Mr. GOH!

I try to keep myself to two active HDDs, so the SATA options don't bother me. I only need the 4. My enormous backup drive is USB 3.0. Mine should be here Friday. The point of origin is ten miles from the FedEx store where it will be delivered for pickup, which usually means swift delivery. It's nice living where everything is nearby.

Yes, the rank ignorance, hypocrisy, and idiocy of the electorate is astounding. I am not sure what can stop this shitshow.

Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm in Georgia to prevent any appearance of conflicts of interest. Trump will just let his kids run the show, the show being licensing his name to projects around the world such that in no way will he be blind to it. It's disgusting.

Rosewill Tyrfing mid tower case. Core i5 6600. Didn't get the 6600k because I'm fine with the stock cooler and I will never need to overclock my CPU anyway. i7 just isn't worth it to me, either. Asus Z170-P Mobo. Nothing too fancy. And 16GB of Geil RAM. I built my own combo and got all this for around $400. I just hope that my GPU is ok. No PS4 this year.

And now a politics post! This article in the Washington Post in emblematic of the corruption of the Trump administration if Trump does not sell off his business assets and put the proceeds in a real blind trust untouched by friends or family. Trump will certainly be running the country like a business, as he promised. He just omitted that he will run it as a sole proprietorship for his benefit alone.

Yes, there would be no time dilation, but the fundamental concept of causality would go out the window even if you teleported instantaneously from one spot to another light years away. That is, there would be outside perspectives (frames, in relativity parlance) in which it looks like you traveled back in time. It's pretty simple: if there's FTL, then causality as we understand it breaks. Effects happen before causes. Well, there could be special rules that prevent breaking causality, but they would involve restrictions on beginning and end points of FTL travel that could not apply to the mass relay system and would not allow for Shepard to zoom about willy-nilly in the Normandy. It really doesn't bother me; I love space operas with FTL. But I do know that if FTL were truly possible, it means the universe is a very weird place that cannot really be understood by human brains.

Hmm. That's more than my budget, and I have to get a new case, too. I think I'll stick with a cheaper i5. Thanks for the info, Ethan!

It doesn't matter how you FTL; the relativistic effects remain. I don't remember any technobabble from the encyclopedia entries (all of which I have read) saying that mass effect drives allow FTL but still enforce causality, but I haven't read any for a few years and might be forgetting. I also don't remember any technobabble throwing general and special relativity out the window. But, yes, the timelines are more just based on different areas. Like the comparative timelines in future history textbooks a thousand years from now comparing what went on in the UK and the USA in 2016 and how those events led to the end of Western Civilization.

How much was the bundle, Ethan? My mobo is dead so I've been thinking about CPU/mobo/RAM bundles. I've been targeting the 6600k i5 over the i7 (i7 seems like overkill for gaming), but I'd shoot for an i7 if the price is right.

I am in!

Actually, it would be a different timeline because relativistic speeds. If you can travel faster than light, you can time travel. Wasn't there FTL communication in the original ME trilogy?

Oh, yeah, outside the city is terrible, but not as bad as the boundary waters between USA and Canada.

There is: the cleansing nuclear fire of your ICBMs.

Tyranny. Very interesting concept, and I kinda dug the lore. The execution seemed a bit rushed, though. The area design was not that interesting and there just was not enough variety of enemies to fight. The game was also too short for its ideas and systems. As you progress, you unlock the ability to do all sorts of stuff outside of combat (like the stronghold stuff in games likes Dragon Age Inquisition), but that part only gets fleshed out immediately before the final sequence of short combat quests. I get a very strong sense that there is a lot of replayability for the story, but the combat was so same-y after a while that I don't think I'll be replaying any time soon. The game is also short for a modern RPG, although not as short as some folks make it out to be. It also becomes more linear after the first Act, although your path is very much affected by what you did in character creation and the first Act, to the extent that entire large areas and quest lines will be very significantly altered or removed depending on how you approached the first hours of the game, which is quite interesting. That is, it depends both on what faction you choose to support (or none; there are three, but I think you can also be a free agent) and how you approach character creation, the rest of the game plays out differently. I mention character creation determining how the game progresses because, in addition to choosing your stats, looks, and background, character creation also involved you making a significant number of choices regarding about the game world. Specifically, you play a very powerful member of an evil overlord's army as it invades the last unconquered corner of the continent. How you choose to deal with infighting between the different parts of the army and the overlord's various lieutenants, as well as how you treat the conquered peoples, significantly impacts what happens in the game. tl;dr - very itneresting game and lore, choice and consequences galore, but kinda drab combat and hurried overall design.

I lived in DC for three years and did not notice a mosquito problem. Outside the city, yes, but there are far worse areas for mosquitos than around DC. I mean, there are mosquitos in DC, just that I didn't notice them any more than in other cities I've lived in.

Until AG Giuliani sends in the stormtroopers to stop legal weed sales.

Futzing with my computer in my spare time has been a good distraction from the fact that my country is going to Hell in a handbasket; I doubt I would have diagnosed it so quickly otherwise.

Definitely a power button short, as it stays on if I manually short the pins the switch hooks into. But now the computer doesn't appear to post and I get no system beeps because I disconnected and lost the cheap system speaker ages ago. Just ordered one and a new switch on Amazon. I suspect the wonky power switch fucked with the CMOS.

Switched out my power supply and that didn't change anything. I noticed that the computer remains on for longer if I fiddle with the wire from the power button to the mobo. I think I have a short or stuck power button, which is very annoying to fix.

It will be very very bad.

As long as my GPU is fine, I can afford to replace my mobo, PSU, CPU, and RAM. But I guess I'll be waiting to get a PS4 for another year, in that case. I'm going to buy a new PSU and swap it in tonight and see if that helps.

I couldn't turn on my PC this morning; the button simply does nothing. When I turn off and unplug my PSU, then plug it back in and turn the PSU on (with the PSU rocker switch; I don't touch the power button on the tower), my computer's fans start whirring for maybe 5 seconds and then everything dies and the power button on my tower still does nothing. I have not had time to troubleshoot this, but my gut instinct is that my PSU died. Anyone think differently?

10 and 2 is still what they teach. Source: I had to take a driving class this summer to get my license because I let my old one lapse back in 2009 or thereabouts. The class was super useless.

Doctor Strange. Unfamiliar with the comics, but the movie was fun and good for a popcorn spectacle. The depiction of magic was wonderfully trippy. Strange's journey is an exact mirror of Tony Stark's from Iron Man 1, though.

37 bucks on cdkeys.