Mr. GOH!

I am so happy my wife does not usually watch crappy television and is totally cool with me playing games on my laptop when she's watching shows or movies I don't really care about. Even when it's a show or movie I am mildly interested in, she doesn't care if I'm on my laptop simultaneously. I mean, she likes to have her iPad out when she watches TV, too. If it's a movie we both want to watch at home, we focus on it, most of the time. We generally do other things for "together" time, which generally means we spend one weekend day per week outside of the house doing fun things together, usually including a movie or play and dinner together. We also take turns cooking for each other and our dinners at home are either one-screen (we both watch the same thing) or no-screen. It's nice being married to a woman who has a graduate degree in film and who has zero patience for "reality" TV and the dregs of scripted television shows and who also is a tech-savvy Internet professional. TN: your bird's demands are unreasonable and any good lawyer should be able to demonstrate that torturing you with bad TV does not count as quality time spent together. Or, int he alternative, that if the time spent watching TV on the couch is so central to your relationship, that the relationship is not strong and in danger, anyway.

That should change sooner rather than later, FG. It will take a series of court cases, but the ruling that SSM is constitutionally protected will go far in the fight to outlaw discrimination.

Yup. As a real adult, I have between one and two hours a day to play on a good day, that's it. Things like MMOs, Destiny, and MOBAs are forever beyond my reach. But that's okay, because I don't like them anyway. My life is multiplayer, so I enjoy playing single player games when I relax.

TN is right; it's insane that any company with lawyers worth their salt would sign off on an agreement that allows to retailer to keep its percentage of the original sale when issuing full refunds to consumers. I have only seen such fuckery in sloppy agreements drafted by people who did not know what they were doing, usually the owners of a small business who decided not to spend a couple grand on a lawyer.

TheRevanchist: Of course it took a few years for the market to settle after the ACA went into effect, and it hasn't fully settled, yet. That it's been upheld twice should result in other improvements (or, more realistically, slower price increases from insurers). Gay marriage: this is a good day for love in the United States. The dissents in the SCOTUS opinion are full of tasty and hypocritical conservative tears. I am glad that Kennedy sees the role of SCOTUS to enforce equality and liberty under the law when the states and, indeed, the people refuse to. It will be interesting to see the many cases that will result from this ruling, such as whether anti-discrimination laws must now apply to gays and lesbians (in many states they do not) and to what extent the First Amendment 'protects' folks who do not believe in gay marriage.

That sucks. It should be more affordable. I'm also in favor of adopting the Minnesota solution; all health insurance companies must be non-profit.

Yeah, I prefer Obamacare to the bad old regime, but I'd rather have single-payer. I'm reclaiming the term. MisterJack: were you not covered when you went to the hospital? Or did you have an expensive procedure? Or is that your deductible?

Obamacare was upheld. Big win for insurance companies and the poor.

Despite being able to play it on my rig, I think they did the right thing. I am suspending playing it until they release a fixed PC version, though. Back to the wonderful Witcher 3 for me.

Played a bunch more and have encountered more stuttering and slowdowns. After messing around with the settings, I found that running it in windowed mode with the GameWorks smoke settings off improves it immensely, to the point I only get some minor stuttering when the game loads new areas as I'm gliding around. It's odd to me that this game seems to be having the exact same problems as Watch Dogs did initially. Othwerwise, it's fun, although I am a little tired of shooting drone tanks with the batmobile.

I don't feel like finding images, but this Steam Sale I got: Valkyria Chronicles, Gods Will Be Watching, Small World 2, Tales From the Borderlands, Homeworld Collection Remastered, Icewind Dale Enhanced Edition, Age of Wonders Classic Pack, and Age of Empires II. Should have gotten the Metal Gear demo for $5, but kept forgetting, too.

Love and Mercy. An interesting movie about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. One half is set in the 60's and focuses on the making the legendary Pet Sounds album and Brian's concurrent/subsequent slump into depression, The other half (told concurrently) takes place in the 80's and is about Melinda Ledbetter encountering Brian Wilson when he was essentially a drugged-up prisoner of his psychiatrist, who dominated his life and siphoned his money while overprescribing Wilson drugs that made Wilson into, essentially, a zombie. All the performances were fantastic; Paul Dano plays the 60's-era Wilson while John Cusack plays the broken 80's version, which works much better than it has any right to. Elizabeth Banks is good as Ledbetter and Paul Giamatti is great as the awful and manipulative psychiatrist. There are a few 'trippy' sequences late in the movie that detract from its overall quality in an attempt to resolve the 60's storyline by tying it explicitly to the 80's storyline when the thematic ties present throughout the early movie were connection enough, but otherwise it was very good.

Inside Out. I felt like it did not live up to the potential of the premise and was more obvious about the heartstrings-pulling Pixar is known for. The performances were all excellent, of course, and each of the comedians playing an emotion nail it perfectly. I also really liked any glimpse into characters' heads other than Riley. I did not like Joy and Sadness's journey through the outlands of Riley's memory because I feel like it really muddied the movie's conception of how emotions work; it feels like Riley's brain is only really connected to the control room and that everything else is just arbitrary goofiness for Joy and Sadness to traipse through. I also feel like the resolution of Joy and Sadness's journey is arbitrary and does not make sense in the context of how the movie presents the functioning of the brain and emotions. It definitely feels like the writers came up with the characters of the emotions and Riley's real-life journey before figuring out how the emotion characters' arcs would fit in with Riley's.

JP3 is terrible, I agree. JPW is worse because it totally misuses a potentially good cast and is boring, which no summer movie should be.

Jurassic Park World. It misused every single cast member, the plot was dumb, the kids were dumb, the movie was pretty retrograde in its depiction of women, the romance was tired and arbitrary, the dinosaurs were boring, the plot made no sense, everyone was dumb as fuck so the plot would even work, it was not self-aware in any good way and was not the smart deconstruction of sequels I was promised, nothing made sense, faux-John Williams ain't no John Williams, Vincent D'onofrio was misused and made no sense, Chris Pratt was not nearly as fun as he should have been and his character made no sense, and the movie was leaden and its sense of fun was unfelt, like it was put together by aliens who only understand fun and humor intellectually as if they were just checking off elements of a movie that would make is Spielbergian (pre-Schindler's List). Utter crap, worst in the series, and I cannot understand why anyone liked it.

I think most trans* people would say they were born trans and that the gender they adopt, though it is a social construct, is an outgrowth of their inborn trans*-ness. It is absurd to say that a white person could be born with a black soul, or vice versa, because those categories are essentially meaningless to the infant before s/he receives the social construct of race through socialization and education. In Dolezal's instance, she has the privilege to choose to appear black or white, but very, very few African-Americans can pass as white. That is, if we accept her rationalization, she is privileged to be able to choose whether she presents as white or black, while dark-skinned black folks cannot. It would be a wholly different situation if she acknowledged her privilege and merely said that she identifies with African American culture and struggles although those struggles aren't in her ancestors' or her past.

That's certainly how UC3 worked, Ethan. I mean, theoretically, the UC games could be excellent. In practice, they're 80% repetitive nearly-on-rails third person shooters. I think a wider variety of enemies and combat options would go a long way to spicing up the gameplay, though. I really wonder if/how that chase sequence works in the final released game.

PC show will be ho-hum.

You mean Zelda NX, Ethan?

Call of Duty, Gears of War, Halo, Battlefield; the four horsemen of boring shooters. I gotta say, the MS and Sony pressers have been good. EA and Ubi were both meh as fuck.

$2million seems like a really low goal, actually. They must have outside funding.

I missed the only part of the EA conference I cared about: Mass Effect Andromeda. There's nothing else this year I care about from the rest of the pressers, as far as I know. I mean, Fallout fucking 4, motherfuckers. All else is meaningless fluff.

I only have one medic card, sadly. I have a shitload of siege cards, and a couple of uniques. Still get schooled by robust squirrel and monster decks. I also don't like to stack my deck with decoys, but I guess I'd better. What really kills me are decks heavy on muster cards, though. I can deal with Nilfgaardian spy-heavy decks.

I really need to improve my Gwent deck. I don't even have enough cards to play anything except the Northern Realms, and I feel like I'm hitting a ceiling as to how effective that deck can be against advanced scoi'atel and monster decks.