Dewar

Ouch, back taxes suck.

I'm personally in the position where I don't have enough deductions to make it worth saving reciepts. I pretty much just use the standard deduction every year. I've found the H&R block online service to be great for this, and it only costs $10 to eFile. If you get part of the way through the process and end up with a form that you don't know what to do with, you can schedule a chat with someone right from inside the web app (for an additional charge of course.)

While it does look kinda Assasin's Creed-ish, it really does seem like the logical evolution of the world and certain portions of the gameplay of BGE. Having not played the original until last year, I wasn't as keen on it as some others here, but I'm interested in where they're going with it.

I prefer highland scotches (specifically Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban) to islay scotches (such as Laphroaig) as there's less of a bitter smoke tinge. I also perfer my scotch with one ice cube (sized a cubic inch or so,) allowed to melt about 1/2 way.

Washington is also an "at will" state though, so they can terminate you without explanation if they so choose. http://www.lni.wa.gov/WorkplaceRights/ComplainDiscrim/Termination/

I really think the DLC is the best area in the game, and if you beat the game you'll have to play NG+ all the way to the Lord Vessel to get there, but it's your call.

I ended up finding this on the Wirecutter: http://thesweethome.com/reviews/the-best-chefs-knife-for-most-cooks/ I never have much luck sharpening knives, maybe I just do it wrong.

I came across one of my many boxes of legos while packing last weekend and I'm wondering if I can manage to set asside a closet in our new place to be a tiny little lego room. It's not the huge livingroom sized thing I imagined when I was a child, but it's a step.

Personally, I like the tone of 80's sci-fi, and it would be interesting to have a modern game themed around it, much like Fallout shows us a 1960's version of the future. In the end, I've always found those "list of influences" type articles near worthless anyway.

It's hard to tell since people get hung up in different ways. Location details follow:

A brief foray into the politics and video games thread lead me to read part of the article about those school stabbings, which then reminded me that I needed to get a kitchen knife for our new place, which led me to start searching around Amazon for kitchen knife reviews. I am probably on an NSA watch list now.

So, who's getting Tomodachi Life?

I'm playing the University of Planet.

So, a year too late, but what's the context of that first picture?

That sounds about the same as I felt by the time I made it that far. I had some major bugs in the second to last mission where you have to target different citizens trying to find the spy. There's so little depth in the building in that game.

At the farmer's markets around here, one of the smaller wineries here does a hopped hard apple cider that I really love and is gluten free. If one of your local places brews something like that, I'd highly recommend trying it.

I've made a career out of looking confident when others aren't. People around here will eat you alive if you show any uncertainty. It's really wierd how the 9-5 part of society is so big on "faking it till you make it" and yet it can be so harmful in the rest of your life.

Once they finally fixed it, Fallen Enchantress by Stardock had a quest system that worked fairly well. It was basically a step up from the "goodie hut" thing that so many 4X games are stuck with these days, with a few longer more involved questlines here and there (including one that causes you to win the game.) It does get a little old seeing the same quests again and again, but additional downloadable quest packs helped that out some.

No expansion, playing on the second to lowest difficulty. This building was bigger than a monolith, it has a special name on the map and looks sort of like a ribcage. I'll have to look when I get home. Not usually my style, but I Miriam started this war, and I plan on ending it, every city, every troop.

Ah, I only got the one secret project, the video for that was really cool. At the moment I'm trashing The Believers as they took about half the planet from my other allies. Just took their capital and got 3 or 4 additional secret projects under my control now. Is there a picture of the full tech tree somewhere? I'm not feeling the weight of the different technologies that you mentioned in your first post and I think part of that is not quite getting how it all fits together. I get a lot of technologies that I didn't think I was researching and that whole system is somewhat opague. Also, I found an alien building and got a nifty little interlude story. Should I be making a big effort to get to those, or is it just flavor?

As far as I can tell, there's no skill based matchmaking at all. I think it pretty much picks a group of random opponents and goes for it. All the new matchmaking system seems to have done is split the two teams after the game is done, but the killer teams still stay together so it doesn't do much good.

Last couple of patches seem to have had some major improvements, but apparently have completely broke multiplayer.

I went and bought SMAC from GOG.com because of this announcement. I've never played before, and so far it hasn't felt all that much different than Civ2. Maybe I just don't have it on high enough difficulty? Any tips on how to best experience the story?

Wow, busy thread this weekend. If it makes you feel any better, most of the stat scaling on weapons drops off pretty hard at between 40 and 50 in each stat, so even if you've leveled sub-optimally up until you find the perfect weapon, you can still recover with some grinding. If you're really worried, Vitality and Endurance are always good. Personally, I leveled strictly them at first unless I needed to up a stat to use a weapon. This part of the story passed me by as well. The lady you talked to wants you to kill four bosses, each in different areas of the game, some of which I'm pretty sure you've been to before. Have a think if you've seen any areas that were blocked off with special fog gates or were just too dang hard at the time. It's time to hit up all those hard places now. Certain super special one-of-a-kind weapons (such as the Drake Sword) use either Demon Titanite or Dragon Scales to upgrade. Demon Titanite in particular is pretty rare, so be sure it's a weapon you want before you upgrade it.

Complete side question, as I haven't played the game and any comments I could provide have already been stated much more eloquently than I could manage. Maybe I just don't see many pictures of Churchil, but the guy in the blimp didn't immediately stand out as anyone in particular to me when I saw that graphic. If they were really trying to evoke that, wouldn't they have gone with the hat?