Mr. GOH!

It's probably gonna be a Destiny clone, i.e. multiplayer only or multiplayer focused garbage. Hope I'm wrong.

About a month ago my rig started throwing up blue screen after blue screen. I tried to diagnose the problem and came up with it being due to bad RAM. So I bought shiny new RAM. Didn't fix the issue. So I kept troubleshooting and the tests all indicated my mobo was bad. So I bought a shiny new mobo (which I planned to do anyway to avail myself of the new Optane stuff). Still blue screen after blue screen. Finally, I replaced my CPU on a whim and, bingo, what is generally the most reliable part of my PC turned out to be just broken enough to cause blue screens. At least it wasn't my CPU. The sad part is that I bought my RAM, CPU, and mobo just last fall. Wasted so much money. I am RMA-ing the CPU, so if anyone wants a refurbished intel i5 6600 for like 75 bucks, let me know.

Sadly, you'll still have a right wing government.

The nudity in American Gods is pretty even-handed, although I've only seen the first three episodes. Bilquis's scenes are sexy, which befits a god of sex and desire. But I get it; you and your gf are uptight Brits. My wife and I watch it with another female friend of ours, and they both enjoy the show quite a bit, and both of them are quite sensitive to male gaze-y nudity, a la earlier seasons of Game of Thrones. My wife gets annoyed at prudish sex scenes in TV and movies, although not as much as she does at portrayals of women made purely to titillate straight men. We've also been watching season three of Fargo and season three of Better Call Saul, which are both pretty great. Oh, and we've been watching The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu as well, which is pretty depressing, though very well done. We have a few more shows on our watchlist, like the recent season of House of Cards.

Wonder Woman. Sure, it's leaden, kinda overstuffed, full of Snyder-esque slow-mo action shots, and joyless, but Gal Gadot is a pretty good Wonder Woman and a mid-movie action sequence is the best of any in the DC movies so far.

Alien: Covenant. It's way better than Prometheus, even though it's rooted in the events of Prometheus. It's creepy and gory and the main characters are somewhat interesting. The CGI aliens look cartoony in places, which is disappointing given the visceral feel of the practical effect creatures from the first Alien movies. The movie also very clearly establishes the direct origins of the aliens as they are in the original movies; it did not feel like a particularly satisfying origin to me and the lack of mystery going forward he's reduced my interest in any sequels.

Yeah, usually the season is wrapping up around now. The hiatus was long due to the production needing to wait for colder weather.

I have never used a vacuum with headlights. Seems weird to me.

What Twitter account were you following? I'm really curious!

While I agree with the sentiment, Ethan, I haven't tweeted anything for years. Trump is a bona fide idiot utterly incapable of self-reflection or analysis beyond "does this make me feel good?" he has always been this way.

I leave the country for one week and the goddamned federal government falls apart. I suspect Mueller will turn up all sorts of dirt on Trump.

Yeah, he's worse than Sarah Palin. Reading Trump transcripts is mind-numbing and way confusing. And I say that as someone who has read a ton of transcripts of testimony in my current work, and transcripts of interviews and focus groups in my former career. It is goddamned rare I encounter anything as nonsensical as what Trump says.

It's a shame Mass Effect is also on hiatus as a series and that Bioware is only working on some sort of "live service" multiplayer game garbage like Destiny. I suspect I/O will pull through, but I feel for the lower ranking folks who will probably be losing their jobs for the time being.

I like it when my opinion is confirmed by experts!

I am nowhere near beating the game and, apparently, not halfway through it, by RPS's account, but the RPS review seems much more in line with my experience so far than a lot of the other early reviews. It's a game about exploration and environmental storytelling that also has very good logs and emails that make more narrative sense than most. It's not like everybody decided to record their last moments on, erm, the space station via audio log; a lot of the final recordings are surprisingly banal, even if they point towards new areas or missions. The attention to detail is pretty wonderful; one of the achievements is to find every person -or, in most cases, their corpse - on the station. Every corpse you find contributes to that achievement since there are no random dead people; they're all named and there's information to find about most of them, although not necessarily where their corpses ended up. The game really rewards taking it slowly and paying attention to everything, from the environment, to the data logs, to stuff written on white boards. Yes, the mimics are annoying, but no more than headcrabs were in HL and HL2. Prey gives you very good tools to deal with every enemy, but RPS, and other reviewers, seem to revert to smacking the mimics with the wrench when you're clearly supposed to freeze them with a different weapon and then finish them off with the wrench. Once you get the rhythm down, its' easy. They're tougher to deal with when coupled with much stronger baddies, but nothing any seasoned video game player can't deal with. Combat is mostly about picking the right tools or laying the right traps, at least early on. I've encountered a couple of heavy-hitting enemies I just had to overpower with weapons when I've gone off to explore areas off the main path, but I think I was essentially underleveled for those encounters and that they would have been much less resource-intensive if I had waited and explored those areas later on. The level design and art direction are also fantastic. The whole station and every environment feels like a real place that had dozens of people working in it until recently. I haven't encountered an area or space that felt like an arbitrary video game space, if that makes sense. Very minor non-story spoiler about a neat moment during exploration below. Edit: Oh, and the music by Mick Gordon is really great sci-fi ambient electronica. The sound design overall is pretty good, too.

Some of the early average reviews were clearly written by folks who raced through the game. I read them and think "this was not my experience at all." But it's a System Shock style game; it's not a fast-paced shooter or a Dishonored-style stealth game.

Just remember that the first four were written years apart. Also remember that King is a maniac whose writing style can be grating. Also remember that he got into a very serious car accident between books 4 and 5 (I think). Also remember that Wizard and Glass is a flashback novel that mostly takes place before the first novel. I mean, I like the books, but I'm not sure I would recommend them to folks in general. They start off as a "Man with No Name" kind of Western without much context, and then morph into an epic, bizarre, and increasingly complicated hero's quest with backstory and context filled in as the books go on, but not in any way that makes the world(s) they take place in feel real. But that may be part of the point, it's hard to say. I haven't read any of them since 2005 or thereabouts. Despite the series' grand ambitions, remember that King views the whole thing as a deeply personal work.

It makes more sense if you finish the last two novels.

Dark Tower movie is not really an adaptation of the novels. Edit: Blade Runner looks like it could be good. After Sicario and Arrival, I trust Villenueve to make something quite special.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2: It was ok, but wasn't quite as magical as the first one. It also seems like it retconned the shit out of Starlord's and Yondu's relationship. Some of the cheekiness was just a little too pat for my taste, especially the arcade game-like drone controls for the sovereign. The chief crime of the movie is that is was about Starlord's status and not really about the choices he has made. Kurt Russell drops in as a deus ex machina from the get-go and Starlord remains kinda dazzled by Russell for the majority of the movie and doesn't have any interesting character moments. I really liked the intro with baby Groot while a big battle was happening in the background. The production design was fucking excellent, too. IT definitely felt like a sequel, but it has a lot of fun like the original GotG. I liked it, but it wasn't great. I saw it in 3D, and it was the first truly pleasant 3D experience I've ever had; no headaches, the screen was bright throughout the movie, and the Thor trailer looked very cool in 3D.

And you'll elect a bunch of hateful Conservatives. Sorry.

I'm not even to the point of having crazy mimicry abilities, and this game is quite good. It is 100% a spiritual successor to system shock and is a better modern take on the concept than BioShock. I'll have more thoughts later, but I am really liking it so far. Edit: Played a bunch more, and it is really neat. Feels like SystemShock or the original Deus Ex.

Not G2A, which I've never used, but cdkeys has sold me some super shady keys for Ubisoft and EA games. My Watch Dogs 2 key was straight up from some promotion for folks who bought a Samsung phone or TV or something. I had to activate it through a special website for purchasers and everything, and cdkeys gave me instructions on what to type into the third party site, IIRC. If it was a dude selling a code that came with his phone or toaster or whatever because he didn't give a damn about PC games, that would be fine. But how did cdkeys end up with enough of these codes to sell them en masse? I've never had a valve code from cdkeys be as janky, but I've gotten games from cdkeys on origin that were similarly strange.

I think within a year, barring major delays. I mean, with the timing of the unveiling, I would almost expect it to be out for holiday 2017.