How would we even know, Cliffy? PC Gamers have had such spotty access to these games, I gave up long ago on the whole franchise. I see Gears 5 is on Steam, but only Gears Tactic is there with it?

Simon Says wrote on Feb 17, 2024, 14:37:


You can even boost heat pumps with underground loops and a water tank to have a CoP of upto to 6 which also helps with air conditioning in the summer.

OK, interested in this. Got a quick link where I can learn more?

Re: Shitty Movies: I recently watched The Marvels with my wife. We both thought it was pretty good. We loved the new Antman too. I think it's becoming popular to shit on superhero movies no matter how good they are. I will be the first to tell you Marvel made some bad choices, and I don't like Brie Larson much, but Jude Law and Sam Jackson saved the first movie, and Ms. Marvel made this one good. It's too bad they screwed up her series so bad.

The Eternals should have been a Disney + Series. There are just too many characters to figure out in a movie, and by the end we could not keep track of half of them. Not-Sebastian Stan, Not-Wong, Shorty, Mad Jolie, You Know Nothing Black Knight, I can only remember the funny names we gave them when discussing the movie after watching it. You can't possibly care about their fates because you don't get to know any of them in the short time span of the movie.

Wakanda Forever was just shit-tastical. The sister does not have the charisma to be a movie lead. Almost any other character from the first movie would have been a better choice.
Thor Love and Thunder - someone needs to reign in Waititi. His first Thor movie was the best one by far, but it seems like Marvel then decided to just let him go ape-shit and Love and Thunder was a mess of corny jokes and bad plot choices.
Oh, and how could I forget the completely forgettable Secret Invasion, a pointless nothing-burger of a series?

* REMOVED *

This comment was deleted on Feb 17, 2024, 17:39. Reason: Intolerance (rule 2)

Carighan wrote on Feb 15, 2024, 02:44:

1badmf wrote on Feb 14, 2024, 21:49:
saw a cybertruck on the road the other day. it was uuuuuuugLEEEE. like if they had someone with no artistic talent design it, so they just used a ruler to draw straight lines everywhere.

Yeah I will say my sympathy for people who bought a Cybertruck and now complain about ~anything in regards to them is exactly zero. It's ugly as fuck, utterly impractical compared to any competitor, nevermind overpriced. You just buy it to openly announce you are a xenophobe and a fascist, that's about it.

Stop with the labeling, jeez.

I can see the appeal, if you like the retro futuristic thing. I will be sticking with my Taco, though. Aside from the fact that I can just carry a gas can, charging my truck would kill me with the electric bill. And also, All-Wheel-Drive is NOT the same as 4 wheel drive and you will get stuck in places my truck will crawl out of. Better towing capacity than my Taco, though.

The finish, though. So you bought an expensive truck that you now need to either baby and clean all the time, or get it cerakoted or painted? (Or wrapped) Why did they not just clear coat it?

WannaLogAlready wrote on Feb 14, 2024, 23:20:

Tomb Raider I-III Not That Much Remastered Really™

Haha! Yeah, I see so many of these lazy "remasters" where they replace some textures and that's about it. Then they want WAY too much money for something some random guy has already used AI to do on the original games which you can get for super cheap.

Listen, if you want people to buy, actually remake it. I'd love them to use the engine from the Tomb Raider reboot series and give us some actual value. The internet is full of 4K texture replacement mods by AI, but you want to charge us because Aspyr added some modern anti-aliasing and lighting effects? I've read some reviews on STEAM, and surprise, it's a buggy mess on release.

Prez wrote on Feb 10, 2024, 09:11:

11 best prog rock tracks to test your hi-fi system

Don't have a hifi system to test; just wanted to express how happy I am that Dream Theater and Coheed and Cambria got shout-outs in an article on Bluesnews.

Are you stoked about Portnoy returning? I was one of the people that was perfectly happy with Mangini, but I'm excited to see what Portnoy can do with them after more than a decade away.

Just went back to Cyberpunk yesterday, and whatever they did in the new patch, it ran for shit. Normally get 70-100 fps with all settings maxed and DLSS +frame gen. It was doing that, but going down to 2 fps and then stuttering like crazy. These drivers fixed that.

Argonius the 3rd wrote on Feb 10, 2024, 16:44:
FYI Xbox is more profitable than Windows

But the only part of the business that is NOT profitable is the console. And now XBox is on PC, it's on Meta Quest headsets...there's even rumors that someday in the next couple of years it will come to Playstation. Which is why Phil is trying to plug the leaky ship and keep everyone from quitting right now while they figure out how to wind down production.

Reminds me when they told us they would definitely NOT shut down the IBM Endicott plant even though they had just built a plant in China making the same chips. And then 9 months later...they shut down the IBM Endicott plant.

Yep, I love all the Spielberg/Hanks produced WWII stuff. Some minor Hollywood bullshittery with facts, but mostly accurate. The Pacific is finally getting some attention as well, due to this show. And I don't know if people know this, but the Clint Eastwood directed Flags of our Father and Letters from Iwo Jim are also Spielberg productions and fantastic movies based on historical accounts from WWII.

Rewatching The Pacific with my wife, who had not seen it. (I'm a WWII history nut, she's not so much.) It's actually toned down from reality in some places. The men who went to Australia called it "The great Debauch" and Bob Leckie - who wrote one of the books the show is based on - slept with a bunch of women, not just one. And the one from the show is made up. In reality, his month long love affair was an AFFAIR with a married woman. (Although he did not know that at first.)
And John Basilone, by all accounts, took that bunker on Iwo Jima by himself. In the show they show it as a group effort, but in reality he threw grenades to distract the Japanese, then tossed in the charge, then killed everyone who ran out of the bunker, got his men up and stationed by the airfield, then ran back to the beach and single handedly led a tank through the obstructions to the airfield, and was then killed running back around the airfield to his men. I guess the writers felt it was too unbelievable and toned down his heroics.

I have to keep my mouth shut with Masters of the Air. I've read the books, so I know who lives and who dies and how and I'm trying not to ruin it for my wife. But I am with Dick Winters on this. Better to have been on the ground in charge of your own destiny that sitting in the plane, hoping you don't die before you even get to jump out. Most of the guys on those B17s had zero chance, and it's not like the pilots could move the plane much on a bombing run, so you're just sitting there taking it. Ugh.

This comment was edited on Feb 9, 2024, 13:47.

FrostyRei wrote on Feb 8, 2024, 16:54:
I was in a closed beta for it over a year ago: fired it up today, exactly the same, no changes noticeable.

Yep, same piece of shit it has been for the last 4 or 5 years. This is 100% a "Fuck it, just ship it and we'll see if we can make enough money to justify fixing it post release."

Gee UBi, make it Quest exclusive and lock out the PCVR crowd and then whine about low sales. Durrrrr.

I have played this a bunch of times under an NDA for the last, god, like 4, 5 years? It's never been good. $70 is because they've been developing this since 2014 and they're hoping to sucker people to pay for their idiocy before the review bombs go off and this slides into obscurity. Leave it to Ubi to fuck up taking the sailing from Black Flag and making it a separate game. I think a bunch of enthusiastic high schoolers would have done a better job.

No winners here. I've seen some claims that he was set up, but the evidence that the child pron was his is pretty strong. He also sexually assaulted a female roommate. (And kept photographic evidence, like a dumbass.)
Seems pretty clear he is a scumbag and th eonly reason he leaked stuff is because he was petty and mad.
HOWEVER - the fact that the CIA is still doing all their bullshit without remorse is also terrible. An agency with a huge track record of abysmal failures and abuses, and we let it keep trucking right along.

Super foreshadowing - his self-given nickname was BAD ASS, but all his co-workers referred to him as Voldemort.

This comment was edited on Feb 2, 2024, 15:11.

I mean, what is MS's track record when acquiring game companies?
Let's see...Fable, surely they've had a hit Fable game since...oh, nope. They actually closed the studio who made those games and shit out a Fable game for their terrible "motion" control: Kinect.
Rare...yeah, ugh.
Halo...Microsoft managed to take Halo and make it worse. Not that Bungie is doing anything good at the moment either.
Oh, Gears of War, surely we got a new game coming for this hit franchi...oh, nothing?
Inxile, Double Fine? Nothing?

So, out of the dozens of studios MS purchased, most have shut down, and Obsidian and Ninja Theory seem to be the only ones putting out content that people seem to like. Mojang is just sitting on their Minecraft income.

Zenimax seems to be at least maintaining some of their own IPs. ESO is still chugging along. I wouldn't say anything has really changed for better or worse here. The studios they owned are still either doing good games or shitting out sequels.

Actiblizz - Can we even say this is bad? I mean, they have been in "shit out sequels" mode for a decade or more. COD every year for a long time. WoW has not really done anything great in a decade. They desperately need to make a sequel with improved gameplay mechanics and graphics, but they won't, because it's easier to just shit out expansions. DIII was pretty good, but I can't even make myself play DIV. And Toys for Bob is pretty much done for. I don't think MS is even capable of making this company worse than it was.

So who cares? Blizzard is not the company making the games we all loved from decades past. They're in maintenance mode, chugging along, shitting out sequels that barely increment on the franchise, with no innovation. Nobody can screw it up worse than they already did. Hell, I hear MS is even bringing back development to Heroes of the Storm, so they can have another revenue stream again. Whoo. Hoo.

jdreyer wrote on Jan 27, 2024, 17:39:

Agent.X7 wrote on Jan 27, 2024, 14:00:
Good job Scotland. Say, where are you storing all the old, unusable, unrecyclable wind turbine blades? Oh, landfills, right.

But don't worry about that. Engineers are working on making them more recyleable. We just need to find a place we can use the millions of tons of old fiberglass. And a process that doesn't use as much energy as they generated to recycle them.

Hmmm, sort of seems like EV batteries. But don't worry, the capacity to recycle them is "coming soon" as well. Just like the flying cars and robot maids promised to us in the 80s.

Oh well, me and George Jetson are gonna go for a joyride on my new hoverbike.

This is like the patient complaining about his gangrene-infected fingernail being pulled when the alternative of not doing that would have killed him outright. Also, worldwide fossil fuels kill around 68,000 per terawatt hour produced through accidents and pollution, solar and wind kill 6. And that doesn't even count the millions who will be killed and the billions displaced in the future from global warming-induced desertification, extreme weather, sea level rise, etc. You're really missing the forest for the trees here.

No, we can certainly sit and plan better ways of doing things. But the "green" industry is just that: A $14 billion dollar industry, and they'll sell you "green" technology that isn't just to make a buck. Sure, the oil industry is crooked and bad for us. But someone put on a happy face clown mask and told you they were the good guys and you bought it. You don't save the environment by decreasing pollution from oil in cars and spiking it by the same or more in fossil fuel consumption to power the electric grid. 60% of the electric in the US is produced by burning fossil fuels. Only 8% is from nuclear (Thanks mainstream media, for freaking people out about nuclear energy) and 13% is from renewables, which includes things like wind turbines which *peeks behind the curtain" use a ton of oil and hydroelectric dams, which also use oil products, and solar which generates landfill mass.

We have invented water based lubricants, but they require different parameters in vehicles and motors and it's just cheaper to keep on trucking with oil. Where is the law requiring research and development and eventual 100% adoption on non-polluting lubricants? Oh, right, nobody is paying anybody to push that through.

No, your analogy doesn't work. It's really like the patient asking the doctor not to chop off his dick simply because he has a hangnail. "But it's the only way I know to fix a hangnail, and besides Merk gives me bonuses for every dick I remove!"

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jan 27, 2024, 16:48:

Bodolza wrote on Jan 27, 2024, 15:48:
You know what fiberglass is mostly made of right? The clue is in the name. There's no issue with putting fiberglass in landfill. Dirt can't hurt dirt.

Plastic mostly, with some glass fibers for strengthening. So, hate to break it to you, but fiberglass is not made out of "dirt".

Thank you, saved me the typing.

Good job Scotland. Say, where are you storing all the old, unusable, unrecyclable wind turbine blades? Oh, landfills, right.

But don't worry about that. Engineers are working on making them more recyleable. We just need to find a place we can use the millions of tons of old fiberglass. And a process that doesn't use as much energy as they generated to recycle them.

Hmmm, sort of seems like EV batteries. But don't worry, the capacity to recycle them is "coming soon" as well. Just like the flying cars and robot maids promised to us in the 80s.

Oh well, me and George Jetson are gonna go for a joyride on my new hoverbike.

Xeth Nyrrow wrote on Jan 26, 2024, 15:13:
Wow, the HP article reads even WORSE! This is a quote from the CEO:

"This is something we announced a few years ago that our goal was to reduce the number of what we call unprofitable customers. Because every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We're investing in that customer, and if this customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment"

What in the hell? Has this guy been having lunches with Elon Musk?

You know what's a bad investment? HP Printers, lol. Screw you HP, you've been shit for a good long while now.

ZeroPike1 wrote on Jan 25, 2024, 06:25:
720p no ads streaming service! For only $9 a month! Netflix you spoil us!

And $20 a month for 4K unreal…

It's more like $27 a month - 4K is now $23 sub + taxes. It's why I unsubbed. Only going to sub once a few shows have built up new seasons. Binge, unsub.
Amazon is where we shop a lot, so Prime Video is more like an added benefit of "free" shipping.Fuck them for now requiring $3/month for ad free, though.
Disney+ is now basically Hulu and Disney. Watching a lot of both.
AMC+ = My Brother in law is paying for this one.
Apple + = My mother in law pays for this one. Some really good shit here.

Streaming is the new cable. You pay for access, and then they make you watch ads even though you paid.

Gee, I wonder if that is because you can play Oculus, Steam VR, AND Quest games with the Quest headsets, and you can play ONLY PSVR2 games with the PSVR2. Not even PSVR games, ONLY the new ones.

Yep, great headset. One of the best out there. Also the shittiest game library bar none.