JonCole

I'm not really a big alcohol guy, but I recently tried Rekorderlig Cider which is this Swedish Strawberry-Lime cider that is fucking delicious. It tastes like candy, but not in the grating way that screams "this is for teens". It actually reminds me vaguely of Japanese Chuhai, though less candy-ish. I wish I could drink it like water, but it's not super-duper widely available where I live so I'm constantly hunting it down. For context, I usually drink some of the aforementioned lighter fare like Purple Haze and Snapshot as well as ciders like Angry Orchard or Woodchuck.

There are some broadly agreed-upon tiers of manufacturers. I'd say that Asus, MSI, EVGA, and Gigabyte are considered the top. Also, I have personally bought Sapphire, Zotac, and HIS in the past with no issue but they're generally considered second rung. I think that some of these considerations have more to do with warranty fulfillment, as the bigger manufacturers are a little quicker and more generous than the second-tier budget guys.

Yeah, definitely. I'm at work so I can't really browse a ton of videos, but a cursory look has turned up this which seems to still be relatively current and accurate (the pieces will be different, but the general ideas will be the same) - The only thing I feel like I have to mention here is that every PC building experience is different. I went years and years not getting a single DOA component and everything worked from the get-go. A few years ago, I had a build where one of my two RAM sticks was DOA and the GPU died after a few minutes of operation. Diagnosing that stuff wasn't very fun, but it's just core to PC building and pretty unavoidable. That said, it's totally a roll of the dice and I still consider it pretty unlikely that you'll have any problems.

I drew this shitty diagram to depict Trials (or Skirmish, I guess) strategy for a reddit comment, worked on it hard enough that I feel I should share here -

I just think it says more about Apple not particularly liking being in the games business (yet still liking the money from it) than it does about them being socially responsible. Strikes me as aggressively lazy, it's not all that different from them outright banning games for sex or violence reasons despite various games actually taking a nuanced approach to those themes. I mean, it's not hard to imagine a game that portrays the Confederate flag in a responsible, non-glorifying way just like books or movies do.

http://www.pcgamer.com/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-tested-not-quite-a-980-ti-killer/ These video card companies basically don't let anyone touch their non-flagship cards until they're out in the wild, but that R9 Fury vs 980Ti comparison is not particularly reassuring. I feel like the mantra of AMD in recent years has been "almost basically just as good as Nvidia, particularly when retailers put our cards on sale really aggressively because Nvidia is outselling our stuff". After going AMD for several years, I'm really happy to be on the Nvidia train. Drivers just seem generally better and more frequent, but maybe that's just confirmation bias.

Amazon preorders are such a weird metric to draw any conclusions from. I think that it's interesting, but really depicts nothing of substance because it ignores that Amazon isn't exactly indicative of all retail and preorders are not indicative of final sales. I'd hazard to guess that a ton of holiday game sales come from Black Friday and week of Christmas physical retail purchases.

But why buy an old GPU at all when the long-term goal is (seemingly, correct me if I'm wrong) upgrading everything? Sure it'll be bottlenecked by the current CPU, but a GTX560 will be woefully outmatched by a current gen Core i5 or i7 and practically irrelevant when most games will be asking for 2GB+ of VRAM.

I'm incredibly unwilling to lay any blame at Iron Galaxy's feet considering I honestly think that there's no way to know what their technical chops are (correlation is not causation) and it's ultimately the publisher's call when to publish a game. With situations like this, I can't help but think that the history of delaying PC releases of games past the console releases is more to do with the fact that often third-party studios do that port and need more time than laziness or devs/pubs specifically hating the PC version.

Probably your motherboard and processor are faring a lot better than your GPU. I'd probably just dump the 8800s and upgrade to a GTX 960/970/980. Video cards are backwards compatible with previous generations of PCI Express, you'll only get a little bit of bandwidth limitation from the slower ports. I'd wait on upgrading the other stuff until the next generation of processors come out next year, unless you're dying to do everything at once. You'll see a big improvement just with the GPU, since a lot of modern games are primarily GPU-dependent (though not all)

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor (£48.53 @ Amazon UK) Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£30.20 @ Ebuyer) Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Blue 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£36.56 @ Amazon UK) Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£40.78 @ Amazon UK) Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£49.19 @ Aria PC) Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£57.98 @ Amazon UK) Total: £263.24 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-06-25 14:10 BST+0100 This is basically just back of the napkin-type stuff, but this would do what you're looking for. The idea here is that you buy the cheapest overclockable, gaming-friendly processor in the newest generation of processors. It has on-chip graphics, so it'll get you started. Down the road, you buy a video card to make it more possible to game. Along the way, you can get another 8gb of memory, maybe an SSD, etc. The final thing you get is another processor, a Core i5 or i7 that would match the power of your GPU. You could probably go cheaper on the case, power supply, and storage but since you'll be keeping those along the way that's what you're going to want to put some decent money into.

I find it very good, personally. Didn't try it in the beta, however, so no way to tell if it's improved. It does have the speed control that I crave, for what that's worth.

I have literally 100+ podcasts in my backlog, Destiny-binge + vacation has been really bad for me. I feel like dropping a ton of podcasts that I'd normally consider staples because my lack of keeping up with them suggests to me that I really don't enjoy them as much as I think I do. This includes the oft mentioned MBMBAM, the oft mentioned in another thread Bombcast, and TAL like Polish just mentioned. It feels super weird. On the bright side, a lot of my recent subscriptions have been very well enjoyed. I love the Bit Socket podcast for a really quick, actually funny gaming podcast. The Beastcast and Patrick Klepek's Three Beers Deep have been filling my gaming podcast needs recently with some intelligent analysis and discussion. I've been listening to A Cast of Kings and A Storm of Spoilers for post Game of Thrones discussion (obviously now on hiatus), which is really excellent for that show since I don't really care about spoilers so much and I'm a book-reader. I've also liked Friendshipping with Jenn & Trin, which is an advice podcast from a couple ladies that work at Cards Against Humanity. I saw Trin on stage with Pat Baer's panel at PAX South and thought she was super funny and charming, which totally carries over to a female-led, practical, short advice show that I love love love. One of their podcasts recently dealt with how to unfollow a friend on Twitter, which is like... seemingly so mundane but actually a crisis if you do unfollow someone for a good reason and they ask you why (or if you're on the reverse end of this, which I remember some people feeling bad about in the Twitter thread). I love this. Despite my huge backlog, using the web player (which syncs progress with the mobile app) has let me really take advantage of the more grindy parts of Destiny where I could use some background noise.

Oh yeah, I guess I should have mentioned that. You should definitely set events to group only, I did the exact same thing and a rando joined. I kicked them (despite warnings from the100 that kicking people for 'no reason' might get me in hot water) and it worked out, but everything going forward I'll make sure to do right. Also, I don't really need to run POE 32's but I'm happy to help fill a seat if needed. I'll probably abstain from joining any sub-34 POEs until the last moment to make sure people who need it run it first. I'll eventually want armor cores for my nascent Hunter, but it's not really a priority over getting Etheric Light at every opportunity. Also also, do we want to try Crota's End this weekend? I've run it a handful of times now that I'd be happy to sherpa a little bit for anyone new. Still have never tried Swordbearing, but would be happy to give it a shot. We could also do VOG HM, which isn't terribly harder than regular mode now that most people are overleveled for it.

I was using that same image yesterday to settle some pro-boycott arguments (or in greater likelihood, piss off the people I was arguing with more). I updated my PvP Reforge guide with Scout Rifles, Hand Cannons, and Fusion Rifles. Still need to do Machine Guns everything, including Auto Rifles. Totally BSed them, they're so rarely used due to them being shit in the current meta that I just guessed at what might be good. I think the hardest part of doing this is finding out where to get the weapons, wikis are surprisingly oblique about where you get certain things (random Crucible drop, random Strike drop, vendor, POE Chest, ???????). Had a good time running NFs last night with Cussed and Mecha. We need to run some more POE32 to everyone leveled up, I'd really like to get some POE34 going but we just don't have many 34's here at the moment.

BL2 is much more refined than BL1, it's really much more worth playing. And really, the series shines most when played co-op. That said, both games are solid shooters and that's just enough to keep me going on its own.

Everyone seems to have one of those, I don't (wish I did, looks like fun). I didn't really include any exotics or unique things, mostly just stuff that's attainable or rerollable. Though I admit I put the Messenger on there with my fingers crossed. This is another example in a string of public outrage that I just can't understand or appreciate. The problem is, I totally sympathize with any disappointment regarding his answers. I think that it really reeks of Luke's general way of carrying himself plus fatigue from being asked the same questions again and again throughout E3. The interviewer from Eurogamer remarked on Twitter that it was a really good-natured interview and he didn't have any personal problems with the answers. I just think that Luke really has no way of dictating the price and was told to tow the line of it being worth literally whatever people were asked to pay. I highly recommend CruciblePlaybook as well, it's really helpful and surfaces some of the meta that you'd otherwise only get by being destroyed live in PvP. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Spare Change myself but people say it's really good and on paper one would agree. I just think it handles slow and fires waaaaay too slowly. It's kinda like Ill Will versus other hand cannons. 55A-Allfate is definitely my favorite of the bunch (minus the aforementioned, pined-for Messenger) because it fires pretty quickly and feels way more responsive. Specced properly, a lot of people compare it to the Messenger or Red Death.

A lot of people characterized it as a really good game that seemed oddly priced as a full retail product. So, I was definitely waiting for a decent price drop.

In case anyone is looking to increase their inventory of PvP-suitable weapons, I condensed some of the various guides I found on Reddit into a more accessible, non-comprehensive Google doc for quick reference - https://goo.gl/zNg4et

Jurassic World was so boring and poorly paced that I fell asleep multiple times while watching it. Since I haven't watched 100% of the movie due to being asleep, take my opinions with a grain of salt but man it was bad. I could just not give a single shit about the kids. Chris Pratt's character was way too... bro cowboy/coolguy serious man for me to take seriously, it's like if Burt Macklin was suddenly supposed to be a legit FBI agent. The dinosaur action was very underwhelming, the CG element made much of it feel very detached to me. Basically I'm just going to watch Park again and forget I watched World. I really wanted to like it, maybe a rewatch at home with viewer commentary throughout and more alcohol will be more compelling than my previous experience.

I completely filled up my 500GB PS4. It's not hard if you're a PlayStation Plus subscriber and get "free" games that fill up your drive. Or if you like AAA games and purchasing them digitally, they regularly clock in at 30-50GB of drive space. Of course, clearing out old games is a reasonable proposition but I think it's a hard one to make to a vast majority of gamers who seem like collectors/hoarders by nature. It's just nice having most of my library sitting on my drive, never know when I'll go back to play something. Also, fair point about regional component pricing.

I dunno, maybe I'm just overly sympathetic to the model here but I think that paying $50 three years ago and then another $50 now for an MMO that I get unlimited playtime for is a pretty slick deal. People raised the same level of ire for Destiny, but I just considered that game's season pass to be a one-time fee to subsidize all of the DLC and non-paid updates that evolve the game in a more progressive manner over time. Similarly, while they did promise a living story from the beginning of GW2 I think that they deserve some credit for having not only stuck to their promise in terms of story content but also major technical/mechanical updates and that asking me for another $50 to let them keep going is reasonable. Then again, I am attributing a little more unspoken meaning to this pricing format but it just seems to me that a company that's consistently delivering new content and updates can't just keep doing that forever unless they have some infusions of cash flow. Also, this isn't to say I'm without complaints. GW1 delivered more characters slots with each expansion, I don't really know what makes that a premium offering this time around. Also, I'm not stoked about $50 and would not have minded it being cheaper despite thinking they're not asking for more than they deserve.

I think most people are annoyed by the prices because there's no upgrade version of the expansion, meaning you get the core game no matter what and suspicion points to its inclusion driving up the price point.

Interesting enough, but I'd recommend that unless the price is incredibly compelling (it's gotta be $50 more at the most than the regular SKU) you just buy a 1TB external drive, rip the drive from the enclosure, and swap. It's pretty easy to reinstall the firmware and installing it right out of the box removes all the displeasure of upgrading a drive later in a PS4's life. Plus, you get to keep the old 500GB drive which softens the price of the drive you cannibalize.