qt3.14159

AB is *awful* when you lose. It really is the worst. But it is hands down the most enjoyable when you win. I probably have a win rate of around 60%... not great, but good enough to keep it fun. Yeah, because my SO is such a great hunter, I forgot how bad they can be until I teamed up with one radomly in nagrand the other day... ugh... Snow? In Stormwind? I think that was Ironforge...

haha As a point of interest, given that your daughter is 11, do you have any worries about the kind of content she's exposed to while playing? I'm sure there's a language filter, but did you have to take any steps above that? Oh, no, not yet. She's not really... umm... aware... of anything that's going on in the game other than herself. She's in our guild, so she's not really exposed to much, other than the occasional raunchy conversation in the trade channel... which she doesn't read. I'm not too worried about her at this point. Now, if she started playing more on her own and joined a different guild... we'd have to have a talk. Actually, I'd probably put a toon in the guild just to get a feel for it. But she's not a real hardcore gamer, so I don't really see that happening. She just likes her Dranei hunter and her cute cat. Now my son is a little more worrisome in the long run. He's only 8 now and his playing currently consists of creating a character, logging on, running to the nearest city and running around jumping into things. But, he's definitely already a hardcore gamer (for an eight year old) and plays a lot of video games, so I know that at some point he's going to realize his friends are playing too (whatever game it'll be then) and he'll go off on his own. But hopefully we've got a few years before that happens.

Pfftttt, my daughter (11) has her own account and in the six or more months since she got it her toon is level 20. She plays, she just winds up playing in areas that don't give her any experience for some reason... I haven't worried about it and actually moved my shaman (lvl 65!) onto her account so we could *conceivably* have a fifth... even if I'm multi-boxing. I'll say, though, multi-boxing a healer AND an upclose dps machine at the same time is.... complex... lol I should probably switch her to elemental and keep her in the back with my priest, I guess... *shrug* And yes, we are raising nerd children. It's awesome!

I started playing WoW a little over a year ago. For some bizzare reason I started on a PvP server and it took six months or so to get to level 50. We moved to a PvE server and then suddenly, we could actually level... it was... lovely. Anyhow, I hit 70 with my priest sometime in February / March and started worked on getting geared. She's a tailor, so she's wearing the high end crafted items and when I've looked at replacing them (the mooncloth set) with PvP gear, I've been unwilling to give up my PvE stats overall. I've played a lot of PvP in my short career, though I tend to play in bursts. I enjoy it greatly, and have a fairly decent win percentage when I play (except on Friday nights, friday nights *SUCK* for ally PvP). Most of my gear has been PvP rewards, like you said, it's relatively easy to get. I think that were the discontent comes in is that I will never have access to the very high end raid gear. I play with my SO, my sister and her husband. We run dungeons with four people. We do all right, but our tank is only just now geared well enough to think about trying heroics again. I will never, ever be geared well enough, or keyed or have enough time for a real raid with people I don't know. It's just not going to happen. And really, I'm ok with that.... except I still feel like I'm wearing "welfare" epics and would like to experience content... ah well, maybe when we hit level 80 we'll be able to run Khara with four people.... but probably not.

oops, what hurlshot said... my bad. taks In that case... BLASHPHEMER!!! j/k you're allowed to find it tedious on the second viewing, I suppose, but I almost imagine it had more to do with the setting than the movie. I saw it for the second time in IMAX (the only reason I went to see it again, really) and it was... breathtaking... Ok, I'm gonna fire up the soundtrack now, I just got the song where they're racing up the mountain through the switch backs stuck in my head....

Speed Racer has now been out on video for 24 days and I have yet to see a review here (except the one from theslug, who is awesome and saw it in the theater). I'm about to quit talking to you guys... *hmph* not that that's much of a threat....

Ok, this is just getting silly. It all comes down to what you like, doesn't it? Myself, I like characters. I like characters more than plot and action combined... MUCH more. And if you cut these games down into movies, that you sat back and watched passively, I could enjoy K1 several times, ME I wouldn't bother watching again and K2 I would watch over and over again. I can never get enough of Bao-Dur, Atton or Mira. But you know that's just my opinion and opinions are like *.

Qt, there is a world of difference between being concerned about your child and trying your hardest to do what is best for it... and then being concerned about whether or not there is enough beer in the fridge, the child be damned. Oh, I wasn't really comparing myself to him, bu rather explaining that I didn't think two years was all that harsh and trying to give some context so that my rather odd opinion holds some weight. I can't remember much of the two years after my son died. They were the first two years of my daughter's life and I have bits and pieces of her as a baby, but I was in such a fog that nothing is very clear. I wasn't on any drugs or anything, the grief is just that consuming... If the guy just made a huge, stupid mistake and is blaming himself, then two years in prison being told what to do and where to be will almost be a relief to him. If he's guilty of something more than that... two years isn't enough.

Yes, yes, we know your theory and how you like Carth... Actually, I don't like Carth all that much... I'm an Atton fangirl! (see my sig!) I did enjoy the interactions with Carth in K1, though... except for his lame "I think I maybe could possibly love you" confession he made in front of the ENTIRE crew. But hey, that's more than you got with Atton! But now that you brought it up... I think we can all (well most of us anyway) agree that the characters in K2 were *much* better overall than in either K1 or ME.

Isn't it funny how the male / female dynamic skews things? Most of the girls I know adored Carth and thought Bastila was a major bitch. Perhaps if game developers want to be taken seriously in the future, they'll have either two sets of characters or two completely different types of interactions based on gender. Therefore, Carth, being a guy, wouldn't open up and cry about his dead wife and son to another guy, but Bastila would find *some* way to be nice to a female PC. Because seriously, she's a bitch. Ok... and, um... ME... uuuhhh... Kaidan was kinda cute, but I always felt like I missed something, a major part of his story. But I didn't. It's just not there.

Yeah, I agree that's fishy. Some people really do sleep extremely hard and might not wake up at a normal baby cry... (my ex was like that) but I'd like to think that the kind of crying a baby would be doing i that situation would wake *anyone* up... How deep was the firepit? Is it possible the baby fell in and injured himself on the way down and didn't cry? Either way, falling asleep outside with a baby is *severe* negligence. Of course, it's also possible that the baby died from some other cause and he put it in the fire and made up the story... It wouldn't surprise me either way, honestly.

True confessions time... (sorry, but y'all brought it up) My first child died due to my "negligence"... sort of. He was 23 months old and had a severe seizure disorder. He'd started having seizures at three days old, though we didn't recognize that that's what they were until he was around six weeks. For the next 21 months, I spent on average two days a week at the hospital, doing blood work, adjusting his meds (at one time he was taking nine different meds), seeing specialists trying to do *something * to help him. He was severely disabled and could not hold his own head up even at 23 months. He had been in the hospital numerous times and the doctors had almost killed him with his drugs twice. Shortly before he died, on top of everything else he started having kidney stones. The doctor called me at home after she got the blood work back and it showed a high level of calcium in his blood and told me to go get some NuSalt (potassium chloride salt substitute) and give him so many milligrams of it with his other meds to help pick up the extra calcium ions. I did what I was supposed to do; checked (and double checked) the label on the container, and gave him three tablespoons of the nuSalt, dissolved in water and poured down his feeding tube. Unfortunately, even though I'd tried to be very careful about the dosing, it turns out I should have given him three teaspoons not tablespoons. We called poison control, they didn't really seem to worried about it, but sent us to the hospital to get some charcoal to help absorb the excess... By the time we were seen in the ER, he had gone into full cardiac arrest and could not get his blood potassium levels lowered. They just kept going up, and there was nothing they could do to get his heart going again. I'm relating all of this, because I know what it's like to blame yourself for your child's death. The police questioned me, went to the house to collect all of his meds, and did a full investigation of the incident. Fortunately, I think they saw just how much shock I was in and eventually filed it as an accident. However, if they hadn't... if they had decided to put me on trial for it and I wound up being sentenced to prison... I probably would have welcomed it. If it wasn't for my daughter (who was five weeks old), I would have have been happy to be drug off to an institution where I didn't have to make any decisions, be very productive or really give a **** about anything. It takes two years to even begin to get out of the fog of grief like that. To have spent that two years in prison wouldn't have made much difference to me, mentally or emotionally, I don't think. Even now, over eleven years later the grief is still unbearable at times. Believe me, two years is *nothing* for this man. It'll take him that long to even want to get out of bed in the morning. I only hope he doesn't go to a maximum security prison, but somewhere he can get some psychological help for the ramifications of it all.

My hatred for ME comes from expecting the next great thing since KOTOR, and getting a piece of half-baked, half-assed garbage instead. Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with this. I heard such great things about this game. I had heard that it was very similar to KOTOR and so I wasn't surprised that many of the story elements are the same, but I did expect the characters and universe to be compelling... and they just weren't. Also, I found that having the PC say the lines, usually worded and expressed much differently than my own reaction would have been it really threw me out of the whole RPG feel of it. It wasn't an RPG it was a choose your own adventure movie. And as movies go, this one was meh.

Actually, what made me "meh" about the whole thing was just how little interaction you had with your supposed romantic interest. While the romance story lines never really went *anywhere* in K1 or K2 (especially if you're female) at least there was some nice build up. With Kaidan it was... here's a story, "I like my women more adventurous", here's another story, "I'm getting a vibe... are you?" Well, we can't act on it, maybe later.... oh hell, screw later, let's do it!!! I know that around these parts it's sissified to like romance in a game... but really, as sad as it may be, it's definitely my favorite parts. The rest of the ME gameplay was fine... but I didn't do even one of the side quests, to be honest. So I didn't get bored going from planet to planet "exploring". At least not after the first one. Oh, and another thing, ME looked like crap on my computer. I have a new Dell XPS laptop with an nvidia 128 mb card, so I should have had decent graphics, but people's head's were always shaped wrong, and had really bright spots on their faces where the lighting was wrong. I figure it was my hardware, but it *shouldn't* have been.

I have to agree with this statement. It was the crappy, unfulfilling ending that sent me into the fanfiction world searching for some closure and then inspired me to play the game over and over again to get every nuance out of the game play rather than rushing to the ending like I always do on first playthroughs. Honestly, if the game had been more satisfying, I wouldn't be nearly as hooked. Although I do love Atton's "Need some company?" line... if they had just left *that* in, it would have made a HUGE difference in my satsifaction level.

The BioWare project is most definitely an MMO. It's been well established that BioWare's Austin office is working on an MMO. Your only hope is that it's not KOTOR (or at least not the same time frame) so that it doesn't completely preclude the possibility of a K3. I have some hope, though. I kinda think BioWare might be able to pull off an MMO with a good story. I'm sure I'll be trying any Star Wars MMO, but I have hopes that it'll be something worth playing.

gt? I guess you didn't "solve" Q-T-Pi's name then. Oh, you did... I just didn't feel like correcting him.. it's a shame lower case q's look so much like g's cause I don't like the big Q nearly as much.

I'm guessing that you're still fairly young and you either don't want kids or feel like they're way in the future. I'm 34. My fiance is only 28, but he really wants his own kids. If it were just me, I would be ok with not having any more, (even though I always meant to) but it's not just me. And at 34 I'm only looking at a few more years of viable eggs... not to mention energy levels. Three years was probably too long to wait, in all honesty.

Being set during the movie timeline *really* limited what they could do with SWG. I played it some and it was fun enough, but I never really managed to get into it... probably because it didn't run very well on my computer as much as anything. I heard, though that SOE ran SWG into the ground, badly. So I think most Star Wars fans are looking for any SW MMO that's NOT run by Sony. Personally, I'll try it. I love Star Wars and enjoy MMOs. But I don't think it would ever fill the empty spot left by the waiting for KOTOR 3.

Universities DO award different levels of degrees. There are tons of "Arts" degrees that have very low performance and hours requirements. If an athlete doesn't have the brains to get an engineering degree (or a BBA for that matter) he can major in one of the not so meaningful degrees. Furthermore, they tend to take extremely light course loads (especially during the season) and usually in blow off classes. It would be rare for an athlete to have enough hours to graduate at the end of his eligibility for intercollegiate sports. If they go on and finish, more power to them, if they don't, they didn't get a degree. How does that make them any different than all the other people who start college and never finish? Yeah, I was really surprised that Mizzou didn't get more respect after Alabama's squeaking by an unranked team. AP definitely has a ton of SEC bias. I still remember 2000 when all the talk was about what they would do when Florida St beat OK in the national championship since FSU had lost to Miami (who was ranked 3) already that year. No one even contemplated the idea that we could win it... of course that just made it more fun when we shut them down so completely. But I digress...

Well, my first marriage was really, really, *REALLY* bad. I'll just say I was young and stupid and he was a sociopathic bully. You'd think that'd turn me off of marriage all together... but really, I'd like to try it with a sane person. I have very high hopes for this one. He and I have been dating over three years and while there have been a few "tense" discussions, there hasn't been anything I'd classify as a fight. I think we're just a good match. And I fell off my first real horse at the age of 4 (the dang shetland pony blew out his stomach so the saddle was loose) and had no problems getting back on then... and have fallen off many, many horses since then but always get back on. Perhaps I don't learn so well.