Zeusthecat

Okay, I know in the past we've had really good luck just checking them out from our local library since they tend to have a big selection of movies. If that doesn't work then maybe an Amazon or Red Box rental will do.

Definitely wait till after the new year and maybe do a 2 week window for each since a week might be a tight time frame to coordinate with everyone. And honestly, I'll be skipping some of these because I see them all the freaking time. Also, for the ones I haven't seen and don't own, what do you guys think is the best way to view these? I'd be surprised if any of the streaming services have more than a handful of them. Hopefully we can find most of them at our local library.

Yeah, not sure if my advice necessarily applies. But the basic idea behind it is that if you have say, a three stage rocket that is fairly top heavy, you can alt + right-click your first stage tank and your last stage tank and set it up to transfer all of your last stage fuel to your first stage tank (or split evenly between your first stage tanks that you plan to eject if you are doing asparagus staging). Then, once you get through to a decent altitude you can reverse the transfer to put the remaining fuel back into the last stage tank where it started so you have the fuel you need. Obviously you would need to time it so that your first stage doesn't burn it all before it gets transferred back. You aren't necessarily using any more fuel in your first stage by doing this, it is just a technique to temporarily redistribute the weight of your ship to get you through difficult parts of the launch. I haven't had to do it for that purpose yet but I have had to transfer fuel out of my last stage to a previous stage to give it enough juice to get to a refueling ship since I needed to keep that stage to have enough delta v to get to my destination.

Just pump it all to your lower tank temporarily until you get out of that danger zone and then pump it all back up to your top tank. As long as you have enough extra fuel and don't burn it all before then, you should just be able to pump it right back up without taking any kind of hit to fuel.

You might try pumping some fuel from your upper stages to your lower stages during the ascent to keep your rocket from going top heavy. You shouldn't need fuel lines either, just alt-right click on each tank and manually transfer chunks of fuel down to your lower tanks as needed to keep the weight evenly distributed. It can be a bit much to manage but if you have your launches down to a science it isn't too difficult to pump that fuel around as needed. Depending on your fuel setup, you may also need to pump fuel back out of your lower stage and into your upper stage before breaking off that stage so you can fill your top tanks back up (top-heaviness shouldn't matter at this point since your rocket is about to get much shorter from losing its first stage).

I think I've pretty much chronicled my daughter's introduction to games in this thread and I basically just started with Super Mario Brothers and slowly worked through those. They are her favorite games now and she's gotten pretty good at them. Since then we've branched into a bunch of other stuff but I think those laid a pretty good foundation for her.

I could be convinced as well. A lot of these movies are played fairly regularly in our house anyways. I assume it's a re-watch of everything but the Cars movies since we all seem to actually agree on those. To re-iterate, my top three are probably: 1. Inside Out 2. Wall-E 3. Toy Story 3 I like Rodi's brief take on Inside Out and that is probably the most concise way to state exactly how I feel about that movie. I have a lifelong love affair with robots and Wall-E just felt like a love letter to my childhood. It was a beautiful movie and I actually didn't mind all the stuff that happened after they got back to the humans all that much, which seems to be most people's complaint with the movie. It was cute, presented a fairly interesting take on how we would end up if we were stuck on a single space ship in micro gravity for 700 years, and the greatest human triumph in the whole movie was the captain managing to get out of his chair and walk. For me it struck the right balance of being cute and just the right amount of goofy. However, the ending would have been better if they all got back to Earth and died a slow, painful death from all the pollution and dirty water and that wonderful Peter Gabriel song would have played to an animation of Wall-E and Eve dancing on their graves for all of eternity. Missed opportunity there. I already said my piece on Toy Story 3 but basically I like it's rendition of Toy Story 2 just a bit better since yeah, it was basically the same plot. And just generally speaking, I feel like a lot of Pixar movies could go from good/great to great/fantastic if they just went a little dark and had some more realistic, less happy endings. Toy Story 3 is the best example with the trash fire.

Man, there's a surprising amount of variation on opinions here. It's kind of funny that we all pretty much agree on Cars though.

Totally agree with you here. I don't necessarily hate it but it is really really middling for me.

I meant to post this awhile back but I did a fun thing with my daughter a couple months back. We had bought a few Amiibos for my daughter and I decided instead of just giving them to her, we would do something a little different. So we wrapped them up like presents (she didn't know what we had gotten her yet) and I convinced my daughter we should turn it into a treasure hunt. She was ecstatic of course and we proceeded to make a treasure map of our back yard and picked out a good spot to mark an 'X' for the treasure location. Then we went into the back yard and I dug a big hole in that spot and we buried the presents. She was so into the whole experience that I didn't even need to try to convince her to wait a few days before digging it up. She was committed. So we waited three days and then finally went on our grand treasure hunt around the yard pretending we didn't know where it was and following our little map until we got to the spot. We then dug them up and she finally opened them and just went nuts. At that point it probably could have been anything and she would have been excited, but they were freaking Nintendo toys that you can connect to your games which just blew her mind. So next time you get a gift for your kid, don't just give it to them. Make a treasure map, bury it in the back yard, and wait. They will never forget it.

Yes! I played it like a year ago and thought the gameplay was great.

Because Taco Bell is great! You haven't lived until you've had a Fiery Cheesy Gordita Crunch (no beef, sub beans).

Hey, if it makes you feel any better, my wife and I went through a year of long distance relationship when her mother moved them back to Washington for her senior year of high school (I had graduated the previous year). Now that I've had a solid 12 years to reflect on that one super difficult year, I have some thoughts on long distance relationships (assuming that both parties actually want to continue the relationship, even long distance): A long distance relationship is way different than a normal one but can still be pretty exciting. You have to get creative to get some of the same satisfactions you would get if they were physically there. Suddenly, phone sex is super appealing and exciting and because talking is all you have, conversations are completely different and more interesting than the mundane conversations you might have on a daily basis. You get to plan trips to see each other and when you finally do it is the greatest thing in the world. Oftentimes in normal relationships you don't really have big things like that to look forward to. Having some space from each other gets your head out of the clouds and is a good opportunity to really reflect on your relationship from a different angle. Number three is a really tough one but it is hard to understate how valuable that perspective ended up being for me. When she moved away, I was devastated. We had spent every second of every day that we could together, were having sex every second we could sneak it (we had a whole range of lies that we would tell our parents but always went to our secret sexy spots instead), and our entire lives revolved around each other. It was maybe just a little unhealthy. Those first few months I was just utterly lost and numb and our relationship came close to ending a couple of times. But being forced to face those feelings on a daily basis ultimately forced me to come to terms with how unhealthy my obsession with our relationship had been and let me rediscover myself and learn to not derive all of my happiness solely from our relationship. I started hanging out with friends again that I had drifted apart from, started smoking a bunch of weed and having other fun experiences, and stayed busy working full time and getting through my first year of college. Once I accepted that it wouldn't be the end of the world if our relationship didn't work out and just resumed living my life, everything got so much easier. Somewhere along the line we came to a mutual understanding that we just had to be together and that this long distance thing was no big deal and with that pressure off, it all just ended up working out for us.

Sorry if we ever did that to you. And weirdly, we moved from that to playing online in Worms World Party on the Dreamcast. The first online console experience I ever had. So many good memories playing WWP on the Dreamcast. We even had that stupid Dreamcast keyboard.

Mmmmmm... wobble physics. Woof.

To be honest, that subjective line is all over the place for me. It's weird that Ratatouille rubs me the way it does and yet I guarantee there are probably a bunch of other movies with similar "issues" that I totally love. I'll at least give Ratatouille credit that it is consistent with all that goofy stuff. Unlike Up, where you start the movie in tears and are led to believe you are going to see a movie about one thing (an old man flying his house around the world), but instead you end up with a movie about an entirely other thing (talking dogs flying planes (they're dogfighting! DO YOU GET IT?) and old guys that can't even walk down stairs ziplining between flying ships). Also, I quite liked Monster's Inc. But Monster's University was a hot pile of garbage. They literally copy-pasted Revenge of the Nerds and made it into a kids movie. Actually, I think I've blocked that one from my memory because now that I'm thinking about it, yeah, Monster's University is the worst Pixar movie (maybe even worse than Cars if Cars didn't have Larry the Cable Guy in it). Also also, I know it's not Pixar but I like Wreck-It Ralph a whole bunch. It's one of those movies that has been played in our house a lot over the years so I've probably seen it at least 30 times and never get sick of it.

So. Hard. Not. To. Argue... I disagree. I think Ratatouille went way too overboard with the dumb goofy shit that plagues almost every other kids movie. Granny blowing her house apart with a shotgun to get a single measly rat? Check. A dude that can have all of his extremities controlled perfectly by a rat pulling on different parts of his hair? Check. A cringeworthy romance? Check. It was just too all over the place with that kind of stuff for me. Copy and paste these same complaints to Up. I really wished they didn't manufacture that dumb conflict with the talking dogs and the crazed old dude. If the whole movie would have been just him flying around in his house seeing beautiful sights and bonding with that kid in some low key way, it would have been perfect. But I guess you can't have a story if you don't have some conflict to drive it along.

We usually spend all of our Pixar debates focused exclusively on how terrible/great Ratatouille is. It's become a years long running joke at this point. I'll make sure we debate Toy Story tomorrow and get back to you. I agree that Toy Story 3 is a retread of 2, I just think it does what 2 did a bit better with the toys having to actually deal with Andy being fully grown up. Those toys should have died in that fucking trash furnace though. Had that happened it might have made number one on the list for me.

Oh man Patrick, we are like polar opposites on this stuff. Are you sure you aren't secretly my coworker that I argue about Pixar movies with on a daily basis? My top picks are probably Inside Out, Wall-E, and Toy Story 3. My bottom picks are Ratatouille, Up, and at the way way bottom is Cars. Which reminds me, I need to see that latest dinosaur one.

I'm not so sure that fixes the issue as I understand it. Typically these pieces would all need to be launched separately and then docked together in space since getting the pre-assembled thing off the ground and into orbit would take a massive amount of thrust.

Well they never played THAT at Applebee's.

Home Alone and Elf will be the only Christmas movies I watch for the rest of my life (and maybe some Ernest Saves Christmas every now and again). As much as I like this time of year with the holidays and whatnot, I really really don't like most of the Christmas media out there. Especially Christmas music. 4 1/2 years working at Applebee's drained 4 1/2 lifetimes of my patience for shitty Christmas music. Unless it's the N'Sync Christmas album.

Dude! A friend and I played that same demo online constantly around 2001/2002-ish. There was that one snow level that we played over and over and over and got so goddamn good at it that we could pretty consistently take out whoever we were playing against in one to two turns. Unlike WA and WWP, in W2 (the demo at least) if you swung around on your ninja rope and let go so that your worm would gently slide down a hill, the collision physics worked out so that you could bump into an enemy worm during your slide and knock them into the water while still retaining your turn since you can use the ninja rope multiple times in a single turn. So we would just swing around the level and bump each of the enemy worms into the water and finish off the harder to reach ones with some other item.

What if you go with two parallel docking ports on each end and try to get them to both dock simultaneously to give you a stronger connection? Not sure if KSP would actually support both of them fully docking and locking in but it seems like it might work. And speaking of mining. I hear this game has it but that mechanic has yet to reveal itself to me, even though I'm 90 hours in. Am I missing something here?

I ended up putting together a decent rocket design last night that quite easily gets one of those big ass orange fuel tanks up to my Kerbin space station. So I launched the first of four that will comprise my fuel bay, managed to get it successfully docked, and then watched in horror as my space station started trying to violently rip itself apart. At first it was a small sway but after about a minute the whole thing was bending and twisting in every direction and just as the pieces looked like they were going to break off, I realized it was the fucking SAS over-correcting and amplifying every little rattle. So I turned that off just in time and everything settled down. It's kind of a bummer that I docked the first two pieces with a docking port junior because it seems like a pretty big weak point right now and seems much more susceptible to wobble. I'd rather not scrap it and start over so I'll need to think of some way to rearrange things to eliminate that weak point.