Welcome to the last Talk Amongst Yourselves for February! As is custom with TAY, organise meet-ups, talk about games, or anything you want. Consider this the unofficial Kotaku Australia forum. Become a TAYbie today and join the best and friendliest community on the internet!
Talk Amongst Yourselves
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221 responses to “Talk Amongst Yourselves”
Oh god, an empty TAY.
I have nothing to talk about.
oh wait! Techie’s leg is almost fibre glassed.
That’s it.
If I didn’t know exactly what you were talking about this would be a weird sentence
I could guess, but it’s still a weird sentence.
Techie’s leg at armour is almost fibre glassed
Oh cool, his new exoskeleton was delivered?
Slowly building it from the ground up =P
No that’s his actual replacement leg. He is a robot after all.
Yeah but considering scree mentioned his leg was being fibre glassed, I took that to mean his interior structure was functioning, this was a layer of armour or external protection to protect his internal workings.
Mornin’
Had some friends come up from Melbourne last week for Green Day’s American Idiot Live at QPAC. Was the first time i’d been to a musical. Was pretty good, especially Chris Cheney from The Living End as St. Jimmy. He was awesome.
I don’t know whether I feel happy or sad that Phil Jamieson is now pretending to be a member of another band. His own band was way better 😉
He’s just playing the alter ego to the main character, just an acting gig with some singing & guitar playing (assuming he is playing it the same way Chris did).
Still, I just find it kind of funny (and sad) that this is where his career has taken him. I mean, it’s great in one sense that he’s got work in a big production, but I can’t help but think he’s been ‘reduced’ to portraying the life of one of his peers 😉
I guess. But a gig is a gig & it keeps him relevant. I forgot Grinspoon were even a thing honestly lol.
heh yeah they haven’t been round for a while. Shame really. They were great!
NBN map turned green! Oh wait, “additional work is still required to to make your address ready…”
Talking to a guy at the Optus shop, he explained that there are “islands” in which there will be a “service shortfall” but, since the exchange will be shut down sometime in the next “18-24 months”, there’ll have to be a solution before then.
Come on, I just want ADSL-speed NBN to replace my dialup-speed ADSL.
On NBN now and last night I couldn’t watch a Youtube clip.
Big fail, don’t get excited.
So they hooked up my street in March 2016. Service available “Jul-Dec 2018”.
Sigh.
Been “Planned sometime before we finish the rollout” for the past few months (which is more info than I had previously. Checked this morning – HFC, sometime between April and June this year. Not sure I dare believe them…
Checked my parents place. They’re on Telstra HFC and have been since my Mum moved in there about five years ago.
NBN HFC availability between April and June.
My assumption is that some time around then is when NBN will subsume Telstra cable, and the people suddenly getting “NBN” during that period are actually just getting the same service they already could have gotten from Telstra, just from a different retailer?
NBN is such a joke. 🙁
Ok so I’ve been working on my backlog and started on Wolfenstein: The New Order
Holy hell this is a good game, I had heard it was good but living up to all expectations.
Although I have just hit a roadblock last night but considering that was an hour after I was meant to be in bed I’ll try again tonight.
For those who have played it is
In the mech thing escaping the forced labour camp.I’m liking the way the perk system works, giving you bonus based on your play style which makes how you play easier. So if you use lots of grenades for example getting X grenade kills lets you carry another grenade
TNP was a blast – loved charging around dual-wielding automatic shotguns XD Unexpectedly good story, too.
*TNO. Stupid fingers.
I played that game last year. It was indeed a nice surprise! I recall the bit you’re up to, but I didn’t really have any problem with it.
I think I stumbled a few times before getting in to the mech, but I didn’t have any problems with the actual escaping inside it. Just have to keep an eye out for the cheeky buggers up on the walls etc.It is the finale of the level I think. Defending the garage as the prisoners escape. Prob going to be ok, think I just need to work out where and when the rocket launcher guys come from. Worst case I’ve taken too much damage on the way down and I’ll just restart the chaptermm yeah I think I was lucky enough to spot the rocket guys as soon as they appeared. I wouldn’t say that section was super easy, but I didn’t have any major issues either. I’m sure you’ll get there eventually 🙂I remember having some issues with that sequence the first time. Answer is simply kill everything that moves.
Yeah, got through it without an issue once I was playing before midnight
I think part of why I struggled was not understanding that if you walk a mech over scrap metal of course it is going to be repaired. So was prob much more damaged going into finale than I needed to beI find that’s the answer to most questions.
– Hatred dev.
New Order was such a fantastic game. The biggest surprise for me was the quality of the writing. They took a game about a square-jawed jewish dude murdering Nazis and managed to give the main character layers and the story a ton of depth – the game even has a meta-narrative where it wonders what the place is for a man who’s only thing is killing Nazis, decades after that stopped being relevant, i.e. the game is simultaneously speculating about its own place in the modern video game world by putting its protagonist in the same position.
IMO we’ll look back on the writing in it down the track in the same way we look at stuff like Spec Ops: The Line.
Did you ever play The Darkness? The first one, not the sequel. Machine Games are all ex-Starbreeze guys that worked on The Darkness and the Riddick games, and especially The Darkness has a similar writing style and feel to it. Hard to put your finger on what it is, but it works amazingly well.
Got through the final mission in Nioh yesterday… wow. Loved everything about the second-last main mission – except that the final boss was a bit of a slog without any ammo for my bow/rifle. The last mission (an epilogue of sorts) was a really cool way to wrap up the story, too. Debating whether I want to continue with NG+, as the gear grind looks like it’ll be a long (and expensive) one.
Will definitely be dropping it if their planned PvP has DS-style invasion mechanics, tho… faced a revenant that used low-stance dual swords with heavy armour – only beat it because it was AI (and thus had exploitable behaviours) and I had a bunch of healing items.
Had more Splatoonin’ over the weekend. Jumped in another tournament, this time just online. Six rounds, best of five matches each, and we were getting stomped hardcore. Hadn’t posted a single win, save for one round where the other guys forfeited. And after the first match of the final round, one of our guys just fell off the face of the internet. Fortunately, he was seemingly our weakest member (B- rank, while the rest of us were in S) and we were able to find another dude to jump in his place. Next match, we only *just* lost. And after that I think I must have finally woken up because I was starting to play ok instead of garbage. AND WE WON ONE. Staved off complete and utter defeat. From there on it didn’t matter, but we’d won via knockout and all up I think it was the morale boost we needed. And/or enough to rattle the other team. Because we then took the following two matches and won the round, woo 😛
Went out for dinner Saturday night, to NOLA at Barangaroo. Pretty nice place, and daaamn can they cook meat good. The brisket and pork neck, didn’t even need knives for it. Also had seared scallops, tuna sashimi, kingfish and yabbies. All round sharing of everything for everyone 😛 Oh and the dessert I had had smoked yoghurt with it, which was really good especially with the dark chocolate “jelly” (almost more like a cocoa kind of mousse/ganache type thing). Good eats.
I went to my brothers engagement party. It was alright.
As for games I’ve played I decided to just leave my Overwatch competitive rank at Master. No point in killing myself to get to top 500, especially with that matchmaking system.
I finished Dishonored 2. Pretty good game, although it doesn’t feel that much different from Dishonored 1. I also thought the writing was a bit weak. Normally I save and load every step in those kind of games, but after Ironman mode in X-Com 2 I decided to just keep playing even after being discovered. Makes the game less of a drag.
Managed to reach max rank in Titanfall 2. Don’t know when they’re going to patch in more numbers.
Been looking through my backlog to figure out a game to play next. I decided to finally start Starcraft 2. Couldn’t get it to work due to my profile not working. Eventually had to call support in US. They discovered that my account was so old that it kept redirecting to non-existent web pages. They had to take some time to transfer it to the new system. Started up the campaign and have been enjoying it quite a lot. Although I do find that everything dies way too fast, doesn’t really feel like I can have much impact in battle aside from having all my units dance back and forth.
I’m like silver rank in overwatch. I have no idea how you get to Master. I guess it has something to do with being good =P
Hey, guys.
Long time no talk.
Got Foxtel installed a bit over a week ago, so we can watch the footy and Dad can watch Game of Thrones, and I’ve been watching Star Vs The Forces of Evil as well.
Oh, and Breath of the Wild comes out on Friday, so I’m picking it up after I finish work. \o/
Are you getting BotW for WiiU or have you jumped on the switch?
Wii U.
Could never bring myself to be interested in the Switch, honestly.
So I lashed out a bit and made a special dinner for Tiglet last night
When I put it down in front of her she said “I don’t like it” which I think means “It looks very nice Daddy. Thank you for going to all that extra effort to make something special”
Apparently if you make a child eat something they don’t like for 11 days, they will end up liking it
I’m not sure on the science of that one but based on observation Wallykazam is much more important than eating
I have no idea what a wallykazam is?
He is an ordinary boy
What else?
He’s a magical trollCan you believe it?
Wallykazam is pretty good, I understand her point.
Last night, Operation Ouch was more important than dinner.
There’s “like” and there’s “tolerate”. There’s no magic number, and there are definitely lots of foods that can take *years* of trying to appreciate. That’s not even taking into account genetic factors, like the people who can’t stand coriander.
After 6 years, my son still won’t eat fresh tomato or tomato sauce. He will tolerate canned tomatoes cooked with other foods. It’s the acidity. He also tends to dislike citrus and pineapple and won’t touch salad dressing or condiments at all.
It’s a tricky balance. You want them to try lots of things, you don’t want to force them to eat things they genuinely don’t like (and kids have much more sensitive taste than adults), and you want meal time to be a happy time, so picking your battles is really important.
The coriander thing is an interesting case. When I was a kid I couldn’t stand it, it tasted like soap to me. At some point in my later teens though, that disappeared and now I really like it. Your palate changes over time I guess. I also flipped around completely on olives – love them now, couldn’t stand them before.
Also have weird taste / texture aversions to both fish (esp cooked) and fresh Tomato, both of which can be traced back to really bad experiences with them as a kid. The fish thing was when I was in England when I was three years old, we went to a fish farm and fished up a trout which my Dad then had me kill by clobbering it with a stick and then we cooked and ate and it tasted muddy and horrible and I still basically have to force myself to eat fish nowadays, and when I do it’s like my brain is fighting with itself, one part is like “this is actually pretty tasty” and the other part is “OH MY GOD THAT’S FISH WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
The tomato one was the day after I’d been home from school sick when I was around five. Mum didn’t re-make my tomato sandwich in my lunch, just sent me to school with the same one she’d made the day before, and it had sat out for a whole day on a warm bench so the tomato had gone soggy and started to turn. One bite and blergh. Especially after being sick for a day, it put me off anything that was “tomato” but weirdly never tomato sauce, tomato soup etc. Eventually managed to get over that and I actually really like them, but I can’t eat tomato on its own. It has to be something with tomato in it. Even if it’s slices of it in a salad, that’s fine. I haven’t gotten over it to the point I can pick one up and take a bite.
I agree with you 100% – *how* a food is presented makes an enormous difference to how palatable it is. Coriander on its own might taste horrible, but if it’s been cooked into a green curry, blended and balanced with other strong flavours, it’s still present, but no longer dominates the meal.
It’s the same for lots of other vegetables. Overcooked, boiled broccoli, cabbage brussel sprouts or zucchini are mushy, smelly and horrible. But if they’re gently steamed, or stir fried, raw in a salad (fresh coleslaw), they’re absolutely delicious. I try to never boil vegetables, it’s too easy to ruin them.
As a kid, I did not like cucumber, blue cheese or olives. Now those things are all fine. Certainly, bitterness is very unpalatable to kids, but adults tolerate it much better (gin&tonic).Maybe there is some evoulutionary adaptation here to help protect kids from eating poisonous plants by accident.
Brussels Sprouts are unappetizing no matter how you cook them IMO. Have had them many different ways including cooked by people who really know what they’re doing. They’re not oh my god pig disgusting etc but they’re just cabbages that taste worse. BS.
EDIT: Also I think that the idea is that children have much stronger sense of taste than adults, so they experience bitter flavours much more intensely.
It’s ok, you’re allowed to not like brussels sprouts. I like them best if they’re steamed alongside other green things (broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini) and garlicky cheese sauce over the top. But they’re not as good as cabbage. Cabbage is far superior.
Cucumber was Tiglet’s first favourite food. She has moved on to other things but there was a stage we would order salad with extra cucumber when we went out to keep her happy.
She still likes it although we give her baby quakes to snack on these days.
As for *how* it was presented I don’t know what else I could do https://www.instagram.com/p/BRArer_h5k7/
I’m just going of what seven news said, which is why I said apparently. May not actually be true. And they may have been talking about kids under 5.
Found it!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4178196/Make-kids-eat-greens-15-days-like-it.html
kids….. One day she’ll truly appreciate your efforts!
I have photos of it on my phone and think she is going to get all excited about it when she sees the picture. Oh well, at least I have pancakes for lunch on shrove tuesday
Heh. I do this to my mum all the time. She’ll spend days making something and I’m just like ‘it looks ugly, I hate it, I’ll just get McDonalds on the way home’.
You are bad and you should feel bad. Bad.
One day you are going to miss your mum’s cooking, even the most boring spag bol. Maybe you should cook her dinner sometimes?
Ha, was all hyped for Oculus 1.12 update then super disappointed that my tracking was still just as shit as in 1.11. But then thought to actually check my software version and it seems whatever update I got this afternoon was not that, so there’s hope yet 😛 More awesome than tracking fixes though, they’ve finally fixed audio mirroring and you no longer have to get to the desktop to finish installation of titles. Hell yeah, time to start playing Elite with subwoofer/transducer again!
Also went digging around in my old laptop that I forgot I used to use through to early 2013 when I built this PC. Found a whole bunch of interesting stuff in there, but most excitingly I found a bookmark to an article about the Soul Calibur V preview night I went to. Could never remember the name of the site it was on and it seemed to have disappeared from the internet entirely, and while computerandvideogames.com now redirects to Games Radar, there was a snapshot of it saved on the wayback machine! That was the night I met and hung out with a random cool dude who then showed up in a small-fucking-world moment when we started college a couple of weeks later winding up in the same class, where we were then bestest buds. But he lives in Canada now and I miss him 😛
Note to self: bookmarks aren’t enough, save everything.
Bought an EVGA GTX 1070 SC last night. $520 from Newegg. Wanted the 1080, but that was a good $230 more, couldn’t really justify it. I should’ve really waited a day or 2 for the 1080Ti announcement & the 1080 price drop (probably 1070 too), but ah well.
Depends on the resolution you’re running too. If you’re using 1440p or less, a 1070 will demolish pretty much anything you throw at it. Got one myself, and it drives my 1440p monitor perfectly.
Yeah only running 1080P atm. Planning on 1440P later this year. No want/need for 4K, esp at the prices they are at currently D=
And it’s nowhere near practical at this point. The hardware has a lot of catching up to do before 4K is viable from a cost standpoint. Even a stock 1080 won’t manage 60fps on high settings at 4K for most games. Probably looking at 30-40fps on average, on a high end system with one 1080.
1440p is the sweet spot right now, and it looks amazing.
That 1070 is going to murder anything you throw at it on 1080p.
Yeah I really wanna go 1440P. Since the plan is either a really nice 27″ 1440P with GSync, or i’ll just go for a Dell 27″ Ultrasharp 1440P since there’s a fair few going 2nd hand atm for quite reasonable prices.
I picked up a nice Asus 27″ PLS paneled 1440p (PB278Q) monitor a couple of years back for around $700. One of the best purchases I’ve made in recent years. The resolution, plus the color reproduction on PLS (or IPS) is just fantastic.
That’s a nice looking monitor, seems to be holding its price well too.
The only thing to remember is it doesn’t do freesync/gsync or any of that fancy stuff, it’s just a straight 59hz monitor iirc.
Gsync is nice, but I don’t see it as a necessity. Especially given it doubles a monitors price it seems.
Yeah, and honestly I’d prefer a spiffy IPS/PLS panel. I can’t live without those poppin’ colors since I got one. I got back to a regular LED monitor and feel sad and depressed.
Still sucks majorly that the Step Up program isn’t available in Australia… That 1070 could have been a 1080ti this week 😀
Oh damn it lol. But it’s all good. I don’t need a 1080Ti or even a 1080 lol.
See I got a 1080 FTW in September, so I was feverishly checking to find my purchase date, and see if it was eligible… Unfortunately it’s 3 months, so I’ve missed out by 2 months.
Ouch 🙁 that sucks. But hey a 1080 is still baller as fuck 😛
Oh. I can connect to the NBN. Still 14 months left on my current contract with Telstra. Bleh. Anyone know how Telstra deal with you breaking contract? @welbot, any experience?
Not so familiar with breaking them with Telstra, but you could be looking at paying possibly the full cost of the contract. (Like what you would have paid them during that period.) Some places cap it off at a certain point, but others don’t. It’s really the kind of thing you’ll need to call them to find out. Sometimes they’re willing to negotiate down a little, but unless you stick with them as your ISP for NBN, you’ll likely be looking at having to pay some amount to get out of the contract.
My guess is, with 14 months left on the contract, you’re probably going to be looking at at least several hundred $ to break it.
Yeah I figured it would be that. Might go over & chat with them about it. Would rather pay $60 a month to my republic & potentially get max speed than pay Telstra $100 a month & get 25/5 & 1tb of data..
Cheers anyway dude!
See my reply fail below, but in addition, it’s actually cheaper to go with Belong. They only charge 95/mth for 100/40 unlimited data, and given they’re a sub of Telstra, they MAY allow you to switch to them without charging for the contract breakage. Still $30 more than MyRepublic per month, but if they won’t let you break the contract without paying it out, it might actually save you money in the long run.
Oh I forgot about Belong, might have a gander at them. I’ll be keeping my mobile with Telstra, but really wanna get away from their internet side of things. It’s just so lacking..
My mate in melb works for Telstra. He’s been on their high speed cable for a year or so. When he found out he got NBN access a couple of weeks ago, he switched to Belong, and sounds like everything is peachy so far. Hopefully you’ll be able to cut costs by going with them if they wanna charge too much for breaking the contract to go elsewhere.
Yeah will look in to them for sure. Thanks man!
Elite Dangerous… 2.3 Beta is out and the patch notes are as huge as ever…
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/332399-2-3-The-Commanders-Beta-Changelog
Including…
•Added some new challenge scenarios
•4 new Incursion scenarios
•Speed docking
•Driver challenge
•Ship launched fighter challenge
Also, Dolphin small passenger liner, pilot avatars, asteroid bases and a bunch of other stuff. Nice. 🙂
Woohoo!
Ah yes – •Added a dockable megaship called ‘Fisher’s Rest’ to the Aldebaran system
Was surprised to see the Dolphin’s in there now, looking forward to trying that out 😛
Disappointing to see the Keelback isn’t up for multicrew for some fighter action.
Suspect Keelback will get added later.
/shit… reply fail to @virus
heh yeah. $100/mth (or 95.95 I think they have on their website) is for 25/1. You can pay an extra $20 a month to get 50/20, or an extra $20 on top of that to get 100/40. Bloody ridiculous.
Switch hype gaining momentum. Got tomorrow off, and going to pick mine up at midnight launch tonight.
Waiting for the GTX1070 price drop next week. Upgrade from a 760 and 8GB RAM to the 1070 and 16GB RAM. Pretty sure I’m going to get the MSI Gaming X card:
My current card is MSI, I’ve had no issues with it and the reviews seem pretty positive, but I’m well and truly out of the loop as far as PC hardware goes.
I went from a 670 to a 1080 and lordy lordy, I didn’t know games got that pretty!
Also did the 670 to 1080 jump and oh boy was that a performance improvement.
Mhmm, I went from BF4 being a stuttering blurry mess (1440p screen, but could only manage the game getting to 60fps on medium @ 1080p, so it was stretched to fit the screen/resolution) to running supersampled res at the native screen res on ultra.
BF1 and Titanfall 2 run flawlessly as well, and anything older than those is smooth as butter.
It was Doom that made me realize I needed the upgrade. 25 fps dropping to below 20 in some areas. Upgrading to the 1080 pushed that to something like a 100fps average.
Shame it didn’t make the game any better.
@welbot need some advice on thermal pads/tape for a gpu. Gonna give my GTX 760 to a mate once my 1070 gets here. Was gonna give it a clean & replace the thermal paste & the pads just to ensure it stays cool for him, just wondering what thickness should I go for 0.5mm or 1mm thick pads?
Let us know how that upgrade goes, I’m about to do the same (hopefully after a price drop next week…)
Should be good, especially with the 6600k. My 760 is great & all, but I need more than a 2GB frame buffer, like GTA V whilst I can run it at high 60 FPS, it maxes out the memory which sucks. Having to have population density & diversity turned down or off to reach that heh.
@welbot might have a different opinion but I’ve never used pads and prefer paste. Arctic Silver’s my preferred poison.
This is for the ram modules, was gonna use paste on the GPU itself. I use Noctua NT-H1, love that stuff even gets decent temps on a stock intel cooler.
I’d have to agree with you there. Paste tends to be the better option for the processors themselves (cpu or gpu). I have seen pads used a bit on chipsets and other small components, but generally in laptops. I believe they tend to use them more in the cramped spaces so it acts as a barrier between the chipset and other nearby metal components, which sometimes to touch the other side of the pad. I’ve never seen anyone use pads on a cpu/gpu though. Intel graphics chipsets yes, but not full blown AMD/nVidia ones.
Curious to know where these pads might be places on the GPU @virus is referring to. Only place I’ve really seen them before is often on top of the ferrite chokes (they look like little cubes – see here https://semiaccurate.com/static/uploads/2010/01_january/normal_chokes_WM.jpg)
Thermal pads for the memory modules man, I wasn’t even thinking to mention that it was for the memory lol, I wouldn’t use them on the actual processor, heat transfer wouldn’t be good enough and it’d thermal throttle way too fast.
Your Weekly reminder that Hitman is the Best Thing.
I don’t usually trophy hunt in games but I’m going to 100% Hitman.
Dickmen.
New Division update is rad as hell. Goddamn I’ve sunk some time into that game.
Good to hear, haven’t played in a while, but Last Stand looks very cool.
Woo, whirlwind trip. Went out to Marrickville to meet with a band and play a bit though mostly listen to them play and it actually went kinda alright. Didn’t get hit with an “oh we mostly just improvise” this time so I guess maybe there will be a next time 😛
Then zoomed up to Newtown to meet friends for Logan, and damn that was brutal. Don’t think it would’ve happened without Deapool, thanks guy 😛 Pretty good, and Laura was great. Also Chuck.
Movie got out later than I was hoping, so raced off to Penshurst as fast as possible (and of course OF COURSE it had to be a muggy awful night that kept fogging up my fucking windshield), to try and get to Gamesmen on the way home to save myself a trip tomorrow. Got there and the rollerdoor was half down, couldn’t tell if they were closed or not but the lights outside were still on. Got a little closer and saw it was actually a mesh on the doors, so knocked and offered a shruggie and good guy gamemen, they opened up for me. Nabbed myself Zelda for Wii U, awwyis 😛 Then had a brief look at some of the Switch stuff (god damn that thing is TINY) and headed home.
Now to sleep for a tiny amount of time and hopefully not sleep through my alarm when I attempt to take on Big W. RIP in advance.
It looks tiny, but put it next to a XL 3DS or the Wii U game pad. It’s actually sort of huge for what it is. Guessing you’ve already been, but good luck at Big Dub.
Great success!
Surprisingly small crowd there, way less than for the NES mini. Also ran into a dude I got chatting with on previous amiibo raids, so that was good to pass the time.
I was surprised that the midnight launch in the city was smaller than Pokemon Sun and Moon. Still lots of people though.
This console is small. Those consoles are far away.
Sorry but if you’re not a fan of “oh we mostly just improvise” then your ambition is wrong, how else will you become a member of Australia’s greatest improv-jazz band?
Oh I’m a great admirer of those who can do it. Unfortunately my only improvisation skills fall more under the Macgyver banner 😛
Hmm. So dat Ryzen. Seems impressive, especially for its price point $1000 less than the 6900k heh.
Argh, just packed up my PS4 in prep for the move tomorrow. Won’t be able to unpack it until at least Wednesday next week… Do I sit here on my last day at work watching twitch streams, or go in blind?
I feel like I recognise the taste of Switch carts, but I can’t place where from.
Let’s just hope whatever it is leaving that taste isn’t effective on your health 😛
I am sure there are plenty of aspects of my Nintendo addiction that are far more unhealthy 😛
Well this is true 😛
It is bitter, like the finest of team-losing-match-in-multiplayer-game tears.
Four hours til I pick up my copy of Breath of The Wild on Wii U.
And I might just pick the amiibo and game guide whilst I’m at it.
I had a look at the amiibos in big w this morning and they’re pretty cool.
Guys. I am in love with the new pro controller. It feels so much better than the Wii U one. Also the joycons. Sorry lil dudes you’re cute but into the bin you go.
By “bin” you mean into the second drawer down, where they will hide until you get invited to one of those trendy rooftop parties where you play the switch…
😉
We call that the Player Two Drawer. Mad Catz lives there.
So we’ve decorated the ukulele a bit: https://www.instagram.com/p/BRKgZPTAqQUL-bBvhg5dl5LZvYrCem2AbAh1-80/
There’s a really good channel on youtube by The Ukulele Teacher, and it has an app as well. So handy for tuning! Spent all week learning some strumming, and a couple of chords. No songs yet ^_^
Looks cool! I haven’t bothered to decorate mine, but it’s shiny and purple, so really doesn’t need it 😉
I’ve heard it’s a deceptively hard instrument to learn. A friend wrote a song for his comedy show with one and he regretted it by the end of the first night.
I think it’s like most instruments, you can get to a basic level of competency, but if you want to play well you’ll have to work hard at it.
But it’s good to have goals 😉
Impressed with the Switch, I tells ya.
Honestly didn’t give any thought to it’s impact on the 3DS until now. Figured it couldn’t compete as a pure handheld, but now I’ve had it for a day – damn – if they ever release a Switch Pokemon game, it could almost single-handedly kill the 3DS, whether Nintendo wants it to or not.
The 3DS is a pure handheld – closable, fits in your pocket, battery life is generally better – but the Switch feels that good in portable mode.
I love my 3DS and never thought I’d say this. Not sure if this is intentional on Nintendo’s part, but going to assume it is.
I think there’s a lot of potential in the idea of getting a second dock. I’ll leave one at my girlfriends place and my office, so I can just zip from TV to TV. I’d actually consider getting a TV and dock for my bedroom.
I bought a second AC adapter at launch, because I realised connecting/disconnecting the AC adapter from the dock could get annoying. So I’ve left one attached to the dock, and the second is my on-tho-go charger.
It’s really making me think about how many different ways it can be used in general, though. It’s such a simple concept, but it’s potentially a big game-changer. It hasn’t been until I’ve had it in my hands I’m really thinking about it.
Although to this point it’s spent 5 minutes up on my TV. Otherwise it’s been in my hands in portable mode, or in the dock charging. Pretty sure this is going to live as a handheld in my life for the most part.
I thought I had it figured out already. I used the Wii U gamepad all the time, but this takes the concept to the next level.
Yes! It always seemed like a simple (but cool) concept, and now I have it, I don’t know what’s real anymore.
Been all day and so far only played through the Snipperclips demo with Mum.
Job applications are the devil.
You writing them to find work for yourself or did you draw the short straw and have to assess the applicants?
Applying myself. I’d be terrible at assessing them, I’d probably pick all the bad ones out of sympathy 😛
Hope you get a good job then. I was having a hard time finding work here in Aus so it was a god send that my former co-worker now based in the states asked for a programmer in social media and I put my hand up.
And why not; if the Australian workforce doesn’t want to pay for my expertise (learned my PhD is more damaging than helpful), I’m more than happy to export my services to the states.
For me it’s probably more that I’ve put myself in a bad situation, too many huge gaps and not enough experience and feeling like I’ve let most of what knowledge I had lapse so it’s like constant having to start over again.
Oh god they’ve responded, asking for a number to call. Gonna die.
Ha, six hours of Zelda and I’ve done fuck all. This is gonna take forever.
I just keep climbing mountains and shit. Good lord this game is pretty.
The cooking is ADORABLE!
I did spend a good 30 minutes throwing random food into the pot to see what came out. I love how you can actually see the individual ingredients in his arms as you’re choosing them from the menu, then you see them all go into the pot. I love it. It’s the little things that get me in games these days.
I also love knocking shields/clubs out of Bokoblin hands, and then picking them up off the ground before they can get to them. Then when they see you steal their weapons, they look shocked and point at you! Then sometimes they start throwing rocks at you once they realise their weapon is gone!
=D
It was a joy to wake up this morning and see a bunch of people lamenting their decision to cancel pre-orders for the Switch.
It is a delightful little machine.
I’m a little cold on it tbh. Especially going with Zelda on Wii U instead, I’m not entirely sold on Bomberman (controls feel like they have weird lag to them, and I don’t mean from the left joycon) so it feels like there’s not much reason for it to exist. Also not a huge fan of the sticks on it, chances are I’ll be using the pro controller for the majority of its life.
Sorry to hear. I’d be down about having to play Bomberman too.
I’m still a bit tingly about the prospect about Zelda on the loo, Fast RMX in the shower (with a plastic bag, of course), and Shovel Knight in bed.
I’ve got Zelda on the loo and Shovel Knight in bed though 😛
Wii U means it has to be your loo and bed. Switch is any loo and bed. Any.
Don’t enjoy it too much. Some who have the console are starting to feel less lucky because of the random and annoying manufacturing faults.
Your number might suddenly pop up.
Does my number popping up include someone buying me a Switch and Zelda? I’d happily deal with shoddy bluetooth for that.
TAY everyone. Given the madness of the Switch I dug out my Wii U. The plan was to have it ready when my copy of Zelda arrived but I decided to try Xenoblade Chronicles X again.
Trust me, game suffers the same faults as the newer Star Ocean and Tales games; good story and well written characters buried under 10 metric tons of extra mechanics.
Despite the bloat though I think I’ve finally gotten over the hurdle and am enjoying it. Might actually finish it this time. Then I might return to Xenoblade on the Wii.
Accidentally overwrote my save file on the Wii U when I migrated my Wii. Strange thing is, I actually liked that it happened; it mean I could start Xenoblade again with a clean slate and I was doing better on the second run.
Nah, if anything Xenoblade X suffers from not having the developed characters and plot of the previous game. I’d take a Tales or Star Ocean instead any day.
I played Too Human so understandably I’m still damaged from the experience, 😛
And I will admit, I’m up to the 20 hour mark and still have kept mostly to around NLA, doing various side quests.
Basically a habit developed from Xenobalde Chronicles where I spent 15 hours virtually note leaving Colony 9 but did so many side questions and farming that when I finally left I was steam rolling anything in my way.
At the same time though, it seems to be the only way to keep the difficult curve from getting ahead of me.
I also played Too Human. And while it had horribad controls and some very questionable design decisions, I really liked the story and thought the whole concept was intriguing. Wish that the IP had been picked up by someone that actually knew how to make a fun game and didn’t reinvent the wheel for the sake of it then masturbate in public about how great they were for doing that.
Funny side note: my 360 red ringed in protest the first time I played Too Human.
It must have been trying to warn you, 😛
Jokes aside, I actually liked the demo and couldn’t wait for the full game. Imagine my disappointment when I got the full game and it glitched out in an area where the demo worked flawlessly in.
At first, I thought it a freak occurence and it was.
But over time, despite the concept and soundtrack showing promise. The game just became frustrating and repetitive.
Dyack also expected the game to run as a trilogy and had Too Human simply stop rather than have an actual ending.
And look where we are now; my copy is basically a rare collectable now because of a court case loss. Go figure.
Someone (might have been the Giant Bomb guys) when commenting on that case said that Epic should have taken the rights to the IP and then remade the game with proper controls and everything just to spite Dennis.
Then Epic would have been no better than Dyack. Also, given the stigmatism the first game created the effort to get away from it would have far out weighed the return.
I preparation for Andromeda, I bought the Mass Effect Trilogy on PC (having previously played through each game and a fair portion of the DLC on X360). Rolled a femShep Sentinal, because why not? Completed the first three main missions and have just landed on Virmire, and here are my thoughts, having not played the original game in 8-9 years –
As with all games of this age, I totally don’t remember the rough graphics. It’s amazing how incremental graphics improvements have been over the last decade.
Bioware’s model for DLC is well fucked. I picked up ME2 for free on Origin, ME1 for $5 and ME3 for $10. The DLC, however, require Bioware points which very rarely go on special, and the point cost for the DLC hasn’t moved much since release – still asking $8 for a character and a handful of missions. It’s a shame I’m not going to get Stolen Memory, Arrival or Lair of the Shadow Broker for ME2 – they’re all fantastic, but I can’t justify the cost on a game this old.
I enjoyed the heavy RPG elements in ME1 when I was younger, even the Mako exploration. Coming back now, with less free time and far less patience for filler – I do not want to do that level of inventory management. It was fantastic foresight to tweak these elements for the sequel, as they’re the things that seem worse for the time since release.
It’s a really obvious port of a console game – the 1-8 quick key slots are well done, but there’s no quick save button. Curiously, despite having achievements, they’re in-game only and not integrated with Origin.
Overall, beside all of the sifting through inventory, ME1 is a fantastic game. Looking forward to getting into the newer games.
I remember thinking ME1 looked horrible. There’s a lot of great looking stuff in the game but when you get face to face everyone is ugly. I think the filter made it worse too. Outstanding game though.
Yeah the way they’re handling ME2 on Origin is fucked. At least offer me a way to buy all the DLC at a discount. At one point I think I totaled it up and if I wanted all of ME2’s DLC it was going to cost more than $60.
When I last re-played ME2 I also found that it got very tedious around the whole planet scanning mechanic. You need to do so much of that to get enough resources to buy all the upgrades and stuff. It was probably just as much of a waste of time as exploring in the Mako, but the Mako was a bit more active and interesting IMO. I’m hoping the claims that Andromeda brings back the uncharted world exploration stuff is true as it was a big part of what made that first game stick with me. The galaxy was still mysterious and everything, you didn’t know what you might encounter at random. I appreciated the more Star Trek feel it had.
So, i’ve never been much of an AMD fan. But Ryzen has piqued my interest, especially with the upcoming R3 & R5 cpu’s. The R7 1800X, 1700X & 1700 all seem like awesome CPU’s, but obviously nothing is perfect at launch. Also the straight up comparing it to a 5960x or a 6900k in reviews is stupid, especially when reviewers are acting surprised that a $1000 (USD) CPU is beating the $500 (USD) CPU.. Well you kinda hoped it would.
But what annoys me most is (& JayzTwoCents pointed this out in his weekly livestream with Barnacules) that AMD were emailing reviewers telling them to disable certain shell commands & such on their Intel CPU’s so the AMD CPU pulled ahead in testing. Which to me is unethical & misleading.
I’m not at all surprised by any of the dodgy shit that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to cpu tests etc.
As for the comparing to intel cpu’s, while it is a bit apples to oranges (given the architecture differences etc.,) I do understand why they do it. It’s kind of hard not to, especially when there’s only 2 players in the scene.
Some of the results were impressive given the price point of s couple of them, but i think the 1700 was a bit of a letdown for them. The fact it’s only like $20 cheaper than an i7-1770k, has twice as many physical cores, and yet failed to beat it in almost every category must be a bit of a disappointment for them. Even I expected that it would maybe JUST be a little faster, and I was quite shocked when I saw the results. If it was like $100 cheaper, I think they’d have a winner on their hands, but my guess is, unless they’re diehard AMD fans, people will choose the 1770K every time.
Yeah. Let us hope the R5 is gonna be the sweet spot for the Ryzen CPU’s since they should have more time to fine tune them so they perform better.
Sounds to me AMD is going back to making RISC style chips and are trying to hide the disadvantage of such by having the complex/hardware accelerated operations disabled so the Intel chip has the same instruction set.
Which in itself is an unfair comparison as due to their complex architecture some operations are slower on a CISC chip and a RISC.
But it has been a long time since I looked closely at CPU architectures. Any insight on this, @welbot?
I haven’t looked too deeply in to the architecture of the new AMD chips, but they have said that they were aiming for a 40% improvement in Instructions per cycle, but I think this mostly comes from SMT (Simultaneous Multi Threading – 2 instructions per core)
My understanding is, that neither Intel nor AMD are using strict RISC/CISC architecture any more, and they’re both using hybrids of both, but each is rooted differently in core functionality. (ie Intel built upon a core of CISC and AMD built upon a core of RISC.) I don’t think either of them is anything close to what they used to be though.
If i recall correctly, the next lot of Intel chips may even be using some new hybrid of CISC/RISC/VLIW/EPIC. It’s really difficult to nail modern cpu’s down to just one type, as different bits within the cpu’s can run on different architecture types. (Like SSE/MMX can be both CISC or VLIW)
Um, no. As long as they’re executing the x86/amd64 instruction set, they’re CISC machines. CISC is better for higher-power architectures. You’re getting confused with the fact that AMD are also making a play for the ARM market, releasing the K12 processor some time this year with is AMD’s first internally-designed ARM64 core (their previous ARM processor used ARM-designed Cortex A57s). The ARM architecture is RISC.
The big improvement for Ryzen is that they have full SMT support, which is an edge that Intel has had on them since it was introduced on high-end Pentium 4s.
Wanting to get a dual monitor stand, something that will comfortably support 27 inch monitors. I found this one, which as cheap as $70, it seems pretty good. I don’t need independent up & down for monitors, since my two don’t move, at most just pivot & swivel is needed. Plus this one can be had for under $100 & seems to have good reviews online.
Link doesn’t work
Of course it doesn’t cause I fucked up, my bad >.< it should be there now..
hahah I know how you feel 😉
Looks like a solid arm to me. Do you have an account with Anyware? Just curious where you got your price from considering they’re a wholesaler. (If you don’t, I have an account with them if you want me to check how much i could get ya one for)
Not sure where I saw $70, but PCCG & Kogan/Dicksmith both have it for $89/$86 before shipping. With shipping would come to $107 from PCCG & $105 from Kogan.
I was only using anywhere because I came across them a while back when looking at this one, which is nice & all, but cheapest i’ve seen it is about $170 (was $140 a few months ago..)
Horizon: Zero Dawn’s a weird game… the first 15 hours or so feels exactly like Far Cry 3 took Bioware’s conversation mechanics, changed to third person, and replaced “you have technical superiority over your foes” to “your foes are robot dinosaurs and you just have a bow and tripwires.” Overall, it was pretty darn dull – I never got around to finishing FC4 because it felt like there had been very little to differentiate it from FC3, and was about to stop playing. Then I found a thunderjaw (the robot t-rex they showed off in the previews), and thought – “Screw it, let’s see what you got.”
I managed to get it down to about half health, but ran out of resources to make arrows and was low on medicines, so I retreated. A little later, I picked up a rope-launcher and went through its tutorials – the last part of which required me to tie down three large machines (eg. a thunderjaw), so I went off looking for a rematch. Found two in a small crater, and against my better judgement, gave it a shot. Many failed attempts later, I managed to knock the artillery off their backs, and tie them both down long enough to pick up said artillery and blow them to hell with it. And it kinda added a little bit of Monster Hunter to the FC3+Bioweare mix – right down to scrounging for materials and hunting smaller machines for parts to make ammo in preparation to fight something larger.If the game has more fights like that, I’m sold on it – and I hope Redmaw has some tricks to set it apart from the other thunderjaws, who don’t seem too dangerous now I know how to deal with them…
I feel like I should to apologise to @beeawwb and to Bobs in general, I have been using the name Bobgoblins all weekend, mostly because it annoys @batguy.
Sorry B-ob.
hehe. bobgoblin*guy at batguy’s work*
“Hey batguy! What’d you get up to this weekend?”
*Batguy*
“Hobnobbin with the bobgoblin!”
* Bobgoblin *
Oh and Tiglet has just started pretending to use a magic stick
Wallykazam, wallykazeek, make a cheesecake for daddy
Isn’t quite there yet but so cute
I knew you’d get the reference 🙂
And that is very cute!
Holy smokes, I used to frequent this lovely community some years ago before moving abroad, 2 pages at the end of the week..where did everybody go?
That’s not even the worst of it. This is week 2 of this particular thread heh.
Daaamn. Do you now if mark serrels is still around here?
Yep Mark is still here, he is the chief editor for Kotaku, Gizmodo & Life Hacker now! He moved up and left us all behind :'( Haha
Good to hear! Thanks for the update 🙂
Lots of it moved to twitter. Site redesign screwed access on mobile so lots of random little discussion and thoughts moved to twitter
Oh right. Fair enough then. Are you talking about kotaku aus twitter?
More peoples personal twitter accounts. A lot of questions that were asked directly here now move to twitter and mentions.
Oh okay cool. Thank you for letting me know the happenings 🙂
Most of us are pretty easy to find on twitter 🙂
Also, I think as people started meeting IRL more often (at PAX and other small meats) it was easier/faster to organise via twitter than tagging here.
Awesome! Good to know 🙂
Chances are many have seen this video already but for those who haven’t, it looks like Jim Sterling is on the receiving end again and this time it’s a trademark take down.
Yeah… A trade mark take down.
Can’t say developers are not creative; it’s just a bitty they waste it on this kind of sh*t.
Short version of the video; again a developer got his/her glass jaw broken and is trying to suppress criticism on copyright grounds but are using the trademark avenue in hopes of success.
hahaha probably helps if they actually had a registered trademark 🙂
Since when has facts stopped YouTube’s system from being hijacked?
EDIT: typo.
Yeah bit dodgy the way they’re tried to tackle this one. Sounds like a serious bunch of douchebags
It all just boils down to basically more people (these days) having a glass jaw than those who do not.
We’re seeing more and more people having no tolerance to critisim. From YouTube reviews to even just forum comments.
Everyone is just acting like, “Free speech == don’t question me!”
Is Jim doing serious criticism or is he still wholly reliant on being an arsehole for entertainment?
Looks like it. I have seen his Slaughter Grounds video so as far as that situation goes had did make a valid assessment which lead to the circus afterwards.
But I’m not dense; I’ve only seen a handful of his videos so there is the chance he has some that are off the mark.
\o/ just signed up for the NBN (with Telstra x.x) I was able to migrate across with the same plan same price with the remaining 14 months of my contract, which is the easiest no fuss solution.
So found out how The witness was screwing us over somewhat
Spoiling for mechanics
Since we are normally playing when Tiglet has just gone down we normally have the sound very low. Which wasn’t a big issue, we could just turn it up when we found a thumb drive or whatever. Right up until last night we worked out that there is a sound based puzzle type, no wonder I couldn’t work anything out with that bloody thingStatus update (descriptions of areas and puzzle types)
Working through the different areas and seem to be getting through most of it. Numerous lasers fired and not too many full roadblocks at the moment. The lasers I know of that we still need to fire are: The bell tower, the jungle tree and the desert hexagonal ones. We currently have no idea at all about the hexagonal things but haven’t been back to try again so sure something will click. Stuck opening a door (colour star puzzle) with the bell tower as well as what we now know is a sound based puzzle. Just worked out the jungle tree one so will hopefully progress through there soon.@cffndncr – I finally got through The Case of Charles Dexter Ward – absolutely loved it. I’m sad that HPL never properly finished it – would have been cool to know if Lovecraft had anyone specific in mind behind the bearded bloke Willet unwittingly summoned… and no less interestingly, who Curwen thought he was actually getting that he considered so dangerous…
Yeah, definitely one of my favourites!
So here’s what’s been happening for me
One of Techie’s legs is 95% fibreglassed
The other is 35% done.
Sid got a $50 bath, spoilt bugger.
I started using twine, thank @welbot
Mum’s health has been up and down
The hospital rescheduled our appointment so we showed up for no reason.
I drove all the way to Frankston and back. (longest distance I’ve driven)
Nob and I discussed our cosplays.
Games wise, I’ve started playing terraria again with Nob, lobster and numbers.
Overwatch as usual. Random heroes. Overwatch seems to lo e giving me Sombra, widow hanzo and mccree. I’m terrible at all these characters.
Last but not least picross e7 and Loz picross. I love picross.
I want a $50 bath.
I’d feel so pampered.
If you pay me $50 I’ll put you in a trailer and squirt you with a hose
Please. Sid does not just get the hose. He gets a message in the form of a strip out which removes the dead undercoat.
Then, he gets a warm bath inside the grooming salon. He gets high quality shampoo and conditioner because he suffers from itchy skin. This would normally cost extra, but Sid is good at conning people.
Then, the pedicure.
After that is the Blow dry and brush. Once that’s finished, a spray of cologne.
Then the groomer will play with him a bit if she has time.
This is definitely not trailer and hose stuff. =P
All Chilli gets is in the middle of the yard with a cold hose & some fancy smelling shampoo & conditioner 😛
Not good enough for Sid. As I said, spoilt
I used to take Chilli to Petbarn & give her a hydrobath etc.. But I didn’t like the shampoo they used, stank like the stuff all old ladies seemed to wear lol.
I’d take her to get pampered like you get Sid done, but there’s one place that I know of here & they’re like $80 or closer to $100 for a dog her size, which is a rort.
So garden hose + expensive-ish shampoo & conditioner. She stays clean for almost a month when I bath her at home too, which is nice. I also do the claws & brush her, I so wish she didn’t have that Border Collie coat so much hair D=
Ah yes. There is a special $90 brush that is really good but I don’t remember the name.
It removes the dead undercoat but you can only use it once a week as it can make your dog bald if you use it too much.
Dog shampoo smells the way it does because they’re quite limited in the ingredients they can use. Dogs often have allergies to the fragrances in human shampoo, especially certain breeds. Our Golden Retrievers would get quite itchy if we didn’t use proper dog shampoo.
Our last dog used to be pretty amusing. Hated every minute of getting a bath. Took forever to dry him off due to the thick coat. But once he was clean he’d run around like a lunatic with a big grin because everyone would be petting him more and telling him how much nicer he smelled.
@negativezero that’s fair enough. The stuff I use is awesome smelling, coconut & something.
Chilli is the same, hates the bath, but loves the attention from it.. She also loves being towel dried haha.
@scree holy shit.. Here’s me thinking spending $20 on a brush was a lot of money haha. If you do remember can you let me know, I wouldn’t mind looking into such a thing.
Okay. So my comment didn’t post before. It’s called a mars coat king and It’s what professional groomers use
@scree Thanks, i’ll look into it 😀
No problem. Hope it helps
WOO MY GTX 1070 TURNED UP TODAY. It’s awesome. Though I maxed out the memory in GTA V and managed to go over by 200mb and that’s only at 1080P hahaha.
Also selling my old card to a mate went to replace the thermal paste, and it was so dried up it wasn’t funny D= also turns out the memory modules have their own little heatsinks, so I couldn’t be bothered replacing the thermal pads on them. Plus they looked all good.
Has anybody done any phone app development?
What software did you use? Have a request for a basic app but I haven’t done App dev so not sure where to start.
Any advice, solutions or recommendations appreciated
I haven’t built one myself, but I found this a while back, and it looks like it might be a good place for you to start.
https://www.touchdevelop.com/
It’s a Microsoft app builder, but it can make apps for ios and android as well. Looks like it’s designed in a way that makes it much easier for non coders to build something, and there’s guides on there and stuff too.
Doing this as multi posts so it doesn’t go in to moderation.
If you want to do some android dev, there’s a good guide here.
https://developer.android.com/training/basics/firstapp/index.html
Just need to download the android studio from the link at the top, and then click get started.
There’s also a ton of other sites/programs which can help you easily make apps, but you probably want to look in to the details of licencing and stuff for each one. I haven’t looked in detail at most of these, but given some of them are cloud based, it’s possible they may try to retain some rights to the apps you make, or perhaps have a paid option that leaves you free to do what you will. It’s possible some are just totally free of any little traps, but you’ll need to look in to each to find out.
Anyway, there’s a list of 10 different ones here.
http://mashable.com/2013/12/03/build-mobile-apps/#JsjzBKdzsPqc
43 hours in, and finally saw my first lightning storm in Zelda.
That shit’s scary 😛
Ha. Five Wii U friends online, and four of them are playing BotW.
@cubits you and your Netflix are letting the team down 😛
Watching netflix on wii u, playing botw on switch.
Team Wii U!
My wiiU is used everyday for either Netflix or Youtube.
Woo, won tickets for Power Rangers!
It’s Movie Time!
Breath of the Page 4: https://miiverse.nintendo.net/posts/AYMHAAADAAB2V0f9gaGKVw
Well, after about 20 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles X, I find myself corrected.
Despite the promise of the story and the concept, the growing frustration over the past 20 hours has finally gotten to the point where the game is just no longer fun anymore.
And most of it goes around how the difficulty curve is not challenging like in a fun way with Xenoblade Chronicles.
Getting my team wiped out in a few hits by an ape that is only a few levels higher than me is just unfair, the combat system (while I get the idea) is just a cluttered mess and I’m no trapped in an affinity mission with no way to get the two tubes needed to complete said quest within a reasonable time frame.
Usually I’d like to see these things through but no; there is little to no sense of accomplishment with farming in this game so this is one game I’m not regretful for not finishing.
At least the prior game had a sense of reward even after the bosses owned my hide.
Yep. It felt like being trapped in a bad single player version of a Korean grind-based MMO to me. Very disappointing after the first game.
I hope Xenoblade 2 is better.