The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

Discussion in 'Your Bijou Blogette' started by Mercury, Dec 15, 2018.

  1. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    I know right

    I mean I was aware that the guy running it was a bit on the dodgy side - this is a small town, and full of gossips, you Literally Can't do anything without someone knowing - but tax fraud to the tune of half a mill was... unexpected.
     
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  2. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    ksjkdjsfkdjskldjsf

    so last year I had to replace my cheap as shit 5 button mouse because the scroll wheel stopped working with a sadly less cheap but still pretty cheap mouse. It developed the same problem after only nine months (unacceptable!) but fortunately was under warranty, so I just took it back and got a new one of the exact same model to replace it.

    EXCEPT. This new one feels like I'm dragging it through mud and has since the moment I plugged it in. It's bad enough in Windows, but it's hell in games. I've changed the pointer speed, I've changed its dpi polling (which is a feature I didn't really need in a mouse and has just been annoying), no combination of the two actually helps. This is a no-name brand mouse so there's no drivers to update. Googling for advice turns up the usual assortment of completely random bullshit, including the perennial suggestion of 'reinstall windows!' (How about no.)

    Long rant cut short, I'm close to chucking this thing at a wall I'm so frustrated with it, esp. since the new FFXIV expansion is out in a week and I'd like to be able to play without being in pain after half an hour because I'm fighting my hardware the whole time, so I'm going to suck it up and get a different new one, and of a brand that actually comes with its own drivers so I can program the extra buttons to work as modifier keys and save myself some additional hand strain by making my keybinds more convenient. And, hopefully, I can find one without a stupid fucking ~ergonomic~ groove - I got used to the one on the other mouse, somehow, but this one is constantly bothering me to the point of actual pain.
     
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  3. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    HEY

    [​IMG]

    Snufkin glam

    (SE let player characters have pipes!!!)
     
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  4. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    I swear this mouse is getting worse

    Like, I thought it was just me that sometimes I couldn't get clicks to register but I think it's just that stiff and awkward. I made it through some BA runs with this thing when I first got it as a replacement; now, I can't imagine struggling through even a dungeon using it.

    Really tempted to hike over to the 24 hour supermarket and get whatever they have that's cheap, although I suppose I could wait until tomorrow morning to go to an actual electronics store.
     
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  5. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    I keep being surprised at how not-shit Finland's consumer protection laws are. I was able to return the shitty mouse again and have the price of it used as part of the payment for a totally different brand of mouse and it wasn't a big deal.

    Anyway I went with a Logitech mouse this time because I've generally had very good luck with their peripherals, even though I'm pretty sure I got dinged with some Gamer Tax for it and its nifty shifting rainbow light. All I've done so far is plug it in and it's already SO MUCH NICER to use. It was almost alarmingly zippy until I remembered I'd turned the pointer sensitivity way, way up to make the other one even remotely usable; at normal sensitivity it feels great. It's also considerably lighter, and if it wasn't light enough for me it has a removable weight. (I think that's maybe a touch silly, but w/e.) It's a touch bigger than I'd like but that's pretty much every mouse ever that isn't a mini laptop mouse, so eh. It doesn't have anything like that shitty ergonomic groove so it's already tons more comfortable.

    I just hope it actually lasts. At 50€ I hope it outlives its warranty considerably, but that might be overly optimistic of me. :p
     
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  6. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    Yay I got the remapping to cooperate

    Now to despair on how to set up my keybinds :') I shouldn't fuss with them too much beyond which hotbars get which modifiers since the ShB skill prune will mean I'll have to rearrange my hotbars considerably anyway, but even that's a hard set of decisions to make. Like, my current mapping focuses on 1-5, shift+1-5, and then Q, M5, M4, E, R, shift+Q, shift+E, shift+R, and the rest are bound but I click them because while I can reach 6 with some difficulty but anything past that is a no-go.

    Since I've mapped the buttons on the new mouse to ctrl and alt (and I'm considering remapping the dpi button to a plain old M6 so I can use it), that opens up a lot more keybinds for me with a lot less clicking, but figuring out what's going to flow the best is a sticky problem.
     
  7. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    Looking into Sims 4 expansions rapidly reminded me why I eventually turned to piracy with Sims 2. :stare: That's two and half years FFXIV sub time, one expansion, and a mog station outfit all together...!

    I don't generally like to complain about the price of games because they're a luxury item and I know how much work they take but with sims games I'm pretty sure they overcharge, especially with how they increasingly carve up content into separate packs - like charging 20€ for a pack to fully flesh out children, after not including toddlers in the base game (they finally caved and gave them back in a free update, but they did very little at the time).
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2019
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  8. IvyLB

    IvyLB Hardcore Vigilante Gay Chicken Facilitator

    oh definitely. I am okay with the expansion packs that really add to the gameplay, without selling you stuff they took out that was previosuly base game content?. Like the upcoming making magic or supernatural or whatever it'll end up being called, and seasons, and like I guess island living has a bunch of stuff too? The ones that give you shops to run and shit also tend to be worth it, as are pets, but I a definitely a bit more iffy on the purely stuff pack ones costing as much as they do
     
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  9. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    I buy a lot of Sims expansions including the stuff packs because I'm a builder at heart, and I don't think I've ever bought one at full price - they do regularly have sales, which is decent enough, and I can justify it away if it's the price of a fancy coffee or a craft beer from one of the many bougie little shops which proliferate these days. I think.its worth it for the time I spend in b&b mode, but it depends what exactly you want from the game which packs are worth buying.
    (Parenthood yes, pets no for gameplay function in my case. I do love the pets but I have a cat screaming at me irl and having one on screen too makes me Anxious.)
     
  10. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    That's fair. Such things are a rare treat for me, so my sticker shock tolerance is pretty low. (My FFXIV sub, for instance, is the entirety of my entertainment budget; expansions, cosmetics, and other games are either gifts or come out of the gift/editing money I've squirreled away. If there's nothing in that pot, nothing gets bought.)

    What makes me the most HMMMM is how, like Ivy noted, they've gotten a tendency of reselling us stuff that used to come with the base game - and honestly, the base games have never really come with all that much content. TS4 is slightly better on the cosmetics front as far as base game content goes, but worse on the gameplay front - like not including swimming pools until players WTF'd enough, and restricting world customization so much. I understand why they nixed open worlds - TS3 load times were incredibly bad and TS2 load times weren't great if you switched lots a lot - but that nixed a LOT of building gameplay.

    My cynical gut feeling is that the EA decision makers know that modders will make up for a lot, even developing their own tools if the company doesn't release any, so they're fine with spreading gameplay and cosmetic content thinner than is what I consider acceptable. Nothing I can do about it but complain on the Internet, though, and wait for any content that appeals to drop to the sub-15€ range. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
     
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  11. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    I understand and agree it is fair to say that when sims4 launched it was incredibly sparse in terms of content, and they have improved it quite a bit for base game even recently - the recent patch increasing door swatches, or the inclusion of a plain white shelf.

    Not really sure about stuff like the upcoming moschino stuff pack, it really doesn't appeal - even laundry day added some functionality to game play.
     
    • Like x 2
  12. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    I am 100% sure that stuff packs selling real world brand stuff are cynical cashgrabs. idk if TS3 had one, but TS2 had the H&M pack and it was pretty pathetic. At least the clothes it came with were more or less from the current century!

    If nothing else, TS4 is miles ahead of TS3 and especially TS2 on relevant fashion. Whoever designed the men's clothes for TS2 was stuck in the early 90s Midwestern US, I swear...
     
    • Agree x 2
  13. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    TS3 had the Katy Perry pack which was roundly walloped by reviewers at the time, so every iteration of Sims has to have a real-world cash-grabby tie-in I guess?
     
  14. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    LOL oh geez. Of all all the damn things...

    I got curious and took a peek at wikipedia - the original didn't have a cynical cashgrab pack! And I forgot TS2 had two; H&M and IKEA. At least the IKEA one was useful and had minimal in-game branding, even if it was, like all stuff packs, pretty thin.

    TS4 has an egregious amount of stuff packs; I wonder if anyone's done a breakdown of how many items and what sorts of new features players get per pack, per game.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2019
    • Agree x 1
  15. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    I just went into my game save to check how many of the stuff packs I have and... Yeah. Quite a lot of them, and immediately I can tell you that Romantic Garden, Spooky Stuff and Vintage Glamour are definitely bottom of my personal list, because they just don't really add anything of interest to the game, imo.

    PS I made a list of what's available in the ones I have, so I can paste it in if you're interested.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2019
  16. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    I am, although without TS3 and TS2 data to compare it to idk what I'm going to do with it XD I still have all of the TS2 stuff but the last time I tried to run the game it threw a fit at me, despite me not touching it since the last time I'd fired it up (maybe it objects to the new hardware?) so I don't think I'll be getting anything out of that. (I really need to just uninstall it already...)
     
  17. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    They’re playing a TED talk here about body language and the speaker just referred to testosterone the “dominance hormone” and my soul just left my body
     
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  18. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    I’m on the javafx part of my course right now, my assignment is to write a tic tac toe game, and I am suffering

    Looking at examples of similar programs, I feel like this course has either not prepared me anywhere near enough, or the current solution is much simpler than any of these examples, but I’m at a loss as to which it is. I suspect the former because it’s gotten worse and worse about going “here’s the javadoc, figure it out yourself”.
     
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  19. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    How to feel like a colossal idiot: look at a notification in the language you're shaky in and be proud of yourself for being able to read it, note the date you're supposed to do a thing down on the calendar, and then a few weeks later get a notice that the thing you had to renew is ending on that date because your dumb ass read it wrong and you should have done the thing when you got the notice.

    Anyway I may have screwed up our housing aid money so we have to pay twice what we usually do in rent next month, so there's that.
     
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  20. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    this Java course has a system that every time you earn a certain number of points, you earn a ‘coin’ you can use to look at the model solution for an assignment. I finally gave up and used one for this damned tic tac toe program...

    I’m baffled. They’re using a multidimensional array for the logic, which never would have occurred to me; the course barely skimmed them in the last section, just enough for us to learn how to make a magic square.

    I feel really stupid. Idk if I’m just a dumbass for needing more direction ( like a direction to use multidimensional arrays for the logic) or if the course is indeed just tossing us off the deep end at this point.
     
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