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If you can believe it, it's been over 4 years since we last raised any money for the forum. To put it into perspective, the last time we ran a fundraiser, Fifty Shades of Grey and the first Kingsman movie were topping the box office The Order: 1886 and Evolve were just released Age of Ultron was the most current Marvel movie The Walking Dead topped TV ratings Barack Obama was the President of the United States Actually, the last time it was predicted that we'd raise enough get to a point where: At least two of those came true! About a month ago, you probably noticed the great outage of March the 22nd when the forum was down for almost the entire day due to depletion of funds. And then the other outage of Two Days Ago because my slack ass hadn't put up the fundraising post yet 😆 We've gotten to a point with our setup where the features we have are close to everything we need, and the software we now use is stable. Pretty much all we need coverage for is hosting. I'm also working on getting those costs lowered a bit to $45 a month. Think we can pre-pay keeping the lights on for at least another 2 years? If so, that'd put our goal close to an even $1000. Last time, 23 of us stepped up to contribute. If you can, consider contributing a month! But really, anything and everything helps. We can even take payments directly within the forum now! This month starts our 16th year together here on LCVG. So here's to many more, with discussions on PlayStation 5, Xbox Next, and everything else in between. To donate, click the Donation Goal Progress Bar at the bottom of this thread!

I’ll be contributing on Friday. Thanks to everyone for their donations! LCVG Gold logins will be sent out by months end.

Well...... The outcome to this exchange now has the potential to be more interesting than the movie. Joey?

Needs to be one with Jon Snow saying "I left the cave and the redhead with nice tits for this?" Carlos.

It is official, expanse saved by amazon . Deal for S4 was completed last night.

That's a lot of time for Forza.

Mindhunter finally returns Aug 16th

BOY(s)!.... I got the platinum. Even deferring to easy for that Valkyrie queen was punishing. I actually got her down to a quarter of her final bar of life on my third try only for her to unleash one of those blinding attacks which finished me off. I tried again, and again, and again for almost an hour last night then called it quits. Several more attempts before I went out early this morning finally concluded with a victory. We were both within an inch of our lives but I just pulled it off at the last second. I took Kratos and Atreus home for the little bonus ending. Glad I had read about that or I'd have missed it. Time to turn my attentions back to the Xbox now until Smash Bros, and I've got Spidey waiting on the PS4 to play through over the Christmas period.

In some cases where you can't get a url to content, or if you are posting something original, you can attach files directly to posts. I noticed in the backend settings that some members were limited to a puny 500kb of total attachments. I bumped that up so everyone now has a much more reasonable amount. Attach away!

Just walked out of The Last Jedi, and fuck that was a good Star Wars movie! More thoughts later.

I told myself before heading north for the eclipse that I wouldn't bother to photograph it, mainly because I know myself and how wrapped up I can get in capturing a moment and end up not actually being in the moment to experience it. But, when I got to Rogue Farms the morning of, there was so much time to hang out before the eclipse started, I decided to set up my tripod and camera with the 70-200mm lens on it. I aimed it roughly where the sun would be and just left it (lens cap on) for totality to arrive. When it finally did arrive, I snapped a few photos and then ignored the camera for the rest. Here is the best of the shots, taken just as totality was taking hold: I kinda dig the lens flares, although normally I'd try to avoid them.

Oops, forgot to update last night. Had a pretty painless time putting everything together this weekend, aided by a 7 hour power outage on Saturday which motivated me to just sit down and plow through the rest of it. It took me a little longer than I thought it would, but maybe I'm a lot more deliberate than I was in my younger years. And that's probably why everything just worked with no issues! Case looks great, it's a little louder than my old one though not by much, understandable with the much more appropriate/substantial fans in this one for the beefy hardware. I would have been fine with no window at all since I really abhor the blinged out builds people do, and yet I kind of like the dark tinted glass. I have it sitting on its side, so if I walk up near it I can see inside on the top and it's cool, just the LED that is inside the AMD cooler/fan on top of the CPU and one on the edge of the video card. It looks really nice and doesn't bleed out into the room! Knocks on the case are probably the same I would have had with any case this size, due to the amount of drives I crammed into it and they are the old 3.5" size. If I wanted to avoid this, I probably would have needed to go with the "full" ATX tower styles, but I made it work. The back panel (now on the bottom) that covers where most of the cable management takes place as well as covers the (only) two 3.5" drive bays, I had to really give it a good shove to get it back on and screwed in, the ends of the SATA cables on the drives made it hard, too. The other two drives + two SSDs...well, I'm not proud of it, but I basically just stacked them neatly in the main bay on top of unused PCI slots, it works fine and the cables are out of the way, this thing isn't going to get stood up or moved and I have no idea what I'd need to put in those slots. The upside is that the four 3.5" drives are 6TB enterprise-level Seagates that a friend that works for A Very Big Computer Company gave me a little while back, they have loads of them in their lab they use for testing that they can't then re-sell or re-use. So I have 24TB of traditional storage, the 1TB ultra-fast PCIe M.2 boot drive, and then I filled the last two slots with 250GB and 120GB SSDs pulled over from the old machine that I'll use for more game installs. I think I am set storage-wise for a very long time, hah, though there is one more M.2 slot I could use if I wanted to add another SSD at some point. Obviously....this thing is fast. I have been re-downloading everything and updating drivers and such, but I gave DOOM a try at 4k at Ultra Detail and it was as smooth as silk. Tried a few older games that are notoriously unoptimized and load times were better and CPU definitely must have been a bottleneck on the old system too, ran much smoother. I hope to give a few newer games a run-through shortly (Wolfenstein: Youngblood was included with the Nvidia, will try that when it releases on Friday) as well as get my Oculus hooked up and messing with super-sampling. I am a very satisfied customer thus far!

Officially arriving on Halloween this year!

How’s this for confirmation? EDIT: What excites me about this is that it means I can finally use a proper Dual Shock 4 controller on the PS4 Remote Play app on iPad. It also means I should be able to use an Xbox controller for Project xCloud when it arrives. The dream of being able to play my console games anywhere I want on any device I want is quickly becoming a reality.

They better have the mother-of-all "Previously Ons" at the beginning of this! Carlos.

There you go.

I donated. All in pennies. Good luck counting the change, ya filthy animals!

Well, I've decided to make a 2019 goal: to have a 4K television by early summer/early October (my birthday). I'll start researching now.

Perfect timing. I just "finished" the main game last night by finding the last Barn Find (the one you get for buying the 10 million credit castle). I mean sure, I didn't get 3 stars in all the Drift zones, and there's still a ton of other activities I can do at any given time, but after 60 hours of play time, I think I can safely say I've gotten my money's worth out of this game.

To answer my curiosity as to how movie and TV content gets delivered to Apple in the first place, their official documentation on the matter requires use of approved encoding houses and aggregates who will take a distributor's content and master it to Apple's required standards, much in the way studios use third parties for their disc mastering and authoring (indeed, houses like Deluxe who do that kind of work for Blu-ray and UHD are also approved iTunes partners). From Apple: https://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/working-itunes/sell-content/movie-faq.html So with that answered I obviously wanted to then find out precisely what Apple's required standards for content delivery are, and wouldn't you know it, I found their complete asset guides for SD, HD, 4K and HDR. https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/ and https://help.apple.com/itc/filmspec/#/ The most relevant stuff: So my suspicion was correct. What you're basically looking at here are extremely high quality a/v masters of the level used to create UHD discs and Blu-rays (dem bitrates!), but delivered as ProRes (assuming ProRes was not already the master codec of choice to begin with, which in many cases these days it probably was). So in short, that's what Apple get to play with at their end before presumably transcoding it to h.264 and h.265 at bitrates of their choosing when delivering downconversions to the consumer. They could then, at any point of their choosing, up the level of quality that we receive without having to constantly go back to the studios to request new masters/encodes if we're to assume these masters stay in their possession. Hope that was as interesting to some of you as it was to me. I know it surely was for the forum's resident media server/transcoding nerds. I'll see if I can find anything relating to precisely how apple takes those masters and downconverts them for our consumption later in the week.

I say do it. You only live once. If the cost doesn’t break you, then buy it if that’s what you want. No, it probably doesn’t make sense no matter how you justify it, but as someone who owns a Switch that I can’t remember the last time I turned on, sense is very rarely a part of this hobby I have loved for almost 40 years. No, I don’t play nearly enough to justify owning all three consoles these days, but I like knowing I can whenever I want, and that there will not be a game I will ever miss out on if I don’t want to. Now as as someone who will end leaving a very large back log of games I will never finish to his kids when he dies, I will shut up now.

I take a lot of pride in where this thread is now going.

This videos gives you a good idea as to why a VR shooter like Firewall is different than one on a screen. I’ve started to get pretty good about using my whole body to peek around corners to make sure nobody is around, and getting better at using blind fire. The guy guy in the video seems to have figured out a lot of tricks (ie shooting out car windows). I wouldn’t want to face him in game.

Contacted support and described my situation and they gave me a refund. Was quick and painless.

Speaking of Ozark, I'm frankly a little mystified at how Bateman can get an Emmy nom for Actor and Linney doesn't. Not saying Bateman is bad, but Linney brings a deep emotional weight that Bateman can't quite match. It's particularly noticeable in scenes they share. OTOH, that Bateman can even compete in a dramatic role like this is something. He has more of a range than I knew.

Glass poster

The Marantz is in my HT! Went (for now) a 5.2.4 set-up. It really lengthened the sounds in the room with the additional height speakers. When I can, I am going to get the Auro3D and add a Voice of God speaker directly overhead. At least I now have DTSX and can listen to the Jurassic Park movies.

I'd stay up for MS/Bethesda on Sunday over Sony, but I'm tehbiased as one of them pays for my beer.

What the heck do they teach over here?? actually I know... Might be worth kicking off a WW2 thread, guys?

I can't help but think that part of my anger comes from when I was 8 years-old and the New England Patriots murdered my family.

I want luke to keep waking Kylo up in the middle of the night.

Amusingly I had a conversation with co-worker who was pissed that Luke didn't go all Super Saiyan on the AT-AT's and new guerilla walkers in that scene. He expected Luke to show "an insane display of his Jedi powers!". My response to him was "Projecting a copy of yourself half way across the galaxy that's able to physically interact with others and manages to save the remnants of the resistance isn't an insane display of his Jedi powers?".

yeah i totally forgot to update the payment method. Many thanks to everyone who chipped in and to Cameron for making this happen. Payment method has been changed and we are set up properly.

My 1TB Fusion drive in my late 2013 iMac died today. I’d been having performance problems for sure, and was thinking it was something with the newest OS update. I’ve already got a 500GB SSD DIY kit coming from OWC (that’s a lot of acronyms!). Everything is backed up but my most recent one is in the cloud on Backblaze. I’m currently running the iMac off of a SuperDuper backup from last last year 😅, and on a 5400RPM USB3 drive, it’s so slow.

Late to the game, but donated.

This tweet seems on point:

Can I rant? I’ll watch Star Trek Beyond ten times over the forgettable rehashed nonsense that was “Into Darkness”. Beyond felt like an expanded episode but at least it was a good episode as opposed to the nonsensical Wrath of Khan ripoff the second movie was. I too enjoyed the original but it’s sequel gets worse with every viewing while the third movie gets more entertaining with its superior character interplay and focus.

Did some searching on that Google thing all the kids are talking about these days and my controller power on bug is something that seems to date back to 2013 for a number of users. With the console off I held down the X button on the front of the machine for ten seconds to do a master power down. After that, boop boop boop, the controller now powers on the console. Google findings did show the bug resurfaces for many who this solution worked for, however, but we’ll see (for others it didn’t work at all).

The Switch version of Tropical Freeze has apparently outsold the Wii: U version’s total sales already in Japan. Not bad, and glad to see it doing well. https://gonintendo.com/stories/309270-japan-donkey-kong-country-tropical-freeze-switch-sales-outsell

Mind you, the Infinity War post credit scene is Nick Fury walking up to Parker to speak to him about this new Cloverfield Initiative, so that's all true.

DIE HARD is starting to show up via some French retailers (May release) inc Amazon France! Prompted by its 30th anniversary I know, but still, Fox actually doing an older catalogue release for once! Hopefully Predator surfaces to cash in on the new film late this year.

I deeply apologize for my language. It's fucking awful.

Last minute Christmas present idea for Keith:

Second viewing done. Second only to Empire for me. Everything just clicks man. Even the casino chase wasn’t nearly as obtrusive though I still think it’s the films weakest link. The casino really clicked though. I can’t hate it cause it’s so different but enjoyable. The feels really landed with me on viewing 2. Luke viewing the twin suns as he passes.... The scene with Yoda is so wonderful the second time around. To the haters I say exactly what Kylo did in the film. Let the past die. Kill it if you have to and embrace Star Wars being fresh again.