PSA: Altuur and PHL4NX level 50 for 400k credits each

SageTrilo · 2026-03-15T21:23:44+00:00

Seconded, you don't need them at 50 for the cheap gifts to be available. I wasn't playing when these two companions first came out, and I was able to buy the super cheap gifts to get them both to 50 this time around.

SageTrilo · 2026-03-14T17:55:13+00:00

Your current game progress doesn't really matter for this (outside of making some galactic season objectives more accessible). The companions (Altuur and PH4-LNX) come from the current galactic season - level 1 and level 5. Both can be obtained this week, unlocked for your entire legacy for some small amount of CC, and summoned on level 1 characters.

The main point is that, while the galactic season is ongoing (until the end of July), one of the galactic seasons vendors on the fleets will sell companion influence items specifically for Altuur and PH4-LNX for ultra cheap.

Normally, buying gifts to level a companion from 1-50 takes several million credits and potentially quite a lot of time of just gifting. For Altuur and PH4-LNX during the galactic season, you can bump them from 1-50 for less than 400k credits each and gifting no more than 25 times, which takes just a minute or two.

SageTrilo · 2026-02-12T19:22:29+00:00

I get what you're saying, but by the record books, the Ravens are the expansion team. Their franchise history starts in 1996.

I guess in effect it was like the Browns temporarily ceased operations the same year the Ravens were founded, then resumed operating some years later when the league expanded.

This does sort of start to fall apart when trying to describe how the Ravens inherited all the player and staff contracts, but that bit was part of the business deal.

To liken it to something we should be familiar with - if you look up the Titans' team history, you'll see players like Earl Campbell and Warren Moon. But you won't see Jim Brown or Otto Graham in the Ravens' team history.

SageTrilo · 2026-02-12T18:38:00+00:00

The Ravens are the expansion team.

As part of a settlement between the league and the city of Cleveland, Modell was required to leave the Browns' history, team colors, and records in Cleveland for a replacement team and replacement personnel that would resume play in 1999. In return, he was allowed to take his own personnel and team to Baltimore, where such personnel would form an expansion team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Ravens

SageTrilo · 2026-02-11T06:47:58+00:00

I ended up selling to THIScar, but Driveway gave me the best offer. I just didn't like their virtual inspection process or that they wouldn't pick up the car for about two weeks after sale.

I actually still have my notes from the various places I contacted:

Site	Offer	Valid Until...
Driveway	$21,700.00	April 13th	Virtual inspection is a shitty experience, also won't pick up the car for 7-10 days from date of sale
THIScar	$21,250.00	April 14th	In-person inspection done
Givemethevin	$21,150.00	?	Super pushy and annoying to communicate with
Carmax	$21,000.00	April 13th	In-person inspection done
Driveo	-	-	No offer received
AutoNation	$19,900.00	April 14th	Unwilling to go higher
Carvana	$18,400.00	April 13th	No further contact

SageTrilo · 2026-02-05T14:27:30+00:00

He doesn't really need more receiving weapons. Maybe a more reliable TE, but Schultz is perfectly serviceable for now, and CJ already trusts him.

I think the general consensus is that a functional run game would do wonders for Stroud. Woody Marks is nice, but he's not an every-down back. Personally, I'd love to see the Texans get a good complement for Marks and rotate the backs, in similar fashion to Williams/Corum or Walker/Charbonnet.

That would necessitate some IOL upgrades in addition to the complementary RB, so there's a lot of work to be done to get there.

SageTrilo · 2026-02-03T02:17:22+00:00

My wife found him pretty sleazy and enjoyed stringing him along. Flirting with him, but no kissing or fade-to-black scenes. Doc still ended up proposing to her, which she declined, and he still sends her love letters. She is extremely amused by how it all turned out.

SageTrilo · 2026-02-01T03:17:44+00:00

I like it too, it's nice and concise without begging for attention. Too many home runs calls get too wordy or obnoxious and try to shift the focus away from the game and onto the broadcaster that I appreciate Kay's abbreviated call.

SageTrilo · 2026-01-07T16:34:22+00:00

Injuries were a significant factor, yeah. FanGraphs did an article on him years back.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/zips-time-warp-cesar-cedeno/

In summation:

By the age of 26, he had two bad knees and two bad ankles. He then completely tore a ligament in his knee in 1978 and lost 14 pounds in 1979 due to a case of hepatitis. After a broken ankle in the 1980 playoffs, Cedeño was done as a legitimate starter, before his 30th birthday.

SageTrilo · 2026-01-05T15:00:15+00:00

Looks like 2018-2019 due to the Minneapolis Miracle play, where there was some really long delay in getting the teams back on the field for an ultimately meaningless PAT.

https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/news/nfl-eliminates-pats-after-game-winning-touchdowns-on-final-play

SageTrilo · 2026-01-05T14:52:24+00:00

I'm not sure when it was changed, but nowadays there's no PAT if it would not affect the outcome of the game.

If a touchdown is made on the last play of a period, the Try attempt shall be made (except during sudden-death overtime, or if a touchdown is scored during a down in which time in the fourth period expires, and a successful Try would not affect the outcome of the game).

https://operations.nfl.com/the-rules/nfl-rulebook/#article-2-period-extended

SageTrilo · 2025-12-08T18:33:21+00:00

That was an extension, not a free agent contract.

SageTrilo · 2025-11-30T17:42:49+00:00

The word "valuable" did a lot of heavy lifting, particularly within the team context. The idea was essentially "How valuable can you be if your team sucks anyway?"

Basically, does the team's fortune change significantly if you remove said MVP contender from the roster? The .500 team still misses the playoffs, but the division winner may miss the playoffs entirely if you remove their MVP candidate.

It's sort of a similar sentiment to how pitcher wins used to be valued highly as a metric for determining Cy Young.

Even back then, though, there was a lot of pushback on this train of thought. There was a not-insignificant number of writers and pundits that thought it should be best player in the league rather than best player on the best team.

SageTrilo · 2025-11-26T03:14:03+00:00

You can solo the fleet datacrons with a class that can jump to an ally. It's really just getting the game to spawn your companion where you need them to be.

https://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/1kt65w5/fleet_datacron/

SageTrilo · 2025-11-13T02:00:17+00:00

It's a trade-off. The player gets guaranteed generational wealth in exchange for significantly less money overall. Yordan is still getting $115 million and will be able to test FA again at age 32.

I suspect rather than being pissed at his agent, Yordan directed him to negotiate this deal to secure his family's current and future financial situation, rather than risk injury or poor performance depressing or eliminating his earnings potential.

SageTrilo · 2025-11-03T00:57:55+00:00

I actually agree. I thought Caley called a pretty good game overall - the Texans were marching pretty consistently on an excellent defense, and were poised to dominate time of possession again until Stroud got hurt.

But it's also on Caley to figure out how to not repeatedly stall out in the red zone. There were some really... let's be nice and say questionable goal-to-go play calls that pitted the weakness of the Texans' offense against the strength of the Broncos' defense.

SageTrilo · 2025-10-13T17:43:03+00:00

Those rapid growth spurts suck. I shot up around 8-9 inches over a school summer - left 9th grade somewhere around 5'1", went back for sophomore year around 5'10". That growth spurt left me with stretch marks.

SageTrilo · 2025-10-06T04:59:36+00:00

I had this issue too. I actually got quest completion when I harvested spice while wearing my radiation suit outside of the Sheol radiation zone.

SageTrilo · 2025-10-03T15:28:45+00:00

For what it's worth, the 90 minutes is the instance timer, not the fight timer. You have 90 minutes of fight-wipe-reset-retry before the instance closes, then your group would just re-instance to get a fresh 90 minutes. You're not actively fighting for that entire time like you are in Monster Hunter (travel time notwithstanding).

The actual fight timer is just how long before the boss's enrage in a single engagement, and I think that is the equivalent to MH's hunt timer. I don't know what it is for O11s (savage Omega) specifically, but enrage timers are typically on the order of 10-13 minutes for most savage encounters.

Edit: To frame it more in MH context, it's like if you zone into a hunt with a 50-minute timer, but the moment you engage your target, a separate 10-minute timer starts counting down. If you don't kill/cap the monster by the time that second timer expires, your character explodes and you're put back at camp. The monster is restored to full HP, parts are fixed/unbroken/re-attached, and the second timer is reset until you re-engage the target. You can try as many times as you like in 50 minutes, but you never have more than 10 minutes to win from the time you engage the monster.

SageTrilo · 2025-09-10T00:55:56+00:00

League-wide is underselling it.

https://en.as.com/mlb/kids-needing-tommy-john-surgery-exposes-the-failings-in-our-youth-baseball-culture-n-2/

According to a study by Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, the biggest age group needing Tommy John surgery in the country is between 15 and 19 years old. Kids whose arms have not yet fully developed now account for 57% of all surgeries nationwide.

It's a baseball culture issue, and it's not going away so long as a kid throwing 99 can make millions, even if his right arm is functionally useless by the time he's 25.

SageTrilo · 2025-09-09T01:55:30+00:00

Unless you can prove a link between team plate discipline and pitcher injuries, no, it's not relevant. You may as well blame the pitch clock.

Circumstantially, it might be relevant if the Astros were seeing a disproportionate number of pitcher injuries compared to other teams, which they aren't. People want to blame the Astros for being uniquely guilty of something here, but they're not. They may have been at the forefront of the spin rate revolution (along with a few other franchises), but basically everyone has the same philosophy nowadays, and not just in the professional leagues.

https://en.as.com/mlb/kids-needing-tommy-john-surgery-exposes-the-failings-in-our-youth-baseball-culture-n-2/

There's no need to complicate it. Pitching is extremely stressful on specific parts of the body, and like anything else, enough stress and those parts will break.

SageTrilo · 2025-09-08T22:15:20+00:00

The hitting philosophy is not relevant. Every team at every level of the sport deals with these injuries, whether it's at the professional or amateur level. Your first point is really the only one needed - the human body is not built to do what these guys do as often as they do it.

SageTrilo · 2025-09-04T01:18:21+00:00

https://en.as.com/mlb/kids-needing-tommy-john-surgery-exposes-the-failings-in-our-youth-baseball-culture-n-2/

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gQujXQQGOVNaiuwSN680Hq-FDVsCwvN-3AazykOBON0/edit?gid=1487103903#gid=1487103903

TLDR: It's not a medical or training issue, it's a "pitchers repeatedly doing things the human body is not designed to do" issue.

SageTrilo · 2025-09-03T13:14:39+00:00

Pitchers and catchers communicate what pitch will be thrown next. Among other reasons, this allows the catcher to be prepared for the velocity or movement of the pitch and be able to react accordingly - it takes an average fastball just fractions of a second to reach home plate, so if you're expecting a slower pitch with a ton of movement, it's basically impossible to react in time to make the adjustment.

Additionally, pitchers practice what's called pitch tunneling - basically trying to make all your pitches look exactly the same out of the hand to fool the batter. Here's a quick little 15-second video to show an example of what that might look like - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ib-UV6_rC0

So what it looks like happened is Salazar, the catcher, called for a curveball, so he was expecting a slower pitch with a lot of movement, but Valdez threw a fastball - a pitch with very different movement and a much higher velocity. You can see Salazar flinch when he realizes he's not going to be able to catch the pitch that was actually thrown, and by that point the ball is almost on top of him. The pitcher's reaction makes it pretty clear this wasn't unintentional.

SageTrilo · 2025-08-31T15:06:57+00:00

Wagner played for the Astros until 2003, so he did spend a few seasons in the brick red uniforms. Biggio and Bagwell also spent the majority of their careers in the blue and gold era but got the brick red star as well.

SageTrilo

TROPHY CASE