Keyrock

The Giants played really good defense for most of the first half, then inexplicably terrible defense on the Hail Mary. On offense, it's a tale of missed opportunities and perplexing play calls. The G-Men should have at least 14 points right now if not for drops and run calls that made me scratch my head.

Holy **** that Hail Mary at the end of the half!

Fins are getting massacred by the Stillers so far. Edit: Hopefully the Giants at Packers game delivers because the first 3 games this weekend have been far from exciting.

There are no time limits in any of the Shadow Tactics missions I've done so far, though each mission has various extra goals you can achieve and one of those is completing the mission in under a certain time, for speedrunner types. There are situations you will occasionally encounter where an enemy soldier will go into a script once one of your characters reaches a certain point in the level or a certain distance from him and he'll start executing civilians. At this point, as heroes, your characters have incentive to act quickly and more rashly than they would otherwise in order to try to save as many civilians as possible. This is not, in any way, necessary. You can let the civilians die and continue along at a slow, methodical pace, but it does add moments of urgency if you choose to be extra heroic that are in no way mandatory.

Thanks for the advice. Another thing I'm going to do, if I go through with this, is keep a constant supply of deli meats, veggies, and fruit on hand. That should not only save me money, but also allow me to eat healthier than I would otherwise living off truck stop food exclusively. Edit: Also, Happy Birthday KaineParker.

I'm seriously mulling getting a CDL and becoming a driver. The downside is that for the first year or two, at least, I'd have to do long haul driving, which comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. On the down side, it can be a rather unhealthy lifestyle, you tend to work long hours, it's nigh impossible to lead any type of regular social life, and you're away from home 90% of the time. On the up side, the pay is decent and you get to travel all over the country and see places you might otherwise never get to visit. Long haul truckers are always in demand because it's a job that always need doing everywhere and not many people are up to doing it. There are companies that will train you, pay you while they train you, and pay for your CDL test, in exchange for agreeing to work for them for at least a set period of time after you pass your test, usually a year or 15 months or so. After that, you can keep working for them or work for someone else. Alternatively, you could pay for training and the test yourself and not be under contract to work for anybody after the test, but you're still probably going to have to work long haul for a year or two because you're not going to get a local CDL driving job with no experience. So, assuming I go through with this, the plan is that I'll wait until late February or March then quit my current job and hook up with a company that will train me and pay me while they're doing it. I don't want to do it now because I don't want to take the chance of getting sent to Minnesota or North Dakota or something while I'm still learning the ropes and have to untarp (a process that can take half an hour or longer) in 0 degree temperatures. Conversely, I don't want to start in the summer and have to untarp in Houston in 105 degree temperatures with the sun beating on me while just starting out. Both are scenarios I may well have to face eventually, I just don't want to face them while still wet behind the ears. Anyway, I'll do long haul for 2 years or so, then try to get a local driving job where I can be home on a regular basis and lead a more regular life again. If I wind up hating the job I can always go back to what I am doing now, plus having a CDL is a very useful tool that opens up jobs that are not all driving, but require someone who has a CDL in case driving a big rig is needed. If I do go through with it, I'll report back here and give you stories from the open road. Also, I'll need a spiffy handle like Dirty Frog or something for my fellow truckers to call me by (or maybe that's just in the movies ).

The Ass Catch

I finished mission 10 in Shadow Tactics. It was a mission full of sadness. I took my anger and anguish out on the enemies in the mission, killing every last one of them. I laughed gleefully as I dumped their corpses into wells and off the sides of cliffs. May their bodies never be found and their souls never find rest.

Man, Connor Cook isn't exactly playing well, but his receivers aren't doing him any favors either. When he has thrown accurate passes they're just plain dropping them.

I'm ready for some playoff footbaw. /rubs hands together

That's just plain stupid. It's not only insanely expensive, it's also impractical. You reach a certain level of pixel density beyond which it just doesn't matter, or, at best, you get extremely diminishing returns. You're paying an exorbitant amount for a monitor that, in practice, will look maybe 2% more sharp than a 32" 4K monitor and you require a significantly more powerful and expensive GPU(s) to run it at full resolution. You're basically flushing thousands of dollars down the toilet and getting no practical advantage for it.

Alienware Arena is giving away beta demo Steam keys of the upcoming Disgaea 2 PC release. There is a limited number of keys, so if you want one then act fast. You need to already have an account with them or make one to get the key.

Did you get to kill any ladies? Oh absolutely. Complete ladykiller, I slayed them all. And was absolutely not stood up at all by anyone at any point.

Did you get to kill any ladies?

I personally don't see Moore as much of a downgrade from Tannehill. The bigger issue is the Fins being one of the very worst in the run defense department, both in terms of yards per carry and yards per game, and a certain running back by the name of Le'Veon Bell on the other side of the ball.

The winner of that game is likely getting fed to the Pats (I know the Fins beat the Stillers earlier in the year, but I don't see it happening again), I'm not sure it mattets which team Belichick & Co. feast on.

Scratch that, it's now the marquee matchup of Connor Cook vs Brock Osweiler

So, I planned to make hamburger helper, to have some for dinner and have some for lunch tomorrow. I browned the beef and it was at this point that I realized that I didn't, in fact, have any hamburger helper on hand. Not wanting to waste the beef I improvised, threw in a can of cream of mushroom soup, chopped up some more mushrooms to add in to increase the mushroom content, added in spaghetti, since it was the only kind of noodles I had on hand, and made makeshift hamburger helper. It came out surprisingly not disgusting.

So we have the wild card weekend schedule (all times EST): Saturday 4:35 PM Oakland Raiders at Houston Texans - The marquee matchup of Matt McGloin vs Brock Osweiler 8:15 PM Detroit Lions at Seattle Seahawks - I was right several weeks back when I predicted the Lions wouldn't win another game this regular season. I was wrong about them missing the playoffs, as I failed to predict the Skins and Bucs would also **** the bed and allow them to back into the playoffs. The C-Hox haven't been the same since they lost the heart & soul of their defense, Earl Thomas. That said, the game is in Seattle, which is still a big home field advantage, and I expect the C-Hox to win. Sunday1:05 PM Miami Dolphins at Pittsburgh Steelers - I'm not sure whether it will be Ryan Tannehill or Matt Moore starting for the Fins, but I don't think it will much matter. I expect to see a lot of Le'Veon Bell shredding Miami's piss poor running D. 4:40 PM NY Giants at Green Bay Packers - On paper, this looks to be the best game of the weekend. The Giants have one of the best defenses in the league and feature one of the most explosive weapons on offense in Odell Beckham Jr. The Packers are on a 6 game winning streak and Aaron Rodgers seems to have his swagger back after a rather poor start to the season. This one's a coin flip in my eyes. I'll be rooting for the Lions, though I expect them to lose. The Lions got exposed after their streak of pulling 4th quarter comeback wins out of their asses sputtered out and seem to be by far the weakest team in the NFC playoffs. Plus, my Boys already know that we can beat them. In the end, we'll face whoever we face (probably the winner of Giants/Packers) the following week.

I figure Satan would be into ridiculously punishing and unfair platformers like I wanna Be the Boshy and f2p mobile games designed to part impressionable children with their parents' money.

Steam reviews can be useful, but you need to read a bunch of them and use your judgement to formulate an overall picture and filter out the legit reviews from the meme reviews, fanboy reviews, and people that have a bone to pick with the developer reviews (I never understood these, but they exist for some reason).

At least 10. I just finished the 9th, which, at first, was set up like it would be the final mission. I suspected otherwise and was correct as there was a PLOT TWIST! Mission 9 was ruthlessly difficult and I now have developed an intense hatred of chickens. Also, these missions would be a bit easier if I hadn't made a promise to myself to kill no civilians. They would still be difficult missions, but there are certain parts that would be made much easier if I just shed a bit of innocent blood. I have to say I'm pretty proud of myself as I managed to kill 5 guards at the same time in the last mission using 3 characters simultaneously. It took me many attempts to get the set up and timing just right to pull it off, but it was so damn satisfying when I finally made it work.

Don't love Volo too much, y'all are playing against each other next week.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the Chip Kelly NFL experiment is over. If it's not and someone is dumb enough to hire him in the NFL again they deserve all the misery their franchise will suffer as a result. Granted, I can't completely pin the Niners trainwreck season on Chip, as it was already an organization in self-destruct mode before he arrived, but he did set the Iggles back several years by getting rid of several of their best players and didn't do the Niners any favors either. Back to college with you, Chip. Golem get ye gone! As for my Boys, we lost a meaningless game to the Iggles where many of our starters played limited minutes, some didn't play at all. Heck, we played Dirty Sanchez at QB for most of the game. We didn't get any new injuries of concern, Romo looked sharp for the 1 series he played in, which is good to know in case we need him, and all the at all banged up guys got the night off. Also Zeke got the night off to rest his legs. I'd say mission accomplished all around.

I finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Good game. I'd say it was a small step forward in terms of gameplay and a slight step back in terms of story as compared to Human Revolution. I just think the story took too long to get going, plus the game had a big lack of compelling characters. The characters I found most interesting were K, Melania, and Duncan; it's a shame none of them played a bigger part in the game. Overall, though, I think this was a very small step forward over HR. Not the bigger step forward I had hoped it would be, but progress nevertheless. I got the Pacifist achievement on this Give Me A Challenge playthrough for not killing anyone, not even I also managed to though I failed to I plan to do another playthrough eventually on New Game+ Give Me Deus Ex difficulty and play the game bloodbath style, killing enemies indiscriminately, and all of them, if possible. As an aside, for the love of God, if your end credits sequence is going to be that long, please please please, with a cherry on top, include a key I can press to speed it up. I always watch the credits to make sure there isn't a bonus scene, and, sure enough, DX:MD included one. I won't pretend I saw it coming, but I wasn't surprised by it either. The character that pulls the Russo Swerve is one that I had some suspicions about during the game. Next up I need to finish Shadow Tactics. While this is a game I praise heartily (you've probably seen me blow my load all over it here plenty of times), it's not a game I can play in long stretches (unlike Deus Ex, for example). It's just too mentally taxing a game for me to play for extended periods of time, I usually stick to hour long sessions at most. There is so much planning and so many moving parts to keep track of at all times that it wears me out quickly. Still, I should be close to the end now, plus a game this mentally taxing is all the sweeter when you beat it.