JonCole

Is the claymore anything like the Bastard Sword the blacksmith is selling?

Yeah, I figured that I'd just use the Drake Sword until it just starts to feel not OP. I don't think it's good for my personal skills to rely on a stats crutch when its good and have to learn from the ground up later on when it's not powerful. For now, I plan to use it to farm some souls and upgrade my longsword a bit. I love Justin's Anor Londo song.

So, I decided to give this game a shot once again after quitting last time subsequent to dying 5 times at the Taurus Demon. This time, I beat the Taurus Demon on my second try (rolled off the edge by accident the first), got the Drake Sword, beat the Gargoyles, and rang the first bell. I poked my head in lower Undead Burg and unlocked the elevator to Firelink Shrine from Undead Parish, but I'm kind of just exploring at this point to figure out what direction is forward. Right now I have 14k souls and I'm not quite sure what to do with them. I've already bought all the boxes that enable upgrading weapons and items at bonfires. I have a pretty decent weapon obviously, and I've already upgraded all my armor pieces with at least +1. I have a +1 shortbow and 200 arrows, so I don't really need to buy any more of that kind of stuff. I'm level 16 with 18 endurance and 16 strength, so my stats seem pretty sufficient for the area I'm in as a strength warrior. I imagine that I don't want to use the Drake Sword forever as it's difficult to upgrade (seemingly), so should I dump some upgrades into my currently unused longsword? Should I upgrade my armor any more (I assume I'll get something better at some point, but I can't really tell if that point is soon)? I'm sure I can dump more points into endurance, but is that my best bet right now? Vitality? Too many options right now, anyone have any tips?

So, installing all those mods was kind of a pain and I suppose I did something wrong because it wouldn't boot until I deleted one of the mods included in that big MWSG pack. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just use that single mod because it basically installs a big suite of mods including various bug fixes patches in a fairly automatic fashion, doing as much as taking control of your cursor and automating some fairly complicated tasks. I don't know how much overlap there is between the various bug patches, but as a non-expert I can't imagine it's worth installing more than one. I ended up not installing the Rebirth mod just because I didn't want to further complicated my Morrowind folder and add too much unfamiliar stuff. The game looks about like I remember it, which I think is as much praise as I could heap on those mods because going back to old games usually means disappointment at how bad they look comparably to newer games. The draw distance is almost certainly much better than it used to be and texture resolution is pretty good, but most importantly it feels cohesive, which mods rarely manage to do while maintaining the integrity of the original game. I didn't get very far, just wanted to get a taste (I'm in the middle of a handful of games, so I'm not ready to dive in headfirst). Man is movement speed slower than I remembered. You really do move super goddamn slow at the beginning, regardless of armor weight or anything like that. I don't know how I got into this the first time around, before it sunk its teeth into me and I could restart the game ad infinitum and bear the flaws. I imagine I'll make a bumrush to a city of note so I can actually get some gear that may make the early-game a little more bearable. One thing that Oblivion and Skyrim do a little bit better than Morrowind is really give you the tools to get into trouble from the very beginning, as opposed to Morrowind where all I have to do is face two enemies at once, run out of stamina in two seconds, and die within ten seconds.

Lack of (noticeable) scaling is something I really appreciated in Fallout, I think they nailed it much better there. When you saw a dude in hulking metal armor or a huge mutant, you knew you were in trouble.

The NSA knew about Heartbleed for two years and did nothing about it. Fuck everything - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-bug-exposing-consumers.html

There are weird systems in that franchise that encourage me, as a person who focuses too much on details, to do dumb things. Like, I won't do any important quests in Skyrim until I'm a high level because quest rewards scale to level. Dumb.

I dunno, if you consider that "beating the game" then I guess it ruins it for you. I never thought Alchemy was so gamebreaking because it seemed to have the biggest impact on economy, for me, which is something that's generally not very relevant or important by the time you naturally would game that system. I suppose you could also create potions that make you nearly invincible, but there are also other things that feel broken when you level them up enough like Sneak that I don't feel using a potion to win is really breaking anything that isn't broken just through spending more time than you would using Alchemy.

I assume all of those mods more or less compatible? I looked at the Morrowind Rebirth page and it said it wasn't compatible with a couple aspects of the V/G Overhaul that could be toggled off, but neither of those two said anything about the bug-specific mods that you mentioned. Yeah, in Morrowind it's really best to put in one or two (two may be pushing it) things you actually like and are sure to use in Major Skills so you still level at a decent clip on the back of the one thing you're using often but still build up those attribute points through everything else you're using. I typically make an armor skill my major skill, because then the leveling up happens at a similar rate at which I battle. So, I do a lot of social/quest stuff, get in a couple battles, level, rinse and repeat.

Probably something like Lubuntu. I thought this was a clever explanation by xkcd of how Heartbleed works:

LastPass's tool checks when the certificate was last updated.

Everything this gentleman said is correct. Also, if you're a Breton you could just use a spell that complements the inherent resistance to that race. It made the boots much more easily accessible to Bretons from minute one, IIRC.

Yeah, I subscribe for Premium because I really think LastPass makes it easy to be secure and I feel confident that they are good stewards of my data. The number of options you have to doubly and triply secure your data is very reassuring. I've tried using KeePass before but found it quite a bit more difficult to figure out that LP. Not only that, but due to the cloud-based nature of the service it's must more accessible on different platforms and different machines than most other services/programs I've encountered. The ease of using the service cannot be overstated. The reasons that people aren't secure with their data is largely based on convenience, it's so much easier to use the same password everywhere so that's what most people do. LastPass is compelling because all it takes is a browser plug-in installation and you can hit the ground running.

Regarding movement speed, I've found enchanting to never have been as useful as in Morrowind to mitigate problems like this. I almost always enchant either one or two items I wear to buff Speed. Also, procuring the "Boots of Blinding Speed" in the world and using an exploit to disable the Blind balance to the huge Speed buff is a trick well-known to Morrowind faithful. Leveling is indeed quite slow unless you specifically seek to undermine that system by really focusing on specific skills that are easily farmable like Repair, Alchemy, Athletics, etc. Just reading this stuff makes me want to go back and play that game. I never put much time into the expansions and I only beat the game once despite playing 200-300ish hours with multiple characters.

Randomly generated passwords are not hidden, you can even generate again and again if you think the result of a generation is not "random enough" for you. I've committed the randomly generated strings for my banks and email addresses to memory, just in case I don't have access to LP for any reason.

LastPass is a cloud-based password storage/generation tool. When you create a login for a site, it offers to generate a password for you using any number of criteria (characters and/or numbers and/or symbols and/or caps and/or number of characters/numbers etc) then stores the password and username in a file that's encrypted and decrypted locally before being synced to LP servers. The software also has a number of handy features like notifying you if the password you're using for one site is not unique between your database of stored passwords, and in this case a new feature that notifies you if you should update a password after a Heartbleed-compromised site has patched their servers. It offers quite a few multifactor authentication options, including physical code generators and hardware keys.

I guess it's as good a time as any to remind people: try to use unique passwords for every website - a password generation/storage service like 1Password or LastPass can make this way easier enable 2-factor authentication wherever possible - this makes it so logging into a site requires two methods of proving you're you, both the password (which seemingly is easier to get every day now by the bad guys) and a unique code generated by a hardware/software solution or sent to you by SMS, phone call, or email; check http://twofactorauth.org/ to find what websites offer this feature don't store financial information in websites/services whenever possible There are already several articles trying to compile what websites have confirmed that they've implemented the patch, because you really won't gain much by changing passwords for a site until they do deploy that patch as Sno said. I suppose that the best advice is just to keep an eye on the services you use and report any unusual activity whatsoever.

We can call them "Goldblum Charms"

War gets bigger.

Requests: Tasteful, non-huge bumper stickers. Stickers that fit well over Apple/Dell/HP logos on laptops. Coffee table book of old.idlethumbs.net editorial content from the good old days. Random thought: I get the impression that Olly is more a Campo Santo dude than a Thumb, but if Olly did Thumbs-inspired prints that forum members/Kickstarter backers could get a first crack at buying I'd be grateful as someone who rarely gets an opportunity to buy his prints since they sell out so fast. This feels like a lot to ask and I feel awkward doing it, but I guess not enough so that I wouldn't at least give it a shot for the hell of it.

Source: Polygon Discuss. My reaction: WHAAAAAAAT Edit: Here's the Campo Santo's website: camposantogames.com Edit 2/6/14: Here's the new website (it's been up for a while, I've just been lazy about updating this) - camposanto.com Also, Chris Remo is now an employee of Campo Santo! Also also, I updated the thread title to reflect the new employee's origins as per the Campo Santo About page and what I know about Chris Remo.

Spelunky is $5 on Steam right now - http://store.steampowered.com/app/239350/

If you still want the AC56U, it's $90 on Newegg with promo code - http://slickdeals.net/f/6843456-asus-rt-ac56u-dual-band-wireless-ac1200-gigabit-router-90-newegg?src=pdw

If it's the generation 1 Nexus 7, I'd say it's probably not worth it.

Most jokes have a kernel of truth that's worth finding.