Keyrock

Call me crazy, but I find retconning established history, both real world and fictitious, for the purposes of being able to include a token characters so that you can trumpet how 'diverse' your work is and show off your ethnicity checklist a heck of a lot more offensive than creating a work that does not include a diverse cast but sticks to a cohesive theme.

I'm all done booking my trip to Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm leaving from Hartford on Thursday July 16th, arriving in Charlotte on Friday in the morning, then I'm leaving Charlotte Sunday Night and arriving back in Hartford on Monday early afternoon. The trip is smack dab in the middle of July, so there's a good chance of near peak temperatures (obviously, there's always a chance I happen to catch an unusually cold weather pattern). The trip has set me back about $430 so far for round trip bus tickets, motel, and rent-a-car. My planned budget for the trip is $800, so I should easily come in under that, as I can't imagine myself spending above $370 for gas, food, tickets to attractions, etc... unless I get hookers.

I see drunken ***holes is not a phenomenon limited to America, then.

You are super duper lucky, or the Dutch clean their roads a heck of a lot better than Americans (likely a bit of both). As for slow leaks, I've gotten those too, though I haven't gotten one in probably 4 or 5 years. It's worth it just to change the tube at that point, rather than have to reinflate it periodically (plus it's pretty much guaranteed to eventually get worse).

I went for a rather abbreviated bike ride this morning. I got about a mile and a half from my house then caught a flat, the second one in about a month's time. Oh well, I guess that evens things out for my previous lucky streak of going 2 years without catching a flat. Anyway, no big deal as I'm always prepared. I changed the tube, got my pump and started trying to inflate the new tube, except the pump's not working... Uh oh. I fiddled with the pump for a few minutes and it magically started working again. I don't know what I did to fix it nor do I know why it didn't work in the first place, but I was able to inflate my new tube. At that point, after putting the wheel back on and putting all my tools away, I headed straight back home. I did have another spare tube with me, but that spare does me no good if I can't inflate it and I'm not going to chance getting stuck with a flat and a malfunctioning pump 5 or 10 miles from home. I'll stop at the bike store on my way home Monday or Tuesday and drop 10 or 15 bucks on a new pump. No bike riding until then. In other news, I'm starting to plan out my trip to North Carolina for next month. I originally thought about taking a train, as I haven't been on a train in probably about 20 years and I thought it would be cool to do that, but holy **** Amtrak is expensive. Instead, I'll take a Greyhound or Peter Pan bus, whichever is cheaper. I'm going to probably take a Thursday, Friday, and Monday off from work, giving me a 5 day weekend, as well as a couple abbreviated work weeks (bonus!), I'll take a bus down to Charlotte, rent a car and a motel, then spend probably 4 days there checking out the area, maybe catching a minor league baseball game or a wrestling show, or a race, or something. I want to go around mid-July because I purposely want to go during the hottest time of the year, so that I can experience for myself how hot it is. I'm determined to make the upcoming winter my last Connecticut winter (my lease runs through March, so I have to suffer through another CT winter unless I want to break my lease) and North Carolina is one of the places at the top of my list to move to. I'm tired of freezing my ass of during the winter, plus Connecticut is just a crappy place to live in unless you have more money than you know what to do with, as the taxes here are ridiculous. I'm looking to move to an area with a short, mild winter (as opposed to somewhere like Florida, where winter doesn't exist) and North Carolina seems to fit the bill. I'm thinking about the middle of the state, that way it will be a couple hour drive to the coast and a couple hour drive to the Smoky Mountains, plus any hurricane that comes up the coast should be rather weakened by the time it gets that far inland and I would be far enough away from the mountains to not get the cold air and snow coming off them during winter. Then there's the matter of finding work and a place to live, so I need to keep the belt tight for the rest of the year to build up as much of a cushion in my bank account as I can, so that I have something to live off of if I can't get a stable and good paying job right away and have to scrape by on whatever **** job I can find. The destination is, of course, very much subject to change, and moving hundreds of miles away from all my family to an unfamiliar location is scary, but I'm determined to do it. I'm so ****ing sick of Connecticut, I've lived here for far too long.

I see Kerbal Space Program is on sale. Temptation level rising... /starts to reach for wallet ...rising... //willpower kicks in I'll wait for a deeper discount. Crisis averted.

Same. I hope they get money to finish the game and make it the best they can, but I'm not pledging a second time.

Just playing more Strife. I did a couple of matches as Vermillion, won one lost the other. I actually had a blast in the game my team lost, it was a really tense match. It was a close match but we were losing and 2 out of our 3 generators were down, but we managed to wipe the opposing team as they took the second generator down. We all pushed out the lanes a bit then went for a YOLO push down the middle and came really close to destroying the enemy base, but ultimately we got wiped and the other team finished us off. It was a super fun game that went really long. I was 6-slotted at the end with ridiculous attack speed. The lifesteal/attack speed build works really well for Vermillion, I like it a lot. When you get him 6-slotted with that build he's like a machinegun. I still mostly suck at the game, but at least I don't completely suck any more. It takes many many hours to get even halfway decent at a MOBA.

I dislike that too. I dislike the shared team leveling even more. I know the various MOBAs all have their own little nuances that differentiate them to some extent, but in the end, pretty much all of them boil down to the same formula. What I'd like to see is a game try to shake up the standard 3 lanes, outer towers, inner towers, generators/barracks, base formula. That formula works quite well, but we have plenty of games using that exact formula already, let's see something different.

You do realize that the only MOBA that didn't try to shake things up was Heroes of Newerth and DotA 2? Every other one did something new. Not exactly true. For example, Infinite Crisis is essentially a reskin of LoL, it's practically identical (and coincidentally shutting down soon). What I meant was that they seem to be making larger changes to the formula. The differences between, for example, DotA 2 and LoL are not that great. The basic setup is quite similar, even the map is almost identical. Even HotS, which differentiates itself a little more with its various maps and larger array of objectives, still uses essentially the same exact formula as DotA, just in a more simplified form.

I'm eager to try a Steam controller. I don't expect it to be revolutionary, but I really want to try it out. I hope they will have somewhere that I can physically hold and use it, like at a Best Buy or GameStop or whatever.

Hopefully the new AMD GPUs are super duper fast and priced competitively. We need AMD to keep Nvidia honest(ish) and vice versa. Now if only AMD could actually compete with Intel again on the CPU front... *sigh*

^ 60 FPS? On PS4? Surely that must be a misprint... or it's running on Wii U. I'll show myself out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaQK7HX2CXE I'm somewhat compelled to make a snarky comment about yet another MOBA, but that would be kind of hypocritical, as I'm having fun with a MOBA currently. Plus, at least it seems they're trying something a little different with the genre. I will say that the art style makes me want to

Figures, just after I bought a 980 (ok, it's $200 cheaper than the Ti here) To be fair, if you're aiming for 1080p, you don't particularly need anything beyond a 980 right now, and I'm guessing you won't with DirectX 12 and Vulkan right around the corner for potentially better optimization in future games, not to mention the consoles holding PC games back. The 980Ti is the sweet spot if you're aiming for 1440p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVB6dSckvJI I wish they had shown some combat, since I'm still confused about how their phase-based combat will work. That said, I think it looks lovely.

I'm on the apathy train. I'd try to convince you to climb aboard, but I can't be bothered.

^ I want an Alpha Protocol 2, preferably starring SIE, so badly and it's never going to happen.

Lucha Underground is the most I cannot miss an episode under any circumstances, I will elbow a pregnant woman carrying a baby out of the way if I have to to not miss a second show since Breaking Bad ended. It's the most amazing wrestling show I've ever seen, it's like this show was written specifically for me. It's campy as all hell, hilarious at times, gets really dark at times, and they have consistent and logical character and storyline progression every single week... As logical as you can get in a universe with a reincarnated dragon in human form, an evil ninja skeleton, a teleporting succubus that controls a man who just got stronger by dying and absorbing the power from the guy who put him in the coffin, an evil authority figure who's brother is a murderous cage monster, and Chun Li. Oh, and they have really great wrestling matches and stuff like this happens:

Bethesda is poor in the attention to detail department. If you take their worlds and their writing at a glance and don't try to think about them, they're fine. As soon as you start scrutinizing, it all falls apart because it's all window dressing, but there isn't much of anything inside the shop.

Raul's tool box

Is it Yog-Sothoth? It's Yog-Sothoth, isn't it?

Just had my best game of Strife so far. I finished with 7 kills 3 assists and 6 deaths. Those aren't stellar stats, but they're not bad either. Of course, stats don't tell the whole story, but I can confidently say I played well didn't play like complete dog****, which is an achievement for me. It was in a losing effort mind you, but that's the nature of a team game, any 1 character can play well and still lose and vice versa, plus when a teammate goes AFK and you go 4 on 5, there's only so much you can do. Still, I'm starting to get the hang of the game. I have 3 characters I'm comfortable with: Malady- a ranged AoE crowd control character, Vermillion - a ranged physical damage dealer, and Nikolai - a tanky melee bruiser. I'm starting to be able to play Nikolai pretty well, though I still need to work on my timing with last hits to farm more efficiently.

I think it is pretty safe to assume it will be Wasteland II with swords. No way this will be a first person game...IMO anyway. But it is InXile so I am pledging no matter what. A lot of this will become more clear when we show our prototype footage later, but no, this game's exploration is in first-person blobber mode. I'm looking forward to seeing the video. Hopefully some of the combat will be shown in the video, because I have to admit that I'm confused about how phase-based combat will work even after reading the description on the Kickstarter page.