Zeusthecat

Honestly, it doesn't look as bad as you would expect scaled up on a 58" screen. And you can't tell in the picture but there are some thin black vertical bars on either side so it's not quite a full 16:9. I'm so used to it now I can't tell if it's actually stretching it or not.

Just got home from work and was very proud to see this.

So this year is kind of a weird one for that holiday thingy taking place today. My wife actually has a card now and is going down to the place where she gets the stuff and they have some super good deals on some good shit plus some freebies. Tonight will be a fun one!

Honestly, I think this is the one reason that actually makes sense to me. The whole ecosystem angle is definitely an important factor for me so I could understand purchasing one for that reason if that is the ecosystem you've bought into. I guess I haven't met any of these people that care about how much a thing like that weighs so it just seems weird to me. The Windows laptop I have for work is super thin and light and I can't imagine needing something even thinner and lighter. And I really think the latest Macbook is taking it a little to the extreme with this. It's just diminishing returns at this point and now it looks like the keyboard is suffering as a result. And yeah, the one I linked has a shitty hard drive. But there are plenty out there that are solid state.

If science had advanced to the point where people are warping all over the galaxy, couldn't they have figured out how to extend the human lifespan to match that of a wookie's?

It did. Now I'm pissed and this trailer is horseshit. If they can't even age Chewbacca properly I'm now dreading to see all the other shit they fuck up. Like that sith? Probably Jar Jar Binks.

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.