Enoch

In a certainly related story, Don Rumsfeld is resigning. It's on the TV networks, but I can't find a link just yet.

It's a new breed of Dems tho, more conservative, aka moderate. Or, you know, balanced budgets and a new golden age! We need a weakly hopeful smiley <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm hopeful, too. The Dems owe their majority to an appeal to the center, which is a welcome relief after 6 years of Bush-Rove "the base is all that matters" governing. The problem is that all the committee chairs will go to the most senior Democrats, who also tend to be the most liberal. There's a danger that these members will drive the party's agenda too far to the left.

It's not over yet. The late votes that haven't been added in yet tend to be absentee, absentee votes tend to be military (particularly in VA, which has very strict rules on who may vote absentee), and military voters trend Republican. As for the libertarians, my pet theory is that Libertarianism is very much like Socialism, only slightly less stupid. It is like hardcore socialism because the vast majority of the supporters of both theories are either wackos who hand out newsletters on the streetcorner or college sophomores who think they're being profound. Of course, because Libertarianism is slightly less stupid than socialism, their main debate tactic is to call everything that is not libertarianism "socalist."

Got the game yesterday. Installing and patching took a while, but went smoothly. I was able to play through the whole prologue last night before I shut it off to watch election results (yes, I'm that kind of nerd, too). My first character is a Halfling Rogue2/Transmuter1 who I'll probably build into an arcane trickster. I wanted a class that could test out how all the talky skills work, and I'm not a big fan of bards. The controls seem OK so far, although I haven't budged the camera from the default view mode. (Disclaimer: This is my first 3rd person 3D RPG; so I'm not going to know what I'm missing if the controls for NWN1, WoW, or the like are much better, as the crowd at the BioBoards seems to think.) My machine is a hair below the minimum specs for CPU speed, and a hair above for memory & video: 2.0ghz P4, 1 GB RAM, 6600GT. There was a little stuttering at the transition to the Harvest Brawl (seemed to be more audio than video), but otherwise, everything ran well on the setting that the game recommended to me (I forget what they were besides low textures, and 1024-by-something resolution). Anyhow, I'm looking forward to spending the next couple of evenings with the game. Unfortunately, I have to travel to visit family over the long weekend, so that's all the playing I'll be doing for a while.

Yay! Just found out that my copy has arrived a day before Amazon told me it would and is waiting in the hands of my apartment concierge. Unfortunately, I took 45 minutes to vote this morning, so staying late at work is going to cut into my installing/patching/playing time tonight.

The game will be at the Meadowlands. The Giants will likely be lacking their top 3 DEs (that surprise pick of Kiwanuka in the draft is looking to be more helpful than expected), but Madison & Burress at least should be back.

Wow, everything's breaking for the Giants this week. Every other NFC contender except New Orleans has lost. Now if we can just get the Defense healthy. 6 important players either sat or missed the majority of the Texans game (DE Umenyiora, DE Tuck, LB Arrington, LB Short, CB Madison, & DE Strahan). Plus the starting RT (McKenzie had a migraine) and #1 WR!

Auto-flush toilets that go off whenever you lean forward. Tourists on the subway during rush hour. The fact that doctors' offices all seem to think it's OK to keep you waiting for 45 minutes after your scheduled appointment. If any other service professional did that (accountant, attorney, etc.), you'd take your business elsewhere. But you can't with Doctors, because they all do it!!

No recipe at the moment; I'd just like to state my opinion that no kitchen should be without a copy of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. Lots of good recipes, yes, but it's key strength is the descriptive techniques for a huge variety of cooking (mostly European/American style, but there are some more exotic offerings, too). For an everyday home cook, it covers all the bases and is well-written to boot.

I got fed up with local stores not having non-preorder copies (I checked five of them), so I ordered it from Amazon. It should be here Wednesday. Whoever does the ordering for Best Buy & EB/Gamestop in Northern VA should be fired.

I guess they're going back to their roots.

And did you? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I did not. 0-for-3. The subway-accessible stores in the DC area seem to be picked clean. Oh well. I've got to take the car out of the garage to get a oil change this weekend anyway; I might as well venture out to the 'burbs to hunt down a copy. Failing that, I've got a good book to read.

Tan shirt (long sleeved, button-down), green slacks, brown belt, brown shoes. I also seem to have gotten some honey mustard on the cuff of the shirt.

But how do you know whether a game will sell out? I don't really buy more than a half-dozen games per year, and very few of those are bought on or near "Day 1." Plus, I recently moved and am unfamiliar with how the stores around here operate. And the whole "job" thing kinda prevents hanging around the store waiting for the shipment to come in. But my problems aren't worth cluttering the thread. I want to here more on what the game is actually like (and how it runs on a sub-spec CPU).

Good news for Obsidian/Atari: Game was sold out at 2 stores I asked at earlier this evening. Bad news for me: Game was sold out at 2 stores I asked at earlier this evening. Maybe there is something to this whole "pre-ordering" thing...

Count me in the "don't get it" crowd. Yeah, I recognized the Holst, but I spent the whole clip wondering if he was supposed to be Arthur's arch-nemisis or something. But that's not entirely surprising. I find that most of the so-called "adult" programming on the cartoon channel have sucked mightily since they stopped making new Space Ghost episodes. Some of Birdman & Sealab were funny, but both series got old fast.

Waiting for the ice cream to thaw enough to be dished out.

You are a little worse off than I am. I'm playing on lowish settings right now with a P4 1.7GHz, 768MB RAM and a 9600 Pro. It's slow enough that I'm noticing some stuttering, however it hasn't really diminished my enjoyment of the game so far, probably because I'm used to the stuttering from other games. If you lower everything down to the bare minimum you should be able to play the game. You may have really poor looking characters and have to run at 800x600, but I would think that you could possibly do it depending on what your tolerances are. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's reassuring. Keep us posted on how the game's treating your rig. I'm a bit better off in terms of CPU & RAM, but I don't know how a 9600 pro compares with a 6600GT. If I can play through the whole game on min settings, that's enough for me at the moment (I'm trying to put off upgrading until the new year).

Now I'm alarmed. That's considerably more stringent than the ones I've seen floating around the net. Is that what it says on the side of the box or in the manual?

I'm curious to see if anybody has run the game with a bare minimum processor, as I will be (2.0 ghz P4). The rest of my system is somewhat more respectable (1 GB RAM; 6600GT). I'm probably not going to pick it up until tomorrow after work at the earliest, but I'd be nice to know what kind of performance problems I might be getting into.

In honor of Halloween, I'm listening to Eyeball Skeleton - Eyeball Skeleton. Because what is Halloween about more than a couple of grade-schoolers making up songs about monsters?

My guess is that he's talking about people who didn't like NWN because of the excessively detailed and quirky D&D ruleset.

That's probably true of the traditional "dark alley in a bad neighborhood" kind of rape. But with more "date rape" type situations, I'm guessing that lust can be the stronger motive (e.g., the 'assailant' takes the backseat necking session a step too far). If you read the article, it notes that the effect was most evident in a decline in rapes by 15-19 year old perpetrators, which seems in line with this.

I'll bite. I'd break your top-10 into 3 tiers, because, while it's often too hard to make individual distinctions, there are some clear breaks in the data: Tier 1: Manning the Elder & Brady (collectively, "Peytom Branning") Tier 2: Your 3-6 (Brees, McNabb, Palmer (if healthy), & Hasselbeck), which I have no problem with. Tier 3: Bulger, Green, Roethlisberger (if healthy). This leaves me with a top-9. I don't really know which of the remaining players should be #10. I'm not a Mike Vick fan. I don't think we have enough data on Grossman or Rivers (both can count the number of games they've played against non-horrendous defenses on their thumbs) to crown their asses just yet. Delhomme is nothing without Steve Smith. The Giants homer in me wants to pick Eli, but he has 3-4 scary dumb/inaccurate throws per game, which is just too many.

Clicky. Excerpt: