Keyrock

Osho succinctly and VERY slowly explains Murican politics:

A halfway decent value (relative to the market)? That's unpossible!

Starfield is built on a 12 year old Frankenstein's monster of an engine if you only count the time when it was called Creation Engine, or a 20 year old engine if you go all the way back to Gamebryo. There have been so many modifications grafted onto the engine over the years, not to mention there's undoubtedly a whole slew of legacy cruft weighing it down that no longer applies to any machine modern enough to actually play the game at something approaching acceptable framerates. I never expected to see particularly good performance. That said, hopefully Bethesda puts in some optimizations because even less tragic numbers like these are still pretty bad: Given there's no ray tracing those numbers are quite sad. The conspiracy theorist in me is starting to suspect that upscalers like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS might have been one of the worst things to happen to gaming in a long time. It just seems like games are not getting much better looking while at the same time getting much worse performing. My conspiracy theorist side thinks that maybe devs are shirking their duties in optimizing figuring "meh upscalers will fix the performance". It's similar to how Star Wars writers will sometimes not think too far ahead and write themselves into a corner because they always have the crutch to lean on of deus ex machina-ing themselves out of any situation because the force.

Not what I expected to hear. If I didn't have the visual part of the video, I'd assume that sound came from a bird rather than a mammal.

I mean, that's every Bethesda game, isn't it? You get a mediocre at best main quest but there are usually some really fun side quests, for example some Daedric quests in TES.

I'm sure I've posted this before but this bears posting again. Absolute Legend.

@HoonDingHow long until you "accidentally" jettison him out of the airlock?

The season is almost upon us. As is my custom, I have been ignoring the NFL as much as possible since the draft. I haven't watched a single second of preseason (why would I?) and the only move muh Boys made during the offseason that I'm aware of was getting Trey Lance. Sucks for the Niners given all they spent to get the guy and what they got in return was 4 starts in 2 years and now a 4th round pick. Good get for muh Boys, though, given that it cost us almost nothing and there's still a chance he could wind up being good, we have so little data on him. If nothing else, he could be a trade asset in the future. Anyway, I've been through this before, I know how this is going to go. I'm going to start out by writing that I'm tempering my expectations, and I am. Muh Boys will hopefully win week 1 against the Giants because we're definitely losing week 2 to the Jets; if there's one thing you can always count on it's Ayahuasca Enthusiast Aaron Rodgers beating the Cowboys. After that muh Boys will play well enough to sucker me into believing just so that they can immediately exit the playoffs in excruciating gut punch fashion. Cowboys football, get the sensation!

I'd say that's a good description. It certainly shares many similarities given the use of raw egg yolks, romano cheese, and guanciale/pancetta/bacon. The zozzona has the added ingredients of onion and Italian sausage (I went with a hot Italian sausage which, combined with some red pepper flakes, gave the dish the perfect amount of spice), but there's nothing stopping you from adding onion and sausage to a carbonara.

Italian deli and yes it's extremely expensive. Plus, I can feel my cholesterol rising just looking at the package. I can find pancetta in most supermarkets in my area but I have to go to a specialty store to get guanciale, or, as you wrote, order it online. Pancetta is a good substitute, it's easy to find and way cheaper than guanciale. If I were to make Pasta Alla Zozzona on a regular basis, well, first of all I'd weigh 400 lbs in no time, but also I'd likely use pancetta. However, this is a dish I plan to make once, maybe twice a year for a special get together and I can afford to go all out once or twice a year, both in terms of the financial and the state of my arteries.

This was the hardest boss fight I've had so far. Against Faceless Void from DOTA 2 Sha'Hala: Guardian of N'Erud. It's a multi-phase fight and each phase has several different attacks and there doesn't seem to be a pattern to the order the attacks are used. Even when I figured out what to do for every attack type, it's a long enough fight that it was hard for me to stay clean the entire time, leading to many many deaths.

The Progenitor boss fight. The Progenitor is the small blue insect. It infests these big flying insect things that look like Zerg Overlords from Starcraft. You have to damage the host enough to force The Progenitor out into the open to damage it. It's a battle of attrition and the first boss fight I've beaten on my first try, albeit just barely. I was completely out of relic charges when I defeated it. The N'Erud area is some sort of space ship that was either built into an asteroid or the asteroid was built around it, I guess. While the surface looks very much like an asteroid and has flying jellyfish looking robots as enemies, among other things, the interior areas look very Alien, and by that I mean the 1979 movie. The enemies feel that way too. They're not exactly xenomorphs, but they're definitely insectoids.

The Chinese Room didn't develop Amnesia: The Dark Descent nor Amnesia: Rebirth nor Amnesia: The Bunker nor any of the Penumbra games, those were all developed by Frictional Games. The Chinese Room developed Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs which is generally considered the black sheep of the series. That doesn't mean that they can't make a great game, hopefully Bloodlines 2 is fantastic, but I'm not holding my breath.

Don't forget, they made the 1 Amnesia game that everybody pretends doesn't exist.

I'll believe it when it's released.

Now who's going to sue people for anything remotely similar to one of his song titles?

I figure there's enough of us here either already playing Starfield or that will be once the peasant tier unlocks that this warrants its own thread to keep the what are you playing thread more tidy. I'm in the peasant tier so I've got a couple of days to wait. I plan on being a pirate and smuggler so I'm going to ingratiate myself into whatever the pirate/thief/scoundrel faction in this game is. Anyway, here's everybody's second favorite throwback character to get us started: Hopefully, M'aiq the Liar shows up somewhere. He has to, right?

Starfield preloaded, just waiting for it to unlock.

Empire of the Dark (1991) - Vanity project goodness! 1991 Dad Bod of the Year award winner Steve Barkett shows off his scintillating sword fighting skills in this thrilling adventure pitting him against a demonic cult. Come for the exciting fight scenes. Stay for the romance. Marvel at Steve Barkett's GLORIOUS mustache! In all seriousness, this is a highly recommended crappy movie. It'd put it roughly on the same level as Lady Terminator in terms of delivering cheesy goofy fun that everyone can enjoy.

Pasta Alla Zozzona: I went all out for this one. I freshly grated romano cheese and I didn't settle for bacon or pancetta, I got the good stuff. Delicious dish, but not something to eat regularly, on account of how decadent it is.

That's what alcohol is for.

Word 'round the campfire is that it was instead the cat's meow.

I am getting no shortage of humor from the Republicans' attempts to co-opt Rich Men North of Richmond as an anti-establishment democrat pro-republican anthem. The first half of that is correct, the second, certainly not. It's not an anti-democrat or an anti-republican song, it's an anti-establishment song. The titular rich men north of Richmond refers to the establishment elites in DC, that means the establishment democrats AND the establishment republicans being deaf and blind to the plight of common men and women. People are fed up with the establishment, that means both sides of the aisle. It's the reason Trump was able to take over the republican party and got elected in 2016 (and will likely get elected next year). Trump's campaign was and is built on "I will fight for the working class men and women that DC has been ignoring". The idea of Donald ****ing Trump being a man of the people and fighting for the little guy is the height of comedy. In fact, one of the most notable policies he enacted as president was a tax break for the wealthiest of the wealthy, not exactly a populist move. That said, it's a smart and popular stance to run on, even if it is a crock of $#!+.

It will be on Gamepass day 1 AFAIK.