Architecture

They really fudge the geography in the first section--HWY 71 is nowhere near the 360 bridge is nowhere near downtown Austin (which looks much more like San Marcos than it does Austin, honestly). Also, people who live in Georgetown (Williamson County in general) have much thicker Texan accents than the city proper. Does the game actually state he was born and raised in the Austin area, or are you just inferring that?

September 16 is still technically summer.

Those of you who're approaching the endgame and default to using Quiet as your buddy:

For the record, there are combat deployment missions which disrupt supply lines for enemy equipment such as helmets, NVGs, gas masks, body armor & specific guns.

There's a transportation specialist being held prisoner in the mission where you have to destroy the four Walker Gears in Africa.

Dean Takahashi over at Venture Beat recently published an excellent breakdown of the whole fiasco.

MGS V is definitely one of the greatest video games ever made, so I'm not sure how Mad Max will stack up, but I'm still interested in playing it. Phil Kollar holds perhaps the least compatible views on games of anyone I've ever come across--his review of The Last of Us made me want to bash my head against concrete for hours. Sounds like a Winter Steam Sale purchase (assuming I'm not knee-deep in Avalanche's other game this year).

I imagine this is my GOTY. So glad it's actually a game and not just cutscenes bridged by walking forward. The game mechanics are better than they've ever been, and the flexibilty of the complex systems married to the responsive controls make this the game MGS always aspired to be.

Green Man Gaming has a 23% off voucher which works on MGS V, for those of you who have yet to purchase the game.

This got announced. Tickets and exhibitor lists aren't available yet.

If you need to rid yourself of a copy of The Phantom Pain, I'm here for you.

I have that mouse pad and confirm its compatibility with Windows 10.

Straight Outta Compton was good. I don't know that I'll ever care to watch it again, but the acting was good and the writers did a decent job of not romanticizing the history too much. It definitely flirts with the issues all big-budget biopics suffer from, but the performances and source material really elevated the whole thing for me. A little long in the tooth, but damn does O'shea Jackson Jr. turn in a commanding performance as his dad.

An annual expansion pass sounds absolutely fair for a game that provides nearly limitless content in a hyper-connected online universe. There are literally billions of things to see (sure, it's not entirely bespoke content, but the point still stands), and adding something substantive like planetary landings and new vehicles is something I am okay with paying for. It's probably the best way to ask players for more money after the initial buy-in cost in this day and age.

Turns out my SD card reader error was actually the initial signs of a failing SD card, not the device or Wintendows. Woops!

Dan's takedown of Jared Leto on the Bombcast this week had me laughing so hard I thought I was going to wreck my bike. "Silverfish are the Jared Leto of insects" is gonna stick with me.

Really like these. And these.

Thanks for the kind words, y'all. I'm bummed as shit that my SD card reader doesn't work with Windows 10. I can't even connect the camera via USB to pull down images. It really crushes my drive to get out and take photos.

I can't get my SD card reader to work and it's driving me insane. Windows sees the device in Device Mgr, says the drivers are up to date and the hardware's working as intended and yet Explorer doesn't display the device and I can't seem to find a way to import files from the card. There's zero information on this online as far as I can tell and it's really frustrating me.

I'm pretty sure that's all grey market. They are certainly not an official partner of any major publishers.

Okay, a couple weird things: One, it looks like Skyrim's throwing an error with ENB but the ENB is actually present and works just fine (though I have a feeling that I accidentally moved a couple files instead of copying them when I installed ENBs into FO3 and FONV). Two, New Vegas now works (after I booted up this evening--I turn my machine off when I'm at work), but FO3 does not. This appears to be a GFWL issue, as I'm missing xlive.dll. The thing is, this worked fine on Win7 (I did whatever evil magics were required to make FO3 large address-aware and not have to use GFWL), but it refuses to launch even when using the script extender launcher as part of Nexus Mods. Either way, I'm a have to do some digging and figure out what all exactly is missing. Has anyone come down on the side of whether a clean install makes a difference or not? I feel like my machine's not as fast as it was before yesterday, but that could just be the bitter taste of some of my broken shit.

Just as I expected, Windows 10 breaks both Bethesda Fallout games and neuters ENB presets.

Clyde, check the Windows 10 thread--there's a way to force the update. It's what I did.

Forced the update (thanks, tabacco). At first my second monitor wasn't detected and I couldn't get the Geforce Experience program to work. Finally looked in Device Manager and noticed a warning indicator that my GPU wasn't working properly and that the system needed a restart. Now I have my second monitor, but it fucked up my color calibration profiles so it's likely I'll have to recalibrate my displays soon to get them back to where they should be. Hopefully nothing else is broken.