Bartimaeus

Free agency starts tomorrow! I am really excited for my team to do...absolutely nothing!

Given that PST sold very poorly (cult status notwithstanding), probably not.

getting rid of previous rules who promoted slavery is not extremism in my book, if he killed anyone who was not part of his movement that would be probably different story. Only revolution which didn't get rid of previous rulers was ours (Velvet revolution) and it sucked ...Except Louis wasn't executed for his involvement in slavery, but rather being a "threat" to national stability.

Looks like a DDoS attack.

Not just significantly slower RAM, but also higher latency. The RAM used for the Ryzen setup is 2133 MHz CL15 while the RAM used in the Intel setup is 3200 MHz CL14. Usually higher speed RAM has that advantage offset somewhat by having higher CAS latency, the fact that the RAM used in the Intel variant is both significantly higher speed AND slightly lower latency gives it a fairly significant advantage. I'll wait for benchmarks done on a truly even playingfield. ...Why the hell wouldn't they just set both to the same settings so it was on an even playing ground, ESPECIALLY when they know it's a temporary issue that the AMD board can't use the higher speeds... That's just silly.

How many nuts did you get?

This reminds me of why I started to really hate ME's combat halfway through the second game, and reminds me of why I absolutely despised fighting anything by the time I was halfway through the third. Such dreadful, repetitive gameplay. On a side-note, the female protagonist (...Riley, somebody said is the protagonist's name?) really does look about as goofy as male Shepard did, so at least that score's been finally settled.

Sure, but Tales is still missing the "plot" part. Furthermore, though Throne of Bhaal was quite poorly written, it was not Werewolf Island levels of writing. Eugh.

Why not? Seems like that's what most people like to do, anyways - when it suits them. And then demonize the other side when they do the same thing. Our political process is surely evidence enough that nothing is truly holy - neither the Constitution nor the Bible - to a large percentage of voters and the people they vote in. We sure seem to like to pretend they are when we can use them to justify our beliefs and behavior, though! I guess that's what happens when we already think a certain way about an issue and THEN come up with reasons to justify the way we think...instead of looking at the issue and reasons for and against certain positions, and deciding the best position from there. A natural consequence of parents trying to imprint certain beliefs on us as we grow up, I suppose.

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?