NetRngr

We appreciate all you do Larry!

Dang I missed it this yr! Happy Birthday Larry!

In case i get tied down, and forget again this yr., Happy Thanksgiving to all of you guys. Hope you have a great day!

Well, not sure how I feel about that. I mean if they are doing internal testing I dont feel they need to tell anyone anything about it however I'm less forgiving than I would be since they pushed it on live servers all stealth mode. They got lucky this time if people liked the change as much as they think they do but it could have gone horribly wrong. Skill based matchmaking is a good idea to keep players playing because really who want to get roflstomped every time you play a game but no game company has figured out the sweet spot really well yet. I will say I did like the original way PUBG didn't even try to use SBMM and just dumped the first 100 folks into a free for all. Sometimes you got lucky others you got stomped but it was good... until every cheating script kiddie on the planet decided to use cheats in the game.

Yeah I was aware of the no politics or religion thing which is why I just wanted to get with you and let you be the arbiter of if it violated the rule. I was being specifically vague in my wording and didn't want to appear to take either side just mention things that have transpired since I started this little whirligig ride I've been on for a bit over half a century. God that made me feel even older lol. Thanks pal. I'll try and swing by Discord soon. Im usually on it in the evenings but am in my raiding guilds' channel trying not to get my face stomped in while healing a raid.

Gator, If anything I touched on above is deemed not for here please feel free to edit it out. Just ruminating a bit.

So, I'm getting ready to turn 58 on Friday and as age increases the mind tends to wander and explore topics not usually pondered. I was looking back at what i have seen come about just in my lifetime. I've seen the biggest technological revolution in human history. When I was a wee lad I remember getting excited with my folks when phones became push button instead of rotary and shortly thereafter, well it seems like a short time, they became wireless which was a game changer when you wanted to have privacy. Now there are cellular phones that merge computers and telephones all into the palm of your hand. Amazing! The Internet is something that most people have access to and is basically a hotline to all of the knowledge man has acquired and can be accessed in seconds. What was once the playground of Nerds and professors / scientists now gives everyone full access to basically anything they would need to know. I've seen automobiles go from devices that were doing extremely well to clock 70 to 80 thousand miles before you had to start looking at freshening up the engine to now 200,000 miles plus is the norm and if you dont get that you probably had a lemon. We are also now entering the beginnings of the EV era and have full electric and hybrid cars. Not quite the flying cars of the Jetson's but we're getting there. I've seen computers go from things that took up large rooms in universities to things that can fit in the space a monitor takes up on your desktop or can be held in your hand. It's still hard to believe that my phone has more than 1,000,000 times more Ram and over 100,000 times more processing power than the guidance computer on the Apollo 11 Mission that landed a human on the face of an extraterrestrial body for the first time. (Leaving all the Star Trek green girl jokes alone as a sign of getting older.) Sadly as we all have seen there are worse things to be sure. Last Sat. I saw, for the third time in my life, the attempted assassination of a political figure. That's depressing, however it's comforting to know all these have failed. I've seen the racial divide go from outright violence in the street to a place where I was hopeful that it would become a thing of the past right back to one of our major issues yet again. I've seen Families who no longer speak to each other based on which political party / candidate they support which is hardly something that should keep you from speaking to your family and friends. The amount of good far outweighs the bad but we should all still strive to get rid of the bad while improving the good.

Back in the day when I was but a sprout, my folks were pretty strict about what shows we watched (Hey Im from the south.). So much so that unless the adult humor was so well hidden we didn't ask any questions and sometimes laughed just because Mom or Dad did. I've embarked on an epic quest to watch / rewatch these shows as an adult and let me tell you... they are awesome. As a young kid the subtlety of Redd Foxx's humor on Sanford and Son or Carrol O'Conner's jibes and the undertones of All in the Family are amazing and side splittingly funny, well unless you are easily offended and then, well you have no business even attempting humor. I just finished the full 11 season run of MASH and while we were allowed to watch it we didn't get half the jokes. The take on war and the horrors that accompany it were also quite poignant given that the show aired within the last three years of the Vietnam War when approval of our involvement was at an all time low. It certainly had some adult jokes and dark humor but it was a great show, much more so than what i remembered. If you haven't taken the time to rewatch these, some of us are old geezers, or if as a younger person (God, I sound old) then you should definitely put them in your streaming list.

I wish I had the desire to right now. I have 19 basses and a Fender Acoustic on the way, (hoping just being able to pick it up and noodle away will help) but since the bride passed away I haven't had the wherewithal to do anything other than go to work and play some video games. That's gonna change since I'm gonna move and sell the house. Someone has to pack all this stuff up.

Wow.... Ghosts are popping up everywhere. I get what you are saying man, Over the past two years i have lost my uncle, my Dad, and my darling wife. You would think that after the first one I would have learned that but as is the case you dont want to admit that it's going to happen or as quickly as it does. In my wifes case it was just under a year and if you had seen and talked with her two weeks prior you would have said she had years left. In two weeks time she went from relatively normal to unable to even take her medication without assistance. Gaming seems to draw people into relationships even if they dont initially think they would be. Gator and I definitely had a rough start to our relationship, I put the blame for that squarely on my shoulders, however now even though we have never met in person Larry is someone I would call a good friend and hope someday to meet. I have a couple of guys in Atlanta that I met back in the early days of UO (Ultima Online) and have played multiple MMORPGS with that are two of my closest friends in the world. I have gone and spent weekends in Atl. with them and when my wife passed they were one of first people I notified as they knew her almost as long I we had known each other. I'm getting ready to take a weeks vacation and go up for a few days and hang out with them and let them know I love em like they were my brothers from birth. It's funny how close you can get to someone just playing a video game. We hope you do continue to pop in as most of us old folks around here aren't playing really competitive games both due to age kicking our asses and the fact that DICE /EA and Activision haven't been able to release a decent BF / CoD game in a decade.

Hope everyone had a safe Memorial Day weekend and all is well with you guys. As a veteran who has lost friends and compatriarts to action it is a somber day for me as I remember the good times and the bad. Its a time that I tend to get a good case of survivors guilt. I know my brothers would not want me feeling blue and being in pain yet it does pop up. If you have lost loved ones to combat action I would like to say I'm sorry and I feel your loss. I spent yesterday planting flags on cemetery plots and had a few left over when I had taken care of the ones I knew of. I walked around and found a few more and gave them a flag as well. I had one single flag left and was on my way back to my truck wondering if I would find a place for the last one and then it hit me. I planted the small flag on my wifes grave. While we were not married while I was in service she was a serviceman's bribe nonetheless. She helped me with my depression at this time of year and dealt with my case of PTSD albeit a light one. In my eyes she has earned her flag and I did miss her support this year as it was the first one since her passing. If you know of a serviceman or a spouse make sure to let them know they are valued. I personally dont like the whole "Thank you for your service." thing since it was my choice for my reasons but I understand and appreciate the sentiment. I knew I would serve ever since I was a kid. My grandfather served in WWII with the 82nd as a paratrooper, My Dad, while avoiding combat, was in during Vietnam, I joined right out of high school and was blessed to serve with the 4th ID, 82nd Airborne, and the 101st Airborne as my home units. To my brothers who have fallen, I miss you and will see you fellows soon enough. Keep a cold one on hand for a brother wont ya? Hooah!

I have said it here before when the topic pops up but I have been a diehard Dune fan since I read the books back in Jr. High and when the movie came out I doubled down. I have to say when the reboot movies were announced I was shall we say, less than enthusiastic. I turn on my TV to do some light viewing after work yesterday to wind down from work before getting into some gaming and imagine my surprise to see that Max, one of the very few pay streaming services I have, is running part two of the new Dune movie. I enjoyed the first part so I decided that it had to be watched. OMG! If you enjoyed the first part the second will rock your socks. Very well done. I suggest that if you have Max you go out and give it a look. I think that this weekend I may rewatch part one and then part two back to back. I always seem to get a much better viewing experience when I see all of a series at one time. A+ movie and one of the very few reboots that I have enjoyed more than the original.

I'll have to give it a look.

That does look mighty fun. Is it still keybind hell?