Father Xmas

The bonus going from VIP to Premium is based on how long you have subscribed which translates into Paragon Reward tokens. VIPs get one per month plus one per year. Since the number of tokens affects which Tiers you have unlocked, players who have been subscribed longer before dropping to Premium get access to more features.

Other than that they are the same.

It use to be that you got 0 Inf if you were in SG mode once you hit Level 35. They changed that to now cut off at 50%.

Rip

How many people thought of the rule #1 from Zombieland, cardio, when it comes to Otis huffing and puffing?

The girl could have treed herself or go all Newt and simply hide really well.

Yes it was the fever talking with T-Bone but I was expecting him to use the "brother is the first to die" movie trope than the redneck line.

Deus ex Daryl strikes again. And he gets the one liner as well.

I agree with the talk show folks, Andrea is a zombie magnet.

I think the positive talk about the series comes more from mundanes than horror/zombie aficionados and comic fans.

Is Robert Carlyle only trying out for "the heavy" or "the unlikeable" roles like Alan Rickman and Rutger Hauer seem to?

Still he makes an awesome manic Rumpelstiltskin.

I just realized that I meant to say rapidly but rabidly works just as well.

Three of those four live action adaptations were western adaptations for western audiences. I've enjoyed a number of Japanese live action adaptations over the years. While the live action Sailor Moon and Cutey Honey suffer a lot from trying to stage fights between characters you sub out for masked stunt fighters, the series kept the heart of the original.

Series like the live action GTO, Hana Yori Dango and Gokusen series were very well done but because they don't have magical girls and are simple comedies or romantic comedies it wasn't difficult to bring to TV.

Movies like the live action Death Note and Gantz with movie budgets and lengths (versus X 1/2 episodes on a TV series budget), could get closer to the actual story including the non human characters and special effects.

Instead it looks as if Neo Manhattan is about to explode with the western adaptation of Akira. I really don't expect to succeed any better than DragonBall, Fist of the Northstar or the first Guyver film.

It'll be an edgier Human Target, with a bigger body count.

No, that was the 70s movies.

As for d'Artagnan, depends how you count them, 3 to 7 novels.

Sorry for the delay, something came up and I couldn't really spend the proper amount of time to think about a $1000 configuration.

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I'm not a big fan of liquid cooling. Not really big about plumbing and liquids mixing with electronics. Yes you can get non-conductive cooling fluid and you can go really crazy and go with a total immersion liquid cooling but the last thing I need to worry about is coming home and finding out my computer piddled all over the office carpet.

But that's my bias. Self contained CPU liquid cooling systems seem to be all the rage at the moment with places like CyberPowerPC and iBUYPOWER having them as the default coolers in their configurators. Also there is talk that Intel's Socket 2011 CPUs that are replacing the Socket 1366 i7s may also include a liquid cooler with the higher end models. AMD's new Bulldozer core FX-8150 is being sold in Japan with a liquid cooler instead of the air cooler bundled here. It's also a more expensive bundle with the liquid cooler.

It's probably a me thing, being a bit old fashion and set in my ways mixed with a bit of old trauma from the time I had a burst water pipe in the basement that I shy away from liquid cooling.

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Not sure how many heard about this but due to heavy flooding in Thailand, hard drive prices are spiking, up to 50% in some cases as factories are affected. The drive I had originally specified in the $725 rig has gone from $40 to 60 in the last month. Western Digital drives are the most affected right now but all hard drive prices are going up.

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One point I would like to point out about my $1350 system, several choices for parts were made with the assumption that a 2nd video card will be added to the system as well as the CPU having the snot overclocked out of it. That's the reason there is an 850 watt power supply in that box and that PSU is a tad pricey. However if you only ever plan to use a single video card you can save a quite a bit of money between a smaller PSU and a motherboard with only one true PCIe x16 slot.

Now due to the hard drive price spike, the $725 setup is actually $725.91 (ignoring "savings" and rebates) so we have around $274 to spend.

So first swap in the i5-2500K for the G840 (+$135) and 8GB of DDR3-1600, Cas 8 memory for the 4GB of DDR3-1333, Cas 8 memory (+$38).

Now what's the point of having a K model CPU if you aren't going to at least try to overclock it so a 3rd party head sink is in order. Again borrowing from the $1350 setup we'll use the XIGAMATEK Gaia for $30. Or you can try the new Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO for $35 which I'm thinking about changing over to. Now both already come with their own thermal compound so you don't really need to by a tube of Arctic Silver 5 for $13. AS-5 will lower temps only by a couple more degrees and I'll rather save that and spend it elsewhere.

As for the video card I suggest upgrading to a GTX 560. Yes you can think of it as an extremely overclocked GTX 460 but it is using an improved version of that GPU that is more power efficient. This one is $40 more than the GTX 460 in the $725 setup. The GTX 560 is actually rated 10 watts lower than the original 1GB GTX 460.

Now after all that we have $26-31 left.

Now you could take $20 of that and upgrade the 500GB drive to a 1TB Samsung F3 which at the time of writing this is only $80. The fact that it's only a 3Gb/s SATA II Vs a 6Gb/s SATA III hurts it very little as conventional hard drivers are only close to 1.5Gb/s in transfer rates.

Lastly if you are concerned about case temperatures, I would add a 120mm case fan to either one of the two top fan mounts or the second front mount of the case. Depends if you prefer positive (more fan intakes than exhaust) or negative (more fan exhaust than intakes) air flow.

So to summarize:

Start with the $725 rig, currently ~$726

G840 to i5-2500K - $135
4GB to faster 8GB - $38
CPU Cooler - $30-35
GTX 460 to GTX 560 - $40
500GB to 1TB hard drive - $20* prices are spiking on hard drives
120mm Case Fan - $9

Total cost - $998-1003

Alternative ideas can be found at Tech Report and bit-tech.net.

I swore I posted here last night about Nabiki once I saw her in the Crunchyroll photo spread.

I think from Robin's perspective, she's a target of opportunity. Nearly everyone else has essentially paired up on the team, even if Kid Flash and Artemis don't know it yet. I imagine Robin is feeling a bit third wheel. It's not like he can have a normal relationship with someone at school. IIRC even team doesn't know is real identity.

Also I imagine she's probably in a similar situation, being a daughter of a super hero. It also doesn't hurt that she can hold her own in a fight and has a bit of a rebellious streak against authority, like the rest of the team.

(Yes I know Kaldur isn't paired up with anyone but he's the mature brooding leader whose girlfriend back home has moved on.)

The item market didn't exist prior to F2P. What they haven't been able to do yet is to tag items from those previous booster packs as items that have been purchased from the market.

So they have to first create a mechanism that can tell the item market all about each booster set and pack and then run it on every player account who ever bought any of those items before Issue 21 went live. It's not trivial and it's not something you get a second chance to do right without a massive restore from backup if it screws up.

Okay. Time to make up questions.

When does my character's voice change?

There are 65 threads over on the Beta test board that deal with all the fixes and changes they have done and want tested and feedback from for Issue 21.5. Issue 21.5 is a lot more than a couple of iTrials and Titan Weapons.

Every bug reported first needs to be duplicated in house so at the very least they can use the same steps that currently causes the bug to appear, to test that the bug is fixed. Once it's duplicated only then can it be prioritized, scheduled and then assigned to someone. The more information you can supply when you /bug something such as steps to duplicate, the quicker it moves along the process.

Games are art asset heavy. I'm not saying they don't have enough programmers at Paragon Studios but not everyone who's working on CoH are programmers. Artists and level designers aren't the people who fix problems in the animation sequencer or the market UI and those working on the game client aren't the same as those working on the server side software.

The number of characters I have with hasten I can count on two fingers. I would hate to see the hasten take over from stamina as the "every character must have it or you're gimped" power now that everyone gets stamina whether they want it or not.

I was running a friend's Sky Raider/Crey mission on a tech labs map with my Ill/Kin. I had my Phantasm out and it blasted some poor Sky Raider into a wall about six feet off the ground. Looked like the results of a horrible teleport accident. He twitched there until he faded away.

Haven't lost any recently from the standpoint of alive but untargetable. I've found caves are more problematic then warehouses/labs.

You are planning to up it to 8GB or it already has 8GB and you are planning to add more? Why would anyone need more than 8GB for a home PC?

Model number? Where did you buy it? Just trying to get an idea of what you got for as a PC and a monitor.

Now I haven't bothered to upgrade the graphics drivers in my folks computer because they seem to work OK. ATI driver upgrading was still a a craps shoot when they got it so since it seems to work okay, I wasn't going to risk it. Bad enough that I'm the family Nerd Herder, I don't need to add to my workload if the driver upgrade goes wonky.

Now they have a very old 15" Dell monitor hooked up to it that can do 1152x864 at 70 or 72Hz which is one reason playing in a window (avoids any problems swapping tasks if I can simply click on the actual desktop) at 1024x768 isn't that much of a sacrifice from a screen real estate point of view. Of course if your monitor has a high native resolution, a 1024x768 window could be very small.

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For graphics settings in the game I first turned off advance settings, which gives me the graphics settings slider. I set it at the middle setting which I believe is one tick below minimum Ultra Mode. I then turn advance settings back on so I can turn off Depth of Field which I personally hate. The upside is it does improve performance a bit. I make sure that the texture settings are on max and that I have texture filtering set to 4x Anisotropic. I found that any Anti-aliasing (AA in my previous post) simply destroys frame rate.

In old Paragon I saw frame rates in the high 20s outside, thirties inside indoor missions. Areas like Praetoria, new Atlas, Faultline, Rogue Isles are a little to a lot lower outside in the zone. I haven't looked at tweaking the settings any further in those areas but in the past I know dropping the world detail some can help.

If you didn't see my posts in your other threads, AO stands for Ambient Occlusion which is a fancy way to say soft shadowing. The three features they added with Ultra Mode are reflection (primarily off of water but also on some costume parts and windows), hard shadows cast by the sun on everything and Ambient Occlusion for soft shadows. Of course with the Halloween event up and running, shadows aren't something you need to worry about.

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The graphics upgrade path I had planned for my parents, which is unlikely since it took three months of pestering for them just to replace their 12 year old Dell Pentium II 450MHz running Windows 98se so the HD 4200 itself is a significant upgrade, is to replace the power supply with something like the Antec Earthwatts EA-430, 430 watt and add in a video card like the HD 6770 or a GTX 550Ti.

Missed nearly all of Gen Rex except the very last minute, finally it looks like a serious episode, wish they do more of them.

Young Justice - This show should win something, I haven't seen a bad episode yet. Looks like they found someone that interests Robin.

Batman - Finally back to the ultra short pre-opening story. I agree that the Aquaman musical sequence was a laugh riot. Still trying to mind wipe the image of him as Black Canary.

Ben 10 - Brings back another old foe/creepy love interest. I wish they would make up their mind between a more mature Ben like in the past few episodes instead of the stuck up self important Ben. Especially when it involves his relationship with Julie. At least Kevin's seem to have a reasonable handle on his relationship with Gwen.

Star Wars - Repeat of the 1st episode this season. I'm starting to lump three-p-o in with Jar Jar as least favorite characters to build an episode or two around.