Raithe

One of the few things we still actually do as a family is to gather around the tree, divide the presents up into various piles and then open them all together. Of course, this morning, as we divide up the piles.. the neighbour turns up, blithely ignores whats going on, sits down and talks.. and talks... and talks...

Hideous amounts of TOR. Seriously hideous amounts. I really should stop that. It still has that hunger to hit the quick save button, and I keep hitting decision points where I want to reload to see what happens if I go another way. Actually I think that could be a bit of a pain about it. While you can start up another class for a fresh class story, or at least interesting twists on things that everyone encounters, playing the same class again would mean going through a lot of samey content to reach those decision points.. even if there are a lot of them. It's kind of interesting on some of the setup, I mean, Republic side gets to Taris in level range of 20-24 or so and has certain story elements, the Imperial side goes to taris around 30-34 level side, and it appears that it's also later in the timeline to the Republic. So you won't encounter Republic players on the Imperial version of Taris, but you'll have a lot of the same areas, but developed in ways that you'd recognise from the world story you would have run into when playing as a Republic class. Lets you have an interesting shift in viewpoint and seeing just where some of that developing universe goes.

There's only been about 6 or so shows since Tom was on. Top Gear has turned into a weird phenomena where they do a single season of 6 shows, and a couple of "specials" a year. But apparently it still manages to turn into one of the biggest exports of the BBC to the world. You had a batch of american "big names" turn up on the show, but they were all the ones that were quite heavily "anglisised" or very big on the UK, such as Christian Slater or the like. In the last year or so tho, they seem to have started to have a few hollywood names who weren't UK born turn up to take the "reasonably priced car" around the test track and plug whatever they were currently doing.

Tom and Cameron turned up on the same week to do their lap when Night and Day was released. Tom actually managed the top track time which lasted awhiles.

For the random trivia, during the shooting of MI4, Simon Pegg turned up on Top Gear to do the whole "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car", and apparently Tom Cruise gave him some ribbing about whether he'd manage to beat his lap time on that course..

We decided to try the more relaxed route.. Ordered all the assorted food for Christmas and Boxing day from Waitrose. So basically it's all prepared, you pick it up a day or so before hand, and then it's pretty much ready to slide in the oven. Of course, for a "take the stress out of christmas" approach, it hasn't gone so well. Ever since we ordered it, every single day my father has done the "so where do I have to pick this up? when? will I have to pay for it?" We put it on a yellow sticky, and he still kept asking the questions. Then pick up day and boom, they'd misplaced a box of stuff. So all we had ready were the beef wellington for christmas day, and the duck for boxing day. WIth none of the other stuff. Chased them up, got the rest of it. Then at home, packing it away into the fridge.. and notice that the big platter of sushi for the post-christmas eating.. has got a "best before date" of the date we picked it up. So today was spent working our way through sushi.

Had an entertaining time leading a jedi padawan into corruption (so to speak) then ended up having to kill her master, and take her as my apprentice. Also, safety note for those Imperials who reach Taris. - If you find a "mysteriously dead jedi" body, don't click on it. You will be surprised and jumped on by a huuuumonguous worm-like world boss. Seriously. End safety announcement.

Most officers on Imperial vessels in WH40k? Because that's a stirring example of clean psychologically healthy folks...

Well, just to throw in the whole.. pseudo-science aspect.. but haven't they done the whole "Humans don't like being wrapped up in tin cans with no outside views" psychological studies? And Joker has a crudload of sensors and readouts on his console, and during battle those big shutters actually come down and cover the windows.. So I'm not really stressing over the thoguht that he looks out of the window to fly the ship.. To me it's more, he gets the damn good view when the ship isn't in combat. After all, how many people do you know who really don't like seeing clear images of stars and spinning, swirling gas clouds in space?

And Raahr! I made it through to the end of Chapter 1. Good gawd that takes time and effort. Every time I thought the story was getting there.. they'd suddenly hit me with more missions and mini-story-arc and send me off somewhere else. Still, hit 35, became a Sith Lord. Have my own cult on Nar Shaddaa, what looks like the beginning of a personal following on Dromund Kaas. And my companion, Khem Vor has I got caught up in the "I just want to get chapter 1 finished damn it, this looks like finally the final mission" and plugged away at it and achieved it at abou 0240.... yeesh, that was not planned. Put in my "Legacy" name and then shut down and went to bed. So I have yet to explore how things shift for the Chapter 2 arc of things...

You also seem to have a whole bunch of the early access folks, who even though they had their registration codes, waited until today at the last minute to do the "oh crap, if I don't put it in right now I'm going to lose the character i've spent hte last x days working on." Even though bioware have been flashing the warning that the pre-order / early access code was not product registration and you had to have it put in for the last couple of days... I even saw someone come on, complain that bioware hadn't been clear that the pre-order code wasn't a product registration, that their stupid website had taken two hours to successfully register and subscribe, and that now he had vented he was going to quit and go back to WoW... Yeesh. I'm trying to understand what is not clear about a "Your pre-order early access code is not product registration code". And a lot of these folks had their CE's and such for several days. I'm betting Bioware was expecting all these folk to have actually registered before hand.. as part of the whole concept of rolling access.

I picked up the "Complete Cary Grant Collection" some months back. There's a time and a place for classic screwball comedy and dry lines delivered in an impeccable manner.

Hm, I haven't turned steam on since i started playing Tor last week.. My credit card is thanking me for avoiding the sales. Then poking me sharply because of the subscription...

On the upside, the capabilities of the actors were a lot better then the original. On the down side, they went with a "my name is conan, you killed my father, prepare to die!" storyline. I think thats what lost it a lot of points. The dialogue was the standard ropey sword & sandal type, but it looked fairly decent and they obviously worked at trying to deliver their lines with real intent. Some of the fight scenes got a bit messy and hectic. I'd have liked to have seen where they'd have taken it with a sequel, but that's kind of doubtful now.

I hate how they've set up datacrons. I'm not sure how it encourages exploration to put a datacron in the middle of an important area and then make you spend 30 minutes attempting to get to it via jumping, falling, and dying. I complained about this, but apparently people don't want getting datacrons to be 'easy.' The one on top of the bank in Mos Ila is a pain in the.. The thing is, they are just simple jumps you need to make, but at the same time they're bloody easy to just misaim by a little bit... Hm, so far any datacron hunting I've been involved in where I ended up falling, was only enough to take me down to about 1/5th to 1/8th total health. Never enough to kill me totally. Although thinking about that, the one on Tattooine sticking out of a cliffside could probably do that if you totally misaimed your drop..but damn, that would take effort to do. So far missing 3 from Nar Shadda, and 2 from Tattooine. I would have got those two, but you have to ride a hot air balloon for like 40 minutes as it passes over the Dune Sea.. and about 30 minutes into the trip it glitched, the balloon disapeared and I reappeared on the desert floor. It was late, I wasn't going to go back to waiting at the time. Woof. hit the 30 level, and now I've hit Alderaan. Pretty world, mountains, forests, snow and greenery... Still managing to keep walking the "grey" path without being schizophrenic. It actually works as a roleplaying character, treating your troops fine, being ruthless with your enemies but not being wantonly destructive/cruel for the sake of it. Just precisely violent and manipulative when it's aimed.

The closest I came was one of the few times I got black out drunk in public years ago. I later got told there were 13 tequilla shots, and someone thought it would be funny to switch the last one for a double rum on me when I wasn't noticing. I remember a very clear image of looking at my watch saying 10:13pm, and saying to the guys "no, I don't really have enough money on me tonight to go around several more places" Then it's blank. I stirred into consciousness at home, my parents looking at me rather disagreeably, letting me know that a> my friend graham had propped me up in the door at some point, and that b> it was 7am, and I had to go to work at the hospital for the morning shift. Which started at 7.30am, and went on till 2.30. Hospital kitchen porter. Among other things, pushing the hospital food trolleys out from the kitchen up to the wards and collecting them. That was... a fun day.

Edward Cullen - All the Twilight vampiers do this whole.. "Sparkle like diamonds" when exposed to the sunlight. So it's a "sparkley Vampires" thing.

Ah, have you seen George Takei's inspired "form an alliance of Star Wars and Star Trek fans to burn Twilight out from the collective consciousness of the world"? Edit: Although a quote I did like: "if Dracula was based in part on Vlad the Impaler, would that mean that Edward Cullen was based in part on Tony Blair?"

Here, enjoy some of my christmas spirit..

And if you don't like the idea of dark side corruption aesthetics, it's possible to choose a preference button so that it isn't shown on your character. As to the datacrons, they're supposedly in-game to encourage exploration beyond the wandering you do on quests, so you poke around in the cubbyholes of the universe... Individually they're not really much of a boost (around +2 or +3) to individual stats, and you need to collect multiple shard datacrons before you can assemble a relic..

Arg. It was late at night.. pushing 2am.. and I just wanted to wrap up a quest and hit that level 30 mark. Then in the final sequence when I engage the Imprisoned One (yes, another one of those KoToR references) in dialogue..and as he greets me..I disconnect. Then, I get told it'll be a 40 minute queue to get back on the server. I think I'll just call it quits and get some form of sleep in. Oh, and when I say tricky, there's one datacron on Nar Shaddaa that involves heading towards a heroic instance, climbing up some crates to get to soem girders, jumping across girders, walking across them, jumping onto a catwalk, running around that, getting in a lift you would have no idea is there if you weren't exploring weirdly, run around another catwalk, jump onto a narrow ledge, follow said ledge around, jump across a canopy, then run across that to jump onto a pole that's actually above the area of a heroic instance. The one thats under the taxi ring looks confusing to get to..since it's hanging out there..but when you notice you can steal a taxi from another location.. then it's really simple.

No, there are specific datacrons. There's one on each world. And you get a "You find a Yellow Matrix Shard" rather then the "This datacron improves your Presence" blather. The Archeology ones are part of ingredients for artifice to built lightsaber stuff I believe.

It pretended to have OK science. There are all those codecs that explain how the tech work. The characters throw out technobabble that use a lot of real science. The Normandy is actually designed like how a real stealth vessel would be like. It's consistent space opera science. That doesn't mean anything bad, space opera science can be quite fun and well-thought out.

That would probably be the Artefact assembly chamber. If you note, there are datacrons that give you bonuses to your stats, and different datacrons that are <colour> shard matrix? Depending on the color shards you have, you can combine them in that chamber to form a "relic" that gives a major boost. So if you have a red shard, a yellow shard, and a green shard, you can get a relic that gives several assorted boosts while you have it equipped. And apart from the starter worlds (which only have 3 datacrons) all other worlds should have five in total waiting to be found...

So far I've managed 3 on Korriban, 5 on Dromund Kaas, 5 on Balmorra, I found 2 on Nar Shaddaa, and 1 on Tattooine. One on Nar Shaddaa is actually _under_ a taxi ring. That one takes a little bit. And the other one was.. a ridiculous amount of climbing, jumping, and falling.. The one on Tattooine wasn't so bad in figuring out the approach, but was bloody finnicky for the jumps you needed to do to traverse it.