Randox

I've come to the conclusion that my approach to modding skyrim thus far has probably been less than healthy for the game and my saves, as has been running an altered grids to load value (which is a shame because I'm going to miss that). On the upside, it's a good chance to try gameplay altering mods (specifically, I want a combat overhaul). And so begins the journey of restoring Skyrim to a Vanilla state, loading up the new mods and settings I want, and then hopefully never touching those mods or settings again for an entire playthrough (without a very good reason). If I achieve a stable build, and don't fiddle with it, everything should be just peaches for as long as I like (helps that the game is no longer being updated. Can't avoid fiddling when the game updates). I've also come across an opportunity to fix a gripe that I have with the majority of games I have ever played. Everything has too much health. In too many games, upping the difficulty makes the enemy harder to kill, and I find this to be immersion shattering when it leads to things like enemies surviving excessive numbers of headshots (grunts surviving one headshot is excessive. Bosses surviving a headshot is a concession I am willing to make for the sake of gameplay). To me, that's an ass backwards way to go about making the game harder. In my experience, the Rainbow Six games are some of the few that get this right. In Rainbow Six: 3, the first one I played, you are easy to kill. Doesn't matter what difficulty level, you can get shot 4 times if you're lucky before you're dead. The primary change is that enemies respond faster, and they get really accurate. In Vegas 2, which I am more familiar with, you die faster at each successive difficulty level, and again, enemies start reacting faster and with greater precision. At no point will an enemy absorb an assault rifle clip. So what I think I need for Skyrim is primarily a damage multiplier. I need one so that late game run of the mill monsters don't become an exercise in patience, and they need one so that run of the mill monsters can actually hurt me. Everyone should be way easier to kill, except perhaps things like Dragons. I never want Dragons to become this easy again. I miss the days when a dragon meant there was a sporting chance I was about to die.

So I started getting back into this game yesterday, and as is my custom after a break, I started looking at my mods and looking around to see what's new since I last made my picks. In what was perhaps a mistake, I also had a look at unreal's pictures and mod list (found here), and that's just not an attainable standard for normal gameplay (even if your computer is powerful enough to run all those mods at once, the game would almost certainly be critically unstable). On the upside, I did walk away with new character skin because I hate the Breton female one (also, he isn't kidding. Those skin mods are absolutely NSFW). Swapped out Climates of Tamriel for Pure Weather since I am already running Pure Water. Figured why not. I can't say I am familiar enough with either to really notice the differences in the weather, however the Pure Weather mod combines with enhanced saturation for a fairly noticeable effect. As a neutral consideration, it's darker than CoT, particularly when it's cloudy at night. I already have a belt mounted lantern to deal with CoT night's, and while it's still pretty freaking dark, it's very well done and something I can deal with. My biggest gripe is that Pure Weather has some serious glare issues. Snow, and a few other textures can become blinding from the wrong angle, though it's possible my other mods are interfering with some of the textures (it comes with it's own textures for things like snow). I've also gotten SKSE so that I can have SkyUI and Acceleration Layer running. And of course, since my hardware has changed, I redid my ini files now that the site I use to do so once again exists. I have however had a lot of problems with the dragonborn addon. It seems that uGridsToLoad=5 is pretty much mandatory if you don't want to crash the game on Solstheim, particularly around Miraks temple. That took a while to sort out. Actually, I'm not sure if I even totally solved the CTD problem because I actually avoided a little bit of the map on the try where everything worked. Not going back to that spot to find out. I also suspect that acceleration layer might be an issue (seems to be effective, but it's also older than any of the DLC I think, so that seems like a potential issue). I was also getting a CTD from opening the map (including once on the mainland) so Warburg's map for Dragonborn has been removed, and I think for the rest of my stay on the island, I will be running Skyrim normally, without SKSE. I've spent enough time, and this build seems to be stable. I will be returning my deactivated mods when I finish off Dragonborn, though ini tweaks will take some considering. Chances are I won't need to go back to Solstheim and the game seemed quite stable elsewhere with a higher uGrid setting (7). I have not yet caved and gotten an ENB mod, though I might, once I get out of Solstheim (doesn't seem like a good place to run more mods and tweaks than you have to). I found one that I think I would like called RealVision ENB (performance) that both looks very nice and has a minimal impact (hence the name, and also important because I am running my CPU pretty hard). Problem is that it was designed to work with CoT (which I suspect I will ultimately go back to), and frankly, the installation looks like a complicated pain. Still, it looked pretty lovely in Gopher's video of it. I also found this tweaking guide (here) which I wish I had found a long time ago. It's easily the best one I have come across from the parts I've read so far, and I have a feeling that once I am back in Skyrim, I will be taking a look at my ini files again taking into consideration what I have learned (it's actually kind of nice that the problems are on Solstheim. You don't have the same massive expanses that you do in Skyrim, so running some lower settings isn't particularly noticeable). Anyway, this is what my game currently looks like when everything is working:

Can't really give you an answer on a project like that right away. Interesting idea. Charing money would need some thought from us I think if nothing else, and frankly, if you are going to have a single server playing on behalf of people, that seems like something that should be run past Jagex for a couple reasons as well. Of course, before you go and spend 90,000 euros on an app, this can be done without a server. A few people use remote access apps to allow them to play RuneScape on phones or tablets remotely through their home computer. Performance isn't spectacular, though that's mostly due to limitations on the phone side really.

So today I found out that they remade the remake of Myst. I was introduced to the series because my Mom spotted the 10th anniversary edition (first 3 games) in the bargain bin I guess about 10 years ago. She thought it looked neat and picked it up for me, and I absolutely fell in love with the games. However, I've never been able to get Myst to run properly. Getting it to run at all was an adventure, but I've never been able to get save functionality, and the game is unstable. A bad combination. I guess I never really paid attention to the realMyst remake, which remade the game using I guess the 5th games 3D engine (the first 4 are pre-rendered point and click, with the 3rd and 4th having full rotation where the first 2 are slideshows). The new remake is important because the first one is actually old enough that modern hardware still has a lot of problems with it. This one, the realMyst Masterpiece edition uses the unity engine instead, and they've added in some more features like day/night as well. I never really thought I would get the opportunity to play this game, though I was considering getting my XP computer to take a stab at it after yesterdays adventure (though it would probably require the use of that computers virtual machine, and there would probably be issues as a result). Now I can perhaps dream that Riven might get the same treatment (second game). I doubt it, but it would be nice. If Riven had the free rotation like Exile (3rd game), it probably would have been my favorite. Exile is really good, but Riven is amazing. This leaves just the fourth game out of my collection, because apparently you have to be Indiana Jones to find that game. I have the second, third, and fifth games, and I'll probably get the Uru spin off games. Now I have the first game which I checked to make sure it would work (for all of 5 seconds, wanted to post while I am still filled with childlike excitement). Still need that fourth one.

Spent a lot of time yesterday trying to make Droid Works work (loved that game when I was little). Learned a lot about what was going on in the process as well. For example, I got more detailed information on why my Win98 VM runs like garbage and why it's probably not worth my time learning how to fix it (being an unsupported OS for the VM software is not a minor issue). Also, my XP VM runs like garbage for reasons I am not sure of, but I remembered that I actually have a functional Windows XP computer that I kept to read an old HDD from another computer. This was met with the same results as when I tried it with the XP VM when that was working. Game time speeds up, droids barely move. DOSbox was also unable to run it. Then I found a 98 VM already set up and intended to run old games. Fantastic. But it's supposed to run in a VM program that isn't compatible with Windows 7 (some people seem to be able to force Win 7 to run it anyway). Rather than screw around with that, I decided to let the XP box run it (the alternative would be running a virtual machine in a virtual machine). It worked too, but not 100%. A lot of the cutscenes still jump and fast forward inside the virtual machine, and the physics is pretty broken. Any tracked droid is hit or miss on getting up even a pretty gentle incline, and any puzzle involving both pushing and slopes is pretty much impossible. So while I was able to get the game into a state where I could at least play around with some of it, I don't think I'm ever going to actually get the game to work 100% without getting a computer that was made in 1998. So in the end it was nice, if a little disappointing. I guess that's the nature of trying to get these old games to work. Sometimes you can get them back up to playable, but rarely can you make them work perfectly without the actual hardware of the time (I've seen the same with other peoples efforts on similarly old games). Also, it's not just the VM. Windows XP boots really fast. Now I really understand my confusion when I got my Vista laptop, and wondered if it was broken the first time it booted after installing. I guess at the time XP did seem slow, but nothing like Vista or 7, and after getting used to them, XP is like booting off an SSD. There was also the novel idea I came across that since Droid Works uses the same game engine as Dark Forces 2 and Mysteries of the Sith (and these games are much easier to get running on modern hardware for whatever reason), that it might be possible to use one of those games to run it instead. They hadn't been able to make it work, but I thought it was a neat idea.

Thought I'd wander by and mention that I made a total goof in my last post. It was pointed out to me that Europe imports a considerable amount of natural gas from Russia, more than I thought they did. That would make sanctions somewhat tricky. I also neglected to mention, or remember long enough to consider, that the American nuclear sector is somewhat reliant on nuclear disarmament, since uranium from disarmed Russian nuclear weapons makes up a substantial portion of the nuclear material used to fuel American nuclear power plants. If memory serves, this is a deal that needs to be renewed in the next couple years, which would make cutting diplomatic ties somewhat problematic on this side of the Atlantic as well.

I remember when I was in Junior High, there was no shortage of people who had never even left the country, and I've definitely traveled more than most people I know, and further as well. Not regularly though, I probably only fly every two or three years.

I like the new Diablo 3 very much, though I am having a hell of a time equipping my Templar while playing my mage. Can't find quality strength gear to save my life. On the other hand, I've started accumulating useful legendary items, items that will be painful to replace. Of course, the day will come when I find something even better. Could really use some legendary chest armour though. Right now it's a belt and arm guard, and I think my templar is currently on his second legendary sword (it was a choice between bringing him up to my damage, or using a sword myself and doing 70% more damage. It was tough, but I am strong enough and he needed to be stronger). He never dies though, or even really takes damage. Uber tank.

Trying to find the time to get another Civ game in. I'm also trying to figure out what kind of map I once. Naval Warfare has never been a strong suit for me in any game that wasn't Red Alert 2. I can handle space and land combat, but not water combat. But I like the isolation, and there should be continents. I also need to stop screwing up my sieges so badly. I lost a lot of time by failing to take cities and needing to rebuild my armies. I did get the expansions for Fallout New Vegas, though I'm not sure what pace I am going to get through that game. Got back into it watching Gopher's fantastic let's play, but that leads to the conundrum that if I play while watching, or having recently watched him, it detracts from the game for me. I've not played it in a long enough time that a lot of the story and dialogue is fresh for me, plus all the stuff I never did. Right now I've switched to watching him play Skyrim because I'm not playing through the game from the start again any time soon. If nothing else, I want to start properly role playing my way through these games, which conflicts with me wanting to do whatever. The end result is that the characters who are flexible enough for me to role play properly are going to be just terrible. Not evil, but certainly questionable. Like with my new FalloutNV character. She will fiercely protect her friends, and is not given to betrayal. But she doesn't think much of killing people who make her angry, and she is curious enough to poke around places she wouldn't against her friends, and maybe run off with a couple knick knacks. Right now I am in the REPCON launch site, though thinking about coming back with a better gun (higher alpha damage). Frankly, the Ghouls the have been condescending and racist, and think nothing of using humans for their own means. I predict bad things in their future as retribution, and bad things in the future of anyone else who tries to use my character as a tool.

Hmm, I thought China has decided not to support the Russians in this. Maybe they changed their mind, maybe I read that wrong. I thought about it being like a prelude to WWIII at one point, but a couple big differences. The biggest is that it seems no one is actually obligated to protect Ukraine. WWII was partly opportunistic, but as I understand it the whole thing started snowballing because of the mess of treaties that existed at the time, which dragged a whole bunch of countries into the conflict. The other difference is the whole global trading thing that's come about since WWII (like the internet and the global stock market). I think Russia is already hurting quite badly on the global market. There is a lot more leverage, particularly against the largest nations which have specialized their economies, to pressure them economically. It's not a fast process, but the realization that a country can't survive without trade relations should be able to keep everyone more or less in line in the long run.

That'll be an adventure, hope you enjoy both the trip and the flight. Pack a snack (but nothing with liquids or gels :P)

For future reference, if electronics get wet you (a)remove any source or power and (b) immerse it in (dry) rice for a couple days. Rice is a desiccant, so unless you have a lot of those packages you find in pill bottles that say 'do not eat' lying around, it's usually the best bet for drying things out asap (you can even get fresh rice at 24 hours to keep it sucking as much moisture as possible). Of course, it really only works for water. Spill something that gets sticky and you're on your own. Been watching the Ukraine thing. Not gonna lie, that makes me a bit nervous. Admitting that I probably don't know enough about Ukraines situation to fill a 5 minute power point and what I do know is almost certainly a combination of propaganda and misinformation via incompetence (When your parents work for the Government, it paints a very interesting picture of the difference between what is happening on at least one side, and what the media understands), I do have a thought. Lets say Canada was headed for a Civil War, and France got really worried about the french population in Quebec. I'd be pissed if they decided to occupy one our provinces, and started interfering with our military. It's the same reason I object to Canada calling a lot of what we do peacekeeping. It's only peace keeping if both parties invite you to play mediator. Otherwise, it's an invasion/occupation, which to me, is an act of war because you are interfering with a nation's sovereignty. I'm also wondering if 'to protect our interests' is an accurate translation of what Russia said, because I'm having a very difficult time believing they would come right out and say that. That would be tantamount to the US declaring they were invading Venezuela to protect the oil, at least as it translates in North American english (maybe it means something different in European). As an interesting note though, since this kind of hinges on who you consider their legitimate leader and who actually said what, I could totally see countries like Canada and the US in a situation where a leader they like has been thrown out and requested our help, and using that as an excuse for a 'peacekeeping mission'. That's kind of a sobering realization for me actually. I mean I've always taken it for granted that the US, Canada, Britain, etc absolutely do engage in propaganda, and not just in war time. Just never really had that look in the mirror moment before. Oh, and I'm thinking that I might be getting diagnosed with Diabetes pretty soon. I've pretty much checked off all the symptoms for both type 1 and ketoacidosis, except for the vomiting (and death, obviously) over the last two days. Got to the closest I can remember being to phoning myself an ambulance, but I guess figuring out what was going on and then making it my mission to drink all the water was enough for my body to keep things alright for the time being, but something very clearly went wrong in my body, and since the symptoms for diabetes seem to be pretty unique, it seems like a good place to start. Might answer some other questions too, assuming that's the problem and depending on how long it's been a problem.

My friends star wars RPG is getting interesting. I'm getting a kick out of it as someone who is typically lawful neutral (or otherwise on the lawful end of the spectrum) in D&D. Our band of heroes would collectively be chaotic neutral and chaotic evil. Today we decided on the way back to our ship from a business meeting to take a detour for a hospital robbery, which involved nearly killing a few random people to make a distraction. We made this detour because we'll be damned if we go meet with someone else without having something to trade, and we thought the Mandalorians might like medical supplies (also, we need some too). Also proposed was getting some air to ground weapons for our ship so we could go hog out and just extort some towns. This all fits with how we started out, which was turning a jail break into a spice heist as well (while we're breaking out, let's steal from the prison drug stash). We might be working for the good guys, but we are not good people. And it wasn't planned that way, it just kind of turned out that everyones character is a terrible person who should definitely be in jail. It does certainly make things interesting.

For me, the second game is sort of worse. The story arc is not one I am fond of, though I guess a lot of people like it because it's everywhere. Like Liberal Media Bias :P Perhaps more importantly, there are a lot fewer choices in the weapons department, and after the choice overload of the first game, I pretty much freaked out. That said, I very much enjoy the second games ending. The third game is, to me, the highlight. It has the better game play from the second game, more weapons choices, and a good story (there is some debate on the ending). Perhaps the best story. At least to me. I got banished and played it a little. Apparently the Market keeps people from hoarding supplies so much, so I guess I need one. I had a period where I took a few people off food production to try and keep the entire rest of my economy from grinding to a halt, and I forgot to put them back on food until my reserves were pretty much depleted. In the meantime, I think my population must have grown a bit, because going back to full production didn't solve the issue (and I had taken them off because I was producing more food than I used to begin with). As soon as people started starving, I released the food from the trading depot, and it did nothing. People who already had food immediately stole it and the people without food continues to have none. The same thing happened when I bought food off a trader, and again when another trader brought me food. It took two years and two deaths to get another fishing dock up (serious stone shortage), and now I am ammasing food reserves in the trading post that are much larger (also hoping to use them to buy more animals). The resources are tricky though. The change from swimming in resources to having nothing kind of blindsided me. I've already harvested pretty much everything near me that I want to harvest right now, and then some. Particularly grim on the stone and iron front. I have a quarry and it is very slow. I think education is going to become a necessity for stone cutting and mining (I assume mining will also be super slow). Some debate over how I want to grow my town. I'm a bit worried that the houses are going to get too far away from everything and nothing will ever get done in the winter. Some sheep for wool would be fantastic so I could make better clothes. I have an order in for some, and it was placed like 3 years ago so hopefully that's coming. Anyway, it's a neat game, though I can see the end game getting boring. Same problem as prison architect. Once you get the machine up and running, you don't tend to have any issues and the challenge goes out of the game. Hoping that something is done to address that in the future, but in the meantime I would like to make a much much larger town, and then try hard mode again. I'm also going to sit here and regret where I put my firt quarry, since I think I might want to move some of my town that way. Or I'll stick with the plan and make that island all mines and quarries and expand around the lakes to the north. A very neat game indeed.

Same here, I think you handled it well. You've been upfront about how you feel about it and how you plan to deal with it in the future. I don't think your being unreasonable about how your view or how you plan to deal with her smoking in the future (going someplace else). And yeah, weed isn't exactly a subtle drug to begin with (that horrible smell).

You people are crazy... The weather here is crazy too. Think we are getting another storm tomorrow. It's been a whole 4 days without a storm (something like that), so it's good. Wouldn't want to go a whole weak without a blizzard. Imagine the horror of going a whole week without a blizzard. Oh well, at least it's not Ontario. They get blizzards and it gets cold too. -20 is enough for me (not gotten there yet, but give it time).

I don't generally think of the two tierd subscription model (free and not) when people say freemium. I think of games like Starport Galactic Empires and World of Tanks. Beyond any issues of fairness (the former game is the epitome of pay to win, which is why I haven't thought about it in a long time), I find the premium shop games (which is what I usually think of when people say freemium) I find they are extremely expensive. I don't begrudge people trying to turn a profit, but when a game wants $15 per month subscription plus extras, my first urge is to gag. So if all that was meant was a two tier subscription, I take it back. I thought it meant they were opening up a premium shop.

To me, subscription rather than freemium is a massive bonus. I doubt I will ever get over how much I don't like freemium (I do play a couple freemium games, but if there were pure subscription alternatives, I'd almost certainly go for those instead). That said, pricy game. Only went through one beta session, one of the later ones. I have to figure that if I played WoW, I'd probably find the games similar (I've seen WoW, just never played it myself). Perhaps the biggest issue for me, and this crops up in most games except for WoW (unless there is something in the story I missed, which is likely), is that I don't feel like there should be other people just like you. One of the reasons I don't rarely play a RuneScape quest on release day is because seeing other people doing the quest is immersion shattering. If I'm some special hero, why can I throw a rock in virtually any corner of the map and find 10 more just like me. The story for the ElderScrolls online also dictate that one the one hand I am a unique person with a unique destiny, and on the other hand, the world is just lousy with other people on the exact same mission. My understanding with WoW was always that it was rather short on the story quests, and set up so that the other players were the actual other inhabitants of the world rather than asking the player to run around a world that is being overlapped by a million parallel worlds. And if not, someone needs to make an MMORPG like that, where the existence of other players is never something you should feel has to be ignored. All in all, it was a neat game, and I certainly enjoyed it. But right now, there is no room in my life for another of this type of game, especially not at that price.

Heh, might not have thought about the layout of that enough. I guess, it just seems wrong to give out a silver to the losing team. I do like the 2 silver method. Another way you could do it if you didn't mind having more games (and it prevents the gold medal match from being the last one) is to the have the loser from the gold medal round play the winner from what would be the bronze medal match, winner takes silver. Then the loser from that match, and from what would be the normal bronze medal match play for bronze. SemiA winner and SemiB winner play for gold in FinalA. SemiA loser and SemiB loser play each other in SemiC. (this kind of throws off the naming conventions, just go with it) FinalA loser and SemiC winner play for Silver in FinalB. FinalB loser and SemiC loser play for bronze in FinalC. It's a bit laborious, and you could have teams facing each other again, but it means that every medal can only be earned with a win. As a spectator sport, I think that not having the gold medal match go last might be a bit of an issue though.

I feel like in Hockey the silver and bronze medals should actually be swapped. Theres something not right about giving a silver medal to a team for losing, so make the bronze medal the consolation prize. Team sports are really weird for being setup that way. I'm sad that the Olympics are over. Also, a props to our Canada 3 bobsled for going through with their third run (also happy they were alright. Was watching when that happened). Also a props to someone I can't remember in one of the cross country events (not typically my sport, so not really good with remembering which sport is which , or who anyone is). In his final heat of 6, one of the guys had obviously had it right from the start but kept going. The Nordic Ski Gods rewarded the effort when 3rd place fell, taking 4th and 5th with him and holding them back just far enough for the guy in 6th to cross the finish line 3rd (where he collapsed and people ran over to make sure he wasn't having a heart attack). It looked like he was in his own personal hell the entire time, but he finished his way into a medal anyway. EDIT: Mens Sprint Final - Emil Joensson of Sweden

Had a look. It's happened 11 times (that I counted) where neither Canada nor the United States took gold in mens hockey, most recently in 2006. I guess I repressed that memory since I have no recollection of Canada placing 7th with USA in 8th. Only 6 times with neither country getting a medal. Anyway, a bit sad I didn't really see anything from today since we seem to have done pretty well for ourselves, with yet more medals in freestyle skiing (ski cross today).

Had a look at that Banished game. Very intriguing, though I've not gone for it yet. It actually reminds me of Black&White which had a similar, if much simpler, system for managing your population.

That was a weird ending. That should have been a penalty shot, not a minor, though I can sort of understanding not wanting to make that call in OT on an Olympic gold medal match. Or maybe I missed something (been a while, though I did go and look up the rules, though I think the Olympic rules are a bit different). Anyway, that was a nail biter game, I really thought USA was going to take it for a while, and then you get a heart stopper of a first minute in OT. Got gold in Curling too, though I think Norway went off and got another gold today as well :D Good times.

Been waiting for these hockey games to come along. The Curling finals are also getting underway for which I am possibly more excited (I don't play hockey anymore, but I still curl). The 4 finals between both sports should be a good show, at least for someone who enjoys both. Still, it would be massively to our benefit in the medal standings if Canada can walk out of this with 4 gold medals. It would be oh so lovely to get the most golds again, and 4 golds would go a long way to making that happen (I've been a tad sour ever since the Americans overtook us in the medal standings. Winter is our thing!). Honestly, I'm not sure if I will hold my breath for mens hockey or not though, really not sure how that's going to go. Also, apparently north America has all of 4 bobsled tracks. Two on each side of the border.

Someone poked me to remind me about this. Updated this page (from Sanctuary AU and down). Windsong297, I have not added your clan because I really do need you to follow the template. If someone could get something of a banner together that would be fantastic (or your clan would look really out of place). If your membership isn't listed on runehead and you don't have independant forums, then provide me with the links to the pages provided by RuneScape (I know the forums wont be publicly accessible. Provide the forum link anyway or I can just link it to the clan page on runescape like the membership list). And it would probably be best if anyone posting on this sent me a PM as well to make sure I see it.