Enoch

I don't suppose there's any way to use this on ME3 DLC, is there?

I only ever played the demo of both Lionheart and DA2. (And I don't think I finished either one.)

Nothing says "I love you" quite like digging out the plowed-in end of our driveway in case she goes into labor!

Might & Magic 9. Or perhaps one of the early 3D RPGs like Menzoberranzan. I've played some other rather bad ones (my uncles & grandfather like to cruise the bargain bin at Babbages back in the early-90s), but I can't recall the names.

You're just a cigarette biat short of the good life. Been prepping for the big case next week... Tons to do and am deathly afraid I'm going to get sick. Not sure what you mean by the cigarette, but good luck with the case. After drizzling for most of the day, it switched back to snow about 2 hours ago. I'm going to have a few more inches to shovel tomorrow morning. And they still haven't plowed our street. Having a wife in the 37th week of a pregnancy tends to make a person worry when their car is snowed in.

If it works the same way ME2 does, you can download and instal the DLC the old-fashioned way, from the BSN.

Snow day. Just dug our walk and driveway out of 13-14 inches of medium-wet white stuff.

IMO, Deus Ex is worth playing through the Hong Kong hub, but it gets rather tiresome after that point. The two times I've tried, I end up abandoning it right around when you get to Paris.

Glad you like it! It's my favorite of that particular Herbie group, largely because it's the most experimentally synth-forward. The other 2 albums released from with that personnel-- Mwandishi and Crossings-- are worth a listen, too. Of course, none of those albums made a whole lot of money, and touring with a full early-'70s synth setup was a pain in the ass. So, eventually, Herbie got frustrated and decided to do something a bit more mainstream, which I'm sure you're familiar with:

Working from home today, for the first time since my home office was displaced by the nursery and moved to the basement. It's cold in here.

The whole collection (album pictured) is quite good.

My standard low-calorie drink: Rye whiskey (Rittenhouse or Bulleit), ice, and off-brand seltzer.

New stretch goal: Buy Josh some actual bookshelves so he can ditch the crates he bought for his Freshman dorm.

This came up in a thread around here a little while ago. I and Monte Carlo, at least, agree. It tastes like perfectly lovely tea, into which some idiot has spilled a crock of stale potpourri.

Take some time to think things through. Do not react on first impressions.? I think she's doing okay in this department-- I didn't find out until about a week after the initial discovery, and no irrevocable steps have been taken yet. The tricky part is that they've got a kid who is just old enough (almost 3) to wonder where Daddy is.

After some research, it looks like my computer problem is a known bug in my SSD firmware, and can be fixed with an update. I'll try that when I get home tonight. Also, I got some distressing family news yesterday evening. Anybody have any tips on consoling/advising a family member who has just discovered (in the most direct way possible) spousal infidelity that had been going on for a year or so?

Well, this federal employee thanks you! Well, if I look at it as buying you a drink (or many) it does take some of the sting out of it I wouldn't temp Enoch with a drink just yet, he has to show a measure of control till Mrs. Enoch pops out Enoch JR. Actually now is the time to indulge. He'll be too busy and tired soon! Perhaps too busy and tired to go out for a drink. But it doesn't take much time or energy to pull the whiskey bottle out of the cabinet on my way too or from the kitchen. Probably have to get a child lock for that thing... In other news, my PC is having weird crashes. Freeze -> brief BSoD -> restart, but with the boot priority for my hard drives reversed. (It looks at the storage drive rather than the SSD with Windows on it.) If I open BIOS and tell it which drive to look at, it boots cleanly. But it has crashed now 3 times today, and never running anything more complex than a Firefox window. It was running games just fine for an hour or two last night. I've already backed files up in case it's a HD issue. I'm presently trying to bait it into happening again so that I can get a better look at the BSoD error message, while keeping a sensor program running to make sure it isn't a heat issue. (Which would surprise me-- I'm in a rather cold room.)

Well, this federal employee thanks you! I'm actually doing the same right now. Seems that I'll be writing a moderate check as well. But that was somewhat planned-for, as I adjusted my withholding after seeing the refund we got last year. Still, it'll be nice when the little bundle of exemptions and creditsjoy can be reflected on our 2014 return. Time for a lunch break before tackling the Maryland portion.

(From the album "The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color")

I'll second most of what Tale said. Favorites and rankings are pretty meaningless, particularly when limited to one (ill-defined) genre. If I'm measuring the games I liked most at the time, it's going to be all late-80s through late-90s stuff, because that's when I was the right age to be fantastically dedicated to this kind of thing. And if it's a retrospective measure of what I now think was truly good, a significant chunk of my gaming history drops out. (Man, I spent sooo much time on old-school Might & Magic games... and they're kinda bad in rather a lot of ways.) Still, the below is more of the latter, because adult me doesn't have a whole lot of respect for the gaming habits of 15-year-old me. (Except that Railroad Tycoon remains awesome.) Anyhow, all this is still a fun reason to stroll down memory lane. The top tier: Torment Fallout Fallout: New Vegas (with DLC) Baldur's Gate 2 (with expansion) Fallout 2 The "great at some things, kinda lousy at others" tier: KotOR 2 KotOR Baldur's Gate The Witcher 2 Special sub-category for awesome strategy games that also serve as a vehicle for fantastically entertaining roleplaying: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Crusader Kings 2 That probably has me over 10, so I'll stop. The next tier would be rather large, including things like IWD, Skyrim, Alpha P, and ME2 that fail at least one of the things I really look for in an RPG, but are otherwise great fun. Special "how the hell does this end up on so many of these lists despite being a pretty terrible game overall?" Dishonorable Mention: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Whateverthe****

Maybe I'm juvenile, or just generally disinterested in sports and nationalistic ****-waving, but this is probably the most entertainment I will get out of something related to the 2014 Games: (Marginally Not Work Safe, so Spoiler'd)

What about dramatically limiting monetary and medical health assistance for those who got sick due to their unhealthy, irresponsible and stupid lifestyle? Now that would wake up a few people and save tons of bucks. Ah, but that requires a judgment call, which, of course, requires a judge of some sort. So who gets to decide when my malady is my fault, as opposed to the luck of the genetic draw or lousy medical advice or deceptive food marketing or my employer making me sit still all day or a hundred other possible causes? And what are my appeal rights to this decision, how many experts can I hire to argue on my behalf, etc., etc. All those administrative costs and the associated (necessary) fraud-prevention controls would eat into those cash savings pretty quickly. It's fun to theory-cast, but many of the slippery-slope arguments are rather inapt in this scenario. Governmental power is effectively limited by what can be implemented in a practical manner. Which, in the case of policies to influence the diet and exercise regimes of the population, means policy "nudges" like increasing taxes on "harmful" stuff (like we do with alcohol and tobacco) and/or providing incentives for healthier stuff like fresh veggies and gym memberships. (Sure, they could try to ban things, but we all remember that Prohibition didn't work, right? Bloomberg's large soda ban was similarly shot down, both by the practical "I can just by 2 smalls" reality and by the courts that said it was beyond the city's power.) And, as Hurlshot alludes, the WHO has no real power, and the folks who do have some authority over this kind of thing generally don't give a **** what they say. The public only really turned against cigarettes once there was a scientific consensus about second-hand smoke being harmful to "innocent" third parties. Similarly with alcohol and drunk driving. I can't see how that case could be made with regard to unhealthy food and drink.

Zor pretty much covered it. To the extent that the big publishers want to do a non-MMO RPG, they want a "rules-light" RPG like Skyrim or Mass Effect that plays well on consoles and has some potential to tap the CoD-Madden-FIFA audience. Ages ago, it made sense for a game like this to license the D&D nameplate (Dark Alliance), but the market for vidyagames has changed-- most of the people they want to be buying the game might not view a D&D logo as a selling point.

Yeah. There is a group of Rakshasa called the Cult of Meow, or something. Older M&M games had a few evil cults (or whatever) named after animal noises. (I recall fighting priests of Bark and Baa, at least.) "Meow" would be in keeping with this rather silly tradition. Edit: Also Moo.

I'm far from a game design expert, but my suspicion is that, while balance and utility do present problems in putting together a game with lots of character abilities, the greater difficulty that this ability-profusion creates is in writing an enemy/ally AI to use and react to them.