Bartimaeus

Yeah, you must be really struggling to run much of anything from this millennium with only twelve megabits of RAM - a megabyte and a half is simply not enough by today's standards, I'm afraid. Would definitely recommend upgrading. More seriously, yes, if you don't have any spare parts already, it can be really difficult diagnose a lot of hardware problems. I still have old nvidia 8000 series cards and DDR1 and DDR2 RAM sets and old power supplies and...for this reason. You'll never know when you'll need them for solving computer problems (yours, and sometimes other people's...).

Whereas I will never pick up a physical book again if I can avoid it. I hate the feeling of paper, particularly book paper.

Sometimes, I think some of the things you say are just trolling. Unfortunately, I know better at this point...

That's strange. I thought the new time limit was 24 (or was it 48?) hours. I can edit my previous post in this topic, which was just under 24 hours ago.

Kind of an odd build. The MSI PC Mate is fairly down there on the low end for motherboards, with only 3 true phases - not good: would not exactly recommend overclocking any, particularly with the highest end desktop i5 you can get. 3 phases is the absolute bare minimum a motherboard would have these days, and you'd typically find it in mATX boards, not standard ATX boards - and, at around $80-90(?) in the U.S., I'm not sure why it wasn't at least 4 phases. Though it's a generation older, I paid around $30 more for the Asus Maximus VI Hero, which is an 8 true phase board (and the phases are almost certainly higher quality, to boot...can't say for sure, though, since I didn't find details for the PC Mate in a cursory Google search...which I would not take as a good sign, but perhaps one should reserve judgement ). I've always thought of the PC Mate as sort of the board made just for the Pentium K/G3258 - not exactly suitable for the 4690k or other higher end CPUs. Odd choice for PSU, too. Again, the highest desktop i5 you can get...and the most power hungry AMD GPU you can get...and you lowball the PSU? I also don't like that with that GPU, you're running pretty close to the max rated wattage on it, with system power consumption at around 475, maybe as much as 500W at full load. I personally like a 100W buffer, but that might just be me. (e): I wouldn't worry overtly about the PSU, though: from what I can quickly dig up, it's still a good PSU for its specifications...just not what would come to my mind when you say the system will have a 290x. SSD looks good, although it would not have been my absolute first choice at its price point in the U.S. However, you are in Sweden according to your location detail, so I can't really evaluate it as such, and it's, at the very least, competitive and comparable to other options, so it was likely a perfectly good choice. Everything else is up to user preference and/or behavior and seems fine, so that is my quick analysis on the build.

Are people proud of being depressed and cynical...or are they merely depressed and cynical?

Maybe it's just nostalgia from when I first watched that when I was like 4, but that animation is still pretty cool.

They sucked in the IE games, too: I have no idea why anybody thinks differently. Best fights of the IE games? Dragon battles. Lich and other spellcaster battles. Other adventuring groups (that are difficult and varied). Other enemies that are difficult, but aren't really super annoying/cheesy (so not dimension-dooring/brain-draining/insta-AoE-paralyzing mindflayers, or stupid trolls most of the time, for example). Not so much fun? The umpteenth group of random demihumans who can't even hit any of your characters. Random, stupid groups of kobolds and goblins when you're like level >=10. Masses of shadows and shades and other garbage undead. They're boring and just a huge waste of time.

Ironically, I think Torment would actually be a good way to showcase decent RTwP: unlike BG and PoE, there's not supposed to be much fighting. One of the biggest problems with RTwP in PoE and the Infinity Engine games? How many gosh danged trash battles there are that waste so much of your darned time. Seriously, they never seem to end. PoE even one-upped the IE games by having all the trash battles wear down your characters for future, more meaningful battles, and, furthermore, made even what should be the easiest of fights have way too much danger for your characters to get screwed over in a number of ways, so you're ALWAYS having to spend time strategizing every single last fight. If you're going to try to make every battle be meaningful and take more than a tiny amount of time...here's a tip: don't present the player with a million different fights to wade through over the course of the game. Or...at the very least, let me CTLR+Y enemies like I can in BG. Every battle in PoE feels like I'm fighting the equivalent of a bunch of spirit trolls in BG2: it's not fun.

I'm just the opposite. After Pillars, I might just be done with RTwP for good. Hey man, don't diss on RTwP for the faults of one game. PoE's combat woes were outside the scope of merely RTwP! I dislike the way they went about deciding to have turn-based combat more than I do the idea of turn-based combat for Torment itself. Don't sell a game on nostalgia alone and then flip one of the core tenants of combat on its head - even if combat is not the major point of the game like it is for PoE or BG. State it clearly in the Kickstarter - or, if it actually was a decision they had yet to come to by the conclusion of the Kickstarter, give a way for the people who want nothing to do with the decision a way to back out.

Those guys make some really decent covers. The fact that they can make me like a Miley Cyrus song says enough, I think.

Yeah, what the heck are you talking about? Pulling was extremely easy to do in the BG games - much easier than PoE, where there is a certain range it'll trigger the entire group when an enemy fully spots you, and where it won't. For most encounters in BG(2), you could pull to your heart's desire - in fact, it was even worse: you could cast AoE spells like Fireball into the edge of visibility, and unless the enemies hit directly saw you, they wouldn't do anything. Unless you modded the game with something like SCS, pulling was much easier in the BG games.

I don't think it really makes a lot of sense to go for two as the "normal" option. This reduces the accuracy rating of the PAT from 99.5% to like 91.6% (edit: I had it at 97% before, which was wrong), last I read. It might be different if they had agreed on moving the 2PC to the 1 yard line, but they didn't. Plus, now fumbling is dangerous, which is an even greater reason not to go for it.

Functionally, they're essentially the same, though. When you're "avenging" somebody, it's usually because you feel as though that person has been wronged...and for whatever reasons, you've become personally offended and wronged yourself through them - enough so that you've decided to take it upon yourself to "avenge" that wronged person. The supposed underlying reasoning is different, but the thing actually motivating you is the same exact thing: an injustice has affected you in one way or another, and you're going to try and right it in whatever way you deem necessary. Revenge and avenging are pretty much completely interchangeable in the case of, to take a very generic fictional example, trying to enforce justice on the behalf of...slain loved ones or something. This is an extreme example, but you can apply the same idea to pretty much any "avenging" scenario. I find it annoying that there's no noun version of "avenge"...and that there's no verb version of "revenge" or "vengeance". What's up with that?

Avenge has much more positive connotations than revenge, though, which is weird, because in a lot of cases, there's not really much functional difference between the two.

If you don't have much desire to mod, the Enhanced Editions more or less serve your purpose, I think. And I say that as somebody who dislikes the EEs. Hoping to hear more on your impressions. Particularly interested in a combat comparison to BG1's higher levels.

Glover 64. Kill me.

I don't think they actually were fire, which is surprising to me, given how businesses tend to fire in situations like these and ask questions later. I'm also not perfectly clear on whether the Patriots actually decided to suspend them, or if the NFL enforced it - they say the Patriots did it, but then say it's up to the NFL as to whether they could ever be reinstated in the future...which implies that it's the NFL's doing. (Also, in case it wasn't clear, I was balking at the idea of firing him for not doing a fifth interview, not actually saying he was fired. Not sure how clear that was in my previous post, now that I reread it. )

There is a bug with disabling status effects, where if an enemy is disabled in the middle of an attack, they will resume the attack upon the effect expiring, regardless of how far away their original target is currently. This is very easy to see by using Cipher's Mental Bindings while an enemy is in the middle of an attack animation. There's also another bug with paralyze at the very least, where if you paralyze an already paralyzed enemy, they will complete their currently queued action after the original paralyze duration ends, and then resume being paralyzed for the remainder of the new paralyze duration. Very annoying. Again, easy to test with Cipher's Mental Bindings.

Fired him for refusing another face-to-face interview? (He offered to do a phone interview, but the NFL declined.) Yeah...no. We'll have to agree to disagree. Firing him for being involved in the scandal at all I would've understood...but we don't know how much of the their texts Patriots leadership actually saw before handing over their phones to the NFL, so I won't pass judgement in that regard.

How did the Patriots organization interfere with the investigation? Only in two areas did the Patriots not "cooperate": McNally, one of the two employees involved in the scandal, was tired of interviews and refused to give a fifth interview, and Tom Brady did not give up his phone. In every other way, the Patriots have cooperated fully as far as I'm aware, including freely giving up the phones and texts between the two employees responsible. I'm of the opposite mind as you: I don't think there should be any punishment against the Patriots organization itself, but I would've been more or less accepting of a 2 game suspension for Brady for being strongly circumstantially linked to the scandal, for lying, and for not cooperating.

You may not wish to watch Wolf Hall, then,

Season finale of Wolf Hall on Masterpiece. Stupid British 6-episode seasons...aired on Sunday, but I didn't get around to watching it until now. Great season finale - I was praying for the death of a certain character GoT-style, but then...then it actually arrived, and they did it so well that I felt terrible that it happened, and now I wish it hadn't. 16th century England, I tell you what...nobody's good. Even the main character, Cromwell, is a bit corrupt...but he's still better than the rest. Wonder if there'll be a second season.