splodge

I add more names to the list.

The Darkness That Comes Before, by R Scott Bakker.

It's very intense very dark fantasy, but brilliantly written and masterfully constructed. Its one of those series that has basically ruined a lot of other fantasy for me, as I find most modern fantasy now to be by the numbers and repetitive / generic after this series. The series is an epic spanning multiple holy wars and deals with all kinds of subject matter. If you are squeamish maybe give it a miss but it's so god damned good I try get everyone to read it.

And I can't recommend The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch enough also. The Gentleman Bastards series is a fantastic series of books. They are yet to be finished but are genuinely brilliant. It's about a band of thieves getting into all kinds of shenanigans, and you will be on the edge of your seat for a lot of it.

I opened up one stream a year ago of a pretty lady with ginormous boobs jumping up and down or something, and now half the suggested streams are always various ladies with ginormous boobs covering only their nipples jumping up and down.

It's 90 percent there already. Seems foolish not to work it out so that these streamers can just do their thing and get paid. Sure there are a ton of places on the Internet where people can live stream themselves doing sexy stuff, but they clearly have an audience / mod team on twitch already.

While in Ireland we don't celebrate thanksgiving, a huge part of the Irish diaspora and my own relatives and direct family who live in the states do and I can't help but feel linked to the holiday.

It has been a massive year for me this year. About ten years ago I was a total mess, my mental health was in the shitter and I was floating from shit job to shit job after having to quit a college degree halfway after going back to college as a mature student. I decided to emigrate and help a buddy set up a business in a country where I didn't speak the language and was forced to make new friends and experience the world through a different lens. It was a gruelling 3 - 4 years and while I had an absolute blast, when I returned home after the business shut down, I vowed I was going to figure out my shit and start over with a solid, stable career.

I wanted to be an air traffic controller. It's something I had my eye on for years, but had no chance of getting as the recruitment process was notoriously difficult and I had zero experience. I did not make it past the first few steps.

I took a job in the civil service working for our police force here as a control room operator in their headquarters, taking emergency calls from the public and soon jumped at the chance to become a dispatcher.

This year, with four years dispatching under my belt and a wealth of experience in high pressure and serious incident management, I reapplied for the position of air traffic controller. Out of hundreds of applicants and a very tough year long recruitment process I not only made it through selection, but ranked only a few spots from the very top of the panel. At the start of next year I am going to be once again moving to start a new life at a new job, hopefully for the last time. I am beyond excited, and a little bit scared - but in a good way!

To say I am thankful is an understatement. Thankful for my family who supported me when I was at the end of my tether and getting myself situated upon returning to ireland. Thankful for my friends who encouraged me the whole way and kept me sane through an awful few years of working in emergency services through a pandemic. Thankful for my colleagues who made me laugh and kept my brain occupied.

I am also genuinely and sincerely thankful for this dumb website. It has gone through many serious changes since I started paying attention to it in 2010, just like myself. With all the ups and downs Giant Bomb has been my favourite, most consistent source of entertainment, distraction and comfort. This website has been there through some extremely dark chapters in my life, and I hope Jan, the Jeffs, and all the staff sincerely take what I am saying to heart if they happen to read over this thread. You have done a fantastic job keeping all this together, and are currently making some of the most fun and engaging content the site has ever produced. Thanks for being a great bunch of duders.

And thanks to the GB community for being consistently the most awesome community on the Internet. I read the forums a lot while not posting much. I mostly lurk on GB infinite these days as I don't have time to chat there alot, but there's a great crew in there all the time and I am thankful for the chats we have had at times when it was sorely needed.

Thanks world, and thanks Giant Bomb!

So they have a massive success with an animated Mario movie, following a set formula and setting themselves up for nothing but a win with very smart script and design choices, and will now follow that up with a live action version of Zelda from...

... the producer of the venom and uncharted movies and the director of the maze runner trilogy.

OK then.

Link is going to end up being Rami Malek or something.

I played through the campaign last night.

It was a fairly bog standard campaign as Modern Warfare goes. I don't really care about the length of the campaign... 5 hours ish is about as much as I want to spend on that anyway. The story is whatever, and it really does feel like they do the campaign now just to tick a box.

The real failure for me is that the new open combat style missions did not do anything exciting with the new format and went nowhere near far enough. My first thought when I heard about these initially was that they might finally make the campaign co-op, and give the players some large sandbox areas to go wild in. Instead it's just running around fighting more or less the exact same dudes every time, completing fairly boring objectives before exfil. Nothing new or interesting really. A missed opportunity.

I'm not all that bothered tho in fairness, I play cod for the mulitplayer and I am looking forward to that. I also belive they are mixing up zombies mode this time around? Making it more open-world? Zombies was always a brick wall for me, whenever I tried it I never knew what the fuck was happening. This was also obvious to whoever was on my team becuase once they saw my confusion they would just quit. After four or five times I just never played

Zombies again. Here's hoping this time around it's something I can get into.

Hot coffee!

I have finished the game. The last four hours or so was extremely frustrating as the game crashed every 30 - 60 minutes, had to step away a few times before I put my xbox out the window.

So a big shame about the performance issues on Series S, but , all that aside..

PHENOMENAL FUCKING VIDEO GAME

Really looking forward to new game +

And some day... some day we will hopefully get a Control 2

I have been getting more and more pissed off with crashes on the series s. It's really frustrating because I love this game so god damned much. I'm maybe about 18 hrs in and casey and another character just had a kind of throwaway moment together and I laughed so fucking hard. God I love this game. I just wish it wasn't crashing now every 45 mins - 2 hrs

I really hope they figure this out

@nodima: agreed, one of the things I think I love so much about this game is that they genuinely want you to have pleasant moments of down time just moving around an environment and taking in the sights and having sometimes very funny conversations with people. You don't have to be scared ALL the time. When you're in it, you're in it, but in between you can relax fully.

Thats what makes the ratcheting up of tension so effective. You have to mentally take stock and prepare yourself to dive back into the nightmare. At times you might be exploring an area, having nice conversations with funny weirdos, and in the back of your mind you are thinking at some point this place is going to be realllllllll fucked up.