majestic

Odd, GOG's version worked out of the box for me. You might want to try DarkXL. Works pretty well in my experience and adding mouselook is a nice extra bonus.

Ah zis is very good, do you remember anyzing mein Freund? edit: Barti's new avatar breaks my brain when he's talking to Amentep. It's... distracting. I can't be the only one, can I?

Yeah, the movie is supposed to play in a version of the events where Roland kept the Horn of Eld. Still, it really looks rather compressed, given the amount of source material. While much of it is simply unsuitable for adaptation - Wizard and Glass is one giant 800 page flashback and Wolves of the Calla is simply The Magnificent Seven set in Roland's world (never mind the parts where King shows up) it's still jarring to see Susannah and Eddie apparently dropped completely and all the villains fused into The Man in Black. The trailer also tried way too hard in showing how much of an awesome badass Roland is.

There's no one stopping anyone from making graphic novel adaptations (well maybe licencing issues but that's not really the point here) - there's 300, Watchmen and Sin City for instance. I'd argue strongly against PG13 precluding a movie being interesting, nor are all MCU films cookies with a slightly different taste. The first batch were, yeah, mostly due to the origin story problematic where one most often runs in to the seemingly inevitable boss battle Lexx mentioned (also known as "giant laser shooting in the sky" effect). Marvel's "Phase 2" has seen some shifts and tried new things. Some films got darker and edgier (The Winter Soldier was really, really good, Civil War less so, but both were much different from the straightforward The First Avenger) and some tried new things. While there's no accounting for taste and all that jazz I think it's demonstrably wrong to brush them all with one stroke. The Guardians of the Galaxy you mentioned as a deviation from the typical comic book superhero movie coming before. As was Deadpool. I mean look at what these movies have done to Suicide Squad - panicked executives littered the movie with pop music and forced extensive reshoots to move it more towards what Marvel was doing.

Our office building is currently undergoing some reconstruction and expansion. Everyone on the upper floor received temporary offices while everyone from the lower floor got to stay. Because, well, there simply is no more temporary office space around and also the construction crew and our facility management took an "educated" guess and estimated that we should be fine because most of the work will be on the upper floors anyway. Right. So literally the entire building except our office and the office next to us is one big construction site. Part of the walls are missing which is fun considering the recent weather and there's enough dust in the air to turn our snot a dark, ashen gray (you can thank me for the mental image later). Today though the construction guys actively tried to kill us. Across the hallway there's a small room where they tore down a wall today. With a pneumatic jackhammer. Which was about 3 meters away from our office (whoever the genius was who tought that level of noise was acceptable should have their eardrums pierced) and they set up the diesel compressor right in front of our office. Mmmm. Nothing like inhaling diesel exhaust for lunch. So we all went home to do the home office thing. Got home, noticed that there's no power. The RCD tripped for some reason, a few seconds of trial and error told me that my boiler died while I was away. Yay. So I checked the thing after finishing work, one of the heating circuits died, luckily it can operate on only one, it just takes twice as long to heat up. Just had a nice cold shower to top the day. Bah.

Blade I'd argue that most superhero movies that came out in the past few years were good, with a few exceptions. They're not high-brow entertainment of course - but eh, neither was Blade (I love the series, yeah, even the second one). I'm not sure I'd rate any of them as great* movies and I doubt any of them will go down in history except for being amongst the highest grossing movies of all time. But even the most forgettable Marvel MCU fare these days is competently made. While I found much of it to be completely forgettable (like Iron Man 2 or Thor) they are arguably well made - good - movies. Especially when compared to other blockbuster summer movie crap that happens to be around, like Transformers or any number of Roland Emmerich films. * I suppose Logan comes as close to great as mainstream comic book movies can. Of course there are always films like Birdman or Super, but those weren't based on existing comic books. Nor were they really superhero movies per se.

Right. You forgot your pills again, didn't you? edit: Seriously though, just admit you were triggered. It happens to the best of us.

Is it like this? Hm, that reminds me of an ol' Axe commercial. Let's see if I can find it... Ah, there we go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAb86iJSuig

For a more serious reply, wow, talk about hysterics. Guy says that he disagrees with the idea of a headscarf ban - something demanded by right-wing populists all across Europe for about two decades now - and then goes on a hyperbolic statement that we'll eventually might end up wearing the things out of solidarity at some point. The "media" picks it up, runs it through google translate three times and we end up with the headline reading Far-Left Austrian President: All Women Must Wear Headscarves to Fight Islamophobia and Volo crying Nazi and me spending way too much time on this message board arguing... again. And not even in favor of something I really believe in. I mean, personally, I'd rather be free of religion than having freedom of religion but banning items of clothing sure doesn't seem to be the right way to deal with Muslim immigration and the culture clash. Since when does out of sight, out of mind actually work? Besides, it really always does strike me as wrong to limit personal freedom for no real reason. *shrug*

He never said any of that. Are you triggered by someone advocating that everyone should have the freedom to wear whatever they like? Are you an enemy of FREEDOM? There's a difference between being facetious and "asking" and "forcing", I mean, like, are you projecting here? R00fles.

So I went and watched me some Ghost in the Shell. It's visually impressive enough but the way the story has been dumbed down is equally impressive. Didn't expect much and got exactly that, I guess. Should've picked the Power Rangers movie I guess.

McCarthy would have a field day with you pinkos. Heh.

I've always believed that recreational drugs should be much less regulated than they are now and I always thought it hypocritical to have legal access to tobacco and alcholol but not, say, dope. Reading through these threads though, I don't know. They do make a great case against legalization.

Oh, nice, it finally went public. Looking forward to it. Not sure that I like the premise but squad TB combat from the creator of the real X-COM? Count me in.

That's not such a surprise. GoG has a huge list of classics, many of them exlusives, that come with no strings attached, and when business reality forced GoG into regional pricing they at least introduced the GoG wallet system. Which was super helpful for a while but now isn't that great any more, what with exchange rates being what they are - but that can change again. There's also the itsy bitsy tiny fact that GoG's classics are generally more stable and none of the other advantages of the other platforms apply to them anyway.

I'd add Steam to that. Same ****, different veneer. Are you dissing the great GabeN, gaming messiah and single-handed saviour of PC gaming? To be honest I also avoid Steam, Uplay and Origin as much as I can - and it becomes easier all the time with more and more available on GOG, but that has its own problems. I completely understand why GOG diversified like that but I want some moar ol' geams, kthx? Where's muh Star Trek Armada and Armada 2, those I would pay good money for. They're practically unfixable these days, outside of going all the way and using a virtual installation of an old version of Windows.

Oh look, it's Luke playing Yoda in an The Empire Strikes Back remake. /cynicism

I just spent a couple hours going through my old hardwarem software and games heap to throw away stuff with no value any more (things like software bundled to certain pieces of hardware I no longer own, like oh-so-many burning kits). Talk about a trip down the memory lane. Good ol' dialup software from over 20 years ago, BBS telephone number lists, a freaking Internet Explorer on CD, Shareware stuff I picked up from a exhibition back in '91 where one of the games on it came with a virus. My copy of Ultima Online. Play at home versions of games that were played on TV shows where the candidates called the host and controlled the characters through dial tones. A ton of games companies made for advertising, mostly little adventures. CDs filled with patches. A couple hundred 3.5" disks and a good deal of 5.25" ones. Fun hardware pieces as well. A whole bunch of 10BASE2 cables and NIC cards we used to do some serious multiplayering way before it was cool. An old computer from IBM (I think that one has an Intel 486 DX with 66 Mhz) that I used as firewall and router for my home network until internet bandwidth improved beyond the old ISA bus throughput rate (5 Mbit/s). And last, but not least, my SCSI host card and the disk burner I got with it. Cuz buffer underruns were for IDE noobs. Seriously.

If you get all riled up about pinapple on a pizza how about kebab pizza?

Well it's not really on the telly since I'm watching it on my PC but I've been binge watching Half in the Bag. I've seen numerous episodes over the years, but never all of them in the right order. Now it happend, I'm at Episode 100, which is a little off-putting. I've seen it before, obviously. I find myself agreeing with Mike and Jay often enough and watched a bunch of movies based on their recommendation alone (or the fact that they were B-movies and showed up, like Deathbed & Disco Godfather or more recently the utterly wonderful Turbo Kid) but I can't for the life of my understand how they can rightfully hate ST: Into Darkness but actually enjoy ST: Beyond (Episode 113 comping up soon I guess) or be *that* full of praise for TFA after riding oh-so-many reboots and remakes all the time for being too similar and not original enough. At least it has Rich Evans who gets it ("it's a competently made movie, and that is all it had to be"). It's probably like that old Tibetan piece of wisdom: Even old shirts look like new when you put them next to even older ones. *shrug*

Damn, that's a cool logo your party has. Although I'd argue these guys have a cooler one http://www.cpusa.org On a more serious note: Since you seem like a somewhat more... sophisticated guy, I would be interested to know what you think about socialism, communism, anarchism and the whole (far) left bunch. Just out of interest Most likely the same thing you think about pure laissez-faire capitalism. Think of a group that would make your FDP look like a bunch of socialists whiners and there you go, libertarians.

Heh. Game just became utterly unresponsive to input after debriefing a strike team. Score one for the new patch.

You could ask Hainly why she joined the initiative and she basically told you she wanted a fresh start as Hainly and to stop being Stephan. Then she said her name is made up from the first letters of her favorite cities. It's very similar to that infamous dialogue in Siege of Dragonspear and I was pretty bewildered that there hasn't been some anti-SJW alt-moron neckbeard diatribe about that dialogue yet, and now I read that it essentially received the exact opposite of a reaction, what with the LGBT community being pissed off at it. The saying used to go that it is impossible to please everyone. These days it seems as if it is impossible to please anyone. Oh boy. The thing is, in this game you can ask then thousand different minor NPCs why they joined up with the Andromeda Initiative and they ALL info-dump you at that very moment. Mostly because you'll probably never ever talk to them again unless they get a quest later. By the way, most of them signed up for the adventure or to leave an old unhappy life behind. Some with more and some with less legal backgrounds.

Why would you punish me and thousands of other innocent players? In other news, I encountered this: https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/61itql/no_spoilers_huge_combatencounter_xp_bug_you_might/ In short, if you are not gaining combat XP, your game is broken with no fix. Good times. What? Nah. I'm not talking about actual players testing the game in a beta but EA/Bio's internal QA. Not likely to be playtesters/QA's fault. Given that the project was apparently behind on schedule, it's quite possibly they never really fully got to that stage...or if they did, they didn't have the time on their current schedule to heed them. Yeah, maybe. They devs probably slapped the menues together with the idea of revising them later, but that later probably never came. Actually that's fairly common in software development in general. I've seen a lot of hacks and quick'n'dirty solutions become permanent over the years, and on projects with less strict deadlines and way less complexity than a game of this size.

Aside from geometry gaps and quest breaking bugs, this was the single most important thing to fix. Next up UI and menus. Indeed. It would be nice if buttons consistently did the same thing. The same button loads and deletes savegames in different screens, that's a recipe for disaster. Came awfully close to deleting my games at times. The playtesters of this game need to be punished by a mandatory 100 gameplay hours of Ruins of Myth Drannor. The ones who designed the UI and the controls get 200.