SecretAsianMan

Yesterday President Obama issued a statement to the FCC urging them to maintain net neutrality. In particular, it outlined these things: In other words the things we've been asking for the whole time. He's basically asking the FCC to make it a utility. Technically the FCC is still an independent agency so they don't have to do what Obama says but I really hope they'll listen, both to him and the 4 million public comments they got.

In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a probe called Rosetta. On August 6th of this year, it met up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This week, the Philae lander will launch from Rosetta and attempt to touchdown on the surface of the comet. This is the first ever attempt to land on a comet. NASA and the ESA will be broadcasting the event live. See here for details and times.

Happy Birthday to my favorite artist and super forum member Tegan!

That was just plain ridiculous. Those aren't even rights. Half of them contradict each other. And pretty much all of them contradict GG.

I laughed entirely too hard at this To quote Comic Book Guy, "of the four Star franchises: Wars, Trek, Gate, and Search, Gate is easily my third favorite"

So apparently there's this play in Germany about Monkey Island This looks amazing

Maybe they're midichlorians

Watching Chris is what got me to start playing Spelunky as well. My rivalry with him in his dailies (which he was unaware of) kept me playing the game. I still do the daily challenge everyday. I haven't been keeping track, but at this point I'm pretty sure I'm well past his number of consecutive runs (I haven't missed a day for several months now).

I kind of agree with CollegeBaby. I don't think it could apply to any of the movies but it's a really generic sounding name that doesn't tell me anything. There's nothing wrong with that, very few movie titles say anything useful. But when I think of other Star Wars movie titles I feel like they told me something. As goofy as the names Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi are, they tell you something about those movies (Phantom Menace and A New Hope are pretty uninformative titles). If I knew nothing about Star Wars except the titles of those movies, I feel like I might still have a vague idea what they're about. Of course this is being said when I know nothing of the movie so perhaps in hindsight it'll be more fitting. I'm also pretty indifferent to Star Wars at this point so any movie title would have little meaning for me.

I agree with you to a degree about L4D1, but I believe this is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There aren't a lot of weapons, enemies, or mechanics, but when you combine them with a group of people the experience is much better than it seems like it should be. The game not only encouraged but to a huge degree required teamwork, on both the co-op and vs side, which is what really makes the game shine to me. At the time of release, there were other "team" games or ones that had co-op, but L4D really made that a core part of the game instead of an added feature. I'll also agree that L4D2 plays better than L4D1, but I'm with the Thumbs in their preference of L4D1. Whenever I play it, I always choose the L4D1 maps because they integrate all the L4D2 gameplay improvements and changes but leave everything else the same. If you're interested, several of us have been playing Payday 2 quite a bit lately. Check out the multiplayer thread.

I can't see it either but I assume its the news that principal photography has been completed and that the title will be Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Also happy birthday

If you're talking about the job I think you are, that's from the Armored Transport DLC (which I don't have). It's a bonus mission of sorts. The normal Transport jobs involve you breaking into armored trucks that have been sabotaged in some form and stealing the contents from inside. There is a chance that one of the trucks will contain some intel that will allow you to play the second day where you do the train robbery. The objective is to steal a turret (actually a sentry gun from TF2) but you can also steal the ammo and some other loot. Despite the high payout, I really hate that job because it's a huge pain. I've never bothered trying to stealth Four Stores because it seems like more work than its worth. I enjoy doing ECM rushes on Diamond Store but that usually requires a full team. GO Bank is definitely tricky because of the random things that the game can do to mess you up (infinite civilians, answering the phone, lasers on the vault door).

My general playstyle in these types of games tends more toward mid-long range weapons so assault/sniper rifles are my usual weapons of choice (although in a PvP environment I'm a terrible sniper). In some ways Shadow Raid is actually EASIER to do alone. You aren't going to be taking out many guards because there are more guards than there are pagers you can answer and you don't have to worry about what someone else may be doing. Of course fewer people means fewer bodies to carry loot and spot guards/cameras so there is a tradeoff. I'd say the biggest downside to doing it solo involves a glitch. If you buy the thermal paste asset, you get 2 of them but there are more than 2 places it can be used. If you have more than 2 people and you all take the paste at the same time (usually synchronized using the in game clock), the game will give everyone the item. I don't know if this was ever fixed but it worked the last time I tried it a few months ago.

Maybe your monster guy stopped to have a snack rather than run away in the beginning. Although I'm pretty sure the game will prompt you to run at the start because of how weak you are. I haven't played it yet, only seen footage of it. And with regard to the perspectives, its probable that you were thinking of the L4D games. In Valve fashion, they use the perspective as an indicator of player control. When you're in first person, you have control and are inhabiting the character. When you're in third person, you've lost control because the character has lost control (the exception to this is the Jockey, which I remember they were nervous about doing at the time). Perhaps that's what you were thinking of.

I was initially dismissive of the pistol stuff as gimmicky because its my default position in shooters that pistols should be gotten rid of ASAP (with a few exceptions, the biggest being Halo). But after having been through the majority of other weapons and builds, I decided to mess around with the pistols and have to admit to being pleasantly surprised. They're a lot of fun. While I CAN do Shadow Raid, I hate doing it because its so tedious. One bit of advice regarding that mission in particular. Since its a mandatory stealth, there's not a lot of difference between the difficulty levels since those settings primarily affect combat. The biggest change is the minimum number of bags you need to escape (3, 5, 7, 9, and 12 in order of difficulty). On Death Wish difficulty, cameras become indestructible and a guard will spawn in the left alleyway but that's about it. So if you want to maximize the payout by getting as much loot as possible, its not substantially harder on a higher difficulty. The same is true for pretty much every mission that you only plan to do in stealth.

To be fair, the ones we did were the easy ones (Jewelry Store and Diamond Store). I'm complete shit at stealthing the harder ones like Framing Frame and Shadow Raid. Besides, I think the funnest part of the evening was the loud and crazy Hoxton Breakout we did where I managed to get two people out of custody within minutes of each other. Also I have a whole new appreciation for the pistol skills in this game.

Unless there's an explained reason for why it has to be there I'd say no because that's basically just gratuitous nudity for the sake of nudity.

How about this

Did anyone else want to barf after reading the previous advice he linked to in that post? Especially the part where he literally says that making such threats known to the public is entirely pointless and provides no real comfort?

Last night I started messing around with another HUD mod called Pocohud. It's similar to HoxHud in that it provides additional information. Some of the added info is useful, some not so useful. It has options to automatically type certain events into the game chat such as when a drill has finished or someone gets downed. A less useful example is the option to type statistics such as accuracy and dps into the chat. All of those can be turned on and off. The main thing I like about it is the option to show the status of buffs. For example, Inspire (a high tier Mastermind skill) lets you yell at players and increase their movement speed for a few seconds. Pocohud will actually show you when you are under the effects of this buff, as well as many others. Pocohud is compatible with Hoxhud so it's possible to use them both at the same time, although you'll have to do some configuring in order to not have HUD elements overlap or duplicate elements show up. I have a selection from each turned on. Using them both puts a LOT of information on the screen so I wouldn't recommend it to newer players because it's quite overwhelming but if you're like me and want to know all that stuff I recommend checking it out.

So here's the question I think we need to figure out. Is BGB a justified trope or a hand waving trope? If it's a justified trope, then if the application is integral to the plot it counts (such as Miranda from Mass Effect). If it's hand waving, then the minor nonsensical ones count (such as EDI from Mass Effect). Or are we considering both?

This calls for the soiler tag.

I can maybe pop in if you're still going when I get home (in about 90 minutes from now).

They do appear to get more beautiful over time, but again its not clear if that's because their power is growing, they're maturing, they're natural beauty is coming out, etc. It's all pretty vague. Also keep in mind that the book is a first person narrative, so everything is described through Harry's eyes and he's the person that everyone in the world wants to manipulate.

I don't want to get too into this here since it's starting to be off topic but I was mainly talking about "pure" faeries. Humans are still human but they can use magic to change their appearance too. I would suppose that their natural form resembles humans because of the close association they have with our realm but their appearance is amplified by their magic. A good deal of what I said is speculation on my part though, none of this is really explicitly spelled out. But in terms of the trope I think that when the fae appear in the book to Harry they're using their charms on him, in both the magical and non-magical sense, thus I still call it at least a partial choice on their part.