Nepenthe

Have you tried claiming that you work for Halliburton and your contract stipulates no private sponsorship for anti-bribery reasons? This will work for two reasons: 1) No-one really understands anti-bribery legislation But it's really simp- right...

Nomex, the underwear material for champions and accident prone individuals...

I know Linz, I've just never been there. Must've reminded me of some other modern art museum, I guess...

Splitting headache seguing into colossal depression kind of day. Even ice cream didn't help.

Indeed, in fact I think that the Missing Link is one of the all-time best DLCs, in general. It succeeds in taking what was good in the basic game, putting it in a compact package and then improving on a lot of things. I'd love to hear what the WiiU boss fights are like... Though with a name like that I can't see this being DLC that just adds the WiiU stuff in

Is that Vienna? The building in the last picture seems somehow familiar to me...

Yyyeah, you might be onto something, my experiences would certainly agree. The happiest conscripts I've known have been in the paras/frogmen, where you not only have to volunteer, you actually have to apply... while we CA guys were placed in a borderline penal unit... Of course, it proved useful later on and might have had some kind of perverse genius in it, building our civilian affairs talents by forcing us to deal with a platoon of total muppets, but it did ruin the whole backpack and gun in the woods thing for me. Who'd think that walking around with a fully automatic 7.62 rifle could suck that much?

Well, after the Missing Link it was pretty obvious that they had at least something more planned for that human revolution -> dx1 time... I'd like to think new game announcement or a stand-alone expansion, maybe? I'm fairly excited!

Tried some Uncharted 3 again. I ****ing hate the game. I liked 2, but in this one the puzzle to me 99 % of the time isn't how to do something but where the hell am I supposed to go? The smoke and mirrors for the "cinematic" experience are really exposed here vs. 2. In the end managed about 30 minutes before had to turn it off in disgust. I also have the new hitman and Dishonored which were left unfinished when I moved... probably going to resume one of those, next.

That's still on the top of my to-do list when my brain starts working again. IF it starts working again... Meanwhile, I've been having a military shooter marathon. Modern Warfare 2-3, Battlefield 3 and Black Ops 2. Sure, these are all short campaigns, 2 evenings or 1 day to complete on a difficulty that doesn't require a ton of grinding. Obviously for someone who only plays the SP campaigns this isn't a lot of bang for the buck; yet most of these campaigns are already getting a bit close to stretching on for too long. Given the choice, I'd rather pay Blood Dragon type money for the SP campaign only, but... Black Ops 2 is head and shoulders above the others. I think the future sections are really well done and the technology they've used is fun and cool. The past missions are mostly pretty much by the numbers and hold the game back from being awesome. The story line branching is cool, as are the optional missions - even though they appear to be a massive pain in the bottom on the higher difficulties. Extra points for the Jack Wall electronic future tracks (awesome, at his best) and the Trent Reznor end theme. I also played this one last, so I should've been more than a little burned out - something I think I noticed a lot more with BF3 that I played on the day before. Battlefield 3 is really ambitious but the vehicle levels seem tacked on. I mean, even the guy in the narrative frame asks "why are you telling me this" after one of them. The Euronext mission ("Comrades", iirc) is one of the best FPS levels I remember ever playing and the only one that has ever managed to convey a palpable sense of urgency without a short countdown ticking on the screen. And it's actually fairly long. Unfortunately some of the other levels start feeling a bit like work pretty soon and there are some horribly contrived QTEs in this game. The game's rather pretty even on a PS3, so I have high hopes about the next generation engine and look forward to the multitude of EA games we'll see on it (DA3 is one of the confirmed ones, AFAIK). MW2 and 3... I think we've established long ago that I primarily play games to enjoy the story... I generally don't need to have that great an impact on it, so I can be pretty happy with games that don't provide much choice, too.* Not much to be said about these that hasn't been said, but I can appreciate the slick summer block buster type thing these have going. The story does get progressively worse through the series and the new protagonist in MW3 manages to stay a cardboard cutout through the whole game. I think he dies at the end, but frankly I didn't care enough to be sure even on my second or third playthrough. Guess the lack of the original studio management IS noticeable in some ways. I think I'll take a stab at BF Bad Company 2, next. The older I get, the more I find myself liking these games. They are good palate cleansers between more complex/longer games and even better escapism when the walls start coming in. :D * I do find the lack of choice grating in some games, mostly GTAs and the like, as well as Uncharted 2 for some reason...

No, he means multiple personality disorder.

IIRC, it's banned by the (West) German constitution which was dictated by the Allies post-WW2. Less a question of what the Germans want one way or the other.

Everybody is... I'm actually better than average at it, but since I've spent most of the past few years working with absolutely gorgeous women, I have to avoid doing what I'd normally do to not seem like the guy with the office crush who can't let go. Been a really warm week here, my penthouse is fairly scalding at the moment. Can't do anything more mentally challenging than play call of duty or battlefield*... of which I'll share some thoughts in the other thread. *Or go get plastered in some bar with a nice terrace, which is what normal people do.

But why pay a MAN to do it?

This is hilarious. It was funny, it never ceases to amaze me the depths of some peoples general ignorance I remember last year when I was in Vegas I invited these 2 ladies to join me at my table for lunch. During the conversation I told them where I was from and they both looked surprised and said " you mean there are white people living in South Africa" Oh well at least they were both hot You reach an age where hot and stupid no longer does it. You start expecting hot and smart and either find one or don't and are still happier.

You can't have a ****roach in the ****tail you were enjoying in the ****pit, either.

The good part about replacing someone incompetent is that people will generally be pathetically happy even if you personally think you're not doing the best you could theoretically do. The bad thing is that you have to un**** a lot of things they've done.

I have some Eclipse Phase books, I'll have to check which ones I have when I get home and then check back - if I don't have 'em, then, gladly!

For example: your avatar. It offends me. Did you stop for a second to think about that? No. If I tried to force you to remove it would you like it? No. Trashman I'll gladly change my avatar if you admit that the Swastika is offensive and a sign of bigotry. I don't see my avatar picture in anyway the same as the Swastika but I really don't mind? Actually, the way the colors divide is kind of swastika-ish.

Unfortunately, when you deal with a lot of criminal cases, you realise that it isn't all rhetoric. The amount of Eastern Europeans in criminal statistics is absolutely staggering. Of course the people who cause the issues don't (mostly) seek permanent residence but instead are pros that make hit and run crime sprees in one country after the other. There's a middle ground, the "traveler" types who will obviously take what they can get where they can get it.

wait, WHA?

That and naming the whole idiocy...

I wouldn't call it a problem with writing in a foreign language. I constantly find myself reusing phrases in follow-on sentences. Which is an incredibly bad writing habit I have to force myself to double check whenever I write something longer then a paragraph... No, it's not a problem related exclusively to writing in a foreign language, but it gets a lot worse for me in English and comes up in shorter passages. I mean, I've either fully or mostly written for a living for the past ~12 years, and avoiding repetition is a part of my normal writing... I just become blind to it when I switch languages.

I feel obliged to point out the irony of opposing the swastika as a symbol of fascism when, say the Seal of the United States Senate still proudly carries the fasces, ie. the etymological root of fascism and it's symbol in Italy. If US iconography had featured the swastika, I'm pretty sure it would similarly have been no big deal. Unfortunately, it was shared only by smaller and/or less visible nations. Edit: e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces#Fasces_in_the_United_States

"Unemployment is the chief export of Somalia". Unfortunately it's not that far from the truth, either.