Bartimaeus

I think it's called a trilogy because story-wise, it's BG1, BG2, and then Throne of Bhaal. Tales of the Sword Coast, beyond also being pretty bad outside of Durlag's Tower, has no meaning to the overarching plot.

"The 1800X is said to even outperform the Kaby Lake speed demon i7 7700K in single threaded performance and the 10-core i7 6950X $1700 desktop flagship Intel HEDT processor across the board with a one-click auto-overclock on air cooling." Uh, yeah, I'll believe it when I see it...from a better source. Even with overclocking, that's just a little much to believe.

Surprisingly, I've had much worse luck with WDs than Seagates. Every WD I've ever had has died on me within like two years. Every Seagate I've had has somehow survived 5 or more...I have old 80GBs that are literally 20 years old that still work just fine that I can't throw away simply because they still work. Since, as you said, Hitachi are supposed to have the best failure rates, I've just waiting until I see a decent price on one until I buy one. This Seagate is still at only 1 reallocated...but it's only been a few weeks since I noticed it. I'm not putting anything new without mirroring it to my backup drive regardless, though.

It took me about halfway through Mass Effect 3 to realize I didn't really like where the series had gone since the first, gameplay and story wise. I don't see myself returning for Andromeda.

...These two are the default main character?

I don't see anything *too* terribly wrong with the guy...some mild uncanny valley, but that's to be expected (especially seeing just a single shot, for me, and not seeing him in motion). The poor woman, on the other hand... In addition to her face being totally messed up, why does her hair look way lower quality than the guy's? He has some actually semi-realistic-looking hair...her hair looks like something, again, out of NWN2 - maybe worse.

Yeah, Kaidan and her sort of switched between games. Kaidan was pretty derpy looking in ME1, but looked more normal in ME3...Ashley seemed fine in ME1, but what the crap, what happened in ME3.

Girl power! Or, uh, squirrel power, I guess.

BioWare has been pretty notably bad at character modeling, whether or not they're modeled after real people...and it's especially bad when you can actually do a direct comparison. See the trainwrecks that are Miranda Lawson, Kai Leng, Ashley Williams, Kaidan Alenko, Diana Allers, etc. Their in-game models are just...they're so bad and derpy. Look at some of the people they're actually modeled after (Yvonne Strahovski for Miranda!), and then look at BioWare's horrific uncanny valley renditions of them. Yikes. Seems like they have the most trouble with humans.

Ripping and encoding BluRays is especially a hassle, especially when you consider that a single BluRay can often have as much as 70GB worth of content...which makes it so that, unlike music where you can just keep stuff in a lossless format (flac or alac or even wav), it's just not very practical to not re-encode it. It's just so much more resource-intensive and time-consuming than music to do video. ...Especially if you want to do it right. Doing bit-perfect copies of CDs is even a little bit of a hassle, but still nothing compared to BluRays.

For some reason, the character profiles remind me of NWN2 characters. Very stiff and a bit derpy looking.

The driver thing is weird - for so long, AMD always had such a bad reputation for their drivers, while nvidia was lauded for theirs. Now, in like the past year, maybe two years, it seems to have reversed a bit. Was there a specific event that caused nvidia to suddenly get a worse reputation for their drivers?

Not even that - how about for body dysphoria? It's not as though body dysphoria is only limited to sex changes, so if somebody has extreme enough body dysphoria over their nose...or any other number of things...should the taxpayer pay for that? If body dysphoria is good enough for a sex change, it should be good enough for a "nose job", right? ...In practice, I'm not sure as to the answer of this. The cases like that SHOULD be extremely rare...but that's not the point - it is, as Guard Dog said, the principle of it: what kinds of things should or shouldn't be covered by health insurance, particularly publicly-funded health insurance (or whatever you'd call the equivalent)? Again, I'm not totally sure of the answer to it: it's a very complicated subject and problem. If psychiatrist/s chosen by state tells that best way to ensure person mental well being means that they need nose job then I personally would be okay for state to cover such surgery for their employees from taxes. If state do not trust to recommendations that said doctor/s gives then they of course should replace said doctor/s with new one/s. I mean my principle is that I am not medical professional with enough expertise to judge what is necessary and best way and what is not to ensure somebody's well being, which is why I and so many other people pay to people that have actually studied subject in such extent that they can call themselves as experts. So question should not be what procedures government subsidies for their employees but how critical the need for medical treatment need to be it to be important enough that it will be subsidized. It is also worth to note that one effective way to save in state's health care costs is to minimize need for long term care. So if one nose job will prevent person needing years worth of psychiatric care/medication that has even lower change to work then it would be wasting tax payers money not to give that nose job for that person. Of course there is of course the question should state employees even receive subsidies that other state's residents don't receive. A reasonable stance. I think how seriously we (the U.S.) treat mental health (or rather, don't treat mental health) factors into this argument a bit. Here in the U.S., we have a lot more of a "your brain and your mental issues are just that - yours" attitude about these kinds of things. For reasons pointed out by many, including you and TrueNeutral et. al., this doesn't seem like the best way to go...and yet, at the same time, I feel like I can sympathize with the mindset of not treating some mental issues as seriously as others...probably because I sometimes have difficulty understanding the WHY behind people so severely affected by body dysmorphia and other issues...but the fact remains that people do, to the best of the people we call experts on the subject's knowledge, appear to be severely affected, and that's probably something we should be treating a little more seriously.

It's always been my wont to support AMD over Intel and nvidia for much the same reasons (plus AMD has always been the underdog against both)...but when I had a chance to get a $90 i7-4770k, well, I kinda had to take it, especially with AMD's desktop CPUs being so bad for so long.

Not even that - how about for body dysphoria? It's not as though body dysphoria is only limited to sex changes, so if somebody has extreme enough body dysphoria over their nose...or any other number of things...should the taxpayer pay for that? If body dysphoria is good enough for a sex change, it should be good enough for a "nose job", right? ...In practice, I'm not sure as to the answer of this. The cases like that SHOULD be extremely rare...but that's not the point - it is, as Guard Dog said, the principle of it: what kinds of things should or shouldn't be covered by health insurance, particularly publicly-funded health insurance (or whatever you'd call the equivalent)? Again, I'm not totally sure of the answer to it: it's a very complicated subject and problem.

That does seem like the really only logical explanation. I had kinda similar problems with my previous video card where it reacted to heat strangely...warping or perhaps micro-cracks in the PCB were causing it to artifact at low heat (i.e. on desktop) but it generally worked perfectly fine when it was actually hot (i.e. playing games).

That's a pretty weird set of circumstances where it blue screens...

Yep. I guess it's for fun after you've already beat the game...

The thing that always annoyed me most in Blood Money and Silent Assassin, was that you really couldn't kill anyone that wasn't the target(s)...Doesn't matter that nobody else saw you, doesn't matter that nobody would ever find the body - I think in Silent Assassin, you weren't allowed to shoot more than one bullet per mission nor kill more than one non-target. That's all you got, so make that one extra kill count...and you also didn't get any saves (just looked it up to make sure). In Blood Money, it was even harder in regards to killing - you couldn't kill anyone who wasn't a non-target period if you wanted SA...and again, you got no saves on the hardest difficulty (also looked it up to make sure). Plus a whole bunch of other things you had to do, like never being seen on camera, never having a cover blown, don't leave behind any evidence, etc. Funnily, I thought Hitman 2 was the harder of the two, even though you get the extra kill - harder level and mission design. But anyways...yeah, trying to get SA on the hardest difficulties in those two games is like...playing with both your hands tied behind your back, I guess...and then your feet, too. You can't use or do any of the normal things you would do if you were just playing casually. I can't believe I spent the time getting SA in every mission in both games. I still have my saves, too...I wanted to go back and play Hitman 1 a few years back, but it didn't run on my computer. Oh well.

"So far, I've strangled a guy, drowned a woman in a toilet, electrocuted a woman in plain sight (without anyone knowing it was me), and blew up a guy with a freakin' cannon. I ****ing love this game!" Are there still really stringent requirements for getting Silent Assassin ratings like there were back in the day? I remember some missions in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin being perhaps a tad too difficult to do everything "right"...and spending hours figuring out a way to do it and actually execute it just perfectly. And then having...what was it, only one save per attempt on the hardest difficulty? Or was that Blood Money and you didn't get any on Silent Assassin? Hmm.

Meanwhile, watching this video made *me* grumpy because of how painfully forced showing people's stupid reactions is. I've watched other performances from this girl (including ones with a proper orchestra!), and they do the same crap every time. I do not care about these people's reactions: please stop showing them. Show the artists actually performing...

I wouldn't say it's that morbid. It's not as though we're all sitting here crying our eyes out - it's an opportunity to share the work - hopefully interesting and/or good - that people have done throughout their lives, people many of us may not have ever heard of. I know what the title of the thread says, but many of these weren't even really celebrities...just interesting and noted people whose time have apparently come and gone and whom we might appreciate to learn a little about. It's also a way to keep updated on the more major deaths, too, I guess. Even though the majority of us are bound to hear plenty enough about those already...

They could only get like ~20% of what they asked for when it was on Kickstarter. Now they're asking for over 5 times what they originally asked for after having had their Kickstarter fail, while having it on their own shady website instead of Kickstarter. What makes you think it's dead?