Humanoid

Weird, it skirted around where I am but missed that big lump of land where I live: 1. NZ 2. Singapore 3. South Africa. Correctly guessed it was my native language, with the followup guesses being Italian and Romanian.

Honestly, I just backed it as a favour to the people here that got so excited about it. I've never played any Megaman games and barely read the Kickstarter pitch. But it looked like it was making a lot of people happy in the pants, so eh, why not, at worst I'd end up with an average game, otherwise it ought to be a pleasant surprise if Megaman is all it was cracked up to be.

Mario Kart 8. It's good, but is also the least-changed iteration of the mainline series compared to their respective immediate predecessors (never played any of the handheld versions). Looks gorgeous, some tracks make me want a free-roaming feature just to explore them ...on foot. Gameplay is generally unmodified from MKWii. Fixed some outstanding issues: the motion control gimmick for speed boosts is now optional, you can hit a button to get the same effect; tedious wheelies on bikes no longer exist; *four*-player Grand Prix is now available. Unlocking content is more forgiving now, unlike the Wii version where some requirements are exceedingly difficult and might never be unlocked by some players. Oddly what is unlocked each time is random (e.g. winning any cup at any engine class unlocks a character at random), but this is not a complaint. On the downside, some irritating changes too: no map on the big screen, only on the gamepad display; split screen multiplayer now splits the screen vertically; no longer able to pick up a new item while dragging another; and the UI has somehow managed to get worse (need to hit a button to even display stats of your vehicle, no indication of each character's weight class, the need to restart online multiplayer rooms just to change character/kart, default selection after each race is "view highlights" instead of "next race"). Some mechanics I found non-obvious and not immediately intuitive (since there's no manual) include the ability to control elevation during the floaty bits, the speed boosts in anti-gravity mode, and predicting whether the camera would follow you or not on sideways segments.

If you look at the screenshot of my NAS setup up there, the cooler is slim enough to not block the DIMM slots. It's a Silverstone Argon AR-01, my budget cooler of choice, with a Nexus fan, fairly standard 120mm fan. If even that is too borderline, it's not a huge deal to get a slimline fan instead, or just move the fan to the other side of the heatsink. An option with some coolers is to shift the fan up along the cooler, though this is possible only with some fan mounting systems (easy on my Megahalems, not much on my AR-01). Even better, though more costly, might be the Scythe Ashura. Scythe products are hard to get in the US because they lost their main distributor there a while back, but Amazon sells some models. The new slimline Kotetsu doesn't seem available yet, but I see the very clever Ashura is. It's an asymmetrical model, it's very skinny on the memory side, but has more metal overhanging on the far side, making it perfect for tall RAM heatspreaders. Check out the photos on SPCR, plenty of room. (I just finished building my new Haswell HTPC over the weekend, but I didn't even consider using the stock cooler, so this is not a helpful point. I installed a Scythe Big Shuriken 2 on it for what it's worth, which isn't much because it's the complete opposite of what you need - it's a low profile cooler, top-down blowing cooler that has a massive horizontal footprint but is ideal for slimline cases)

The Misty Beethoven "Kickstarter" was well worth backing. :D (It wasn't on Kickstarter per se because of their rules, but still fully crowdfunded)

I'm bad at piracy. Back in the 90s I was a dumb kid who spent about $400 on an CD writer thinking it'd save me a ton of money in the long run, but ended up making copies of ....nothing. Possibly the worst $400 I've spent on computer stuff ever. Sure I burnt a few audio CDs here and there with Napster-sourced music, but if I were to guess, I reckon maybe I'd have actually used it, oh, maybe 20 to 30 times? Horrendous. At least I didn't fall into the trap of buying an Iomega Zip drive though.

NAS ....just about done. 7 out of 8 drives installed, so even tiny little SATA cables start looking like a mess. If only you could have multiple data connectors coming off one cable. At least the SATA power cables are neat enough using four-way splitters. Those red SATA cables I bought for a couple bucks each are exceedingly crappy - the clips won't even engage properly half the time - but at least they're short and relatively neat. The black ones that came with the motherboard are more of a pain to work with despite them being of obviously better quality (I particularly dislike L-shaped connectors, of which two of them are). Kudos to Gigabyte for including four of them in a relatively entry-level board though, many boards nowadays only come with two. 4x4TB, 1x3TB, 2x2TB plus one waiting for me to transfer the data it before I throw it in there. before installing it for 25TB. Unfortunately I have about 23TB of data to store (of which 80% has been transferred at least) so I'm almost immediately going to be capped, urgh. But at least now that this is done, this weekend I can (if I choose) disassemble my old HTPC which used to be connected to most of this, and build my new one in its chassis. P.S. The hardest part of the build, other than waiting on slow copies, was extracting the 3TB drive out of its external casing - external HDDs are getting harder and harder to crack open, almost as if they don't want you doing it.... 'Twas a Seagate GoFlex Desk. EDIT: Kill-a-watt showing power consumption hovering a little under 90W under load. Probably various things I could fiddle with in the settings, particularly idles, to get that down, and might try to set up uptime scheduling. That said, it'd work out to be about 40-45 cents a day running 24/7.

One person buys it and reads it out over Skype to the others, would that be infringement? P.S. Until this whole Kickstarter thing I had no idea what a novella was. And I'm still confused over exactly what and how many novellas are even being created as part of this project, and all the other projects for that matter. I guess it's something I've been ignoring.

It means you put on a Robin mask and instantly no one recognises you, even people who you are intimately familiar with and despite your mug being plastered on wanted posters all over the city. But then in a 'dramatic' turn of events, your identity is exposed via cutscene and you must make a hasty but violent escape in your own particular idiom.

With a sufficient number of drinks, you can skip point 2.

Uhh, Half-Life 2?

1) Open the curtains so I can hear it louder. (My curtains are usually closed any time of day) 2) File a lost luggage report, then go do something else to get my mind off the annoyance. 3) Huh, free Christmas tree lights, I wonder where they came from?

Wrapped up Privateer, starting the session with the damned Exploratory Service missions out of Rygannon. In my various Privateer binges over the years I've usually pulled the plug without bothering to do this mission series, maybe only done it two or three times ever. The reason, as always, is Gothri. Gothri in asteroid fields. Four Gothri in asteroid fields. Four Gothri and a giant green egg in asteroid fields. Rygannon 3 and 4 took a few attempts each to manage, dying on each occasion more than in the rest of the game combined. After that, wrapping up the game was a breeze, albeit a tedious one spent afterburning across entire systems while being relentlessly chased by an invincible foe. After all these years, this game still has the best credits presentation ever. I play often enough to not be surprised by the game, but the sharp and pointed verbal sparring our bastard of a hero engages in never fails to make me grin. Reminds me of how bland the mainline series can often be, Maniac aside. Anyway, I have my gun, my beautiful Steltek gun, which no one is ever going to take away from me. Now to fire up Righteous Fire...

Odd, they showed up for me using print screen.

That was the initial two-week delay. The further delay appears to be due to some other shenanigans - obviously one is tempted to blame publisher interference but nothing actually revealed yet.

All in all it was a bit too grim and oppressive for me to enjoy the story, but I had a blast just doing the random things around the city. There's a bit of a dissonance there between the rather severe player character and the ridiculous hijinks you can get up to, which is obviously not a problem Saints Row suffers from. Heck, they should just licence out their Hong Kong map for other developers to build games in. It's always a shame to make something like this and to only get to use it once before discarding it.

So I picked up EVE from the Humble daily because why not, then predictably spent altogether too long on character creation to the point I logged off and did something else immediately after. Came back to it later in the afternoon to do the tutorial, but it completely failed to grab me: as far as I can tell, it's a game based around selecting options from a multitude of drop-down menus. So eh, that's enough for now, but given that a month's sub is included I might try again later. What did happen after was almost predictable however. My itch for a space game having been tickled, I fired up Privateer and started a fresh game. Suddenly it's 2am. Oops. God I love this game. Twenty years on though, I still keep making the same gameplay mistakes I made back then. Neglecting to restock my missiles. Forgetting to buy sector maps after getting my jump drive. Underestimating the engine upgrade needed to fuel my latest gizmos. Buying a new ship too early and not having enough cash left over to kit it out. Forgetting I can't make stopovers during delivery missions. But I have my Centurion now and all is good with the world ....even though my current loadout is two missile launchers and no guns at all.

Could always just buy a cheap Pentium or whatever as a stopgap if it comes to the worst.

Reading the latest Long War changelog, and I think I'm done with the mod. There's such a thing as taking things too far, and additions such as SMGs, battle rifles, machine pistols and bloody sawn-off shotguns are ridiculous, especially considering there'll be five or six tiers of just about each of those weapons. It's just turning into some guy's military power fantasy instead of an intelligent consideration of good, balanced gameplay. God, I hope someone forks this project and just keeps the bare minimum class system, fatigue system and a balanced mission frequency to take advantage of those mechanics. Everything else I'm happy to toss out, frankly. Aside, juuuuust about done with Broken Sword 5, am at what I assume is the final location. Verdict ....s'alright. No regrets, but it's plainly obvious when compared to say, Broken Age, that it feels a lot rougher and generally 'indie' than the more polished productions. If not for the IP, it'd be just another adventure game like the dozens of others I have on GOG/HB/Steam and am yet to play.

I guess you'll just have to do it using the honour system. Call time outs when you need to change something. :D

The very first Google hit on the subject seems to be exactly what's needed - Soundboard plugin for Teamspeak.

Hell, at that price I'd buy two and forget having a spindle drive. :D But seriously yeah, that's a performance-oriented SSD for a budget SSD price.

I have no friends (in a literal sense, I have no gamer friends at all in the city I currently live in) so that's probably not going to be an advantage. A year or so back I tried Disney Infinity which appears to have a similar figure-based system when I was visiting my sister. It was completely terrible, so it's a low hurdle for Skylanders to beat. (My read on the situation is that the Disney game is a knockoff of the whole Skylanders thing?)

I have no idea what Skylanders is, but it appears to be next to impossible for me to buy a Wii U without getting it bundled, so I guess I'll find out soon enough. ($279AUD for basic console + Skylanders + Mario Kart 8, time for me to bite)

Maybe they could be an optional download or something. Heck, in the 90s you might've been able to choose to play redbook audio straight off the CD, or some MIDI music.