Contentious C

The Jim Cornette & Leon White story, starring John Krasinski & Toby Jones.

I got it the last time it was deeply discounted, and it totally bollocksed my phone's wifi in the process. Probably not worth it if you're in any sort of small apartment or already have a fair number of wireless devices.

Any idea if B&N excludes new releases during that sale? I could just cancel my July pre-order if so. But I suppose if it's only a week or something, the odds of it being when I want it to be are not good in the first place.

This would normally be the point where someone might think Danny Ainge sold his soul to be a super-genius GM, but that would be wrong. Gingers don't have souls.

In other news, dog bites man. I could have said the phrases "NBA" and "everyone needs to do cocaine" to you guys 6 months, a year, 2 years ago, and your brains would have instinctively pulsed, "Nick Young".

A part of me wants to say, "I, for one, welcome our new murine overlords", but yeah, all these deals are scummy. The only plus would be Comcast losing, because they're losers.

I'm realizing for about the 53rd time (particularly after trying to answer Rippa's question about Witcher) that Bethesda video games make me bad at video games, and bad at actually getting through my backlog of stuff I've never even played. So I thought I'd throw this out there. What should I play? My PC selection of relatively untouched games is vast: GTA IV; the entire Mass Effect series; the entire Dragon Age series; Sleeping Dogs; Far Cry (through 3/Blood Dragon); the Just Cause series; Witcher 2 & 3; Saints Row 3 & 4; the two recent Deus Ex entries; etc. I like my games with RPG elements. I like my games with some fighting. I like my games with some freedom. But I think the biggest reason I find myself going back to something like Skyrim or New Vegas is that the tutorials are solid and make you feel like, "Yeah, I can just wander off and go do some neat stuff." Granted, part of why I just consoled/blasted my way through Oblivion is that the controls were so clunky that it was a chore in comparison to the games they've done in the decade-plus since. I tried playing through about the first 45-120 minutes of Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age 1 and didn't have that sense of control; maybe they get better, maybe I need to quit whining. Feel free to tell me as much. I also played through roughly the first mission of Saints Row 3 and wasn't in love with the tiny shooting reticles or the controls. I played quite a bit more of L.A. Noire (why, I'm not sure) and found myself thinking, "Wow, the Saints Row games really must be trying to parody GTA, right down to the oddball controls," so I'm not super-eager to dive into something made by Rockstar, if it handles like I recall L.A. Noire handling. I think Deus Ex Human Revolution had some of the same problems, and its tutorial level was...not great, from what I remember. So, tl,dr; What is going to be the simplest thing to pick up without feeling like I have to unlearn a thousand hours of bad habits from other games, particularly when odious controller setup is one of the things practically guaranteed to get me to avoid a game? Sleeping Dogs seems tempting, for some odd reason. I suppose I should go back to Mass Effect and give it another spin, though I had forgotten that it wasn't even available in HD. Something totally out of my normal wheelhouse like Far Cry 3 is tempting, too. And yes, after listening to the lot of you talk CONSTANTLY about it, I pre-ordered Yakuza 0, so this is just to tide me over until that launches.

I tried starting with 3, and then I realized, "Oh, right, the goddamned entirety of the plot of 2 is stuff I am totally ignorant of and am now being grilled over so I can 'design' my version of Geralt." At which point I found the nearest ledge to jump off and kill myself (it doesn't take much, 5 meters seems to be plenty for him). Who knows if I will ever play any game in the series, what with the awful controls in 1 and people telling me the controls don't get better enough in 2. But, if you've played some of 2, then maybe you at least know what choices you'd make and can just fill in those blanks for yourself well enough to fake it.

Almost 39. I also recall the green board (the worst was obnoxiously long nested threads when the thread title was obnoxiously long), and many days of IRC featuring teenaged Bill Barnwell & CSC.

How into it? On a scale of 1 to Double-Broken-Arms?

My boss seems to be on a kick of listening to Bach in his office. So, naturally, I find myself thinking of Bojack Horseman 5 damn times a day. "If you're such a nerd, who's your favorite Baroque composer?" *baaaaaaawk* "Bach? Not Vivaldi? You're insane!"

Not surprising, since the recommended settings for JWE look fairly close to my PC since dropping a high-end GPU into it. Hell, I even had to dial back the settings on Rise of the Tomb Raider because I wasn't thrilled with how much my machine was heating up. At least you're not in no-man's-land of wanting/preferring a better (or at least less wattage-hungry) CPU & mobo but not being able to justify it, since the bump upward is only one tier. GPUs are beginning to come down (and I think will continue to do so), so it could be a good time to build something new. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.

My totally cockamamie theory about Starfield is that it will bridge Fallout and TES. There were Nirnroots of a sort in FO4, so maybe the various races of Tamriel seem so different because they are. Someone escapes Earth, lands on various planets, picks up some friends, they eventually settle on Nirn. Or, worst case scenario, Reddit is right, and it's the adventures of a space-faring cat in search of lasagna and a week with no Mondays.

Yeah, it's being a father figure to her that's as certain a death as leading a guild in an Elder Scrolls game. EDIT: I actually just realized this is the same TV Trope: Mentor Occupational Hazard.

The funny bit about that is their claim that, "We want people to know we take our burgers as seriously as we take our pancakes." I think we already knew that. What we didn't know is how much they were shitting themselves on the quality of their pancakes.