party and all that). No game download link yet obviously, but all the extra content is there under the item in my GOG library.

Happy to report the 'revoke Steam key' functionality on the backer portal which was only enabled earlier today works well. I assume my boxed copies will have Steam keys that I can't trade in, so it's a pretty straightforward decision to redeem my digital copies with GOG instead.

Humble Bundle has finally added a listing of all the individual keys you own but have yet to redeem. I know I had some, but not 50+, that was ...illuminating.

That screenshot is probably a literal fifty shades of grey.

If the amount you need to add is a multiple of an available tier, you can add money by using the Pledge option in the top bar of the backer site, then converting the credit to 'points' instead of whatever the listed option is. But that starts at $30 and the T-shirt is $25 so it's not optimal, so unless you want to add multiple things it's probably better to wait until they have a more elegant method sorted.

I'll troll Star Wars fans but that's about it. Though sometimes the definition of troll gets so liberal that being a part of the peanut gallery is counted as trolling, in which case, yes.

I play girls in Saints Row. In fact, it's pretty much the only franchise where I do. Something about the absurdity of it all fits well. To be fair though, gender in Saints Row is a dynamic concept, as easily changed as one's hairstyle. P.S. I move my sliders to the left because I find it more aesthetically pleasing that way. Am I objectifying women by doing so? Should I move it to the far right to clear my conscience and fight off accusations of sexism?

Not that it's a useful comparison, but apparently about 5 million Xbones have been sold thus far. At $400-500 each, that's $2-2.5b worth of revenue - i.e. Microsoft could have given away every Xbone ever sold. Now that'd have been a fair sized bee up Sony's bonnet. Every now and then you hear stories about MS shareholders wanting the company to quit the gaming market altogether, so I wonder what they think of spending that equivalent amount of money to buy one game.

It's their way of telling you that you should play Crusader Kings 2 first and then import a save where the ERE controls all of Europe.

Now I'm sad that my title isn't Grand Master of Flowers.

I think it should be even more public: in each user's profile there should be a count of edits made, along with an average edits per post ratio.

Watched a gameplay stream of it yesterday, it's gorgeous when it chooses to be: the times where it doesn't think it has to outbrown and outgrey other modern shooters. Apparently it cheats a bit though, I'm told that prior to release, at E3 or whatever, the devs boasted that certain grand-looking sights weren't just static backgrounds/skyboxes but in fact were fully navigable areas that you could visit. Turns out ....not so, they are just pretty backdrops. Besides that, well, I appreciated that it didn't have loot spam like Borderlands - that Torchlight screenshot above is apt. But it has no discernable narrative (I'm informed that the game has a Bioware-esque 'codex' that explains stuff, except that instead of being ingame, the game just tells you to look it up on Bungie's website, erm...). And loading screens, oh god the loading screens. At any rate, less than an hour in and I'd pretty much lost interest, despite the hosts being people I like to listen to in general on just about any game or topic.

While I don't really do fighting games, Street Fighter (yes, the JCVD one) is the best video game movie adaptation ever.

To be fair, they did remove Jack Keane 2 from their catalogue.