Vorlonesque

As someone from West Virginia I found Nick's story hilarious. My family used to take those mountain roads during summer when we'd go on vacation to Virginia Beach and my Dad would drive like a maniac on them while my brother, my mother, and I would hold on for dear life. I'm not sure if we were driving the same roads as these were two lane roads that went past Seneca Rocks and through the Green Bank radio silence zone or whatever (if Nick was driving through there it might explain his lack of cell reception as it's government mandated to aid the radio telescopes at Green Bank, though large parts of the state are simply without cell coverage regardless of that). Having lived in the state for 37 years it occurs to me that I've never been to either of the two big ski resorts (Snow Shoe and Canaan Valley) this is likely because I am clumsy as fuck and would likely die by self inflicted hoisting off this mortal coil.

A 980Ti and I'm running in 1920x1440@75Hz on an old sgi branded Trinitron CRT. I think I may have cropped some bits of those pictures out but I can't remember for certain.

I've been playing quite a bit recently and I've been using my Imperial Courier a bit more than my Eagle lately. With level 3 dirty drive upgrades or whatever I can get it going pretty damned fast and it actually turns pretty well (almost 60 degrees per second, while my Eagle does a bit over 70 degrees per second if I remember correctly). I was playing in conflict zones and the Eagle just doesn't hold up very well under fire...its perfect for taking out clippers and pythons in RES bounty hunting areas along with the occasional bigger ship...but in a CZ where you're getting hit by multiple ships the Eagle is hard to keep in one piece. I think my Eagle looks slightly better, but the ICourier doesn't look bad with the same bright yellow paint job (though it looks more orange in that picture as I was near a red dwarf at the time). Edit: Oh and here's my Eagle for comparison's sake:

DAMMIT, I am now going to have to get at least a few of these...purple so I can have shadow ship laser beams, and green because I like the way green laser beams look! Edit: I guess I should like green beam lasers given my user name! I bought all seven colors so I can do stupid things!

If I remember, my accidental feeding of people to rats did count against me (I was apparently hiding people unconscious in an area where they were later being eaten by rats...I realized this when I witnessed it at some point and was horrified to realize THAT was the thing I was doing that kept getting me a few people on my kill count). I was thinking I was being humane and it turned out I was a far worse monster than if I had just stabbed the guys. Edit: I should add this was in the first game...not sure if that will happen in the new one. If it does my character is apparently some unintentional bumbling Willard type killer.

Thanks for posting this, as I was getting ready to ask if the disc had much of the install at all (or any for that matter)!

My Asp doesn't look quite that nice, but it looks ok (its my workhorse for cargo and stuff like that)

That's actually a real gun too...the world's smallest pistol produced in numbers I think. I remember seeing a video of one years back and when I heard it was going to be in Battlefield it made me happy because it is the right level of hilariously impractical and historically real for the game.

Someone complemented me on my bright yellow Eagle with stuff on it. Said it looked very nice and sporty. Its always cool when you run into someone in this game and they strike up a conversation, makes it feel more alive!

I thought about just buying a fez and being lazy...but I'm too lazy for even that

After I posted this pic last year people told me I should dress up as Matt Smith's version of the Doctor for Halloween: Truth is I'm too lazy to put together a costume!

I'm pretty sure the MS Sidewinder 2 works in Windows 10 as its what I'm using (well, I'm actually using a Sidewinder FFB 2...but its close enough that I would imagine if Win10 detects one it should work with the other). I'd guess that your stick probably is dead. I regretted replacing my old SWFFB2 with a Logitech G940...I managed to find a new in box MS SWFFB2 a year or two ago on ebay that was perfect...I wasn't fond of the rubberized plastic handle of the red button model, so I replaced it with the handle off a regular Sidewinder 2. I'm using a Warthog throttle and a set of Saitek rudder pedals with it, so its a completely mismatched setup but it works well enough!

I first saw it (pepe) when a coworker had a depiction of sad pepe (made from those little plastic ring things that people make depictions of pixel art with) at work beside his picture of George Costanza and I thought it was either the "get out" frog from Something Awful or Frog from Chrono Trigger and asked him about it and he said it was a meme originating from a comic strip. I just looked it up and I guess the plastic things are perler beads.

I always think of the one with Jack Palance from the 80's.

I remember regretting not backing that...but it sounds like I dodged a bullet there at least. (I still regret not backing mid-air, as it looks like the sort of game I want to play as soon as I can)

One of the nice things about mostly single player games like this is that you can take your time to get around to them without missing anything.

I just finally saved up for a set of 3A Enhanced Performance Thrusters for my Eagle...its combat outfitted so its not getting racing speeds...but its a boost over the 254 or whatever m/s speed I was getting before and it turns a bit faster as well. Power management became a bit tricky though and I had to drop my sensors down back to 2D and when I got back I put a 2D FSD drive in it to save weight and power when I'm not going long distances. I'll probably tweak the load out a bit (maybe 1D life support instead of using 1A...though 1A has some benefits wrt its long O2 supply that can be used in combat to save power for other things...but it weights a little more so its a trade off). I think I may try to upgrade my Power Plant's output a little bit and upgrade my shields to be more efficient and lighter...but for now I've got the thing running and I'll keep tweaking it to get the weight down without throwing out all armor and weapons since its still a combat loadout. Edit: I'd add that I sold my Cobra and Diamondback Scout to help finance the last bit I needed for the thrusters and an extra 3.5 million credits for insurance...so I've currently got my old Sidewinder (that I may upgrade and play with as I haven't touched it in a while), my Adder that I use for exploration (and occasional trade before I got the Cobra that is now sold), and my Eagle that I put the thrusters in. After taking the Eagle out last night I don't regret it at all...almost got an Anaconda bounty except I accidentally hit a Fed's anaconda and I had to suddenly escape 5 or 6 Federal ships in my Eagle and the thrusters made that a little easer. Next time I'll be more careful about which ship I'm shooting.

I decided to take my Eagle down to Maia to pick up some Meta Alloys to give to Felicity Farseer. I thought about taking my Adder that was better outfitted to the job or upgrading my Diamondback Scout that was probably better suited...but the idea of taking the Eagle down there seemed like a lot of fun. It was tense because I only had a small number of jumps before I needed to fuel scoop and a couple mistakes could leave me stranded without fuel or a fuel source. I had to check the galaxy map every so often and make a detour to the nearest scoopable star at times...but I made the ~450 Light Year journey from Kremainn to Maia in my little Eagle (it has a yellow paint job and I've taken to calling it Big Bird's Bones...and if I could name a ship that would be its name). I then ventured from Maia to Deciat (and Farseer Inc) which was over 470 LY from what I can tell. Through the course of this adventure I'd stripped out the shield generator to make room for a cargo rack and my last hull reinforcement module to make room for a small fuel tank to give me a little extra margin for error. I was interdicted a couple of times and ended up the victor of those encounters with some damage but nothing too bad. I managed to make my way from Deciat back to Kremain (229.75 LT according to ed-td.com's route planner) in my trusty Eagle and ended up appreciating the ship that much more. After the journey I'm kind of attached to my Eagle...I've had this particular one for a while without getting it blown up and replaced via insurance and now that I've had this adventure with it I'll be sad if I ever get it blown up. I've taken down NPC Pythons and Anacondas in it (usually with help from the NPC Fed's in high risk mining areas in Kremainn) and just today I took down an FDL with it in Ngaliba's Comprimised Nav Beacon with the help of an NPC Cobra Mk3 who I believe was a fellow bounty hunter (there may have been a third ship involved...I wasn't playing with VR so I didn't quite have the situational awareness I normally would to be able to tell who was helping me for certain beyond the Cobra that I almost collided with several times). I like my DBS, but I think the Eagle is my favorite ship right now. If I get enough credits I'll almost certainly slap one of the expensive enhanced thrusters in it (right now I've got a little over a million credits and I've stopped upgrading the ships I never use so that I can keep getting credits until I have over 7-10 million and feel comfortable getting those thrusters).

I don't really entirely disagree, and I'm someone who never liked Halo at all and didn't really care for the new DOOM beta. I think new DOOM is in a weird position because given that its called DOOM its likely going to try to hearken back to some old school sensibilities but its also going to have to incorporate some new stuff and the question becomes "which new things to add and which old things to keep" and everyone will respond differently. Different people feel that different parts of DOOM made it DOOM. You have people like me who still play DOOM deathmatch online via various source ports like ZDaemon and Zandronum and love the speed and weapons of DOOM 1 and 2, who love the whole crowd management an projectile dodging and enemy types of the single player game and don't see stuff like Brutal DOOM as really being DOOM anymore. You have people who will say that DOOM is all about the atmosphere and the scariness and I think DOOM3 was an attempt at making that DOOM and I respected that even if it wasn't the DOOM I wanted in the end. You have people who see something like Brutal DOOM as being more DOOM than even DOOM was. At this point DOOM is this weird cipher obscured by age and its meaning in terms of what makes it good is decoded differently by different people and there isn't any right answer. I think if you find yourself making a new DOOM game you have to make the game that fulfills your vision of what made DOOM good and ignore everyone else...then let the chips fall where they may...but I imagine that's not even remotely easy when you're a group of people with differing ideas of that working for a large publisher. I think the Halo comparisons come from the fact that Certain Affinity (a company created by ex-Bungie employees who developed the multiplayer for Halo 4) designed DOOM 2016's multiplayer combined with it being a little floaty. I also found it to be a bit slow, but I will admit that I tend to like my FPS games faster than most people and think that UT4 is also slower than it needs to be so take that with a grain of salt. I don't think it feels like Halo at all, but I haven't played Halo in a long time. My biggest gripes with new DOOM weren't that it was at all like Halo, and more that the weapons felt a bit weak (a rocket or shotgun blast right in someone's face took their health down by about half as I remember), and that the run speed was a little slow compared to past id games and there wasn't a means of locomotion to gain speed over time (which is something that I like and that id games in the past have had, whether it be strafe running and wall running in DOOM, bunnyhopping in Quake1 and QW, strafe jumping in Q2 and Q3 (and in DOOM3 for that matter), or what-have-you). But those are both more about my preferences and they don't make new DOOM a bad multiplayer game...they just make it a game that isn't for me which is fine. There are games out there that I like for multiplayer (Quake Live, Tribes Ascend, Titanfall, Reflex, UT4, and others) and I think a lot of the backlash about DOOM 2016 comes down to people expecting this to be a game for them because they loved the original or loved past id games, but I think it needs to be evaluated on its own merits rather than as a continuation of the tradition of id shooters. Its not really the same people at this point and its a different game. I was harder on it myself when it first came out largely because I heard people talking about how fast it was and how much a return to its roots it was...but I sort of realized that different people see DOOM in different ways and I have to realize that different people making that comparison will mean different things.

I've been playing the hell out of Reflex recently (http://reflexfps.net/) and enjoying it (even though I'm terrible...especially at 1v1 where I get easily distracted and psych myself out occasionally). I didn't see a post about it on here and I thought maybe someone might enjoy it so I thought I'd post. Its an arena FPS in the style of the Quake games in terms of gameplay (it is being made by ~3 people in Australia at least 2 of whom worked on CPMA for Q3 if I remember correctly...but my memory isn't the greatest so I could be completely wrong)...and the current art style reminds me of Virtua Racing with the polygon counts pumped way way up (it has a flat shaded and at times almost cel-shaded sort of look to it, but with lots and lots of polygons on everything). You can rocket jump, strafe jump, and bunny hop/circle jump around for speed and maneuverability. I'm still getting used to the movement (its a little different than QW and a little closer to CPMA I think, as you can both strafe jump and bunnyhop), but I really like the way it feels and my only real gripe is that it doesn't have a lot of players right now so its a little hard to find a game. I made some videos of some games I played for a couple different modes: Arena Team DM (basically Clan Arena from Q3 (or Rocket Arena if I remember correctly), you spawn with all the weapons and fight in rounds): FFA (Free for all):

I think Reflex also works well on that front. It feels more like Quake to me than the new DOOM game I guess (http://reflexfps.net/) Edit: also, that's me playing in the video...so sorry for my shitty playing in advance!

Titanfall was my go to multiplayer game for about a year and a half or so (I moved on after I couldn't find anyone playing Hardpoint anymore on the PC). I really loved the wall running and general speed of it. I'll almost certainly pick this one up. My play style basically amounted to "jump on and off of every wall everywhere all the time" and I really enjoyed that:

This is true...my memory is a bit foggy about it because it's been at least 13 years since I studied that bit of History in college (and likely 15 years...13 years ago I graduated so it has to be prior to that as I think the course would have been Recent Europe or something I took to fill in hours which is why I sort of accidentally minored in History (which didn't really compliment my CS manor, but I have no regrets and enjoyed those classes as they offered a nice change of pace). As for Cruz and Trump being similar my Dad had an interesting notion...Trump is a con man by choice, but he's an asshole by his nature and that's just who he is at his core. Ted Cruz CHOOSES to be an asshole and terrible...I think it's more a conscious choice on his part. That makes him worse as a person I think...but they are both terrible and Trump being an asshole doesn't excuse the actions he takes by choice. I sort of agree with my Dad on this...Donald Trump is a walking id monster to a degree and its hard to tell what is calculated and what is just the ugliness in his heart showing itself. With Cruz I think it's entirely cynically calculated. If this is a mess I apologize, as I'm typing it on my phone so its probably full of errors and unfortunate auto-corrections.

Trump is a weird sort of ill-advised love child of P.T. Barnum and Huey Long with some Pat Buchanan and George Wallace thrown in. He's a carnival barker, a demagogue, a nativist, and a host of other things. I hesitate to call him a Fascist because that implies that he has a well defined ideology. There are certainly elements of Fascism in the mix, but I feel like he's instinctually groping for angry stances that might resonate with some people and then seeing what gains traction and doubling down on it. If something doesn't have the desired effect he discards it and the boorish outrageous persona he's taken on gives him room to cynically do that. I don't think he can get elected tbh. I think there's an upper limit to the support he can get in a general election. What scares me is that I didn't think he'd get this far and I think he's got a good shot at being the nominee, so I'm a little concerned that maybe I'm wrong about his chances in the general.

I believe Dishonored is what happens when you don't have any cats!