Father Xmas

Right now, for gaming, the Intel 2nd Generation Core family of CPUs (aka Sandy Bridge) pummel AMD CPUs about the head and shoulders like Batman with thugs. Doubly in the case of AMD's new FX-4xxx, FX-6xxx, FX-8xxx series CPUs (aka Bulldozer).

Right now hard drives are expensive due to a stoppage of production in Thailand because of record breaking flooding. This causes the OEM hard drive market to have excessive shortages and when supply dries up, prices shoot up. It looks to be recovering a bit but it will be a while until hard drive prices come down to August's prices.

Memory is cheap right now, less than $10 a GB for high speed, faster timing DDR3 memory.

Video cards. AMD just paper launched their HD 7970 but it and it's lower priced brothers won't be available for a few months. nVidia is on the verge of releasing their next generation GPU. When new video cards are released, their "older" siblings are usually reduced in price. Right now, for me, the GTX 560, GTX 560Ti and GTX 570 are the three video cards I would look at, depending on your budget.

Power supply. This is one of the most overlooked part in a home build. Don't go cheap here. You should budget around $15-20 per 100 watts. Look for PSUs with an 80Plus rating with the 12 volt part of the supply being able to crank out at least 80% of the PSUs maximum wattage (for example a 600 watt PSU should be able to put out 480 watts or 40 amps [480/12] at 12 volts).

Sorry, you simply look "young" in your photos (young meaning somewhere between post puberty and 30), no disrespect intended it's just I'm lousy judging a young woman's age from a photo.

Still "ski bunny" is the first thing that pops into my head when I look at that sweater.

502MB of memory as a starting point, less due to integrated video swiping some. Ancient Intel integrated video for graphics, Pentium M based Celeron M single core CPU. Hard drive info is missing but it's likely a fairly slow hard drive as well.

It gets slow as the game is trying to load 10 pounds of stuff into a 3 pound bag. Memory, well lack of it, is your number one problem in getting the game to run there. And if you ever get through loading, expect maybe 10-15 FPS, a bit higher in indoor missions, and while traveling through a zone, expect a lot of stuttering especially if you encounter groups of other players.

And systemrequirements.com should catch on fire and burn. It really gives new players a lot of false hopes when it comes to whether their hardware can run the game. I guess it depends on how you define "run".

Groovy

And of course the Japanese are well on their way to build a Tachikoma. It can also do somersaults when it's not scaling fences or picking up your child's toys.

Here in the US, the episode had a special looking at Doctor Who Christmas specials. It had a variety of American and British actors who are Whovians (including the ever delightful Natalie Morales) and it became obvious in retrospect that RTD's Christmas specials (they included The End of Time) are for the most part downers when you look at the bigger picture.

• The Christmas Invasion - that's not snow.
• The Runaway Bride - so this is the Doctor's, what number genocide again?
• Voyage of the Damned - the Doctor meets new girl, she asks to come along, he says yes, she gets Jossed. Merry Christmas.
• The Next Doctor - well a somewhat upbeat ending, invited to dinner and all, but the other Doctor did lose his wife and it had a giant CyberKing robot that's powered by orphans.
• The End of Time - knock x 4 plus an ending almost as long as the one in Return of the King.

Now the two Moffat specials had some pretty upbeat endings. Happy tears.

But I digress. I didn't think this was a bad episode. Lots of jokes (I like the way Moffat turns the Doctor into a Seuss character when he's around children). I like the "borrowing" of Narnia as a framework.

And I would like to commend the show's makeup department. They've been able to ago Amy and Rory for these time skips just enough to make them look and feel like they are older since the last time you saw them.

So yes I enjoyed it and yes it's a lot more sugary sweet than Tenant's holiday specials but I would rather have sweet than bitter in my holiday TV.

And while this story may have been overlooked because of the 2013 guesstimate, I think it's good for at least one new SyFy Saturday movie and a few mentions on Coast to Coast AM.

You know how as a teen you really hated getting clothes your mother bought for you, basing her knowledge of what's "in" by watching TV. Well when you are approaching 50, it still happens. So nothing cool from my Mum.

As for my Dad, who at least understands some of Geekdom (my love of Science Fiction books, TV and movies came from him) but there would be no way he could get a purchase of any type of Geek swag or Tech pass my Mom's intractable insistence of practicality. Why would I need an SSD when what I "really need" is a nice belt and a 6 pack of tube socks.

Friends may get me something mildly geeky to feed my anime, SciFi/Fantasy or City of Heroes addiction but I won't be getting together with them until after the new years.

So where did the book come from? I know Snow White gave it to him but where did she get it from?

Obviously free to play. However you will find it somewhat constricting due to the limited number of characters you can play on free, being locked out of incarnate play, locked out of some ATs and powersets as well as the consignment house and invention system. However some of these are unlocked depending how long you may have been previously subscribed. Read more about Freedom at ParagonWiki.

Content wise there's been a number of pay to play powersets as well as costume sets that have been introduced. Then there's the whole signature arcs "Who will die!" that's free for subscribers but not for non subscribers. Also you can now buy the ability to use capes and auras right from Level 1 at the Paragon Market. 160 PP each I think.

There's a big change with rolling a new character. Like Going Rogue, you can now start a character of any AT, hero or villain and then choose if you are a hero or villain. This is now done in a bombed out Galaxy Park tutorial and with new story arcs for the low level zones.

Also they have revamped the travel powers so the primary movement power is available at Level 4 (Fly, Superspeed, Super Jump and Teleport) and they've added a 5th power to each pool that unlocks at level 14 (first three powers now unlock at Level 4, the remaining two powers now unlock at Level 14).

You did miss a new Halloween event and right now there's the winter event going on that has a few twists added for this year.

I think those are the highlights.

When Batman and Bane yell at each other will the moviegoers be able to understand. Bat's voice in Dark Knight sounded like he was doing the Demosthenes pebbles in the mouth exercise so what's this, equal time for the villain?

It'll be like listening to Mumbles Menino argue with himself.

Very nice job.

Being able to tweak your difficulty changed the game for me. Especially being able to not have bosses while soloing. It made a world of difference to my weaker damage dealing characters, made them fun to play than XP debt magnets.

Global Friends lists. Now I could find out when my friends were playing on another server.

The consignment market. Influence shortages went away once money bags could buy my drops for big bucks, even if I wasn't asking big bucks for them.

I think Manson's version of Sweet Dreams is nice and creepy and complements the original Eurythmics version.

That said I really really hate the tendency to stick a rock/punk/pop track into a movie trailer that's set in ancient times.

I'm waiting for another remake of Ben Hur with parts of Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars" being stuck in the trailer.

Well done Oz, well done.

Speaking of that, how was it done? Is it a modded existing figure with original packaging? Is it a service you have access to down there? I see "Build A Figure" on the packaging so is it a modified Marvel Legend toy? I'm simply curious.

The anime version of X-men was surprisingly good.

Time to start the one year countdown clock until the big end of the world party. Woot!

Expect numerous 2012 disaster specials on History, Discovery, TLC, Science, SciFi and slowly creep into mainstream channels as filler, panicking the population into a self fulfilling prophecy.

1) Movies like high end video games are expensive to make with no guarantee of making your money back. As a way to improve those odds you either make a sequel to a profitable movie or create a similar movie. However a lot of times Hollywood wrongly guesses why a movie was profitable. Example Avatar, Hollywood assumed it made a billion dollars because of 3D, not because it was a novelty and rehash of a successful previous movies like Dancing with Wolves or Last Samurai. This is also why films are toned down to PG-13 often because it's a demonstrable fact that successful PG-13 films return a higher profit than a successful R. Exception to the rule is if you can do a movie cheaply enough, then an R can be very profitable in certain genres (horror, teen sex romps).

2) When over the top special effects were impossible to do or insanely expensive (pre-CGI), it constrained the screen writers, producers, cast to deliver a character centric movie. Now it's too easy for the story to go over the top with CGI FX (Transformers, 2012) and turn all the characters into 2D cardboard props the film goer doesn't connect with at any level.

I've only tweaked a few things due to the hard drive shortage and particular models of GTX 460s being discontinued. Edit: Now they are pretty much gone. Sadly there isn't an nVidia card with similar performance at the old GTX 460 price point.

I did notice at NewEgg that the 1.5GB Caviar Black WD is actually cheaper than the 1GB due to the supply/demand situation. Prices are starting to come back down in general for hard drives but it'll still be a while until it's back to where it was in September.

For any big changes I'm waiting for Ivy Bridge CPUs from Intel. There will also be an updated motherboard chipset to go with them that'll have native USB 3.0 and PCIe 3.0. So a few months.