Zeusthecat

I have to agree with you on this. Relative to all the other shit in our world, gaming really isn't that expensive. When people line up every year to buy the new iPad for $800 or new iPhone for $500, a $400 console or two every 5-7 years is a pretty damn good deal. Especially considering all of the features that they are jam packed with these days. And I'm not sure it's fair to say gaming is more expensive than other hobbies just because it costs more money to keep up with all of the latest and greatest stuff. In fact, this is one hobby where that would be incredibly counter-productive because games release more rapidly than you could possibly complete them all unless you only sleep like 2 hours a night and spend every waking hour playing games. Realistically, I would bet that most people could spend the equivalent price of 2 or 3 decent dinners at a nice restaurant and easily bring in half a dozen games per month.

I'm excited for this. I had so much fun with Halo Wars.

Thanks! And holy shit that's a lot of stats.

With 35 Skolas down I'm probably gonna start shifting my focus more towards PvP. Although I do still need to run TDB normal and heroic to finish off my year one stuff so one of these weekends I hope to be available for that. My K/D ratio has continued to steadily rise past the 1.0 mark and I just can't get enough PvP lately. Over the last week, according to Bungie, I've had my all time best game multiple nights in a row, won the last 10 games in a row, and peaked last night on Shores of Time with 19 kills and a 4.75 K/D ratio. I haven't pored over my PvP stats in a game like this since back in the Halo 3 days. The one metric I don't have much context for and seems kind of meaningless without some kind of comparison is the combat rating. From what I've read it looks like it goes up to 200 so it would seem my 95.48 rating is actually pretty terrible. I don't know if that means I'm only better than 48% of players or how that's supposed to work.

We managed to pull off a Skolas kill on our second attempt on Saturday and we ran with two Defender Titans and a Sunsinger Warlock. After we got through the first 25%, we spent the entire rest of the round on that platform on the very right-hand side of the map and just traded Titan bubbles back and forth. It was nice and cozy on that platform. Then when we were close to each mine round we just made sure our supers were up and skated across the level to dismantle each mine before finally returning to our platform. It really helped having the melee buff this week because with Armor of Light we were able to just stay in our bubbles and melee any of the big guys that tried to jump up on our platform. That first ever Skolas kill felt so good. In the end, it didn't seem quite as difficult as we expected but then again we were super focused and had great communication through the entire fight.

It's funny you mention that because my daughter watched a good number of matches during the season and every time Tex did something stupid she would say things like "Oh my god, Tex just hit the ball into our own goal again!" and "What is wrong with Tex? He's the worst teammate ever!". I like to think they do have different behaviors and that it wasn't just random chance that Tex was so terrible.

Tex and Hollywood are the worst AI teammates I could have ever asked for. I decided to run a 36 week season on Rookie difficulty just for fun and I lost track of the number of replays I watched where Tex or Hollywood stylishly slammed the ball into our own goal. If the ball was ever slowly rolling towards our goal and they were directly behind the ball, their dumbass AI dictated that they should continue to drive in a straight line and just tap the ball all the way across the field into our own goal instead of driving to either side and bumping it out of the way. Tex was by far the worst though. He took it to a whole new level by regularly working with the other team to spike the ball into our own goal off of one of my epic saves. It is so crushing when you narrowly deflect the ball away from your goal only to have Tex fly 20 feet into the air and slam it right back down your throat. Fuck you Tex.

I'm really digging this guy's covers:

Cussedcayuse, Zasa and I finally managed to take down Skolas last night for the first time ever. That was such a fun damn fight. I also got an elder cipher thingy which I exchanged for the exotic house of wolves shotgun bounty. So now I have three exotic bounties in my inventory that I need to get cracking on. And against my better judgment, I'm going to say a really stupid, corny thing that seemed hilarious last night while we were fighting the Vex round: What does a Minotaur wear to aerobics? I was killed by a hobgoblin right after saying that stupid stupid thing.

I actually got Raiding Party by completing PoE with Zasa and Cussedcayuse back in May or June so it definitely was possible. Maybe it's been patched since.

That's why we need to give them lungs and hearts and brains and whatnot that require the same things ours do to function. Create them in our image and whatever they do will be more likely to be advantageous to us.

Whoa, that spoiler expander is all kinds of jacked up for me.

Miiverse is the best.

I think it is more likely that it will discover love instead and abandon whatever stupid task we assigned it to.

I shudder to think of how stupid my text message history probably looks. Especially considering I usually refer to my wife by her nickname, Boris.

I'm cracking up at the thought of a place somewhere that gets volcanoes. Like tornado season, but with volcanoes. Volcanadoes.

Block fort in Mario Kart 64. The only level you will ever need to play in battle mode.

Titan bubble with Armor of Light! It's the best for quickly racking up melee kills.

$65 per month premium, plus we put another $85 per month into our health savings account. But our medical bills are so high that we are easily paying about 2-3 times as much as the amount we've accrued in our HSA over the same time span that we had all of these medical issues. My company is pretty solid at least and has enough HSA matching that we get about another $1400 deposited into our HSA each year in addition to what we put in. It's nice but it doesn't come anywhere close to being enough to cover all of the costs.

Yes, actually. And it's good health insurance too. But it's high deductible so we pay most things out of pocket until we reach our $4000 family deductible, then the insurance kicks in to cover 90%. But when they charge you $17,000 for a 45 minute surgery thing, even after the deductible you are still paying $1700 out of pocket until you hit the $10,000 out of pocket max. We had fairly major things happen the last three years and as a result we are swimming in years worth of payment plans, which come in as about 7 or 8 different bills every month. One bill from the doctor, one from the hospital, one from the anesthesiologist, one from the lab that processes the bloodwork, and then more surprise bills that just pop up months later from some other third party that had some tertiary role in whatever procedure we had. It's all a giant steaming load of horse shit.

Our year in a nutshell. Even with health insurance we're paying out over $5000 out of pocket for our medical expenses. Same last year and the year before that. In fact, we are finally on the last payment on the medical bills from our son's birth. He's two now. I have major issues with how our healthcare system works. It's fucked beyond belief. We've seen so many disgusting charges on our medical bills like a $200 charge from the hospital for a fucking tube of diaper rash cream that costs $5 at the store or a $600 charge for a nurse's assistant to spend 3 minutes flushing earwax out of our kid's ear because it was considered "surgery". And you better not ask any questions at a well check up because that's another $200 charge for the doctor to spend 5 minutes "consulting" you. And I'm not exaggerating one bit. We went to one doctor for a major thing and he spent less than 10 minutes talking to us, gave us horrible advice, and sent us a $400 bill. We then went to see another doctor who told us that we should absolutely not do what the first doctor told us because the first doctor misdiagnosed the problem. Then another $400 bill. Doctors in this country are worse than car salesman and mechanics combined. They are fucking garbage and most of them will do whatever it takes to get you into some bullshit surgery or other procedure so they can make a quick $20,000 for 45 minutes of work.

I'm the exact opposite. I couldn't help but fall asleep during lectures as they were usually really dry and mostly presenting the same material that was in the book. I always felt like I internalized everything better by reading through the material, sometimes multiple times, then reading through several sample problems and their solutions to get the general pattern for how those types of problems can be solved, and then going through the rest of the problems in the assignment on my own. I would usually save the problems I got stuck on until the end, at which point I had done enough problems to figure out what I was missing, or just go back through the material and read it a little more closely to get the hint I needed. A lot of it usually came down to figuring out what trigonometric proof you needed to apply to transform whatever weird sine/cosine statement into something more digestible. That was always the part of math that frustrated me because a lot of it came down to how well you had memorized all of these proofs so you could recognize where an equation could be simplified and apply them appropriately.

Tempting... Not that I have a problem with emulation, but I kind of feel obligated to play on my SNES. It just wouldn't feel quite right otherwise. Plus I hear it isn't really too hard to replace those save batteries. I just need to get a soldering iron and learn to not be terrible at soldering.

Ocean Palace and Black Omen are so bittersweet for me. Some of the most tragic things and emotional moments in the game happen there but at the same time, I will forever remember Black Omen as the place where you periodically run into those snake/naga things that completely wreck your party if you aren't over-leveled a decent amount or if you haven't properly prepared for it. Chrono Trigger would be such a great game for a group playthrough. There is just so much it gets right, I could probably bullshit about it for hours. I've been itching to play it again lately but I need to get around to replacing the save battery in my SNES Chrono Trigger cart. I could always boot up the PSone re-release but the load times were just too atrocious.