Zeusthecat

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.

Lords Management more like *********

Lords Management Edit: What sorcery are you using?

Doesn't seem any more extreme than someone trying to just get decent at a LoMa/Lords Management/Whatever. Edit: So I guess I can't say M OBA on these forums.

They probably are and I just didn't notice. I'll check it out when I play this evening.

And is the only purpose for upgrading a gun to make it more reliable? If so, I might just take a pass on that and go with whatever guns I pick up from enemies. I like the element of uncertainty it adds to encounters.

I think one of my favorite things about this game is how guns sometimes just fall apart. I've had it happen a few times now and it is such an effective way to force me to improvise and take an approach that I wouldn't normally take. With most shooters, I more or less just stick to one or two guns through the entire game and I didn't realize how boring my usual approach was until this game started forcing me to switch up my tactics. One thing I don't quite get though is how weapon upgrades work. I've purchased a few but the computer just shows a gun with a number of diamonds next to it and I don't know if I'm upgrading that type of gun to just make it jam less or if I am ordering one of those guns to be delivered to a safe house and I have to re-purchase it if I drop it to pick up another gun.

Thanks for the response Gormongous! I definitely like it enough to keep going so we'll see if my opinion changes by the time I get to the end of the second season.

I don't think it's fair for any of us to be judging the quality of anyone's voice until we've heard all of them sing. That is the only way this raging debate will end: an Idle Thumbs Sing-off.

I get where people are coming from with not wanting to vote but damn, when you really look at some of the candidates, it is often more like choosing between a destructive pile of shit and a person who is kind of shitty but at least isn't trying to smash everything around them with a giant fecal hammer. I see a lot of this bullshit here in Arizona. We are something like 48th in the nation when it comes to education and yet our governor just cut another $200 million from K-12 education and $75 million from university education all in the name of lowering government spending. Then you have things like religious freedom bills, laws that attempt to restrict women's access to contraception, anti-voter laws, and a number of other completely regressive things that pretty much exclusively come out of one particular party. And I get that in practice, a lot of these things are all talk and once they are elected, they don't necessarily have the influence to do all these things they campaigned on but if I have any capability to tip the scales away from whatever dystopia some of these psychos are fighting to achieve, then I am going to check that box for every possible democratic candidate on any ballot I have access to. If it is true that liberals aren't as good at voting as conservatives then it is incredibly frustrating to think that a lot of the bullshit could be lessened if people would just make some kind of an effort to vote.

I finished the first 26 episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (which is basically season 1 I guess?). By the end of it, I had warmed up to this series quite a bit but I still have mixed feelings about it overall. On the positive side, I think the lore is really solid and there are a lot of interesting and believable details about the world that are surprisingly well fleshed out. The various crimes they solve and the way they go about executing things and communicating with each other also feels very well thought out. Generally speaking, I don't really have any complaints about the premise or story and quite enjoyed that aspect of the show. However, there were a few problems I did have that I think kept me from being IGN.com'd by the show. Probably my two biggest complaints are that there was way too much talking and even with all that talking, there were still things that I felt weren't explained very well. I think for me it was a fundamental problem with how flat and monotonous the English voice actors were combined with the heavy dialog that made a lot of things very hard to follow. Whenever there was an extended conversation between two characters, it just seemed like they were talking so fast and with so little intonation that I regularly found my mind trailing off and then had to rewind it to watch again and try to catch the points that I missed. This was exacerbated by the fact that a lot of what they were talking about was often steeped in lore that I barely had a grasp on because it was explained earlier in another fast talking segment that I also had a hard time following. I didn't even really know what a Ghost was until I was over half way through because as far as I could tell, they never explained it and just assumed that anyone watching would automatically know what that was. From the context, it was fairly obvious but it is still not completely clear to me what they mean when they talk about the possibility of an AI attaining a Ghost. I assume Ghost is basically their word for soul and it may be obvious enough to most people but it kind of bothered me that with all that talking, they really didn't seem to go into it much (and maybe they actually did and I missed it because again, a lot of that dialog was hard to follow). Also, I think I have to echo a little bit of what syntheticgerbil said earlier. That ridiculous leotard outfit is gaudy and distracting and way out of place in this show. It didn't really bother me too much but it was enough of an annoyance to me that I figured it was worth mentioning. I mean, that strap in the front is barely wide enough to cover her thingy and with everything else being so serious and grounded in reality, I can only assume that this type of outfit was conceived purely for titillation. I also really liked the music in the intro but was a little disappointed that there wasn't a whole lot of other good tracks that stood out to me throughout the show. Gormongous, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what it is about this show that you find really appealing and if you feel like my complaints are off base. I strongly suspect I would like the show much more on a second watch and probably even more so if I had a chance to watch the subbed version (I think having subtitles to read would make it much easier for some of these things to become cemented in my brain). I started season 2 last night and I'm already liking it quite a bit more than season 1. But that is probably also because at this point, I've put in enough time to at least have a basic understanding of a lot of these details.

I would love to join in on the conversation but I know I'd just end up being that dumb guy asking dumb questions and liking all the worst shows and hating all the best shows. And also I'd have no idea what anyone is talking about cause I've only seen like 15 anime. But I totally want to listen to this.

Oh hey! I may still be a noob when it comes to my exposure to anime but I think I've watched the entire Dragon Ball Z series and all of the movies enough times that I could totally go toe to toe with you. But you would probably still win. The Cell Games is still one of my favorite block of episodes of any show ever.

I've done a few missions now and feel like I've put enough time in to have some actual thoughts on this game. The two overwhelming feelings I have while playing this game are trepidation and excitement. Every time I leave a safe house or bus stop and start driving down those dirt roads, I find myself wondering how far I will get before murder starts raining down on me. And usually, before I even finish that thought, I hear an engine revving behind me followed by a rain of bullets that forces me to stop and get out before my car explodes. The first couple hours of playing I was wondering what the big deal was and why people complained about this game being too hard or too unforgiving. I had only died once because of some stupid mistake and the few times I came to a guard outpost, I was able to pick them all off pretty easily while maneuvering around some rocks and trees. Then last night, during an extended play session, everything just started literally falling apart. During one encounter, my rocket launcher fired a dud and then promptly fell apart in my hands, leaving me with no option but to chuck a couple grenades and then run back in the other direction as an exploding car started a brush fire that nearly surrounded me. In another encounter, I tried to stop my car a good distance away from an outpost to safely pick off the enemies but was spotted prematurely by some guys who immediately hopped into a car and charged me. I barely managed to take them out before my assault rifle fell apart in my hands at which point I heard another engine rev behind me, causing me to instinctively jump onto the hood of my car just in time to avoid being smashed. But at this point I had lost both my assault rifle and my rocket launcher and desperately started firing my pistol at the gunner, taking him and the driver out before either one could kill me. In the meantime, the rest of the guards at the outpost 50 yards away were still firing at me and the mess of cars I was taking cover behind was close to exploding. So I had no choice but to charge toward the outpost while throwing the few grenades I had and managed to find cover behind some rocks where I found another assault rifle near a dead body and finished clearing everyone out. It's amazing how many of these moments there are and how often they happen. I think it was in the same run as one of the other incidents mentioned above where I slowed down to admire some zebras and out of nowhere, 10-15 guys started opening fire on me from multiple directions. I panicked and tried to just drive through them as fast as I could but my vehicle couldn't take all the damage and it died right before I was viciously murdered by a lot of bullets. Luckily, my buddy rescued me and dragged me away right before my car exploded and started a brush fire that helped create a wall between us and the enemies. Then, I found a tree and healed while my buddy took out the rest of the guys that hadn't died in the fire. Sadly, when I went to examine all the carnage, I found that the majestic zebras that started this whole mess had also perished in the fire. It's weird. Coming down with malaria sucks. Having guns break and constantly jam sucks. Having my rocket launcher fire a dud when I'm counting on it to blow up a car that is speeding towards me also sucks. But all of that shit just makes everything that is usually so monotonous in a game like this super exciting. The missions and story are also nothing special. They are just there to drive me forward and get me into situations like these. I've played a lot of shooters before but this is one of those rare ones that I just can't help but sit here and think about all day while I'm supposed to be working.

Yeah, I think the music is perfectly fine. It's pretty subdued anyways and kind of just fades in and out. And I kind of like the tension it adds to fights.

Well shit, I am one of those completionist type people so maybe I need to rethink some of these life decisions.

Thanks for the heads up. I will take your advice and bump that down. My goal is to run through another few quick burn games after Far Cry 2 before jumping into another long one so I can maintain some steady progress. I'll move Stacking up to that slot instead.

So I take it there are no options to tweak signal timing at each intersection or anything like that? From what I've heard about the traffic flow problems, it seems like a big part of that could solved by just letting players adjust signal timing parameters, cycle lengths, and offsets to improve progression down corridors.

In the last 2-3 weeks, I've knocked 5 games off of my Steam backlog (thanks to LucasArts replays) bringing my current backlog to 11 games. I started Far Cry 2 last night and I figure when I'm done with that Binding of Isaac and FTL will be the next 2 games I knock out. I checked out that howlongtobeat website (which is awesome btw) and if I don't get too distracted with other games, I think I can get through the rest of these over the course of the next 4 months. Man it feels good to see this list getting steadily whittled down.