Robert C

My wife actually answered one of the eleventeen billion daily scam calls we get this afternoon. This one said US customs had an arrest warrant out for our her arrest. Would've maybe been a little more believable if the scammer could've actually pronounced her supposed last name (Salazar) remotely correctly. If I had to guess, I'd say neither of us being able to stop laughing probably told her she wasn't going to get anywhere. My wife finally annoyed her enough that she hung up on us.

I know this isn't exactly an original thought, but is there a worse job top level professional sports than running back? You're pretty much guaranteed to get hit on every play if you're on the field. That's got to put you at even higher levels of CTE risk than the average NFL player. Plus it wears your body down insanely quickly. That means you're not likely to get that second contract, which is where players really start to make big money. And even if you do, the league doesn't value your position, so you're not gonna get nearly what you'd get at a position like WR or OT. Carson was a pretty good RB, but he made substantially less in his career than Christian Kirk is gonna make this year.

stuff: - I'm hoping this stuff is legit. Considering the source, I tend to believe it. I'll be glad to be back in Vice City. - That finally explains why Cops & Crooks disappeared. I'd wondered what happened to that, but never knew the explanation. - Mixed feelings on this two character/Latina/Bonnie & Clyde thing. Totally on board with the Latina main. Hopefully the incels and racists decide to boycott the game, and the online player base becomes more tolerable. I wish they'd gone with her as the sole main character, though. I could do without the Bonnie and Clyde part. Since they're going with that approach, I hope they do it right. GTA works better when it's over the top, crazy stuff, rather than attempting for deep and meaningful. The franchise needs more Trevor and less Niko. - I'll be shocked if we see this game before 2025. - Good luck to them with fixing the crunch. I know crunch sucks. And if you're dealing with outside, personal stuff it can become unmanageable really quick. At least they're trying. But if they don't have their project management working right, ultimately they'll be stuck back where they've been in the past.

Cars? You've been out of the GTA loop too long JT. We've been getting charged 20K a pop for blowing up tanks and APCs.

Thing I read said deathmatches. I assume other pvp modes too but I didn’t care enough to look. I assume they’ll keep the current ratio, and this will only be forward looking, but I really dunno. I kinda hope they wipe it completely, just so I can enjoy the wailing and gnashing. either way, I hope it culls the herds of ewo k/d nurses.

Are we sure it's too late?

Info on a bunch of other changes is dribbling out. A bunch of quality of life updates. It's almost like somebody at Rockstar decided to play the game and realized "This shit really pisses me off. I'm gonna do something about this shit." - K/D ratio no longer affected by freemode - no more getting charged for blowing up weaponized personal vehicles - people running races backwards are ghosted, so they can't troll the folks actually racing - option to ghost everybody till the first race checkpoint (though this one would've ruined DVDR crew races. The whole point of those was the big crash at the first turn)

To be fair, Vandy has about the same chance of winning the SEC as my Aggies do. A&M is obviously the better team, but neither of them is winning the conference this year.

I’m still wishing for the maximum chaos scenario - Notre Dame to the SEC.

A bunch of new weaponized stuff. More unnecessary supercars you can't use without getting blown up. And drones. If those are in freemode, that might finally push me into invite only permanently.

Contract stuff is quick too. And payphones hits are paying a bunch right now. The car miniheists are good money, and don't take too long. Plus you can always deliver the cars for that business pretty quickly. Don't like the delivery location? Blow it up and get another location at no cost. Grabbing the blue dot cars is good money. Spin the wheel at the casino for a new T-shirt. The nightclub rewards got bumped up really high recently. And you can always sell Ballers to the pay and spray. I have a very personal definition of easy, which is basically that if my sorry ass can do it it's easy. I'm also boring, so I stick to the same plan every time. Don't bother getting anything besides the minimum stuff. It won't help anyway. The explosives are useless. Use fast travel in the sub to cut down travel times. Also, fly everywhere. I always end up using the Sparrow or Buzzard, since I never learned to fly the Oppressor I/II. Use the sub to get there. The mission you rage quit on is either really easy or annoyingly hard, depending on whether you can take out that chopper before getting killed. If you don't get it the first time, prepare to get spawn killed while you sit on a jetski. The key seems to be to just go slow on your way there, and shoot as many missiles as you can once you get radar lock on the chopper. Once he's gone, the rest is easy on the surface. Inside the sub is standard GTA combat. The guards will be the same place every time, so you get a feel for it pretty quickly. If you have to get the safe numbers, it's just more standard GTA combat till you find the right guy. If you have to get the plasma cutter, it's standard GTA combat. It can be more annoying than the safe codes, but still not too bad. The fingerprint clone mission isn't bad. Just shoot five guys in a room and do a hack. The cutting torch isn't bad either. Take out the guards with missiles on your way in. Run around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to locate it, then run away when you do. The weapons are a little more complicated. If you get the Merryweather HQ version, rage quite and try a new session. Repeat till you get somewhere else. Then land on the roof and go in from there. Standard GTA combat, another hack and you're done. The actual heist itself is tricky, but not too bad. I ignore the guards and run right at the hack room. Take out the three guards when you get there, do the fingerprint hack (which has an insanely easy trick to it), grab whatever's there, and take out either one or two guards on the way out. I've seen people the whole thing can be done in 45 minutes. Takes me maybe 2-3 times as long, but I get there. And get anywhere from 1.2 to 1.7 million for it. Took a long time to get that from Rooftop back in our day.

As near as I can tell, these updates will happen on the One too, though Nate and I are on the new gen release that came out in March, and the One isn't cross compatible with that version. The game has been weird the last year or so. I haven't shot a dot in months. And making money is actually viable. You'd have been a GTA billionaire from the current setup with the amount of missions you did. Don't think the older stuff's payouts have changed, but there's a bunch of new stuff with big payouts for short missions, and a heist that's easily soloable.

The sound of quiet when there isn't supposed to be quiet is bad stuff. I did an internship at Motorola during undergrad. One day I was trying to grab the signal processor chips I was supposed to be testing, which were stored on a rack next to one of the production testers. Specifically, they were right next to the big, red button on the side. It was amazing how quiet everything got when all those fans shut off at the same time. Those things aren't supposed to shut down, ever. Took em about three hours to get it up and running again. Would've been worse if the Teradyne techs hadn't happened to be on site that day. Not fun.

Fox sports loves to show them during Australian Rules Football, for whatever reason. Fortunately I’ve never run into them elsewhere.

I guess it might come down to how badly ESPN wants Clemson, FSU, etc in the SEC. And maybe what they can get out of Fox to let part of the remainder go to the B1G.

Ultimately I think there will be two separate GTA onlines, at least for awhile. We’ll have GTA online Los Santos, and GTA online Poughkeepsie, or wherever it ends up. The former will remain unplayable due to bad design choices (broomsticks). The latter will be unplayable since Rockstar can’t figure out how to keep their servers stable to save their lives. Each version will earn them a billion dollars from mindless Rockstar fanboys As a mindless Rockstar fanboy I will play one or both endlessly.

I’d love to know Lincoln Riley’s thoughts right about now. Did another school leave him on the dark?

Just call it the USFL. Nobody will be using that name in a few years anyway.

What's the endgame here? B1G and SEC bury everybody else, eventually the conference system cannibaliizes itself and the big football schools break off from the NCAA to create their professional league/NFL feeder system?

Depends on how thick the zombies and/or demons are on the ground. Damage isn't horrible. Ripped a gutter off the house, but we were gonna replace the roof and gutters this year anyway. Truck's drivable, which is good since I need it for a trip in two weeks. It's gonna need a new hood and right front fender/body panel. Maybe a new front bumper shell, left front fender, and paintjob. Damage seems to be contained to the front third, so it's manageable.

Had a tree fall on my truck and house last night. My day is gonna involve a lot more chainsaw use than I was anticipating when I went to bed last night.

My great grandparents deserve some sort of trophy for unoriginal naming. My grandmother was their sixth child, and only daughter. Instead of giving her an actual name, the just gave her first and middle initials - V. I.

My favorite is when they suddenly discover a bathroom emergency that has to be dealt with NOW. Of course they couldn't possibly have gone any of the nine times you asked them to go before you left the house.

Reading this in bits and pieces. He went full Swinney: "Non-revenue sports [athletes] that have for years and years and years been able to create a better life for themselves because they've been able to get scholarships and participate in college athletics. That's what college athletics is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be something where people come and make money and you make a decision about where you go to school based on how much money you're going to make." How about you, Nick?

Watching Fisher's eyes bounce around like that is kinda mesmerizing.