Zeusthecat

Too bad Chewbacca didn't age along with him. It would have been better if he was an old grey haired wookie and had an old man wookie growl.

Oh man, good point with the resolution scaling with high dpi screens. That is actually something I have an issue with on my work laptop. You make a decent point. I guess I can understand the type of user that would benefit from this. But still, generally speaking, I think the cost to benefit ratio just isn't there. If people that buy Mac laptops really only tend to use them for lightweight stuff and web browsing, then just buy like 5 cheap shitty laptops for the same price. Yeah you won't get that Apple quality and support but I think your 5 laptops will get you further than the one Mac. And I know my Mac experience isn't typical but we had the battery completely die on ours and the case cracked multiple times and we had to take it in to get it repaired. But this was in 2006 so maybe their build quality isn't as shit now.

Take this Dell laptop at the same price for instance: link The gulf is freaking huge. The Mac battery life, screen, and keyboard must be freaking out of this world (and tbh, the keyboard on the new model looks incredibly uncomfortable) for a person to want to cripple themselves like that.

But but but. $1300? I mean, there has to be some Windows laptops out there that are decent in all of those areas and cost far less, and with probably better specs right? I'm obviously being hyperbolic, I mean, this is the type of topic where I feel hyperbole is expected and required.

I don't think I will ever understand what the appeal is for Apple laptops and desktop computers. Seriously, $1300 for a laptop with only a single USB type C port that doubles as the charging port and specs that are just kind of okay? I have a co-worker who eats this shit up and the best reason I've heard for why he prefers to spend 3-4x as much to get their products is just because "It's Apple". I had a terrible experience with the one Apple laptop I owned. The software sucked, half of the programs I wanted to run weren't compatible, and it was woefully inadequate if I wanted to play any kind of semi-new game on it. Someone please tell me what I'm missing. I badly need a scenario where a human being would be better off purchasing and using an Apple laptop over a non-Apple one.

"I was gonna clean my room until I got high I was gonna get up and find the broom but then I got high my room is still messed up and I know why (why man?) yea heyy, - cause I got high [repeat 3X]" Reading this out loud in a somber voice makes it sound like it belongs in a "Don't do drugs" commercial.

So yeah, I'm getting kind of stupidly excited for this.

Fuck the water and fuck boats. I thought I was taking a nice scenic shortcut to my destination and then...

Poor Owen Wilson.

That's true, and I think the stuff surrounding the history of Draenor was the worst offender but I think it could have been much worse considering how all over the place those stories were.

I went through a similar thing with Warcraft lore at one point while I was playing that game heavily. I think I read through the entirety of that same Wikia for every location, character, and thing that had ever been created for that universe. There was something cool about seeing how the lore slowly evolved from just the backstory for a couple of games to this entire universe that was full of history and interesting characters with various backgrounds and motivations. I feel like they did a pretty good job of stitching a bunch of these random, seemingly incoherent story elements together throughout their various sequels and expansions without leaving too many seams showing and without having to go too crazy with retcons. In general I am a fan of lore as long as it isn't required to enjoy the game. WOW and Elder Scrolls pretty much hit that sweet spot perfectly for me where I had a blast playing them even though I wasn't familiar with the lore and because I enjoyed them so much, it motivated me to want to dig a little deeper into the lore which then enhanced my enjoyment of the games even further.

You might want to update your W4 form to make sure you aren't declaring any personal allowances. Even if your allowances match up to your situation, it still more or less comes down to an educated guess as to what they should remove from your paychecks and you will almost always owe a little or get a little back no matter how accurate you are when you try to fill those forms out. So make it as low as possible if you want them to take the max amount out of your paycheck. On the bright side, you can look at it as getting an interest free loan from the government.

In Dragon Age Origins things got really hot and heavy between me and Alistair. It started out innocently enough but one thing led to another and I ended up taking his virginity and blowing his fucking mind. Then I got bored. He was just too inexperienced and couldn't satisfy my radical dwarf sexual desires. So I moved on to Leliana and within one conversation I had fallen deeply in love with her. The only problem is that I never bothered to mention any of this to Alistair. Before I knew it gossip had spread around the camp that me and Leliana were an 'item' and she forced me to make a tough decision. If I wanted to get anywhere with her I would need to break up with Alistair. I was torn. On the one hand Alistair was a nice enough guy and I didn't want to hurt his feelings. On the other hand, he couldn't give me the radical dwarf sex I desired. So I went with my baser instincts and kicked him to the curb. Then me and Leliana lived happily ever after.

I had a relatively decent Far Cry 2 stream last night. Here are some highlights showing a couple gnarly situations I got myself into. Apologies for my dumb face and dumb commentary. I need to get some better lighting set up for my webcam. This game is the best.

I wonder if anyone has considered using flaming hot Cheetos powder as breading for fried food. Or if the powder isn't quite the right consistency to make for a good breading, I guess they could just crush a bunch of flaming hot Cheetos and use that to get a better crunch out of the finished product. Some obvious possibilities: Flaming Hot Mozzarella Sticks Flaming Hot Fried Zucchini Flaming Hot Fried Pickles Flaming Hot Fried Chicken Flaming Hot Corn Dog Flaming Hot Jalapeno Poppers

I think what might be happening is that I'm hearing the sounds of the bullets hitting surfaces behind me or they modeled sounds echoing or something. I don't think the channels are necessarily messed up because a lot of the time the sounds are coming from the expected direction. Luckily, I am not alone with this problem so I'm not completely crazy: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1704289.html

I finally resolved my shitty connection problems and it is running super smooth now. We ended up having a Cox technician come out and tweak the signal levels to see if that was the issue and once everything was in spec we ran the test again and saw the exact same results. So that pretty much narrowed it down to the modem (which was a new Motorolla Surfboard with great reviews) that we had purchased in November. Luckily, we still had the box and receipt so I was able to exchange it for another one at Best Buy and after activating the new one, upload and download speeds are right where they should be and I'm a happy dude. So I guess my main take away from all of this is that you can't necessarily trust what it says on the modem status page. In my case, everything checked out and the modem reported that everything was working properly when in reality, something was wrong with one or more of the upload channels and the problem only became apparent during sustained uploads. And for the record, if you are ever checking your internet speeds, use testmy.net over any of the other speed tests. It allows you to specify file sizes for upload and download tests and gives a much more accurate portrayal of what your real speeds are. And thanks to the graph that that site provided, I was able to get a clear profile of what was happening during my uploads and saw big gaps of massive packet loss which gave me an overall upload speed of 650 kb/s versus the 9 mb/s that all the other speed tests reported.

So I did another round of testing last night with my work laptop and pretty much narrowed it down to it being on Cox's end. Plugging in directly to my modem and restarting it a couple times in the process gave the exact same results that I was getting on my home PC. So it has nothing to do with my computer hardware and nothing to do with my router. I took it one step further and logged into my modem to check the status and signal levels. Everything checked out with the exception of the SNR on one of the channels being below the acceptable level. According to the documentation I read, each of those 7 or so channels needs to be at a minimum of 35 dB and one of my channels was at 32 dB. I don't know enough about what kind of impact this type of discrepancy would have and I assume it just means I'm going to have a slightly higher packet loss. I feel pretty confident though that my modem is fine after checking these values and the reported status. So I think one of two things is going on here: either Cox has stepped up their traffic shaping and it is having much more impact on my streams now than it did in November (doubtful) or I am just getting a shitty signal and I need a technician to come out and look at it. The second option seems like the most obvious way to go at this point as I'm doubtful that my sustained upload bandwidth would be getting impacted so badly by traffic shaping (and we are on the second to highest speed tier too so 1500 kb/s sustained upload just seems ludicrously low when you consider all the other millions of people that have Cox/Comcast/Whatever and can stream at much higher bitrates). So I'm gonna call Cox after work today and hope that I can cut through their bullshit and get them to send someone out.

Are you getting any beeps when you try to boot it up? I had a similar problem once but was lucky enough that it beeped at me when it tried to boot up and I was able to determine what the problem was by the beep code.

Also, 2 year olds love symmetry and things that are not meant for them. So get her some simple geometric shapes like balls, blocks and paper towel tubes and then top it off with some expensive ass shit that you would normally get for an adult that she can utterly ruin without upsetting her parents. Maybe a couple universal remote controls and six expensive Blu Rays that she can destroy and dirty up with her fingerprints. Her parents will probably think you are a douchebag at first when they see you break out the balls and blocks but when they see you follow it up with all six Star Wars movies on Blu Ray and a nice Logitech universal remote, they will be singing your praises for years to come.

With all the auto-correcting we have on here for things like ********* and Lords Management and opinionated in a way that is different from me, I feel like there's a missed opportunity by not also auto-correcting mage, sorcerer, sorceress, conjurer, enchanter, witch, warlock, etc. to wizaaard.

One thing that I keep getting really confused by in this game is the direction that various sounds are coming from. I am playing with headphones on and I keep hearing sounds that seem to come from behind me but when I turn around, nobody is there. I've noticed it with brush fires too where I am watching shit burn and start to hear a burning sound that I swear is coming from behind my character. But every time I turn around there is nothing there. Has anyone else noticed this with this game or am I just crazy?

I literally no nothing about how port forwarding works. But now that you've mentioned it I'll look into that as another possible remedy. Thanks again for throwing some ideas out there. This issue is consuming me and I freaking hate to leave a problem unsolved.

Yeah, I've tried that and even managed to find a nice utility someone made that lets you test your bitrate and latency to every possible Twitch server. These tests actually reflect what I am seeing with my streams. My best two connections are to LA and San Francisco and the results that I get with the Twitch connection test come out to 1500 kb/s or less which is extremely low compared to the 8-9 mb/s that I get on my internet speed tests (and I've tried about 7 or 8 different speed tests). This utility also rates the quality of your connection to the Twitch servers based on these parameters and mine comes out to 0% quality across the board every single time. Something just seems wrong and from what I've researched, it doesn't sound like I'm being throttled, but that there is some other factor at play that I am missing. I thought at first that maybe it was just my timing and Twitch servers were overloaded but after seeing this issue for so long that is obviously not the problem. I'm also going to try flushing my DNS to see if that helps but I doubt it will since restarting my computer didn't have any effect either. Thanks for the response Jon.

I've been having a weird problem lately where I am getting a ton of dropped frames when I try to stream to Twitch. Back in November, when I originally set everything up, I was able to stream Dishonored without any issues with the bit rate set at the recommended value of 2000 kb/s. Over the last month though, whenever I've tried to stream, it comes out incredibly choppy and OBS shows a very large percentage of dropped frames. Even lowering the bit rate down to 1000 kb/s still results in some dropped frames but it is overall much smoother. Even more frustrating is that when I run an internet speed test, it always shows me having about an 8-9 Mb/s upload speed which should be way more than adequate to run a stream at 2000 kb/s. One key thing about all of this is that the streams tend to start out fine and then start to degrade and drop frames after it's been running for a little while, usually 5-10 minutes or more. My immediate assumption when I noticed that was that maybe Cox was throttling my bandwidth because I was over my data limit or something. So I downloaded ShaperProbe to see if there was any packet shaping going on and unfortunately, it tells me that the servers are busy every time I try to run it even after a month of regular attempts (apparently they only support one client connection at a time?). In this same time span, I've continued testing my streams and have gotten the same results every time, which indicates to me that it has nothing to do with me running over on my data since the time span has overlapped two billing cycles now. At this point, I'm at a loss and super frustrated that I can't figure out exactly why I'm having this problem now when I didn't have it in November. We did get a new modem between then and now so I guess that could be a possibility but I doubt it since it is much better than the previous one we had and internet speed tests all come out higher than before. And I've done all the obvious stuff like restarting my modem and router and computer multiple times to no avail. The only other thing I can think of is that maybe my network card in my computer is going bad so the last thing I am going to try is to hook my work laptop up to my network and run a Twitch connection test to see if I get different results. Does anyone here have any experience with this kind of stuff or any thoughts on other factors that I may have overlooked? I am not very experienced when it comes to diagnosing network issues and I am mostly just learning as I go but I think I have reached a point where Google has run out of advice and troubleshooting steps for me to try.