Enoch

Loaded up Shadowrun: Dragonfall. Got as far as the character creation screen. I'm just not really in the mood to wrestle with re-learning the ruleset enough to make a character that I'm happy with. Not sure what I'll go to next. Might need a break from CRPGs.

As a father of a 22-month-old **** with a potential new **** arriving this Spring, this is not a thing I needed to hear. (Right now, it's still a little amusing when he looks me in the eye with the "I'm about to something that I know you don't want me to do" grin on his face. But I'm not optimistic that this will still be the case 2 years from now.)

Yeah, the Chip thing is wacky. (And hilarious. And a beautiful source of schadenfreude.) There must have been some serious behind-the-scenes drama to make ownership do such an about-face less than a year after giving Kelly final personnel authority. After how patient they were with Reid, I figured it was a given that Kelly would get at least another year or two. That said, I still think that the Bradford trade was one of the silliest moves I've seen in recent years. Foles and Bradford are pretty near-equivalents as low-tier NFL starters-- you can get by with them, but neither one is good enough that a team currently starting him shouldn't be looking for a replacement. Giving up a 2nd-round pick for a like-for-like swap (and with the party you're getting only signed for 1-year, at a stupidly high base salary) is dumbfounding.

I've slacked off on buying many new-to-the world games, and I'm OK with that. PoE:tWM and Torment are paid-for already, so I'll get them and probably play after a patch or two hit the streets. Apart from that, I'll be playing catch-up. I've got a few evenings of playtime left before I wrap up Dragon Age: Inquisition (which I'm enjoying more than I expected to), and both the Shadowrun expansions are still in the queue. I'm looking forward to playing The Witcher 3 once I get around to upgrading my rig (which might be in 2016, but might not). I might eventually grab Fallout 4. A friend has been talking up Darkest Dungeon to me, so I might try that out. I enjoyed the predecessors to the forthcoming Deus Ex, Dishonored, and Mass Effect offerings enough to be interested. If they're well received, I'll pick them up once their inevitable DLC cycles near completion (2017-18, most likely).

Those numbers don't mean what you think they mean. They're from estimates produced under the Improper Payments Information Act of 2002, which requires agencies to estimate the amount of all "improper payments" in their programs. "Improper Payments" is much broader than fraud. It includes any overpayment, underpayment, payment made to the wrong recipient, and, for complicated reasons, any payment for which the people doing the estimate can't find sufficient supporting information to verify. https://paymentaccuracy.gov/ is the official reporting vehicle. It's also not a great way to defend DOD spending, because DOD can't even get its recordkeeping together well enough to produce a statistically valid estimate. But, yeah, federally-funded state-administered programs with huge numbers of beneficiaries and complicated qualification criteria are the areas where it is hardest to ensure that payments are going to the right people. (Particularly in the healthcare field, where time doesn't often allow for lengthy verification processes.) You can always make improvements, but it's kind of the nature of the beast with that type of spending.

Yep. Over 2 centuries of stable representative democracy, the last 75 years of which as the global economic, military, and cultural hegemon.

You don't think things are slightly more newsworthy when they come from the mouth of a person who is trying to become the leader of the free world than they are when they come from a cartoonist, an advocacy group, or a congressional staffer?

It's the difference between "prone to overcautious inaction" versus "prone to massive strategic blunders." On the one hand, some winnowing of the herd is to be welcomed. On the other hand, unlike many of the also-ran candidates, Graham was actually a useful divergent viewpoint to have in the room. The GOP is a different party (and probably a lesser party) when the defense hawks with serious experience (both in the military and on the relevant oversight committees) are marginalized. In fact, he's really the only candidate on the GOP side who has articulated an approach to the ISIS issue that isn't either cartoonishily unrealistic or a carbon copy of what is already being done, but with angrier rhetoric. (I mean, sure, proposing a major commitment of U.S. troops on the ground in the Middle East isn't going to win many elections so soon after Iraq/Afganistan, but it's a far more credible response than is pretending that the bombers already being sent to Syria are going to be somehow more effective if the President says the words "Islamic terrorism" when he sends them off.)

On the other hand, the Omnibus draft also includes a provision making sledding on Capitol Hill legal. So it ain't all bad!

For my part, the only reason to put up an x-mas tree at all is to have an actual goddamn pine tree in the house for awhile. It's nice to have lights in it (which enhance the experience of lying beneath the branches on one's back and looking upwards), but I could do without all the other decorations. I go buy one every year from the parking lot of the paramedic station around the block. They sell at a ridiculous markup, but I think of it as a donation to a neighborhood nonprofit, and I enjoy the experience of strolling in to buy one and surprising them by carrying it home by hand.

Home Alone, as written by Cormac McCarthy

Yes, 1/3rd of GOP-leaning eligible voters can't be convinced that Trump is a clownshow. But as the evidence mounts, the other 2/3rds of them-- plus nearly all centrist and left-leaning eligible voters-- get more convinced of the opposite. Here's the buried lede for that article: That said, if the "establishment lane" support remains fractured between 4 or 5 names, that 1/3rd would be enough to get the nomination. After that, well, anything can happen.

Hillary is talking about guns now because the issue helps her in the Democratic primary. Bernie Sanders is trying to attack her from the left, but he's spent his political career representing a pretty rural state, and thus has a voting record on the issue that is a little out-of-tune with the core audience that shows up for Democratic primaries. I suspect that the rhetoric will soften when it comes time for the general election, and that, even if a D wins the White House with long coattails, only the most marginal gun-control initiatives would have a prayer of getting through Congress.

Annoyed at DA:I. Played through the fade section tonight. Got to the level's "boss," watched a cutscene, long boss fight, cutscene, pick a survivor, cutscene, speech, decide what to do with the Wardens, more chatting... and then a crash-to-desktop. Of course, that whole sequence had no autosaves.

Fashion! But, yeah, with how common red-green color-blindness is, it's kind of shocking that the NFL didn't see this one coming. Ironically enough, the League's longstanding rule that required one (and only one) team in each game to wear white stemmed from a similar issue-- so that people with black & white TVs could follow the action.

I'm not sure that anybody would argue that having 2 small kids is easier than having 1 small kid is. More that going from 1 kid to 2 kids is a smaller marginal change than was going from 0 kids to 1 kid. At least, that's what I'll keep telling myself for the next 6 months...

Thanks, guys. The kiddo had some issues as a newborn (underweight; hypoglycemic) and had a rough time through his first cold season in daycare, but he was pretty blissfully healthy through this past spring and summer. Coughs and sniffles have made the rounds lately, but nothing serious. Sick kids are no fun, but they also tend to take long naps, so you get a nice break. Regarding the in-progress nubbin', we're now seeing some specialists at the super-fancy hospital an hour's drive away who have some further insights on the problems that we've had in prior pregnancies. 13 weeks along and everything is looking good. Cautious optimism.

Has a coldness dial, 0 is off 5 causes ice in liquids and frosts veggies, we keep it on 3, he turns it to 0. This was like the 6th time he's done it but the first we didn't catch it within a couple hours. Took until now to realize that I can pull the dial off. Ever since the youngin' around here has been walking, we've had to pull the knobs off the front of the stove whenever it's not in use. His persistence in trying to blow up the house is a little unnerving. In other news, we're nuts enough after dealing with this one (and assorted failures along the way) to be expecting Youngin' the Sequel next May.

Still DA:Inquisition. I get that they didn't see much benefit in building a day-night cycle into the game. That's fine and all-- with no "date" counter, and with the open-worldy elements broken into separate areas (each with campsites already set up) it isn't really necessary to put that much effort into simulating the passage of time. But that doesn't mean that it isn't annoying when an entire zone is set to "it's always night" for no good reason. (Well, for "zombies are creepier at night" atmospheric-game-design reasons, rather than reasons supported by any in-game logic.) Why wouldn't I just take a nap and explore that creepy swamp after sunrise?! Also, the game continues to suffer from poorly explained UI features. My main character was level 14 before I discovered that, after you upgrade an ability, you can toggle which of the two available upgrades you want active without re-spec'ing the whole character. (In fact, you can do it anytime outside of combat.) That said, I'm still having a lot of fun with the game. The Specialization abilities make the combat a lot more enjoyable, and less PEWPEWPEW than it felt at the outset. I went with a Rift Mage, and I'm actually finding the TacCam situationally useful.

Not 100% a fit for the "Music" thread, as it has a fair amount of "kids are cute" appeal:

Dragon Age: Inquisition. The console-driven interface is consistently irritating, and a lot of stuff is not explained well to the player. I had to go to the internet to figure out why Cassandra's health bar sometimes had grey triangles in front of it and sometimes didn't. And the interface for travel using the map screen is obtusely un-intuitive. (Just walking up to the 2nd-level market at Val Royeaux took several minutes of clicking on everything to try to get something to work.) The inventory screen (or, really, series of unnecessarily nested screens) is a mess. The camera is functional in open areas, but really irritating when you have to deal with a low ceiling or lots of trees. That said, when I'm not fighting with the interface, I'm mostly enjoying myself. I do sometimes wish that the dialogue options weren't so limited-- mostly, I'd like to see a lot more options for dishonesty. (Why to I have to tell the truth when Josephine asks about my past, or when Cassandra asks about my faith?) But that's a fairly minor concern so far. The story hook is a mite conventional, but it's got a solid mystery behind it, and the open-worldy elements are, thus far, satisfying enough to make exploration fun.

Man, flying around and dropping meteor swarms on folks in M&M 6 really was satisfying. But also pretty hilariously broken, especially how you can still move up and down in real time while in the Turn-based combat mode. I've played through the DAI Intro section, and, so far, I think I really hate the camera controls. The standard camera is giving me more trouble than DA2's ever did (this may be a level design issue), and the "Tactical" camera is too clunky for routine use (although it seems to have some utility for isolated circumstances).