Nepenthe

I'm about to go and pick mine up. I've had a 10-hour job interview this Monday, and have spent three days helping my mother move with 4-6 hours of sleep in between. To say that I'm looking forward to booting this baby up on ~Sunday would be a major understatement.

Yes, Lotus Notes was a part of the deal with us, as well.

IT don't allow us to use any oither browser. That's still better than when I was working for the Finnish Ministry of Justice (up until 2008) and we weren't allowed to use other browsers than Exploder 6 (the others hadn't been 'certified'). The best part was that CERT-FI (another government entity, Computer Emergency Response Team) had issued a recommendation against using it for its exceptional vulnerability. Of course, they might have just thought that a tabless browser would improve workplace efficiency. I'm pretty sure it did, in my case.

Specified that for you! Nothing much to say. Except whenever they try something 'new', like 'sign up for the newsletter and get an extra bonus item' or 'Bioware social integration', they always bollox things up. Sigh. Also first month without a ME2 release. Interesting, I was kind of expecting them to finally release the Blackstorm to the general public (as opposed to just the Gamestop preorderers), it's a pity everybody doesn't have it, as it's by far my favourite weapon of the game. DA2, I'll probably go take a gander at the Digiexpo in two weeks here in Helsinki, along with the other stuff...

High hopes for the G20 meet. The Eurozone countries are spitting mad over Greece and I don't think the Brits will be too averse on coming down hard on the financial sector. My natural optimism prevents me from claiming "watered-down compromise", but we'll see.

AFAIK, the gist is that the law's there to allow the parents to make that choice. Instead of a bunch of preteens going to buy those alien sideboobs from the store without them knowing. And generally, if you want to legally disallow something, you have to either attach a fine to it or prepare to make yourself ridiculous. We have some choice examples of the latter from the past few years.

I'm sure you'll pick up plenty of cues by watching the first half of Thunderball. :D

Yeah, Friday here too. Nordics used to have the general release day on Thursdays, but more and more stuff seems to be coming out simultaneously on Fridays... AP and NV, for example (though ME2 was still a Thursday release here, IIRC).

Could you explain to me what the difference is, apart from the color of the bar? I mean, I don't think I ran out of endurance that often during DAO (since I was paying attention to stuff like fatigue etc.), and by Awakening and the latter DLCs I already had access to the stamina potions they'd neglected to put in the original game...

This. IIRC Return to Ostagar had a similar, but slightly less annoying feature, where the kick-off area would show up on your worldmap before you'd bought the expansion? Anyway, was in really bad taste (even if I had Warden's Keep from day1 and never had to actually see it for myself)

Thanks, but as I wrote, I already had it - I just couldn't play it any longer...

Yeah, the Last Crusade was a pretty good SCUMM game.

That would be really classic, considering that Andy Chambers apparently even worked on SCII. :D

What's the problem? I permanently shelved DA:O because after reinstalling the game after a HDD wipe I cannot get Shale anymore (nor any other free DLC, unlike with ME). At least this way one cannot lose a companion. Considering that it SHOULD work, you might have wanted to troubleshoot instead?

Here I was expecting them to say the original was meaningless and they spit on it. Would probably be a more honest reply. Then they probably wouldn't go the extra mile of, say, getting Sheldon Pacotti to sign off on the story etc.

I'm ridiculously excited about this game. I only really need to decide how many copies of it I preorder (and oh what platforms) Drove me to pick up DX2 on Steam (it's not one of the backwards compatible games for x360 - probably because nobody else than me bought that version - and most of the supposedly backwards compatibles, like KOTORs, don't really work, either)

Agree. Hey, we are here on an Obsidian board. Quality in a game is something very subjective and entirly dependant on what elements you like about a game. I, for one. Do not care about Bugs or polish. Never did. I don't really like the Polish either. And I am wary of Greeks, especially when they are bearing gifts. I think I should probably lie down for a second, I'm feeling kind of funny. :I

Laughing my ass off, the guys bashing formulaic Bioware stories are the first to defend star wars from the same criticism. Oh the irony.

^^ this is the main reason I have NV preordered, even though I'm not terribly interested and probably won't have time to immerse myself into it before next year, anyway.

Yeah, the Copy doesn't deserve a head-patting for other aspects of that ad, either.

Oh, I don't feel bad at all, the contrary - there are still people who are dorkier than me without necessarily being trekkies!

I love WoW discussions, even after 10 years of MUDs and generally being quite in touch with gaming, I can read a whole thread on the subject without basically understanding anything.

[boo] Haw haw! [/boo] Seriously though, if the squad members from ME2 are more than short conversations and emails in ME3 I will be so (positively) surprised that I'll need years of therapy to recover. Well, Bio have done some pretty amazing stuff in the (distant - depending on your viewpoint) past. I think ME3 is going to be a watershed game for Bio (will they try to push the limits, or settle into a comfortable recycling pattern), just like I see New Vegas as one for Obsidian (can they finally deliver the REAL AAA title people have been expecting from them since before KOTOR2).

It's a bit complicated here, but most postgrads are salaried employees of the university (I did this for a while, and being in the highest echelon of postgrads = the ones closest to being ready, I made around 2500e/month before taxes). This generally means they have to TA, and depending on their level also do 'real' teaching, but their main duties still are writing their dissertation. Some people are in specific research projects (with external funding), which sometimes gets funneled through the uni (who takes a chunk for their own misdeeds). Some people, like me, just get a grant from some third party and an office from the Uni (mostly these people are the lower-rung guys who couldn't get accepted to some real project that pays real, or relatively real money, but some of these sources of funding do carry quite a lot of prestige. So you can also end up as 'poor, but respectable'). Undergrads get around 400-600 euros a month, which is tied to making certain progress milestones. There's also a (fairly low) amount of student loan you can get, but it's IIRC generally tied to market interest rates. Again, IIRC, the interest is tax deductable (I knew I was going to keep doing postgraduate studies, so I avoided the loan like the plague). Oh, and if you make too much money, you have to pay back the 'support' part. The issue being that neither the support nor the financial limits are anything close to what you need to survive in the real world in Helsinki, for example. It's also theoretically possible to use the student support system for postgraduate studies, but due to the upper limit of 75 months, you're generally going to have run out of months by your masters degree, or soon after. Minor caveats, I know there have been some changes to the system since I left it in 2007...

Mmh. I think this goes back to the larger question of what will the squad composition of ME3 be like. Will they just start blank slate (what I am afraid of) because "everybody can die!111zomg!" or actually go with something a lot more ambitious (what I hope for). Since they've been 'positively surprised' by the amount of people importing from ME1 to ME2, the odds for option B are not non-existent, but probably not that good either... :/ But, I'll be happy to carry this conversation on in Commander Shepard's favourite thread.