I Object!

by Bryan

6 comments

1 Kryten42 { 05.23.20 at 3:12 am }

Been AWOL for over a week. (not COVID). Had one of our *normal* sh*tty infections. Just finished antibiotics. *shrug* Trying to catch up now. I saw this idiot on Twitter and some other crazy (normal) stuff. I have a lot of messages to reply to at some point. I think I’m glad I missed most of it to be honest!

Anyway, I’m also catching up on movies & games (I bought some new ones to go with my beefed up gfx card, but then got sick & couldn’t enjoy them). Catching up on Coffee & real food too!

Going to watch the Good Omens mini-series on Prime. Looks like a good laugh! Have you seen it? There’s a couple of trailers on YT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZSXlNRRoGU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERM-OjqVpv0

I’ll see what the Worlds lunatics have been up to tomorrow.

2 Bryan { 05.24.20 at 2:15 pm }

I saw Good Omens as soon as it was released and loved it. It is not identical to the book but it is faithful to the spirit.

All you missed was the date change as the world is just as screwed up as always, but at least you are living in a country that still believes in science and was able to deal with COVID-19. I am putting up with allergies which is not a good thing when I need to go out. People are not happy to see an old guy sneezing and coughing even if he is wearing a mask to reduce to pollen.

3 Kryten42 { 05.26.20 at 10:35 am }

I thought I had watched Good Omens, but apparently not. Weird. *shrug*

I have a chronic cough, usually brought on by even very mild hay fever or anything that irritates my upper respiratory system. Smoke from the fires was especially bad. I tried several anti-cough medicines, and a couple worked well. But carrying around a bottle of cough syrup isn’t very practical. Last year I found a new product “Vicks VapoDrops + Cough” & the lozenges work really well. they dissolve slowly in the mouth and work for awhile. Vicks was an Aussie company I remember from my youth when Mom would use the old Vicks vaporub on my chest to help me breathe easier so I could sleep or just to go outside. 🙂

Do you remember the game Command & Conquer from around ’95? It was first on DOS. I still have the box with the old 3.5″ FD’s. Sadly, EA bought out Westwood Studios in ’98 and it was the beginning of the end. Westwood managed to finish RA 2 before EA put the boot in. many good Dev’s were either fired or just left and the C&C games went downhill fast. This was when I first began despising EA.

Fast forward a couple decades… In what was to many an absolute & unbelievable shock… EA decided to remaster C&C & RA. At first, we all thought it would just be the usual and typical EA scam with a coat of paint and undelivered promises. To the amazement of all, Jim Vessella – Creative Director of EA, reached out to C&C fans, content creators (MOD’s, Maps etc) and the original Westwood Dev’s to get involved with, what became a complete remake of, C&C & RA! 😮 The typical comment on YT/Twitter etc was similar to “EA doing something right? Must be a cold day in hell!” They even brought back some of the original cast members to remake the voiceovers, action cutscenes etc., like Kia Huntzinger who was the voice of EVA. 😀 Sadly, some of them have died. Thanks to feedback by the C&C community , many of the original games annoying (or plain broken) *features* have been fixed or redesigned.

So, it’s due to be released on June 6th on Steam (with all original content & expansions) and has been completely remastered to work up to 4K (4096 × 2160, though most PC displays use 3840 × 2160) and can switch in real-time between the original graphics modes and whatever your system uses natively. So… I decided to buy the “Command & Conquer Remastered Collection” yesterday for AU$30 (and I still cannot believe I gave EA even $1!) and it is a very fair price! Only 10 day’s to wait… 😉 😀

YT Official Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iMfypQj3k0

Info:
https://www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-remastered

EA… Listening to, and working with, end users! 😮 😮 The universe just went *TILT*! If it sell’s well, they will also work on other C&C titles. 🙂 We can but hope! 😉

4 Bryan { 05.27.20 at 10:03 pm }

Been busy with tenant stupidity. I don’t see how many of them lived to physical adulthood and have serious doubts their brains will ever catch up 😈

EA is the M$ of gaming. It must the working from home outside of the corporate bubble. Someone saw a way to make money with old inventory using the fan base to do the heavy lifting rather than creating something new. It’s like the movies – remake great old films to make more money. Although they are upgrading significantly from the VGA version available in 1995 on CRTs powered by Pentiums. ATI cards were the choice on the West Coast with SVGA the mode of choice if you could afford the screen and the RAM. I still have a Windows 95 box somewhere.

It looks like it is worth the money, but you can’t know until you play it.

Actually I used Vicks Vapo-Rub under my nose at crime scenes. It killed the orders and was in the case with the gloves, evidence bags, measuring tapes, etc. It really nuked your sense of smell.

5 Kryten42 { 05.29.20 at 12:22 pm }

I can understand you tenant frustration Bryan. People on twitter say similar things about the many MAGAts there. *shrug*

Agree about EA. Also that they have been getting seriously hammered by one disaster after another since 2017 and their revenue has taken a serious hit. Gamers finally had enough. So they really had no choice. We’ll see how long the lesson lasts.

I’ve been buying (at discounted prices, especially on Prime) some remastered movies the past 6 Months. mainly because most of my old movies in XVID 480p (640×480 4:3) do not scale at all well to 1440p 16:9. Some even had some scenes fixed where the cutter got a bit overzealous on some of the old films! latest few I got were: “The Fifth Element”, “The Great Race” and “Airplane!” I needed some good laughs! And they look better than I remembered. 😆

Oh… you reminded me about using Vapo-rub on the upper lip. We did that in Cambodia too. Not exactly fond memories.

I’ve been surprisingly happy with the new GFX card. It performs better an even the newest games better than the official specifications lead one to think. It performs 2-3 times better than my old R9 390X, where I expected only up to 2x. So… part of me is glad it died, and another part prefers if it had lasted until year end! 😆 That’s when the new AMD NAVI 2X cards are due to launch. typical. 😉
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-big_navi-rdna2-all-we-know

I am holding off upgrading the MoBo & CPU until next year. I did think of upgrading a couple weeks ago, as the new GFX card showed me that in some high-end games, my CPU is the bottleneck now & not the GPU (as was the case with the 390X). But I can live with that for awhile by simply reducing some settings. It won’t kill me. 😉 😀

I hope things get easier for you with the apartments & life in general my friend!

Oh! Been meaning to ask how the kitties are? (Feral’s too).

6 Bryan { 05.29.20 at 9:47 pm }

Property and Excise are doing well now that I have found a flea chemical that works. The local flea population isn’t being killed back in the Winter because we no longer get below 0°C for 8 hours like was normal a decade ago. The big players in flea treatment no longer work as the fleas are now resistant.

We only have a couple of ferals left. They are recent immigrants as the old families have been adopted or passed over the Bridge. Neutering works.

I’ll have to check out the movies. Those are definite winners. The are probably not available in this zone.

We both know that a month after we finish a new system they will come up with something “cheaper, better, faster”.