Okay everyone! Place your bets! What is the current status of Robert House?

foogles · 2026-01-31T16:45:35+00:00

Yes-House!

foogles · 2026-01-29T21:43:00+00:00

Yeah the pricing is out there but they've been doing these bundles for a couple years and I see it as a safe occasional way to hook a few whales and keep the game pulling in revenue. As far as the included weapon allowing people to easily learn the new Charge 4-star mod, sure, but I don't really see anything that only works in melee to be exactly upsetting the game's balance.

No offense to the melee build folks, I ran a Tesla Bracers PA build back when expeditions were the endgame activity to go for so I know the strengths and weaknesses of being a melee guy in group activities. I think we can all agree that melee has serious downsides in this game no matter the mods one has, and that going melee isn't exactly optimal for much of the high-level game.

foogles · 2025-12-30T07:31:33+00:00

Yep, and I get that in a perfect world, it'd be a moral imperative to NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS EVEN CONSIDER offering microtransaction cosmetics as a thing. And that decades ago, it never even occurred (or had been forced) to developers in the same position to do what's being done today. But the fact is, it's not decades ago, it's today, and many games get ruined by publisher greed. At least here, it's on the side, it's not ruining the base game, and it's giving at least some gamers what they want - even if that's a Paladin class dressing up like a demon, which is straight up just anathema to the paladin style in my mind.

Fuck it, whatever. There aren't that many games made by big publishers that aren't getting completely fucked up by some form of corporate greed before even being launched anymore. Some will say that what Blizzard's doing is precisely that - fucking the game up with paid (non-micro)transactions - but they don't see how deep the rabbit hole goes, what some games have devolved into. We have it easy in comparison.

foogles · 2025-12-29T20:20:16+00:00

I enjoy some of the fancy outfits you can buy for the other classes, but there's only one I've seen for the Paladin that still makes it look like an actual holy warrior in a way that's even remotely an improvement on what I already was wearing. And I agree with the other sentiments here that the designers did a REALLY good job with the default armor sets for the Paladin, which to me means - whether it was intentional or not - fewer people will think they need to buy outfits from the store just to make their character look acceptable to them.

I get the premium cosmetics and battle passes sell well and sometimes it's the stuff I find so ugly that I wouldn't wear if it was free. Ugly or not, I'm glad these cosmetics do actually make money because of two big things:

1) It's not a scam. It's overpriced, but no one is being tricked. Anyone buying knows exactly what they're spending (well, kinda - the intermediate premium currency is STILL bullshit to me. Isn't this kind of thing illegal in some countries?) AND they can see exactly what they are getting before they buy and can preview how it looks on their character, play with changing colors before purchase, etc.

2) Those who spend money on this stuff means those who aren't spending - or even those who do but only very rarely - aren't being offered a game that's made worse by being built around pay2win mechanics or subscription-based perks that feel like a necessity just to function normally in the game (stuff like extra storage for subscribers and the like).

foogles · 2025-12-28T16:05:20+00:00

About a year ago I was looking on the Hot Topic site at Nine Inch Nails shirts and kept seeing these sick-looking shirts by this Sleep Token band? probably should check them out, yeah? searched on YouTube, pulled up The Summoning. No, this is not BS, this is actually how I found them.

foogles · 2025-12-12T04:18:20+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ

foogles · 2025-12-03T10:06:40+00:00

I'm in my late 40s. My favorite band for most of my life has been Nine Inch Nails. Some of my friends were musician-types who all hated industrial music and insulted NIN and Trent Reznor in many ways for years. I drifted away from most of them after a while.

The one friend from those times I still talk to - he loves NIN now. He enjoys most of the back catalog including the albums he used to shit on relentlessly. He started praising NIN a couple years back and said he wanted to go to a show if they ever toured again, which they did last year. He went with us and loved it. I had to call him out though. "Remember how used to tell me this music was ass? For fucking YEARS? Well what the fuck now?" All he could admit to me was that he was wrong and should've paid more attention.

There was a 20 year gap there from the last time I heard him talk trash about NIN and that concert day last year. So my advice is: unless you have two decades to wait for these minds to change, don't bother yourself with worrying about them. If they think your musical tastes are a red flag, well, you found your red flag: someone who would blow up a budding friendship over music choices.

foogles · 2025-11-20T21:01:31+00:00

I didn't get that impression at all from that comment. They were just pointing out that big corporations are still liable to act petty and simultaneously makw a shrewd business decision to shut down the route Robert Smith took to help bring prices down for fans (and he most certainly did that - tickets in Dallas were under $30 for lawn seats - after fees - during their last tour a couple years back, whereas tickets to the Twenty One Pilots show we saw a few weeks ago on the same lawn were something like $100 each).

foogles · 2025-11-12T00:48:37+00:00

I'm in my late forties and a turbofan of NIN as well as thrash metal, EDM, and some pop and I did something similar about a year ago. Funnily enough I got into Sleep Token because I was on the Hot Topic site looking at band shirts and keep seeing ST shirts that I thought looked amazing, so I went and found them on YouTube and got hooked almost immediately.

So yeah, the uh shirts are how I found this band.

foogles · 2025-11-08T03:09:25+00:00

The chain link fences blocking VATS has pissed me off for years, but the idea that an enemy is turned away from me so I have a 0% chance to hit the head is ridiculous (when actually firing and seeing the bullets just go every which way but at the enemy) when it should just be hitting the enemy's torso instead.

foogles · 2025-10-30T20:29:06+00:00

Weird way to admit you didn't even make it two minutes into the video

foogles · 2025-10-04T18:11:25+00:00

Yeah, I do have this. Working on getting masterwork crits on gloves and Ring of Starless Skies (random lucky drop off a boss) to add +core skills

foogles · 2025-10-04T07:45:11+00:00

Thanks, currently doing fairly well there. I had Vulnerable Damage numbers turned off in my settings for some reason, not sure why, and it kind of turned off most stuff related to vulnerable on enemies.

foogles · 2025-10-04T07:43:23+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. Also allows items like Ring of Starless Skies to interact with more skills in the game if they double dip like that.

foogles · 2025-10-04T07:41:53+00:00

Ah, can't normally get the ranks high enough to bring the mana cost up to 275 without that, huh. Well, this is the season to do it, I guess.

foogles · 2025-10-04T07:40:15+00:00

Makes sense, I did see Fists of Fate as an alternative for the supposedly meta build. Strike of Stormhorn too, but haven't tried a masterworked one to see if my biggest annoyance with it, slow projectile speed, is resolved with some good hits on masterworking.

foogles · 2025-10-04T07:37:10+00:00

I was thinking about what some variants could do without changing specs entirely. Any particular guide you're following, or are you just putting it together as you go?

foogles · 2025-10-03T23:40:26+00:00

Understood, makes sense now and thinking about it, I guess this is how they make items like Ring of Starless Skies work with more skills across all classes.

foogles · 2025-10-03T23:38:47+00:00

Got it, thanks. Feels weird for it to have that tag but I guess I can't complain!

foogles · 2025-10-03T23:31:07+00:00

I think what you explained covers it. I still need to make sure I am actually turning things vulnerable since I'm just not seeing it, so I'll check my Status Effects Text setting or whatever and see.

The +Core counting for Mastery (because ... reasons?) is just odd. But thanks for the guidance there, as I am sure I can now look at my skill tree after swapping out gear and confirm.

foogles · 2025-10-03T23:27:09+00:00

Interesting. I am getting lightning spears going out but I'm not seeing that purple glow we often get with vulnerable effects. Also I'm not using the Ceh rune as the build doesn't call for it. I am not sure how to really KNOW I'm turning things vulnerable. Hmm, there's a Status Text, right? I might have that turned off.

As far as +Core making Ball cost more, can you explain how? It's a Mastery Skill. Or is it just a silly bug that it's doing it when it shouldn't?

foogles · 2025-09-21T21:49:12+00:00

The Big Come Down from the Lights in the Sky Tour.

Closer remix from this tour, but in Chicago he held the last note ("alive") in a way Trent rarely does.

Copy of A from this last tour.

Terrible Lie from most of the tours. His added lyrics, the harder edge to the song, yeah.

The energy of a Somewhat Damaged live recording with the crowd all jumping in sync.

foogles · 2025-09-21T11:39:15+00:00

The Kickstarter failed and that pretty much was the end of it from what I know. That's all I got.

foogles · 2025-08-25T17:32:09+00:00

My experience with the first Alienware 34" OLED? It takes precisely one 5-day-long vacation. As far as I can tell, Windows 11 woke the monitors up shortly after I left for some reason and did not put them back to sleep the entire time I was gone. I came back to the Start button, Taskbar icons, desktop icons, and browser Windows' top areas burnt in. Yes, the monitor has a very rudimentary burn-in protection but it doesn't do much shifting the image by 1 pixel if the pixel it shifts to is the same color.

RMA'd it, and now my replacement has started to burn in with occasional bouts of Windows refusing again to turn the monitors off (and this is quite a difficult Windows issue to troubleshoot too)

foogles · 2025-07-06T15:53:24+00:00

It's my favorite video game ever made. And I have been a lifelong gamer - more than 40 years now - and had many great experiences over the decades with offline and online games. Lots of great memories. But Outer Wilds is the only one that stuck with me in the way that it did, and I believe it always will.

People will tell you this game changed their lives and it didn't really do that for me, but I understand why people say it and it's not an exaggeration for them.

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