Enoch

Yeah, I did some of that, too. In a few of the spots,

The Normandy Crash Site is enjoyable only if you're all weepy and nostalgic about ME1. Otherwise, it's a lame pixel hunt. And the memorial that the Alliance gives you to put there looks ridiculous. I did the and Tali's loyalty quest last night. Spoiler request: How is ? Also, on Tali's quest, I predictably failed the dialogue check at the end. I presume that making it ? (Personally, I don't really mind the outcome I got-- it's a more poetic sacrifice than making everything all better would be.) Oh, and I now agree with whoever it was a while back who said that the usefulness of Throw lies in its quick cooldown time. The hordes of were a simple matter of getting enough distance so that Throw could recharge faster than the rate they were coming at me. (That and constantly running side to side to avoid )

Fun instance of total pwnage: Taking Garrus and Miranda along with my Sentinel on the Tali recruitment mission. 3 people with Override makes any kind of Geth opposition quite trivial. (Really, if the Quarians are the tech masters that we are led to believe they are, how the heck have they not completely trounced the Geth already?) Also fun: Mordin with maximum Incinerate against Krogan. (And not just for when he says "Flammable! Or Inflammable. Forget which; doesn't matter." in the middle of combat.)

As of 9/30/09 (the end of the Federal fiscal year), the estimated net cost of operation of the TARP (meaning, the subsidy cost of all the purchases, plus net losses already booked, plus operational costs) was $41.6 billion. Link. I haven't checked lately, but I don't think that the repayments have gotten to the "most" point yet-- some high-profile entities have gotten out, but there is a lot of money still outstanding. The CRA stuff has been pretty thoroughly debunked. The repeal of Glass-Steagall did have a role in this, but a far far more important immediate cause was the decision by the SEC in 2004 to remove leverage limits on the big investment banks. At the crazy leverage levels these firms quickly got to, a 3% decline in the total value of their assets would be enough to make the whole company insolvent. Once those leverage levels were achieved, it was just a matter of time. The housing crash was the immediate cause, but if that didn't happen, something else would have done it sooner or later. With the endorsement of the Clinton administration, and Clinton signed it into law. So, if a bill is passed and a president signs it he automatically is a supporter of said bill. Are you saying he's not? Personally I didn't find any evidence of this, did you? Treasury Sec'y Robert Rubin was the driving force behind support for "financial reform" in the Clinton Administration. Both parties share a fair amount of blame-- the financial industry really had both sides pretty thoroughly bought. But Rubin's recruitment (from the industry) was a product of deliberate political strategy. Back in the early '90s, the Democrats were tired of constantly getting their asses kicked in fundraising. Their solution was to refine their policies and fundraising pitches to appeal to big business in those sectors that didn't conflict with their support from unions and environmentalists. That meant Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The phrase I like to borrow is that we didn't have a subprime mortgage crisis-- we've had a subprime generation of financial and political elites. I've linked this article here before, but it's worth a read if anybody missed it. (As is the authors' blog.)

@Chrisimo: You left a pretty important term un-'spoilered' there.

Have you somehow lived you life without having heard this song? (Or the probably-more-well-known cover?)

I was over 25 hours into the game before I discovered that Shepard's cabin has its own bathroom. The non-Samara loyalty missions so far have been pretty interesting. I've been mostly letting the companions handle things as they please, which generally means accumulating Renegade points. Miranda . Garrus . Samara Mordin . Grunt... [not a spoiler] well Grunt just shot whatever was in front of him[/not a spoiler]. I guess it makes sense in that I have specifically sought out violent people for this mission. Thane, . Maybe the missions for Tali and Jacob will provide more balance. (Jack and Zaeed, less so.) Is anybody aggressively managing their Jerk/Sap status? My "playing it by ear but avoiding neutral options wherever reasonable" (the thinking being that both Jerk and Sap points are positives, so the only response to be avoided is the one that give you neither) has gotten me a little over halfway full on both meters, after having started with lots of Sap points and a few Jerk points from importing. This will probably hurt me later as poor meta-gaming (there have been a couple of coercion checks that I've missed so far), but I'd rather test the game out and criticize it later if meta-gaming Jerk/Sap points turns out to be important.

For the first question: Hmm... I think I'll split the difference. I'll take a trip to to do Mordin and Grunt's quests, then it's on to the . That'll put me with just over half of my squad loyalty quests done. Most boring quest so far: Samara's loyalty. Pretty lame. Although, as I mentioned before, Reave freakin' rocks-- it hits quicker than Warp (usually before enemies can duck back behind cover), does more damage, and heals you. The damage is spread over a few seconds, and it doesn't detonate other biotic effects, but it seems to work much more quickly than the 4 seconds the description claims, and the detonation is a pretty useless feature-- if an enemy is already shieldless and being Pulled (etc.), extra damage on them is overkill. I burned some eezo on respec'ing Shepard, taking all of my points out of Throw (I only put the 2 levels in necessary to open Warp) and Warp in favor of Reave.

Snowed this weekend, which was a good excuse to sit around playing the game pretty much all the time. Question: Without getting too spoilery, when should I Are people finding ammo powers useful? I haven't played with them much-- I'm playing a Sentinel, so my approach is to just spam Overload and Warp/Reave at protected enemies.

How does someone reach adulthood without have heard of the man in the moon?? It was overcast and snowing here most of yesterday/last night.

For the love of god yes! Why can't we turn those damn notifications off?! Not just the "Press F to end", but "Left click to launch a probe" and all the other idiotic messages that we really didn't need to see once, let alone a billion more times. And ironically, the one that is the most important, they tell you once and never again. I actually had to restart the tutorial to find out what it was. You know, that W + space jump-hop that only works under cover. I love how they just casually pop it in there too right in the middle of a fire-fight at level 1 when you're scrambling to stay alive. Kind of how women do the boyfriend-drop just before you go for the home phone number. If you weren't interested then why waste my time flirting? Gimme my five minutes back, you skanky tart! I never wanted you anyway! Also fun: when EDI pipes in with rather important mission info while you're in the middle of a firefight. The game clearly doesn't anticipate that I pause the game and look around after every shot, which, along with the general combat noise, renders the VO a little difficult to understand. I went through the whole Samara recruitment mission without knowing .

That's odd. Just by scanning everything in the cluster you start off in, I found more Platinum than anything else-- probably 30% more of that than of Iridium or Palladium. Edit: I am also both happy and disappointed that this worked to reduce load times.

I'm curious as to how the Verner thing is going to work in my game. When I played ME1 with this character, I spoke with him once (and was polite), but ignored him for the rest of the game. Also, am I the only one who never remembers to use the heavy weapon until too late? I always seem to realize that it would have been useful after the battle is over. (E.g., the )

Yeah, the thing from Napolitano was an absolutely idiotic thing for her to sign her name to, and was written in a quite ham-handed fashion, as if they wanted to fuel the paranoia of wacky conspiracy theorists. But it's not like there haven't been issues of violence by domestic terrorist/separatist groups-- it's definitely something that I want DHS monitoring. The rest of GD's rant is what you get when every news item is read with the mindset of always assuming the absolute worst about people you have already decided to dislike, and ignoring any evidence that they may, in fact, be human. Sadly, this is how more and more Americans on both sides of the political spectrum have been viewing the world lately.

Pretty much any FemShep who doesn't turn the "makeup" slider to the "none" setting looks like a clown. And the only hair options that look good are the ones with it either tied back in a bun (i.e., how any sensible person with long hair would prepare for a job involving frequent deadly combat) or shaved off entirely. Oh, and all the non-black hair colors look like they were done with $0.79 DIY dye from CVS. Default FemShep broke all of these rules, IIRC.

Huh? The cursor's speed was dependent on how fast I moved the mouse before I got the upgrade. The same seems to be true afterwards.

Also: Getting drunk with Dr. Chakwas was pretty awesome.

I'm still playing slowly. (Stupid work.) Recruited Garrus (fun mission), did the Normandy Crash Site bit (a pixel hunt that is only interesting if you're crazy-nostalgic for ME1), and scanned some planets. I have to say that I'm starting to agree with those who question why this scanning stuff is in the game at all. And the "scanning upgrade" I purchased doesn't seem to have done anything. Zaeed is fun. Doesn't seem to be completely integrated into the game (I tried to have a conversation with him on the Normandy, and he tells some fun war stories, but there's no dialogue interface), but when I took him with me to find Garrus, one of the gang leaders recognized him and treated me with a lot more respect. So far, he's basically Canderous, but without the whole "Mandalorian Pride" thing.

Yeah, I had the same impression. Much less of a "being a jerk for no reason" feel.

I see why people would think this, but to my ears, this is a bit like criticizing an AC/DC album for being too loud and vulgar. Sure, it's accurate, but the parts that you're calling out as weaknesses are the entire ****ing point of the work.

That was actually kind of disappointing.

Yeah, I think of her kind of like I do of Kenny G: Clearly gifted technically, but having no taste whatsoever.

Worthwhile planets: -- That one with the Forbidden Planet reference in the description. You couldn't land on it, but the reference was cool. -- The first time you get tentacle-raped by a Thresher Maw is memorable and fun. -- The first time you spot a Prothean pyramid was also cool. -- There's one planet where you meet up with some Alliance marines who are holding off waves of Rachni. A fun battle. -- Generally, the fights in the modular large above-ground buildings were some of the more intense firefights in the game. Thus, the missions that involved them (like the "Crimelords" one) were worthwhile. -- For importation-into-ME2 purposes, it's probably worth doing the "Geth Incursion" mission out in one of the clusters to the far right of the galaxy map to get the data to give to Tali.

Being on every junior-high required reading list in the country probably helps sales... (Not to take anything away from the book.) ((But Nine Stories was better.))