Keyrock

I got my 360 controller yesterday, which means I'm full speed ahead for gaming on the Monster Rig. Warning: Long-winded alert! tl;dr version: SteanmOS is currently great as a console OS, not so much as a full-fledged desktop OS. Full version: In related news, I put the SteamOS experiment on hiatus. It's simply not ready for what I want to do with it. Sure, as a Linux veteran I could mold and shape it and work through all the conflicts that arise to turn SteamOS into a full-fledged Linux disto, but why bother when I can just install a full-fledged Linux distro and have essentially what I want out of the box? It's akin to taking the round peg and putting it through the round hole, rather than taking a square peg and trying to hammer it through the round hole. In fairness to SteamOS, it's still very much in beta. Also, for what it's trying to be, it actually succeeds quite well, even right now, far from finished. As a console-like OS built around gaming, it works fabulously. It's essentially Steam Big Picture Mode with some minor tweaks. Desktop mode is hidden by default, but it's easily enough enabled with just a couple of button presses/clicks. The default desktop is rather basic, but it will likely be plenty good enough for many users as it's more robust than what you get with Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft's consoles. Still, for a power user, like myself, it's not enough (plus, as a long time Linux user, I'm used to the freedom of being able to change, rip out, substitute, and tweak absolutely everything, right down to the very core of the system). The problem with SteamOS, when trying to turn it into a more robust all-purpose desktop, is that the official repos (named "alchemist") just don't cover much beyond what comes pre-installed with the system. You wind up adding the Debian repos to the database (easy enough) to fill in the gaps (as SteamOS is based off Debian). Problem is that SteamOS has its own version of many packages, custom tweaked for whatever reason. You can set a filter easily enough so that official SteamOS packages will always be preffered over Debian packages of the same type if said package is available from both sets of repos, which does alleviate a good number of conflicts, however, conflicts will still arise and cause problems as you mix and match packages from different sources. I could surely work through the problems and make the exact desktop I want, I've gone through much worse. As stuff got updated, minor conflict problems would likely arise once more, but nothing I couldn't fix again. Still, why go through all that to mold a square peg into a round peg when I can just get a round peg to begin with? With that in mind, I downloaded and installed Xubuntu 14.04 (Based off Ubuntu, but with the snappy, clean, classic simplicity of the XFCE desktop pre-installed rather than the crime against humanity that is the Unity Desktop that Ubuntu ships with) and now I have the lovely (in a clean, simplistic sort of way), full-featured, robust desktop, along with Steam, that I would have had to take several days to achieve molding SteamOS into, in a matter of minutes. I'll give SteamOS another look several months from now to see how it's progressed. Hopefully they expand their official repos to the point where you generally don't need to add Debian repos to fill in the gaps if you want to make a full-fledged desktop and alter things to your heart's content. Then again, they might not, as that's not really the purpose of SteamOS, it's meant to be like a console, and as such, it works quite well already.

Yes put out a rather generous quantity of seriously ****ing awesome music. This particular tune features one of my favorite outros ever. It almost seems like it goes on way too long (3 minutes!), but it's so freaking good that you don't want it to stop, then the guitars kick it up a notch at the end and you wind up wishing it could have gone on for a couple more minutes. Ain't too many bands that could pull that off.

I'm waiting for the heel turn where, after gaining power, TrueNeutral changes his name to ChaoticEvil.

I wish you could disable the Neutralize prompt in the game as I like to time the hacking to take out pursuers or pursuees myself.

Chester Cheetah is very disappointed in your snack recognition skills.

I love the fact that Polar Knight wields a snow shovel. Little details like that just make my heart go aflutter.

This guy has his priorities straight.

Aww yeah, after a few delays, Shovel Knight has a release date, and it's this month, June 26th! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yachtclubgames/shovel-knight/posts/867693 Box art: Who has two thumbs and is ready to dispense shovel justice? This guy!

No there isn't. If you fight he dies (it is a fight to the death, after all). You spare him by talking him out of the fight and convincing him and his men to drop their weapons.

Crate is working on balancing Occultists, among other things, and that mastery will supposedly get a bit of a boost in the next update (B19), along with 2-handed melee weapons and other goodies. I'm pretty excited for 2-handed melee weapons, though it will mean respecing my Witchblade as I use a couple skills that require a shield. I'm sure balancing 2-handed melee weapons will be a long process (as it has been with rifles), as you lose a slot and along with it all the magical bonuses you could have had in that slot and the attachment you could have put into it, along with whatever extra damage or defense you could have gotten from either a second weapon or a shield or caster focus.

I wound up taking some of the money I saved by buying the Xeon instead of the i7-4790K + aftermarket cooler and plunked down for a Logitech Z506 5.1 surround speaker system. Not the greatest system in the world, but I'm not an audiophile and I'm sure it will be plenty good enough for me. Definitely an upgrade over the ****ty speakers in the 27" monitor, that's for sure, though I'll still often use my pretty good JVC circumaural headphones, especially at night when I don't want to piss off the neighbors.

That is a pretty compelling reason to kill the guy. Still, the game has no shortage of bare breasts, so I can go without seeing one set of them to spare what seems like a pretty stand up guy, in my canon playthrough, anyway.

Humanoid is taking the everyone must die approach. I take it you killed Aryan La Valette as well?

Wow, I can't believe there are people out there giving LeBron crap for leaving the game with cramps (not anyone here, mind you). When you get hardcore cramps it's not a matter of playing through the pain or willing yourself to play, your body simply will not allow you walk around. It's not a question of will or competitive spirit. Suggesting that LeBron quit on his team is just ridiculous. I guess with just how stunning Miami's collaps in the 4th was last night it's overreation time as usual.

Yeah, hitting enemies with a melee weapon feels appropriately chunky and powerful. The bodies exploding is maybe a bit too over the top, but satisfying nonetheless. Similarly, firing guns just feels powerful, and the recoil animation is just right, something that was lacking in the very early builds of the game. Also, they're really nailing down the balance in the game, another area where Grim Dawn is superior to the Val Helsing games, in my opinion. Occultist skills tend to be a little underpowered at the moment, especially if you're going to a primarily Occultist build, but it's a continuous process getting the masteries and the multitude of mastery combinations just right and Crate Entertainment have the game pretty well dialed in right now.

I'm pretty sure that's who Humanoid was talking about. In my Roche path playthroughs I killed him, err, let Roche kill him. My canon playthrough is a Iorveth path playthrough, though, so he lives.

Naah, he didn't need Geralt for anything, he was just collateral damage, in fact it kinda bit him in the rear. He did maybe overestimate Serrit and Auckes' abilities, but it was necessary for him to get to Loc Muinne in time. 2 kings were already dead and so he hedged his bets Was talking about the fat king, who I will take to be canonically dead in my game if at all possible. Would've been great to go four out of four! You want Radovid the Stern dead too? If anyone is going to save the Northern Kingdoms from becoming provinces of the Nilfgaardian Empire, it will be him. He's far and away the most overall competent to rule and stand up to Nilfgaard of those still alive or now dead.

Good for you. I tried twice and was unlucky both times. That's the way she goes. Yep, it's a roll of the dice with cheap Korean no name monitors. You get lucky and you essentially get a monitor every bit as good as a brand name monitor that costs almost twice as much, you roll snake eyes and you get something with cringeworthy backlight bleeding that looks like it was assembled by a 6 year old with a learning disability. Lady luck, she was on my side this time. Why not contact XFX before getting the card to find out about the warranty from the horse's mouth? I, personally, would get the 265. I'd be mother****ing myself every time I had to turn a setting down in a game if I got a weaker card for essentially the same price.

He completely f*cked the north for his nostalgic reunion. The north done ****ed itself. Sure, Letho didn't help matters, but the northern kingdoms were already in the process of disintegrating. In my canon playthrough, I spared Letho also.

I gotta say, I lucked out on the no name Korean monitor. No dead pixels whatsoever and a surprisingly small amount of backlight bleeding. A little bit in the lower right hand corner, but fairly minor, less than I expected.

SteamOS Rig Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 3.4GHz (3.8 max turbo) ASRock Z97X Fatal1ty motherboard 16GB ADATA XPG V2 DDR3 2400 (PC-19200) EVGA GeForce GTX 780Ti Superclocked 3GB GDDR5 Seagate 600 Series 480GB SATA3 SSD WD 750GB 7200RPM SATA HDD Antec GX500 Mid-Tower Green 27" ITC Lava 2560x1440 monitor Cooler Master Rapid Quick Fire 10-Keyless MX Brown keyboard Kensington Orbit Trackball Microsoft XBox 360 wired controller Thrustmaster Hotas-X Flightstick

The Witcher 2. I am limited in what I can play until my new 360 controller arrives (hopefully tomorrow, likely Monday). Also, I want something that pushes graphical boundaries so that I can see what the 780Ti can do and orgasm to 1440p glory. The Witcher 2 will surely achieve that. It's downloading at the moment. In the meanwhile I'm de-gimping SteamOS into a more full featured Linux system. I understand why so much stuff is hidden from the user in the default setup, since it's meant to function like a console, and in its default setup it does just that, booting you straight into Steam Big Picture Mode. So far I've changed it to booting to a login screen from where I can go straight to desktop (also, I'm not a fan of having a computer, even a private desktop in a locked apartment that bypasses login and boots straight into the system with no password needed) and I've added in official Debian repos so that I can install more programs. Next order of business is to replace this Gnome 3 desktop with something I like better, either Cinnamon or XFCE. The great thing about Linux is that ifi you don't like something, even parts of the base system, you can replace them with something else, and there will likely be several, if not dozens, of alternative choices. As an aside, I am THOROUGHLY impressed with how quiet the 3 stock 120mm fans in my ANTEC GX500 case are. They essentially make no noise at all even when running full bore, all you hear is the movement of the air.

The only thing that trailer is missing is someone from CDPR dropping the mic and walking off the stage at the end. They are the undisputed heavyweight trailer champions of the world.

It's alive. It's aliiiiiiiiive! Of course the official SteamOS installer is garbage, so I'm in the process of downloading a custom installer iso one of the Linux hackers made that has way better... everything (Seriously, GabeN, you used to work for freakin' Microsoft. Can't you make a decent installer?). But I booted the beast up and it ran, went into BIOS (the ASRock BIOS looks sexy as ****), changed the XMP mode for my RAM. Everything works fine so far. Monitor looks good, no dead pixels noticed. Granted, this is all from a few moments of experience. It only took me 3 tries to get everything hooked up correctly. I actually had all the switch and LEDs hooked up correctly first try, but neglected to connect the 12V CPU power connector (doh!). Once I got that hooked up I noticed I neglected to hook up the chassis fans to the power supply (doh! doh!). Now I think everything is hooked up properly.