Bartimaeus

Why would you pay $75 for it if you didn't care about it? (e): Nevermind, I see that the beta key is actually $9.10. My bad.

Why?

Even the real time strategy bits of the Total War games are quite unlike AoE - the TW games are very slow-paced and take a more generalist approach with its use of giant unit clumps and unclear combat conditions (no hitpoints transparent to the player(s), semi-random projectile usage, vague/fluky mechanics like stamina and morale, etc.) which makes micro-management pretty limited at best compared to the games I mentioned earlier. Strategy and general tactics therefore become much more important, whereas speed and micro-management are much more important for games like Age of Empires and WarCraft. Hm, so a combination of TW's strategic turn-based map and AoE's fast-paced RTS gameplay?

Age of Empires is much more similar to the WarCrafts and StarCrafts and Command & Conquers of yesteryear: no turn-based stuff, much more micro focused than macro (although the latter shouldn't necessarily be minimized, mind you), and extremely fast-paced - to the point of the limits of human reflexes and thinking speed at the higher levels. The Total War games are basically the opposite on all of those...so if Cossacks is like AoE as sorophx said, don't expect too many similarities.

Yeah, it's sad to hear. May not have lead the most consistent team year in and year out, but two Super Bowl wins - and both against the BB and TB-lead Patriots - is pretty special. Probably the only HC vacancy this year where you can really say it's an end of an era for a team.

Feels like I've been waiting half my life for this dumb die size decrease...

Yikes, the Seahawks are eviscerating the Cardinals about as badly as the Cardinals eviscerated the Packers last week.

That's a pretty lame gimmick account.

She doesn't have any albums: only singles and 2-3 track EPs. They're all also released digitally only. I'm also not certain why there appears to be nowhere to buy them.

Um...let's see here...hm...maybe..the new Zelda? Honestly, I'm not even really sure about that...Skyward Sword was easily the worst main Zelda I've ever played, so I don't exactly have extremely high hopes.

Yeah, if your child is horribly spoiled and can't handle not getting a present on Christmas, it might indeed affect their current psyche. The good news is, they're already horribly spoiled and probably aren't salvageable anyways. :D

Yeah, they've been my non-Packers favorite since last year. Seems like they have an even better chance this year than last. I almost hope the Packers lose the division to the Vikings this upcoming week so we don't have to face the Vikings in the wildcard round and then Arizona again immediately after...but I suppose it makes very little difference if we can't even beat the Vikings, so we might as well make terrible Vikings fans cry by taking the division away from them when they expect to handily beat us again.

Yikes, back to being completely putrid offensively for the Packers. I had a little hope after all the upsets today that we might be able to win it, but this is just terrible, haha.

Bed of Chaos is mildly interesting lore-wise, absolutely garbage gameplay-wise, and quite likely the worst boss of Dark Souls. I pray that the shown boss is nothing like her in the latter respect.

I actually tried Sunless Sea, but playing it appeared to crash my PC and make my operating system unbootable after like fifteen minutes. It appeared to have rewritten some registry values involving my Windows 7 "user" folder (C:\Users\User Folder) - specifically, it set the directory location back to the default (the previously mentioned location), whereas I had externalized it to another hard drive years prior and never run into any issues until immediately after trying to play Sunless Sea. I'm not sure if it would happen again, but I don't really have any interest in finding out, either.

Motherboard or PSU does sound likely based on the symptoms, but without spare parts, it's very difficult to say which.

I hate it when I get something replaced via warranty, and what they send me is also defective and you have to begin the whole circus operation over again.

It's irrelevant whether it's after he hits the ground: he caught it while falling, he has to complete the "process of making a catch" (whatever the heck that means) all the to the ground and after. He didn't do that: the ball bobbled a little while it was touching the ground (as you can see here), which the referees time after time have consequently ruled "not a catch". There are a couple of catches and non-catches that have made me scratch my head this year, but this was not one of them: I knew (or at least thought I knew) it was going to be overturned as soon as I saw the replay. Personally, I think the whole "process of completing the catch" is rather asinine: if, at any point, you have secured the ball, I think that should count as possession. That would solve the problem of catches like this and the Calvin Johnson catch and the Dez Bryant catch, et cetera. However, it would also mean that any time a ball pops out of a receivers hands after only holding it for but a moment, it would often be ruled as a fumble instead of merely an incompletion, and this would probably encourage defensive backs and linebackers to smash as hard into receivers as humanly possible to try and force fumbles. Of course, a lot of them seem to try to do that anyways, so whatever. It would make the passing game a bit more turnover prone, which I guess could be exciting.

Didn't look like a catch to me at all. That is not control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSlpCBek1_M

Context?

I think that's essentially what I'm already doing - it's just not technically a NAS proper, but a Windows build whose storage is more or less an image of my own main system's storage but with additional files (videos, generally speaking, but also some other stuff including old files) that I don't carry on my own main system. I watch movies over the network from it, but I'm also able to watch movies directly on it via Windows as well (which you wouldn't be able to do if it was an actual NAS, which means I don't want it to be an actual NAS as it's also an HTPC for my TV...). (edit): Hmm, this all reminds me: I still haven't done anything with my 240GB SSD that's just sitting in one of my other PCs for like the past half year. Hmm. Oh well.

Yeah, that's a no go for me. I keep my own hard drive storage of my own BluRay encodings that I've spent a lot of time converting down from the 40+GB raw rips to my own liking that I'm not prepared to throw all away for the sake of convenience, . Plus old football game recordings, TV shows, et cetera, et cetera. I also keep a backup of my own main PC that I occasionally update to ensure I never lose any of my precious collections of music, videos, games, et cetera, et cetera. So it has to be a real HTPC. My current one is just so *slow*. I'm seriously surprised it's still kicking, given its age, and the fact that the vast majority of the motherboard's capacitors are all visibly burst. It's an old hunk of junk, but it's a tough old hunk of junk.

Trying to make a very cheap HTPC to replace my current junker HTPC that I made out of extremely old parts. The current HTPC runs 1080p movies perfectly, but basically can't do anything else, including even streaming 480p YouTube videos. That's what happens when you're using a decade and a half old single-core Athlon 64, I guess. I have an old i5-750, but no motherboard...why is it so hard to get a hold of a junky consumer-grade LGA 1156 board for a non-ridiculous price?