arch_8ngel

Blaster Master. (has some gun-design cross-over with Fester's Quest and is a much better game overall) Great game. Fun exploration. But has a couple of REALLY frustrating bosses and is long enough to have justified some kind of password system that it never had.

Probably nobody of note that doesn't already benefit from other defense spending. They are just taking on part of what the Air Force was already doing, so right now it is just some extra letterhead and redundant command structure.

To be fair to Cavuto, he was never into the Trump falating game, so unfortunately I doubt the dimwits that follow Trump on this would listen to cavuto. But this whole thing feels one or two steps away from Trump getting all of his followers to literally drink the KoolAid and ascend to their spaceship hiding behind the nearest comet.

Back when Neo Geo was new, you were effectively getting an arcade machine for way less money and way less space commitment. Way too expensive for kids, though, of course.

BuT hE iS sUcH a GoOd BuSiNeSsMaN!!! AnD hE tElLs It LiKe It Is!!!

The price of a gallon of delivered-to-the-station refined gasoline has a much higher floor than someone needing to take delivery of and storing 1000 barrels of west texas crude oil.

Did you miss the day that oil futures hit negative $38/barrel, to where people were willing to pay almost $40k per contract to NOT take delivery?

I would be keeping the raw rips anyway, so handbrake only gets used if the original disc had a weird format. I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the only movie I have had to handbrake so far to get it to play on a Roku. Most stuff are common enough codecs that it isn't needed. Once I need to upgrade my setup, I may switch to having a separate disc of handbrake recodes for tablets, so that things are ready to copy to devices for car trips. But on the home network, the bandwidth is high enough that transcodes just aren't needed.

It works with subtitles just fine assuming you rip the movies correctly. I just use MakeMKV and keep everything in that container format.

I'm enjoying it. Yes, you can DIY the hardware and software with something like FreeNAS, but the Synology software is quite good and very user-friendly. I picked up a DS218+ on sale, as an entry-level device, just to see how much I'd like it. If I'd known it would work this well, I probably would have sprung for the DS918+ to have the 2 extra bays for later. The important thing is getting one with the Intel chipsets, though since I don't have mine connected to the internet for off-site use, there is no real need to use any of the transcoding capabilities. If you already use Plex, these things supposedly make great plex servers. I've just been using their built-in video-station software (pipes to "DS Video" as a front-end on Roku, PC, and Android and calls into VLC if the built-in codecs can't handle a file on their own), and I have been happier with that than I ever was with Kodi on my media center.

I didn't realize that 75" sets existed, since I usually see adds for either 70" or 80" sets.

Even if he isn't going for a high-end TV, $1000 is entry level for HUGE-sized TVs.

Definitely regretting not taking advantage of the initial fire-sale on TV equipment from Best Buy when shutdowns rolled out. But I suspect this year's going to be an over-the-top cyber-Monday/black-Friday discount year as retailers just try to clear inventory and generate revenue at all costs.

The "extra" spending this thing brought on was me finally pulling the trigger on a synology NAS for better sharing of the movie collection throughout the household devices. (previously had only been ripping my movies to a hard drive attached to the media center PC) That has, inevitably, led to me buying a few discounted movies per week to bulk up the collection... And while yes, we also have Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, having movies and shows to watch that don't involve an internet connection seems like a worthwhile quality-of-life backup if we have a rough hurricane/storm season and the pandemic slows down infrastructure repair (i.e. if I really have to, I can run the NAS on the generator and the kids can watch stuff on the tablets, or we can still have a family movie night for some sense of normal) But frankly, that was all paid for, and then some, by just one month of having the kids home without daycare expenses...

I saw $1.55 yesterday, but most of the local stations have been steady at $1.65 for the past month.

She definitely seemed over-eager to call him out.

Who hurt you?

Icon of the era.

You would have needed a source for cards you didn't own, but scanners and laser printers were decent enough and prevalent enough that if you really wanted to, you could clone black and white proxies of any card you or your friends already owned. But I think the other poster was talking about the more modern chase of "meta". I honestly don't recall that even being a thing during the earlier editions, though. I didn't know anyone that "just played", though. Everyone was collecting at some level. But I think he made a fair point that some kids were and are spending absolutely stupid amounts of money on CCGs...though I guess nowadays there are good PC versions that give you the full card roster to play from online, right? I guess that probably discourages physical proxy play in an era where it would otherwise be more prevalent.

Looks like it is going to make game development even more expensive, since all of those models/assets require development...

He isn't talking about proxies being "worth" anything -- just that, pragmatically, they should "function" the same for friendly play. No different than playing games on a PowerPak -- if I just want to use it for the game, I don't really care if it is collectible/valuable. But you're right, back in the day, we all bought into the BS that discouraged proxies and encouraged people to shell out for more cards even when playing friendly games, and kids who tried otherwise were teased for it.

I was a bit old for them when they were released. I only remember a couple of kids in high school having them (and being ridiculed for it), but my younger cousins and little brother were in the target age group and he and his friends and bought into it pretty heavily for their age at the time. I'm just saying how it felt back-in-the-day, where I knew MtG seemed to be relegated to playing in card shops and at friends houses for a long time, versus seeing kids with Pokemon cards everywhere from *seemingly* the moment they were released. And you're right, I don't follow pokemon at all -- definitely an outsider perspective, and it may well be that the widely popular run that I saw everywhere wasn't truly the "1st edition".

I think his point was that even garbage condition Alpha and Beta are relatively rare since they were limited initial releases, whereas Pokemon 1st edition was everywhere from day 1.

Yeah, it is going to be a long while before I take kids shopping again.

So I get out for a after-lunch drive everyday to get my youngest to fall asleep for his nap. It is a nice opportunity to keep a pulse of parking lot volumes at stores and crowds at the various beaches and walking areas. VA is starting to open back up this weekend, as I'm sure there is immense pressure to have parks and beaches be "more normal" by Memorial Day in a couple of weeks. But now that we are 7 weeks into some level of shutdown, combined with spring weather, there is a level of attention-fatigue setting in where no matter what rules are supposedly in place, people are going to start going out in greater numbers.