Bartimaeus

"The FCC just repealed a 42-year-old rule blocking broadcast media mergers" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/16/the-fcc-just-repealed-decades-old-rules-blocking-broadcast-media-mergers/?utm_term=.0ed42f1a0d8e Good ol' regulatory capture in action, baby.

Autotune doesn't seem so bad if it was being used to make minor corrections...but if they were minor corrections, then clearly your singer is already half-decent and it's probably better to just let the minor issues stay rather than introduce unnatural (and usually quite noticeable) pitch shifts to a performance. So yeah, crappy. I like some forms of vocoding, but autotune and straight up pitch-shifts usually sound pretty bad.

Fortunately, oil spills don't really happen anymore.

food poisoning, happy happy joy joy

Alien (1979). Besides a few technical problems (the chief, of course, being why the hell are Ripley's underwear so uncomfortably small ) and that horrible, idiot secondary female character, it was very good. Not sure what they were thinking by having her be as annoying as possible. I read that the actress hated the character, too, and she was apparently put in to "represent how the audience was feeling". Yeah, about that...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhbuKo7Y880

Yeah, I guess it's not a big deal.

Should there not be a limit to how many points you can assign a single game? I could submit a list of 25 games, assign 1 point to 24 of them, and give the one 101, .

Yeah, as Gfted said above. So the thing I'm wondering is, who the heck scrolls down past the 2 dozen game-specific subforums to see who's online anyhow?

How so? I'm on 52.0.2 with auto-updating off for plugin compatibility reasons.

Why would there be a lawsuit? The government would just have to deal with filing a million eminent domain claims and paying out the paltry amount of money for every inch to each individual. No lawsuit necessary - just a lot of pain on the part of the federal government.

Now what they should do is split up that territory by doling out each each square inch to like a million people, so that when the government claims eminent domain, they have they have to deal with a million people all at once. That should take long enough to outlast Trump.

Can't argue there. Unfortunately, some of us just are the way we are. Uptight and over-analytical children, the lot of us!

Here's the cast of the Amazon's recently announced LotR show:

Hey, that's a pretty good idea.

Especially Ruby Rhod. He's mostly why I had to mention "ears" in the previous post.

1. The system likely works the same as Rainbow 6: Siege's, where only one person can be a specific character at a time - as such, if everyone owns Luke but you haven't grinded another 40 hours for another character (and presuming nobody has chosen them too), congratulations, back to the trash can with you. So yeah, unlocking additional characters is indeed very relevant. 2. Ahh, and here's the problem. See, most of the rest of us don't want normal gaming to turn into the radioactive waste dump that is mobile gaming, . Also, yeah, what Shady said above.

It's painful to sit through. If it was just Bruce Willis screwing around doing his usual bit, it would be an alright flick...but most everyone else in that movie, Jojovich especially, makes me want to rip my eyes out and my ears off.

To be fair, those started off as achievement unlocks, then eventually they added random drops of actual items (not crates) in addition to the unlocks. Then if you weren't getting what you wanted they added the ability to craft things into other things. It was all free updates adding content beyond the base game, and continually responding to criticism from new players who had less "generational wealth" who wanted the ability to get the items that they wanted. All the way to up to adding an item stores and going f2p eventually. Which was certainly necessary at some point if they were to justify free updates. Imo TF2 is one of the all time greats, especially before it went f2p. I respect basically everything Valve did with the game until the stupid Golden Wrench bull****. Which was an attempt to get people to craft away their inventories before they godfathered all items in under vintage status and started to have item rankings. Yeah, at the time, I was okay with the achievement unlocks because they didn't take too long to get (and actually, it was utterly trivial to cheat your achievements via the Steam Achievement Manager and/or the achievement unlock servers), but when they added the store and crates and piles of non-achievement weapons is where I really started drawing the line and quit pretty shortly after. Things really only got worse from there.

Do we really know Luke & Vader will have significantly better stats, or is it speculation based on their prominence within the original stories that make people assume they'll be unbalanced in game play? EDIT - I also believe EA has announced they're lowering the 40hrs to 15 for Luke and Vader, then 10 for the others (and 5 for one of them?) Reading more elsewhere, we know that, at the very least, Darth Vader and Luke have special force abilities (I read that Luke specifically has force pushes and force speed/rushes). I don't know about general stats - I presume we'll know more on release. As for EA, yeah...after the internet raised a hell of a ruckus and whined until all our ears bloody fell off. Goes to show once again that screaming and whining like petulant children can absolutely have an effect. Personally, I think it's all still baloney...but I'm not the target audience here.

There are 16 heroes. So that's over 600 hours - maybe a couple of them are unlocked by default, and maybe some of them are a little less than 40 hours? That's still an utterly ludicrous time commitment to unlock your freaking basic classes in a game of this type.

Uh, except the dozens of alternative weapons that you either have to grind for or buy in TF2, Keyrock. Some of them play similarly to the default weapons, but a whole lot of them don't.

I think the majority of people who play these sorts of games look at them as being pickup-and-play: you don't want to spend the first 40 hours of the game getting crushed because either you got the game later than everyone else or because a slew of people just bought their way to better stats. I certainly don't want to be concerned with that crap - I never would've played Team Fortress 2 if the only class you started with was the Soldier and you had to grind 40 hours for some in-game currency for each additional character unlock. It's such a crappy experience. (Similarly, after Team Fortress 2 started adding dozens of alternative weapons that you either had to buy or grind for, I quit playing...that, and because all the alternative weapons were making it difficult to play casually because of all the random crap that you couldn't really plan for anymore due to the sheer amount of stuff in the game.)

I only vaguely remember seeing commercials for Lucy...