Zeusthecat

Sorry if I came across as insensitive. I'm just being pedantic about the way the word 'epidemic' is so casually thrown around with this kind of stuff.

So I guess we are apparently in the middle of a "heroin abuse epidemic". It's scary to think that it is spreading so fast and infecting so many people. I wonder what precautions I can take to avoid catching it.

Sorry, I'm a little behind but we finally grabbed A Bug's Life and I watched it twice. It sucked. It reminds me of those second rate CGI movies on Netflix like Thunder and the House of Magic or Turtle Tale. Every character is a lazy stereotype and nobody is likeable. I was expecting to see at least some Pixar magic but it was all just really generic and all of the bugs were completely interchangeable. There was nothing about how the ants or grasshoppers (or any of the other bugs really) acted that really came across as ant-like or grasshopper-like and instead they seemed to just rely on lame visual gags to define the bugs. The caterpillar is a ravenous fat guy, the praying mantis is a magician, the two rolling bug guys are foreigners that don't understand what anyone is saying, and of course the flea runs a fucking flea circus. Even if they did do a good job with the bugs though and actually made characters you didn't want to see immediately squashed by a giant foot, this movie still just has the worst and most pointless story. The grasshoppers have more or less enslaved the ants and are forcing them to gather up food as an offering. Why? So the ants don't realize that they outnumber the grasshoppers and step out of line. I really can't figure out what the issue is here though because the grasshoppers have all the food they want in other lands and the only reason the ants would rise up would be to fight their oppressors. So the grasshoppers' logic basically boils down to them just wanting some lower beings around that they can be assholes to without repercussions. Never mind the fact that there is no analog to this in the real world and grasshoppers and ants probably couldn't give two shits about each other (not sure why they couldn't conjure up some actual insect conflict that might resemble something in the real world). Then there is the mechanical bird. Flick convinces the whole ant colony to go along with his stupid plan to build a mechanical bird out of leaves and twigs. It was maybe kind of cool when the little woodland critters did something similar in Once Upon a Forest but it was fucking stupid here. Suspension of disbelief has its limits and I begrudgingly gave the movie the benefit of the doubt that yeah, if there was somehow a genius ant that built a mechanical bird and knew enough about aerodynamics, and knowing ants can lift multiple times their own body weight, that maybe they could get the wings to flap by rowing the little oars inside the body of the bird. But then my brain exploded when I saw the flea light a match and use his flea body weight to shoot a jet stream of lighter fluid at the bird and light it on fire. Nope, that's not how that works. The worst part of all of this is how utterly pointless it all was. Flick is the worst main character I've seen in a long time. He makes mistake after mistake and does far more damage than he does good and yet one stupid speech at the end wins him the princess and convinces all of the rest of the ant colony to industrialize so they can partake in all the leisurely activities they always wanted to do. I always hated ants before but after seeing this movie I hate them even more.

Mmm. Sexy. This is the sexy thread right?

Damn, that's quite different from my experience and sounds super shitty! I still find it hard to fault the customer though and think it is really on restaurant owners to set their prices in a way that they can pay their staff a fair wage without relying on donations from customers. I've seen so many people from so many walks of life that are bad tippers for one reason or another. But at the end of the day, it is their money and tipping isn't mandatory. For some, eating out is a rare treat and they just can't afford dropping a good tip, some people are bad at math, and some people can afford it but just don't feel like being charitable. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to just assume they are all just assholes. I'm guilty of that too unfortunately as it can be quite a vicious environment. And I totally agree on a forced 3 months work in the service industry. To this day, I attribute my years at Applebee's as the most valuable life experience I've had. You learn so goddamn much about people and conversation and body language.

If my several years at Applebee's is any indication, yes, wait staff workers are very often entitled and shitty. I started out working back of the house making $8 an hour. The shifts were longer, working conditions sucked, and we made about 1/3 to 1/2 of what front of the house people made. Then I eventually made my way to front of the house and saw a drastic increase in income and shitty co-workers. Yeah, you get some bad tips and that can suck but there was this weird mentality with almost everyone where if they weren't getting 20% tips they would take it personally and get all bent out of shape. And the discrimination it fostered just made it even more toxic. Any time a group of black people, military people, young people, old people, hispanic people, European people or religious people came in, there was this automatic assumption that you were going to get a bad tip if they sat at your table. And that just set the whole stage for a bad experience on both ends. Tipping is bullshit and tip jars that pop up at every random place are the absolute worst. People that make tips generally have no idea how good they have it compared to all the people working twice as hard for half as much money.

Dude, that is awesome!

To be honest, at first they kind of felt like bullshit but they really are the best versions of those missions. Especially the Subsistence missions. I finished mission 46 last night which I guess means I've finally seen the true ending and the big twist. I still need to finish the last few remix missions and I think I'll be done.

Pretty much.

To be honest, at first I figured people were just being hyperbolic about how terrible this online stuff is integrated into the game. But Jesus, that is just about the worst implementation of an online component I've ever seen in a major AAA release. It makes no goddamn sense. I would estimate that of the last 10 nights that I've played this game, 7 or 8 of those nights had this connection issue where the servers went down for maintenance. At least I have an excuse to use this gif again to express how I feel about the jackasses that thought this was a good idea:

So I've been playing the crap out of this and really enjoying most of it. I hope to post some more thoughts at some point because there is just so much good video game stuff here. But my issue right now is that the Metal Gear Solid V servers go down for maintenance just about every single day. Maybe there are a few days here and there that it doesn't happen but almost every time I sit down to play in the evening, I eventually get a message saying I lost connection to their servers and when I try to reconnect it tells me they are down for maintenance. Normally I wouldn't mind since I'm not paying attention to the online stuff but I'm pretty sure when it happens I'm instantly losing like 90% of my GMP. At first I thought I was mistaken but I swear last night I had well over 1,000,000 GMP and then got that disconnect message and saw my GMP plummet to about 100,000. Is this normal? Please tell me this isn't how this is supposed to work...

Dude, I'm totally not outraged and I never said he hates the puzzles for being clever. I just said the review was kind of irritating for the reason I outlined. He spent several paragraphs going on about how concerned he is about people using guides and I felt that it colored the review in a negative way that seemed a bit off the mark to me. It's such a weird line of criticism for a puzzle game too. He talks about how the game rewards your puzzle solving by building your knowledge so that you can solve more puzzles, but then later says the game doesn't give you enough reward. It's not clear to me what other rewards he would need to for his criticism to be rendered invalid. A cutscene maybe? A gun? Sometimes puzzles in a puzzle game can be hard. And I think it's totally fair to knock a game for having puzzles that are too difficult or obtuse. But to knock it because the puzzles didn't provide good enough rewards and didn't give you some big fanfare when you solved them is missing the point of the game. Yes!

Taking the paragraphs he wrote leading up to that statement, I stand by my claim.

That Polygon review is kind of irritating. It seems kind of like he knocked the game because the puzzles are so clever that nobody would be able to resist using a walkthrough, which would defeat the entire purpose of playing and experiencing the game. Also, hearing such a bold claim regarding the puzzle difficulty only makes me want to play this more.

Well shit, I just Googled it and apparently the director gave an explanation for why Riley's emotions are of mixed gender: http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Inside-Out-Main-Character-Has-Male-Female-Emotions-72176.html Kind of a bummer that there was no real significance behind the decision and it was just done to more or less make the dinner scene more understandable. Boo.

My first thought was that it was a smoking apparatus. The color of the water was a tad yellower than it should have been but I swear I made something that looked just like that once. Then I realized it was just a pee bottle and got sad and a little grossed out.

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-e3-2013-day-two/1600-513/ Around the 16 minute mark is where he claims that preparing the trailer for E3 2013 was the only time their team had had to crunch at all. I guess things got a little more crunchy since then. Edit: Sorry, had to fix link. It was acting squirrelly.

If I remember correctly, I believe Blow was interviewed on the Bombcast a while back and made a comment that they refused to "crunch" with this game and with the exception of a demo they had to throw together in a short amount of time, they've pretty much worked standard weeks while making this game. I'm paraphrasing a bit here and things may have changed in the years since that interview but if that is true then I would imagine that partially explains why development has taken so long. Which is totally fine in my book. I hate the crunch mentality in software development.

I feel like between this thread and the busted thread thread (i.e. the "Making Nick Breckon Uncomfortable" thread) both near the top of Idle Banter, we have taken a dark and uncomfortable turn into the creepier side of weirdness. I don't know how I feel about it but I shudder to think of Nick and Chris reading through these threads. At least Jake is safe... for now.

My get rich quick scheme that is guaranteed to work for everyone is for every person to start a get rich quick scheme.

It seems like they move pretty naturally to me and I haven't noticed that. It could just be something I'm glossing over though.

I have everything cranked up to the max and so far the dynamic shadows have looked really nice. I see some slight jagged edges if I look close enough because anti-aliasing isn't compatible with the shader but it's hardly been noticeable for me. The animation on all the grass and trees is really incredible too. It honestly looks a lot better in motion than it does in a screenshot. Yeah, even with my latest build and a GTX 980 ti this game still dips well below 60 FPS in certain places, even with the default graphics. With the shader mod installed it seems to dip slightly lower than the dips I usually see but the lowest I've seen so far is about 25 FPS which is totally fine given that it regularly dips into the 30's with the default look.

I've been getting back into this again lately. I decided to try out some graphical mods and found a good shader and resource pack that make this game look really nice.

Chris, your PC build story was amazing. Well, amazing in the sense that so much of what you described is exactly what I went through this last weekend (although in my case I'm just dumb). I just got the last of my new PC parts delivered last week and had a couple similar freak out moments while I was putting it together on Saturday, one of which I feel incredibly stupid about in retrospect. It's been several years since I've put a PC together but I've done it enough times that I was feeling pretty confident about my ability to get it all done in a couple hours. So I started going through the motions, got the cpu installed, put on the thermal paste and spread it out evenly with a credit card, and got the cooler mounted without issue. I figured the hard part was over at that point and the rest should be a breeze. But then as I pulled out my two RAM sticks and tried to set them in their slots, I found that the heatsink on my badass gamer RAM made the stick protrude out too far which resulted in my giant cpu heatsink partially blocking one of the RAM slots (if it weren't for that RAM heatsink I would have had enough room to get the RAM under the cpu heatsink pipes that were tapering out over the RAM slots). It was super close though and I could almost get it seated if I went in at a slight angle but it was still just slightly blocked. So I went ahead and removed the cpu heatsink to temporarily get it out of the way, got my RAM installed, and ever so gently mounted the heatsink back onto the cpu. It wasn't the cleanest job though and that RAM stick is being forced to sit at a slight angle because the CPU heatsink is still slightly in the way. From there everything went really smooth and I got just about everything connected to the motherboard and realized I had two problems. My first issue was just that I was down a SATA cable which wasn't a big deal and I figured I would just run down to Fry's Electronics and grab one. My other issue was that I couldn't seem to find the right connectors to get all of my little daisy chained power cables connected back to the power supply. I just kept looking at all of the power supply cables that came in the box and the three cables coming out from the power supply and could not seem to find any way to get them all connected. So I figured I would just need some kind of a molex adapter and made my trip down to Fry's to get that and my missing SATA cable. I found the SATA cable I needed no problem but I must have sat there staring at all of the power supply cables for a solid 45 minutes. I just could not find the kind of adapter that I thought I needed and in a bit of a panic, just got desperate and grabbed a few things that I hoped would magically work somehow. I got back home and sure enough, those cables didn't help. So I started frantically Googling power cable adapters and did some research on my power supply to see if there were additional cables I was supposed to purchase separately but I just couldn't come up with anything. So on a whim, I pulled up a random Youtube video with like 1,000 views of a guy un-boxing the exact power supply I had purchased to see if there was something I was missing. I was about to stop the video after a few minutes but as soon as he pulled it out of the box, I instantly saw what my problem was. Apparently, all of the connectors I needed were right there on the back of the power supply and all I had to do was plug them directly into the unit. I guess I had mounted my power supply into the case so fast and without thinking that I never even looked at the back and just assumed it was like previous power supplies I had purchased where the cables coming out of the unit itself directly connected to all of the other daisy chained cables that were hooked up to the various drives. I probably wasted a solid three hours going down this stupid stupid rabbit hole and I still feel like a big fucking idiot for never taking 5 seconds to just look at the back of the power supply (to be fair, the documentation that came with it didn't show any diagrams or anything that pointed this out, I guess it just should have been that obvious). But from there, everything was a success and it booted up right away! My wife had also surprised me just last week with a new desk that she had a friend custom make from some old barn doors. Pictures and specs below: Specs: CPU - i7 4790k RAM - 16 GB 2400Mhz DDR3 GPU - GTX 980 ti SSD - 500 GB HDD - 2 X 1 TB