TheMightyEthan

As soon as I make a little progress through my backlog I'm planning to subscribe to Xbox All Access on PC for Outer Worlds.

That's just...

Dude, I think there's definite progress there. Besides, faces are like the hardest thing to draw, and it's only been a month.

Yeah, that is the best way to get cooperation from those people kinds of people in my work: just point out that they're probably doing it to other people too.

On time two years in a row! Post in this thread by November 22 to sign up, and by November 25 I will assign each person a giftee to rain generosity upon. Rules: Digital gifts only, typically Steam since it's the easiest to mess around with wishlists and gifting on. Other services/gift cards are fine though. There will be a separate wishlist thread to help you figure out what your target likes. Make sure your Steam wishlist/other wishlists are up to date. Suggested price of $10, though under or over is not against the rules. What this means is, don't expect a $60 gift--if your Santa gets you a $5 gift that's on your wishlist, that's all they're required to do. But if you're feeling ultra-rich or ultra-generous, we won't thumb our noses at higher priced presents. Multiple gifts are fine, but by no means required. Gifting period will officially commence alongside the Steam Winter Sale, which is rumored to begin December 19 this year. You can gift earlier though if you find a killer deal (or just can't restrain your excitement ?). Gifting deadline will be on or around the end of the Steam sale, which should be January 2. If you don't get your gift by then, message me. No brand new members (signing up after this message) unless I or another mod approves you. Have fun! Ho ho ho!

I remember playing Tales of Destiny on the PS1, and playing for like 10 hours, and defeating the up-till-then Big Bad, and thinking I'd beat the game, and then the opening credits started... (I was young and it was my first JRPG, I had no perspective on how long to expect it to be.)

Well, the EU renegotiated the deal they said they wouldn't renegotiate. They're saying this deal is take it or leave it and not up to renegotiation, but, as I said before: But really, parliament passed the "in principal" resolution, so I expect after the elections (which the Tories look set to win pretty soundly, if you can trust polling data) Parliament will pass the implementation legislation and the UK actually will leave by the end of January.

HE STOLE $3,000 FROM HER! As a prosecutor people like her drive me nuts. I admire their magnanimity, but sometimes people who commit crimes need to be convicted of them...

Don't just sue, she should call the cops, that's a crime.

Preordered Pokemon Sword, even though there's no way I'm going to get through Golden Deer and Ni No Kuni before November 15...

No Boba Fett movie can ever top the original.

That is a bro move to announce PC before the PS4 launch.

Got the mount to hook my camera to my telescope, so I went back out and took some more pictures of Jupiter and Saturn. This first one is just a raw picture of Jupiter from the camera through the telescope, with the exposure adjusted on the camera to show as many of the moons as possible: Then we have a much shorter exposure time photo of Jupiter, to try to get as much detail as possible (not much detail, but you can at least see the color): After that I started experimenting with taking videos, which I can feed into some free astrophotography software to get these: Then I can do some Photoshop compositing to yield: Which is actually pretty close to what it looks like in person through the eyepiece of the telescope. Then I moved on to Saturn. Again, the first picture is just a direct shot through the telescope: Then take a video, run it through some processing (and also apply a 2x barlow lens, which I forgot to do with Jupiter, and the result is): That last one actually might be clearer than it looks in person. The reason all the processed ones are angled opposite from the direct shot ones is that the telescope has an odd number of mirrors, which means the image you see is left-right reversed, so when I was doing the processing I fixed that. Next I want to try Jupiter again through the barlow, to hopefully get even more detail. I also want to try some longer videos. The longest one I took last night is the one that resulted in that last Saturn picture, and it was just under 2 minutes long. The longer the video the more frames the software has to work with, so the better it can correct for atmospheric disturbances and the like, and the better the resulting picture.

Game pass is a sweet ass deal.

@Mr. GOH! I'm pretty sure you've said each of the last three games you've played is GOTY ?

Both TFA and TLJ were movies that I liked a lot when I first saw them, but that as time has passed I've started to feel less and less positive toward.

Yeah, I'd go ahead and pack any empty space in your freezer with ice, that way it's already there in the event you lose power.

Yeah, FE3H definitely takes a while to pick up, but I'm working my way through my third playthrough and I'm not sick of it yet.

From what I've been reading they understand that it's because they rushed it out so it's competing with the last Ghost Recon which has been developed more throughout its life. It's similar to Destiny 2 and how people were disappointed it seemed pared back compared to Destiny 1.

Wow, that's awful.

Even The Last Jedi though was basically just Empire Strikes Back in reverse, so it didn't exactly get away from the original trilogy. I did like it though.

Yeah, I would not be getting into it nearly as much as I am if I hadn't been able to get my grandpa's telescope. I bet if I were to buy new all the equipment I got from him it would cost $6,000-$7,000. Of course he bought it 30 years ago, but still, it's in great shape and is obviously extremely high quality.

It's almost like there are massive structural problems with the way the world is organized that those in power have been ignoring for decades.

Observed again Saturday night. No pictures because I don't have the camera mount yet, but we looked at Jupiter and Saturn again. We could see four of Jupiter's moons clearly, and even see some cloud banding on Jupiter itself. I think I saw the Great Red Spot for a second, but am not sure about that, the view was fairly wobbly due to Jupiter being close to the day/night terminator and so a lot of temperature change going on, plus it was pretty low in the sky so I was looking through a lot of atmosphere. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen, until we changed the view to Saturn. Saturn was farther into the night side and higher in the sky, so the view was clearer, and while we couldn't see any cloud banding we could very distinctly see the rings. I'm really excited to get the camera mount, which should hopefully be later this week. Finally, we tried to look at Neptune, and I'm about 51% sure we found it. I forgot to try my barlow lens, so we were only looking at it with 160x magnification, and at that level Neptune is far enough away that you can't see it's a disk, it just looks like a blue star, so it's possible we were in fact just looking at a blue star in the same general area as where Neptune is supposed to be. At the 320x I can get with the barlow we should be able to see that it's a disk and confirm if we're actually looking at the right thing. I also realized I screwed up the math above, and that crater picture is actually about 320x magnification, while the big picture of the moon is about 80x. The new eyepiece I ordered should have 50x magnification, which will allow me to see the whole of big targets like the Moon or Andromeda all at once (as you can see above the Moon is slightly too big to get all in the frame at 80x magnification). If I get my stuff in time I want to try to go out of town this weekend to look at Andromeda without as much light pollution.