Gorth

IIRC, you can set to ignore all invites from somewhere in options. I'll have to look that up, thanks

Gorth's second theorem says: c = (political correctness) + (- hypocrisy) Where c is a constant. You have a total mass of BS which needs an outlet. If you increase the political correctness, you end up with an equal quantity of hypocrisy They just seem to go hand in hand, one following the other. BS doesn't translate well, too much ****

Got back home to Queensland this weekend (after having been away for a while). Put in a lot of hours Sunday evening/night Both my smuggler (who is now a gunslinger) and inquisitor (who is now a sorcerer) got their ships. Tried my hand at one of the space combats. Rather simple (no substitute for a space sim), but a fun enough diversion. Oh, decided since I was going to complete those stories and not getting pestered by constant "buy me!" reminders, I got a two months non-recurring subscription. I just wish people would stop tapping my shoulder and invite me to their groups and guilds. I really don't want to play with other people

Dun dun dun dunnn duh dunnn... Best Star Wars games ever. Not all that effeminate lightsaber swishing stuff. So, I better hang on to my DVD trilogy with the original cinematic releases, including irrefutable proof that Han shot first. (downside was, you could only buy them bundled with the crappy ret-conned versions, but nobody forces me to watch those)

I fail to see the humour in this one. I've watched it 7 times now. Maybe if I watch it an 8th time I might get it

I actually thought the setting rather uninteresting (vampire overuse syndrome?) and the game was good despite it, not because of it. Sounds, music, visuals, voice acting, art direction, dialogue, just about everything else contributed to the dark and ominous "style". I don't think the game actually needed "vampire" clans to be interesting, anything slightly unusual/supernatural would have done. Just guessing, but I think, like Planescape: Torment, most people who played and enjoyed the game were clueless about the setting and the background before (and after) playing.

Hmm, went back and dusted off some of the old stuff. I think I meed to scour various online stores, heck maybe even Amazon may have some of this stuff. Need to complete my collection of 'Le Cycle de Cyann' (Bourgeon) and 'El Mercenario' (Vicente Segrelles). No, I can't really provide screenshots, as most of them violates the TOS I would love to find some of Arleston's stuff, 'The Shipwrecks of Ythaq', 'Les Maitres Cartographes' and all the "Troy" stuff he wrote, regardless of who drew the stories.

Free porn, cheap viagra and second hand AK-47's?

Heck if I know... I used to get the Danish translations where the word 'comic' never figured. The Danish term literally translated into "drawn series", i.e. probably very close to the bande dessinée in meaning, if not translation.

Not sure what Oby is rambling about... Another one here who grew up with "European" comic culture. Mostly Franco-Belgian stuff (translated) at the time. Haven't read that stuff for ages, since it's very hard to find in most places outside Europe. Mostly American imports, which holds little to no interest. Herge, Peyo, Franquin, Moebius/Giraud, Jodorowsky... too many to mention. Only notable late additions would be Van Hamme. My old albums are getting rather worn and threadbare by now

Merged Divinity Original Sin Kickstarter threads...

Pessimism is doomed Congratulations

Which brings me back to my favourite position on the subject, get rid of "marriage" as a legal status. It's a religious thing. Let churches handle it in ways that suits them. Get rid of state funding and tax breaks for churches too. If people wants them, they can pay their tithe.

Yeah democracy sucks when people vote all the wrong ways... I can see the conundrum though. At what level (state or federal) should the right of minorities be protected? Is it ok for a state to discriminate against a group of people if due process has been followed? What if it wasn't gay discrimination but say, some ethnic group or a particular disability? Hypothetical example, a law that bans all redheads from working for a state institution because of hair colour? Should the federal institutions overrule such a state law (because it is not explicitly covered in the constitution... I think)?

We'll probably have to disagree on that one... From where I'm sitting and having observed 30 years of gaming first hand, becoming more inclusive and trying to appeal to more people has been a decidedly negative factor. Increased reliance on safe formulas, risk aversion bordering on the paranoid, death of originality, attempts to cater for lowest common denominator, blandness, style over substance, out of control hype, joy killing tropes that have become so much a staple that people give you blank stares if you suggest making a game without them. So no, not everybody see the trying to cater to as many as possible as a positive thing

I wouldn't go so far as to call $1600 for "value for money" when the first monitor lasted less than a year (and I spent more than 3 months before involving a lawyer, registered mail and questions for the magistrates court to get Samsung to fork up with either a refund or a replacement) and the second lasted less than 2 years

I bought PS:T last of all the IE games because the cover art didn't really appeal to me. Unlike IWD and BG2 (which I bought based on playing BG1), I picked PST off the shelf and ultimately put it back. The cover didn't appeal to me. I went back and read reviews then went and bought the game because postive reviews and by that point I'd enjoyed IWD and BG2. But that cover art really didn't do anything positive for me. BG1 was the first one I tried. A colleague of mine back then (back in Denmark) had bought that humongous 5 cd game set and tried to sell me on the idea. Let me try it out for a few weeks after he had completed it. I don't think I made it out of Candlekeep at the time before boredom set in. Gave it back to him. When PS:T was released, I ran across it on a store shelf, staring at a face so ugly only a blind mother could love it and those orange/blue clashing colours... just bizarre enough to pique my interest. Took down the box, read the little text blurbs, bought it, played it, loved it. Bought IWD unseen when it came out, as well as the remaining IE games when they got released. Only went back and got BG1 for myself years later. Still my least favourite of the bunch

Yeah, I could try the capacitors. A ready made "capacitor kit" (one of each capacitor) for this particular monitor on ebay is $16 plus shipping. That's how endemic the failure rate of this supposedly "flagship" Samsung monitor is

****!... ****!... ****!... Bloody engineers at Samsung got the "bright" idea of pouring some kind of liquid plastic (not really, but the same consistency) over the connectors on the very PCB I wanted to heat up. No way I could detach the cable without break the connector beyond repair. Ah well, got the monitor assembled back to its previous state. Can see something on it, but the darn flicker is driving me insane >_ I'll never ever voluntarily or knowingly buy a piece of equipment with a Samsung logo on it. If I ever waver, I'll have to go back and read this post as a reminder. Time to save up for a replacement monitor.

Wait ... what? What for? As mention in the monitor thread in Skeeters Junkyard, it turned out that the culprit (the new, constant screen flicker) wasn't actually my gfx card, but my traitorous monitor failing me. Some googling around showed it was a common problem with that particular model (bad design and shoddy manufacturing quality), so it's mostly one of two things. Bad (i.e. cheap) capacitors or the soldering on the scaling logic chip becoming brittle and loosening up. My symptoms sounds like the latter. General cure is to heat up the PCB enough to melt the metal and get it to "re-attach" itself to all legs on the chip. Some use heat guns, most use an oven. Usually easier to do if you remove the PCB from the monitor

Not 'did', but about to 'do' when I get home form work. To boldly go where no Gorth has gone before. I'm going to take my PC monitor apart, rip out the PCB and bake it in the oven. Recipe's found on various hardware forums suggests 8 minutes at 200C, then left to cool for about an hour. That's going to be interesting

I actually bought PS:T because of the cover art

Heh, just having finished my play through of DA:O, the bolded hit home for me. Denerim's supposed to be the New York or Los Angeles of Ferelden, so to speak. Crowds of people wherever you look. Instead, there's like a handful of folks standing around, but the place is otherwise deserted. If Assassin's Creed does one thing well, it's the atmosphere of the cities. They really do feel like actual cities full of people, rather than just an empty space. The weird thing about Denerim is that small backwood town Lothering appears to have more people in it simply by virtue of the blight refugees... Blight refugees that Denerim never, apparently, gets. But there are also other aspects - virtually no merchants? Virtually no people walking through? I tend to ignore these things - its a game after all (and not a game of DENERIM: THE FANTASY CITY SIMULATOR). But it does leave an oddness if you think too much about it. I wonder if it isn't the same issue that FO:NV ran into? I.e. engine (who am I kidding, read: 'console') limitations, where it's only possible to have a limited number of actors in any given location without blowing the memory constraints? The designers may have wanted to add hundreds of people, but it would never run on small memory configurations.

Planet scanning was awful. That's being nice to it. The moon buggy game became tedious after a while, but I'm not sure how things work at Bioware. Sometimes, it's like rather than improving things with potential they throw in the towel and just toss it out, replace it with other filler (i.e. planet scanning). The search, grab and run stuff in ME3 was actually a decent compromise and I'll admit I enjoying the getting out of a system by a hairs breadth on occasion before the Reapers got me. I think they could have run with the moon buggy idea though and expanded on it. As for combat, after having played all 3 game back to back, I don't find that ME2&3 compares very well to 1. Something about the larger, open spaces, the feeling (illusion?) of physics being at play etc. just creates a much better experience, even if enemy AI probably was better in ME3. What we need is a ME Redux pinching the best of all 3

Finally got to put 3-4 hours into the game, playing around with 2 characters, one 'good' Han Solo wannabe (what I always wanted to play in kotor before the silly game castrated him and turned him into a whimpy jedi) and a sith inquisitor just for the pyrotechnics. Game looks nice, but Jebus, the combat is bad. It is everything that prevented me from liking Warhammer Online despite being a fan of the setting for 25 years. I could have sworn that TOR is just a graphics mod running on top of the Warhammer engine. It feels like exactly the same game. Griping about the mind numbing combat aside, it at least looks nice and oozes money thrown at it. Voice acting between mediocre and good (didn't run into anything bad). Visuals are nice, making you wish they had put that kind of stuff into a single player game with good crpg mechanics. What I haven't really gotten to yet (and what really matters for me) is the story bits. I realise I need to focus one character at time and persevere for a bit and progress through at least some of it to get a fair impression.