JonCole

http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-slow-cooker/ I have their pick (I actually have two of them, I liked it so much) and highly recommend it.

First one I'm kinda interested in participating in! I have just the recipe in mind, just need to get some ingredients. Fingers crossed that this post will actually motivate me to make this happen, unlike most ____ Club type things that I always aspire to but never actually join in on.

If you didn't like 4 but you still want to play Far Cry for Thumbs-related reasons, then just go with Far Cry 2. FC3 and FC4 are quite similar.

I've also noticed that if you copy and paste the YT link as a link (with the hypertext linking included) rather than plain-text it sometimes won't embed correctly.

Fallout 4 - I already know that this will probably be one of my most played games in 2016 and the time I've spent with it thus far has been so excellent. Destiny: The Taken King - This expansion/game has a reputation for taking Destiny and making it a game that is recommendable to everyone, which is entirely true. The changes to the story make it more replayable than ever and the changes to the multiplayer meta make it far more competitive and interesting than the relatively stale HoW MP. Until Dawn - Such a unique game with excellent motion capture, a fun teen horror theme, etc. Plus, a perfect couch co-op game to play with a friend or spouse. Bloodborne - The first Souls-type game that really roped me in right from the beginning and it deserves no shortage of credit for that. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 - Same old COD multiplayer, but it's consistently my most liked FPS multiplayer so it practically gets on my list by obligation.

Yeah, this is part of why I don't really care of building PCs lately. If you're really trying to crunch on budget, you're going to be checking Newegg every day for their daily deals, you're going to be checking PC Part Picker every day for price alerts, you'll be checking Slickdeals daily, etc. And the secret cost of all those machines listed is a lack of a Windows license, which is expensive in its own right. Sure, a lot of people who post these builds say they just have a key lying around or they just pirate it, but if you're a normal human being that's probably not going to be the case for you. And even if you do manage to build something that is functional and has specs you like, it'll probably be underwhelming. I currently have a budget Pentium in my machine because I was intending to at some point upgrade to a Core i5, which I haven't really been able to afford yet. That chip, even with overclocking and what not, really can't measure up to a decent quad-core chip when it comes to gaming performance. Sure things will run, but not at medium-high settings at 1080p. And forget trying to capture if you want to get decent performance, a dual-core just can't multitask on that level. So my suggestion would be if you can possibly manage it, get a Core i3. Even if that means you skimp a little on the video card, do it. I'd take a Core i3 + AMD 250/260x over a Pentium + GTX 750 any day, particularly if that's going to be the spec for that machine for the foreseeable future. (Before anyone corrects me, I'm aware that Core i3 chips are also dual-core, but the hyperthreading makes a measurable, significant difference.)

I really wish that I could get one of these but they've been sold out since before Thanksgiving and it seems like a new batch won't ship out until mid or late January.

It is by default for established players because the spark of light consumable that brings you to level 25 is included with every copy of TTK, expansion or Legendary Edition.

Every office I have worked or volunteered in has had a water cooler, I think it's nice to have around for cold water, or for water hot enough to make eat, instant coffee, ramen, etc. I wouldn't mind tap water if I lived in places with good tap water, the tap I had in Colorado was wonderful but Florida tap was awful. Texas is okay, but I'd still rather drink from a water cooler.

Ooh, that's pretty nice indeed for that price. I feel like AMD has a pretty solid foothold on the low-budget gaming laptop space in my limited research. I bought a Dell that seems to be an unexpectedly great gaming PC wrapped up in the Inspiron middle-range line for $900, the Inspiron 7559 - 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.50 GHz)] Windows 10 Home 64-bit English 8GB Single Channel DDR3L 1600MHz (8GBx1) 1TB 5.4k Hybrid HDD + 8G Cache [1TB 5400 rpm Hybrid Hard Drive + 8GB Embedded Flash Cache] NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 960M 4GB GDDR5 15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) Anti-Glare LED-Backlit Display 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.0, Dual Band 2.4&5 GHz, 1x1 Seemed to me that any model of gaming laptop with the 960M was running for $1000-1200 and the base model of this one goes for $800 with the Core i5, I did the $100 step-up to the Core i7. Before I grabbed this one I was looking at some of the ultrabooks available, again my primary goal was getting a Windows laptop that I could do work on but this was effectively the same price as most decent ultrabooks for way more power and slightly less portability (4-5 hours of battery life instead of 7-8, a little heavier/bigger).

I feel like I've recently failed as a legit PC gamer because I just bought a gaming laptop. Well, more of a laptop I intend to use for business purposes but oh whoops it is quite capable of gaming. I'm tired of upgrading my PC. I'm kinda just tired of having this huge behemoth desktop tower that was a pain to lug around and setup when I was moving to my new house. I was not very excited about the prospect of buying a $200-300 processor so that I could capture video at a decent framerate and resolution.

I think the question of how do we know that they're being sincere or not is a legitimate one, but I read the original article in question as a means to blow off steam rather than some broad attempt at policing. If the article does little more than inspire people to be a little more skeptical and discerning, I think it'll have served what purpose I personally hope it intended. Seems to me that there are far more actionable/police-able instances of appropriation that take place outside of cuisine, though cuisine is the kind of pervasive undercurrent of appropriation that should at least be made visible if not actively fought against. I've never thought to consider what is the appropriate amount of white guilt is worth feeling, I'll check out that article when I have a spare moment.

As a Filipino-American who has seen an increasing amount of butchered lumpia being sold as authentic Filipino food, all of this rings perfectly true to me. I was trying to figure out how to characterize exactly what the problem described in the article was because it also rang true to me, but you captured it - it's not the fact that non-native people are cooking these things, it's that it's inauthentic to market them as legit while disserving them. It's why the example of many different cultures enshrining French cuisine (and why isn't that appropriation?) also doesn't track for me, because the adoption of French cuisine is obscenely earnest and many chefs spend an eternity learning in French kitchens, ascending from the guy who carefully chops the garnishes to years later being the guy who cooks the fish.

i'm so stoked

Yes. And one of the episodes (of Master of None) actually made me cry. So yeah. Watch that thing.

I'm going to take a culinary leap here and say that hard tacos aren't bad either, it's just that 99 times out of 100 you're eating one that was produced in a factory, packaged for weeks if not months, then consumed. Fresh(ly) hard(ened) tacos are essentially really big tortilla chips and thus cannot be bad. I've made some before in my toaster oven, essentially you just take a nice corn tortilla, soften it via microwaving with a warm tea towel, then drape it over adjacent bars of your oven rack. In a big oven it'd probably just be directly adjacent, but my toaster oven has narrower gaps between the bars of the rack so it was two bars per tortilla. It's good stuff and worth trying. Similarly, homemade soft tacos are excellent when warmed directly on a gas burner on low. It gets that perfect brown/char going in seconds, I just regret not currently living in a house with gas burners currently.

I think his point was that remakes for the sake of accessibility, especially as it pertains to PC games, seems a more justifiable reason for producing a remake than "oh this came out last generation, let's upscale the rendering to 1080p". I guess I'd agree that this is a cashgrab in a sense, Square Enix is hardly foreign to the idea of monetizing to an aggressive extent. That said, I really hope that this is episodic because they need more time to work on it because they are going to be adapting it in some way. I doubt they'd change many of the main story beats, but I think they'd need to do a lot to the writing/pacing to make the game bearable in a modern context. I mean, the gruff, stoic Cloud works at the very beginning of the game, but his interactions with other characters, stuff like the snowboarding, etc would really need to be rethought to make it work with the art style they've adapted here. It's been a while, but even that FFVII movie basically had Cloud doing his own thing 99% of the time with the rest of the characters representing something approximating human tendencies.

I only bought games for my wife, which was smart because she plays infinitely more PC games than me in recent memory. Pretty happy with my purchases!

For the record, both of the suggested methods of folding socks are awful.

I like the lack of fluctuating game prices via flash sales. I did like the daily sales, insofar as I think that checking daily isn't horrible and they recently adopted the practice where they'd reinstate all the daily sale prices on the last day of the sale in case you missed something. So, I do kinda wish there were still daily sales so at least it felt like more of an event. Either way, I have to admit that it's way simpler and more convenient to just look at my wishlist, buy what seems to be below whatever price threshold they needed to cross to be worth buying, and then doing at all at once.

Super pumped for Civil War, I know comic book lovers are going to think that it's small fries compared to "real" Civil War but I'm content with the small teams they built up here to kinda crystallize the idea behind the original comic plotline. Also really like that they're bringing Bucky back in a real way, he's probably one of my favorite parts of the Cap comics in the past 5 years or so. I'm only a few episodes into it, but I'm totally on the Master of None hype train. I feel like it's totally earnest and I think Aziz is best when he's just being himself rather than a character, and this certainly tries to give us the closest character to Aziz as they could muster. Also on a slow crawl through Jessica Jones, don't really want to binge through it like Daredevil. David Tennant is great, I was a bit afraid to see him in this super-antagonist role but he's pulling it off with style. And I was also kinda wary to see Krysten Ritter in the titular role because I couldn't think of anything I saw her in that I liked (really didn't like her in Veronica Mars, where she resonates most clearly in my memory), but she's doing an absolutely superb job. I find the character far more appealing than the kinda goofy comic book presence that Jones has been in recent memory.

My question is, do people really feel like the content well has been totally tapped? I'm still working on sleeper stimulant, I don't have a full Trials or IB gear set yet, I've only gotten enough flawless runs to count on one hand, HM raid is still far from farm status like VOG or CE was after this long, etc. And I play all the time! Like, ALL THE TIME. So I don't know what I'm missing here. I don't feel like I'm dying for new content yet, but maybe I just am looking to wring more out of this whole thing than other people.

Fair point. The uncertain future of Destiny in terms of new content does put a negative filter on things like this. But I view it as a program that, if successful, brings more people to the game and thus improves the chances that more content will get made. Maybe I'm just being optimistic. Also, maybe this is just looking rosier to me because I actually am interested in getting more people to try Destiny, I earnestly believe that it's a better game than when it first came out and it's a game that doesn't get enough credit for what it has to offer. So offering incentives to me, having already been a person that'd try to talk someone into playing the game and trying to help sherpa a bit, just seems like good business.

I'm not 100% sure how the quest structure works, but every interpretation that I can make from the FAQs suggests that it's not much more than "do x amount of public events with your RAF buddy", "do y amount of quest completions with your RAF buddy", etc. This is not a quest you should feel left out from not doing. And again, I'm still not seeing what here is not cosmetic. Sparrows do not differ in function to an extent that I'd consider any new sparrow to be much more than a new paint job. The "gear", being the sword, is just a reskin of the legendary sword you can get otherwise.

I'm pretty sure this is common for MMOs. I don't think it's that bad. Half the stuff you mentioned is purely aesthetic. They've already locked a speeder the Red Bull thing and it turned out that the sparrows you could get from the TTK preorder or from the raids are all pretty much exactly the same except paint jobs and tiny velocity differences. The quest is specific to the actual mechanic of the event, so that's a weird thing to feel like you're missing out on. And the weapon I believe is attainable by other means and really it's just a reskin of the legendary sword you can get otherwise. I believe there is a cheese way to do this, you could have a buddy who already owns Destiny create a new PSN account, that account will get access to Destiny and PSN just from being on the same console as the main account, then you can do the refer-a-friend with that account. Then do the same thing vice-versa for your buddy.