Father Xmas

I'm not surprised by either character who changed size.

Angel changed sides from the side with the people who they are suppose to be helping openly mocking you to the side that wipes out those same people without breaking a sweat.

Raven changed the side where her true form is encouraged to be hidden to the side whose leader tells her she'll be accepted openly by her own kind.

And Frost doesn't really change sides.

I second. I can forgive a lot of retconning if the movie is good and this movie is great. I'm almost willing to say it's better than X-men 2.

Great story between Xavier and Eric. I thought the actress who played Mystique was very good and Kevin Bacon played an excellent Bond villain (it felt a lot like a Connery Bond film at times). Funny cameo.

Unlike the 3rd movie, this movie was long enough to have both action and character development. Easily better than Thor.

As for previews, silly penguin movie, silly body swap movie, Rise of the Apes, TF 3 (which got a laugh out of the crowd), robot fighting movie. Sadly none of the other Marvel or DC films that are coming out. Not even a HP 7 Part II.

Saw the preview this morning at X-men. Looked surprisingly good. At some point Andy Serkis has to get an Oscar for the life he puts into these virtual performances. Caesar looks awesome.

More like a flying motorcycle.

Also, a helicopter, even a small one, can autorotate when the engine fails. Riding on a column of thrust, you're sort of toast when the engine goes (reason for the chute).

Both ATI and nVidia had a number shift when they after they hit the 9000s.

For ATI they first went with x and x1 with three digits but then simply started over with the prefix HD in front of a four digit number, HD 2xxx series. They are currently up to the HD 6xxx with the HD 7xxx just around the corner.

nVidia dropped a digit and went with three digits with a G, GT, GTS or GTX in front of it. They started with 2xx, skipped 3xx except for some OEM versions, the 4xx series were good and now they are on the 5xx series.

As others have pointed out, the link to Tom's Hardware Graphics Card Hierarchy chart is a good way to find the general ranking across the generations and across brands.

The ducted fan "jetpack" that was shown off at Oshkosh back in 2008 is back.

9 1/2 minute video.

For me I use it in two ways.

At low pre travel power levels I use it to avoid finding stairs and getting to roofs of buildings.

At higher levels I use it to boost fly, if it's not already capped and make ridiculously long (due to maxing out the height) super jump (but the landing will hurt).

If you are a super speeder, it's really useful through terrain that isn't normally easy for a SS, such as Terra Volta.

It can always be used to break your fall by triggering it before impact by applying a short burst (jump) from it.

Don't forget The Middleman episode, "The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome" where our squeaky clean hero goes from this



to this

Now I loved the original Swedish one, still need to see it's two sequels. At least they had the decency to film it all three movies at the same time so they could punch them out every nine months.

Still uneasy about this US remake.

It's probably easier and at the very least safer to code a new NPC to handle per character settings than modify a system like the store NPCs that has been bug free for years. Players who aren't interested in altering these movement oriented buffs never need to see the option while those who are interested can seek them out.

In one way it streamlines the experience of a player who isn't interested in some of the new content that's been added to the game over the years.

Well AR is your basic multipurpose boomstick. Take all of the standard FPS weapons and instead have a power for each one. Shotgun (Slug, Buckshot, Beanbag), machine gun (Burst, Full Auto), grenade launcher, flamethrower (Flamethrower, Iignite) and sniper rifle. Animations are rather basic. At least now you can customize away the Frankengun for something that isn't a supersoaker on crack.

Dual Pistols is another kettle of fish. Besides flashy gunkata / Equilibrium / John Woo style animations, you have the ability to change the secondary effects based on the ammo you are using which are represented as toggles (Tier 4 power).

I so enjoyed being chased down elevators by a hoard of gears from the Box of Parts way back during the good old days. It was one of those WTF moments when the elevator goes ding and gears started to pour out while resting. This of course was just after the devs added the chase through elevator code.

A yes, the French Fantastic Four series, to keep the name recognition up between the two FF movies.

Fan subs of course, Episode 7 aired on the 20th.

Since they found Frost, they've already talked about the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club which she was once part of. Once they established that context, no need to include "of the Hellfire Club" part anymore when talking about the Inner Circle.

Well it turns out they were 5 months early. New date October 21st, so no World Series. But I'm still buying Halloween candy. If it happens, more candy for me.

So finally I got around to modify the high end rig to a Sandy Core (Socket 1155) based system. This system is designed to handle a 2nd video card as well as overclocking the CPU.

For the CPU I went with i5-2500K. It's the logical upgrade from the i5-760 of the previous build. Even when not overclocked, it gives a substantial boost to CPU performance going from 2.8 to 3.3GHz, not counting in the internal gains due to the improved design. The unlocked overclock K version is only $15 more and is needed due to Intel finally coming up with a way to lock down base clock overclocking.

I swapped out the Hyper 212 Plus CPU heatsink for the slightly less expensive but slightly better performing (according to FrostyTech) Xigmatech Gaia. Still including a tube of Arctic Silver 5 and damn those commodity prices on silver.

For the motherboard, I'm still kinda up in the air about it. Right now I'm including the ASRock P67 Extreme 4. I'm also considering the MSI P67A-GD65 and the Asus P8P67 Pro and may swap to one of them at a later date. Yes, they all have the B3 rev of the P67 chipset. What I really like about the AsRock is the 3.5" adapter that can bring a pair of USB 3.0 ports to the front of the case.

Memory is kept the same, 8GB of CAS 8, 1.5 volt, DDR3-1600 memory.

The drives are essentially the same as before. The DVD burner is now the same Asus that's in the $725 build, I decided to drop my requirement of it being a drive that can do LightScribe. You need special media and then it takes time for the drive to etch the label on; it seemed like a silly requirement. The hard drive is now the SATA III - 6.0Gb/s version of the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drive. It wasn't for the SATA III ability but because they tweaked the head mechanism for a slight improvement in seek times over the older SATA II version.

The video card was upgraded significantly to the 1GB HD 6950. It is around 15% faster in games, not sure about this one, over the previous 1GB HD 6870. The down side is it draws a bit more power so ...

I upgraded the power supply to a 850 watt, 80plus Silver, Corsair HX850. Now this PSU is sized assuming two HD 6950s and an OC HD 2500K. You can easily get away with a 650 watt PSU, with room to spare, if you only plan on using a single video card. The HX850 has modular cabling, 70 amps available at 12 volts but it's only drawback is it's a tad long. Not really a problem with the Cooler Master CM690 II Advanced which I'm also keeping from the previous build.

All together, the unit price of this is as of this post, $1278.88 which is under my target price, with 5% hardware buffer, of $1287.50.

You're late.