mikeszekely

The second one. Some other stuff from the fair... Onyx Prime. He's sort of a triple changer. He's got this dragon mode. But also a centaur mode. Sideways and Excellion. Walmart exclusives, I think. Yeah, there's that Perceptor, too. He's getting the Blaster treatment... replacing the clear plastic of the prior release with painted bits, swapping black parts for dark gray, etc. But you'll probably buy him, because' he's coming with Ratbat and Ramhorn. And sure, Ratbat also had a release prior... but this one has his boosters. I think Percy and friends might be a Target exclusive. ...along with this two-pack of Devastation grunts. Amazon exclusive Carnivac and Ironfist... er, Fisitron. Bascially what I expected, though I'm surpised to see they actually put some new tooling on Ironfist. There's Diaclone-colored Topspin and Spinister, too. Spinister will basically be the same as the WfC version, but with darker colors inspired by the Marvel comics. And it's not news, but there's another peep at the other Hearts of Steel pack.

Alchemist is... Eh. I mean, I'd have maybe added some yellow, but that's Alchemist alright. Thing is, if you're deep enough into the lore to care about the 13 then you're probably buying regardless. Vortex, on the other hand, *chef's kiss*. The Hot Wheels collabs are pretty neat. I have Boneshaker in my garage in Forza Horizon, so seeing one that transforms into a robot is pretty cool with me.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, AMD isn't bs-ing and the 9070 XT is the same as the RTX 5070ti at rendering frames at 1440p with no upscaling or ray tracing. That's good and all... but upscaling and RT matter to me. So I still kind of need to know, how much worse is the 9070 XT at ray tracing? How much worse does the latest Zen 4 version of FSR look compared to DLSS? What kind of framerates both cards getting with RT on and upscaling set to Quality? Ultimately, to me, the RTX 5070ti might be worth $150 more (assuming it's eventually possible to get one at or near MSRP later in the year).

Yeah, I don't expect them to even match DLSS 3, let alone DLSS 4. I'm just going they've improved enough that i don't look at AMD's RT and FSR and immediately say, "Eww, I'll pay extra for an RTX 5070ti, thanks anyway."

So the 9700 and 9700 XT are actually going to be $549 and $599 (assuming you get get them at MSRP, though it does sound like AMD is working to have a lot more stock than Nvidia). Still concerned about AMD's ray tracing performance and FSR lagging behind Nvidia and DLSS, but I'm eagerly awaiting real benchmarks and proper reviews.

As someone who's been playing D&D since 3e, who's read most of the Forgotten Realms novels, and who adored the movie I'm cautiously optimistic.

Heads up, Walmart's collector's con is March 13-14. I expect a few Transformers exclusives like the Excellion repaint of Hot Shot and Sideways, but I think most relevant to the people here will be Deluxe-class Seaspray.

They haven't said definitively, pending an autopsy, but that seems to be the case.

Younger, I expect , than many of us on these boards, myself included. No two ways about that, it sucks.

I mean, I'm playing it with Game Pass because I'm already paying for that, but after playing long enough to get to the second main area I'd say it's worth picking up if you don't have Game Pass. The more I play it the more it reminds me of The Outer Words. I mean, The Outer Worlds was sort of mechanically similar to Fallout, but rather than one big open world map it was broken down into a number of smaller open world maps. So, Avowed is mechanically sort of like Elder Scrolls, but again instead of having one huge open world it's broken up into a series of smaller ones. Which is still fine; each map is littered with side quests, colorful characters, and hidden treasures. For anyone else giving it a go, I went with the court augur background. I bulked up my intellect pretty quickly, but as of level 10 my other stats are fairly even. Counting buffs from items and what not I've got a 7 in intellect and a 4 or 5 in everything else. I'm focusing on casting, but rather than wands my main gear is a one-handed sword and a grimoire. There's a very good one-handed sword you can get fairly early on in the game, and rather than replace it I just keep upgrading it. You can set a second loadout that you can switch to with a single button (left alt on PC, dunno console); the idea I think is to be able to quickly switch from melee to ranged. I'm using a pistol for my other loadout.

Roberto Orci passed away from kidney disease at the age of 51. He was a writer for all three Kelvinverse Star Trek movies, the first two Bayverse Transfomers movies, and the Transformers Prime show, among other things, and a producer on many more.

I'm down. I loved P3 Reload; P4 with the save graphic overhaul and quality of life upgrades would very likely make it my favorite game in the series (mechanically P5 was better, but I thought the rest of the game never quite lived up to P4). Avowed isn't as big and open as Skyrim, but the writing and voice acting is sharp. It's high fantasy from the people that made Fallout New Vegas and the Outer Worlds.

So... Avowed is pretty good.

The impression I got is that Mecha Invasion might be just one guy. If he's doing all the designing and prototyping himself (and not paying himself for that work) that would reduce the cost, and make it possible to sell for for less and still make a profit. There's also (technically) the reduction in packaging due to pairing them up. Still, I think a lot of the pricing (especially by Fans Toys) is less "we need to charge this much to make money" and more "we're charging this much because collectors will pay it."

Can't say I've ever bought an ebook from Amazon. I do, however, have something just short of 20GB of unencrypted epub files on my hard drive. Somewhere along the line I started using Google Play Books to sync books I uploaded myself between my phone and a small tablet I use in lieu of a Kindle.

I agree, but my current desktop came with a 512GB NVME boot drive and a 1TB mechanical drive that I upgraded two years back to a 2TB NVME. I'll just yank that drive out of the old build and transplant it to the new one.

I don't even think that's the record. How long have people been waiting for XTB's Galvatron? The thread on TFW is turning ten this year. Long gaps and delays seem to be the norm. Sometimes it has to do with designs needing to be retweaked. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting factory time. I'm just giving MMC a hard time partly because Scyla did, and partly because (even though it's been quite good!) Defensor is my least-favorite combiner and I want them to hurry up and finish because I decided to go with MMC for my cartoon MP Constructicons... a decision that's getting harder to abide by, since XTB's Long Haul got pretty good reviews and now their Scrapper is out and Scrapper's my favorite. He's apparently also very good (at least as Scrapper... there seems to be some doubts about how well the leg mode will support the weight of the gestalt). MI's ability to put out six Constructicons in about six months is indeed interesting, as Scyla put it. But it's also worth noting that they were first announced nearly two years before the first set released. By contrast, Dream Star only has two (and a half) figures released in their set so far, but it was announced almost a year after MI's. Purely speculating, but I think the more established players tend to have the basic design for the whole team done, then refine and tweak one, release it, and start refining and tweaking the next one. I'd guess MI had all six basically read to go before they released the first set.

To be totally fair, I think MMC only announced theirs because XTB and FT did. They've been pretty upfront that no Constructicons would come until they finished Defensor. Of course, that does raise the very legitimate question of why, after getting Bruticus and a G2 repaint out fairly quickly, it's been nearly three years from Streetwise to Groove, but MI was able to put out six Construticons in six months.

The guys who made Space Marine 2 are making a AAA game based on one of Hasbro's "tentpole" IPs. I'm thinking Transformers has to be the frontrunner; Space Marine and the Cybertron games aren't all that far apart. G.I. Joe would be a very close runner up. Dungeons and Dragons would be my dark horse pick.

With the Giant Legion all wrapped up I could be done with Constructicons for awhile. On the other hand, I could take a look at Dream Star Toys' Hook Warrior. While you may here "IDW" tossed around describing these guys, this is definitely NOT how Hook looked in the IDW comics. Honestly, Hook's traditionally my least-favorite Constructicon, but this guy's kind of gorgeous. No weird cartoon legs, no cabin foot, no "what do we do with the wheels on his arms?". As with Shovel Warrior, there's loads of mechanical details but with curves and angles that give him an almost organic shape, and they replaced his traditional overhanging shoulder shelves with big booster wings. It's a very slick design; I think my only real aesthetic complaint is that there's nothing about his chest that screams "Hook" to me. This lack of immediate "this is Hook" is exacerbated somewhat by the fact that his crane is not attached to his back out of the box. Rather, it's an accessory... one of several. In addition to the crane, he comes with a red translucent blade, some kind of short cannon, his gun, the combined mode chest armor, the combined mode head, plus an alternate face and forehead for that head. If you pull the forehead out, you can slide the visor out and remove the lower half of his face. Then you can mix and match to get the look you want... stoic vs angry face, eyes vs visor, and normal forehead vs crested forehead. That crested head is going to come up later. In something of a first for Devastators, it seems Dream Star's won't be made from six guys, it'll be made from seven. The chest armor can transform into what appears to be the upper half of Megatron. I don't have confirmation, but it looks like Devastator's forearms become Megatron's legs, and some part of Devastator's crotch and hip skirts might be his pelvis. I'll go into more details on him when the set is complete, for now all I'll say is that he does seem to have ports on his forearms, but they do NOT match any pegs on the cannon that comes with this set. Getting back to Hook Warrior, his head's on a ball joint. He can look up, down, and tilt his head to the side adequately. His shoulders rotate on ratchets but can get hung up on his backpack, and they move laterally 90 degrees but on the wrong side of the swivel so he has Hot Rod shoulders. His bicep swivel is weird. There's a flap at the top of his bicep, and if you fold it down he can swivel his biceps 360 degrees but it looks messy. But if you don't fold it down, his bicep looks neat but the swivel grinds against the wheels in his shoulders and forces them apart. His elbows are even weirder. It seems like a single joint that bends a little under 90 degrees... but also nearly 90 degrees backward. There's actually a second joint, but it's behind a flap. If you open it up you can use it to get a bit over 90 degrees of bend, but now he's got a big flap laying on the front of his bicep. Or, you can open it just a little, and settle for just 90. His wrists swivel. His thumbs have a ball joint at the base with two additional hinged knuckles, while his fingers are pinned at the base with two additional hinged knuckles. The index finger is separate, the other three are molded together. He's got a ratcheted waist swivel. His hip skirts can move so his hips can go 90 degrees forward or laterally on ratchets, but only about 45 degrees backward due to his butt armor. He has limited thigh swivels, and double-jointed knees. The upper joint is ratcheted, the lower just friction. Despite the double joint you're still looking at just a bit over 90 degrees of bend. His feet and toes have some downward bend due to how they transform, but no upward tilt. His ankles pivot about 45 degrees. The cannon and pistol both have handles that fold out with slots on them. They plug onto tabs in his palms, then you can wrap the fingers around them. As for his crane boom, the most obvious thing is to plug the large peg on the base into one of the two large peg holes on his back. There are ports under Hook Warrior's forearms as well. You can fold in the handle of the cannon and flip out a peg, then plug it into either arm. A similar peg can be used to attach the red blade. There are less obvious things you can do with the crane. There's a hinge on it, so you could rotate it and fold it over his head. The butt of his gun plugs into the end of the boom, above the hook. The peg you use to connect the crane to his back also fits into his forearms, if you want to give him a sort of underslung BFG. Alas, I can't find any meaningful way to attach the cannon. By far my favorite thing to do with the crane, though, is to extend it, bend out the ends, and attach the red blade to make a pretty wicked scythe. The only downside here is that he can't hold the scythe particularly well. There is a handle-like protrusion you can wrap one hand around, and the other around the dark plastic, but there are not slots for the tabs in his palms to lock into. It's purely relying on the friction in his fingers not giving out under the weight of the scythe. Kind of worth it, though. Like I said, I traditionally think of Hook as the boring one, but with a scythe he's kind of badass. Hook Warrior's transformation is a bit more involved than Mecha Invasion's Craner, but honestly I think it's a lot more straightforward than fellow DST Shovel Fighter. Like many other Hooks in my collection you can kind of break him into his upper and lower half, and focus on one half at a time. While it's fairly obvious what's supposed to move and where it's supposed to go, you will occasionally get tripped up by exactly how certain parts move, though, and the instructions are pretty terrible, sometimes ambiguous and occasionally omitting some steps. My first thought was that Hook Warrior almost looks more like a military truck than a crane. However, this style with three-wiper cab set in front of four front wheels, with four more rear wheels with a centered boom are common from Chinese manufacturers like Shanghai Evangel Industrial or Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group. The main thing that's a bit off is at the rear. Hook Warrior's booster wings wind up forming identical pods flanking the crane. There's some molded detail that almost suggests a window, and the control cab for the boom does usually sit on the left side. On a real truck like the XCMG XCT80 there is a pod on the other side, presumably housing some of the machinery to move the crane, but it's significantly smaller than the control cabin. There's some tolerance issues. You might have noticed that I can't quite get the front of the cab lined up right. The green plating under the crane that makes up his backpack doesn't like to stay plugged into his actual back all the way in truck mode, either. Hook Warrior can roll on his rubber tires, and the crane can elevate roughly 60 degrees with two extending segments. The hydraulic piston is another real-world feature you'd see on these sorts of Chinese crane trucks. Somewhat annoyingly where the crane attaches to the truck can rotate, but the pods flanking it are locked in place and prevent it from turning. On that note, the crane requires some partsforming. The big peg you use to plug in into his back gets folded in, and instead of using the big holes you use a pair of smaller pegs to plug them into those two smaller holes between the two big ones. If you did it right, the gray plastic on the crane will follow the angled slopes of the green plastic on the truck. Too bad, the connection of the smaller pegs is a little loose. I find the crane likes to pop off when you manipulate it. As for the rest of his accessories, Devastator's head sort of transforms. You can fold his neck back 90 degrees, and spin and flip some kibble on the back of his head over his face, so it wraps under the chin. The right side of Devy's head folds down and away and rotates 180 degrees. The right side folds up and uses a ball joint to lie semi-flat. The neck peg will plug into a peg hole in front of the pod on the left side of the truck, with the side of his head mostly covering and tabbing into the side of the pod. The other side of Devy's head just lies on the truck. It doesn't even tab into anything. With a red-painted "window" I guess we can pretend Devy's head is the control cabin for the crane. The barrel of Hook Warrior's pistol collapses and plugs into the barrel of the cannon, and you can plug the blade into a square hole on top of the cannon. You're supposed to plug into a peg hole in front of the pod on the other side, but this time it doesn't even remotely resemble any part of an actual truck. It's just kibble. Honestly, I think I'd have preferred if the entire pistol could have stored inside the cannon, or the cannon could have turned into a better gun in the first place, and that the cannon better resembled the control cabin. I'd have preferred to omit the Devastator head entirely; if the gestalt is going to need partsforming might as well go all in on it. While DST is going for a very stylized look, and making his partsforming bits into an extra Megatron figure is a bit out there, DST doesn't seem to be reinventing the combination the way MI did. Shovel Fighter was a right leg, and Hook Warrior is the upper torso. There is a little shifting of other parts, but the bulk of the transformation is simply starting in truck mode, undoing some clips on the insides of his thighs, splitting the front of the truck in half, and then using the unlocked mid-thigh joints to wrap the front of the truck around to the back and folding the arm connectors out as you do. You should wind up with something like the above picture. Once there, you can slot him into the chest armor plug using pegs inside to plug into the ports under the truck windows. The head plugs into one of the large pegs where the crane was. The crane can then shift to either side by plugging it into a tab in front of the combiner connector and a port behind it. If you like, the red blade can store on top of the crane, but there doesn't seem to be a place to store the cannon or the gun. Surprise! Hook Warrior has a fourth mode! Like Shovel Fighter, Hook Warrior can also transform into a right leg. Again, it's a bit easier to start from the truck mode. The section behind the cab with the combiner pegs will shift back, giving the cab room to fold up. The front of the cab shifts forward to give the foot more toes. Heel spurs fold out from under the cab, and the front pair of tires wraps under them to form a heel. The rest is basically rotating the pods 190 degrees and reposition Hook Warrior's arms, then opening up his chest to reveal the slot for the leg connection. The red blade can store in one of the large peg holes where the crane usually goes. The crane, meanwhile, folds up and plugs into the heel, with the other end just sort of resting against the calf. Again, there's no place for the cannon or the gun. Come to think of it, Shovel Fighter's gun had alt storage for vehicle mode, but not leg mode. I'm guessing, based on how the gun plugs into the cannon, and how there are other ports on the back and top of the cannon, that maybe the cannon and all their other guns will combine into a larger gun for Devastator. Anyway, you might be wondering what's up with Hook having a leg mode? This is a reference to the IDW comics, where Spike killed Scrapper. Later, Bombshell used a cerebro shell to take control of Prowl, and Megatron made Prowl the Devastator's upper torso while Hook moved to Scrapper's spot. And that alternate forehead with the crest that I said was going to come up again? That'd be the crested head that the fan-dubbed "Prowlestator" sported. There's no prototypes, or even a definite confirmation, but it's been strongly implied that (counting Megatron) this set will actually have eight total members, with a version of Prowl to release after the standard six Constructicons. Given that Scrapper is my favorite Constructicon and one I wouldn't mind displaying on his own, and given how many other Devastators I have, I appreciate that DST is giving us extra options for this set. But as for Hook Warrior himself... he's decidedly OK. I appreciate the more straightforward transformation, I think he looks pretty good in both modes, and the crane boom as a scythe grants him a cool factor Hook rarely seems to posses. However, some iffy tolerances and questionable design decisions like his elbows and flaps that lie in place but don't actually plug in or lock on hold him back a bit and make him seem like a step back from Shovel Fighter. You do get a bit more bang-for-your-buck than Shovel Fighter, though, as they cost the same but Hook Warrior comes with a lot more accessories and an entire fourth mode. Ultimately, I think the stylized designs are, as with MI's, a two-edged sword. There are people who don't really want or need another cartoon G1 Devastator who will appreciate that DST is doing something different, but likely just as many strictly cartoon collectors who simply don't have a place for this on their shelves. To the latter, nothing I say is likely to change their minds. To the former, I'd say that Hook Warrior has his flaws, and neither he nor Shovel Warrior are as fun or inexpensive as Mecha Invasion's guys, but if you like the design Hook Warrior seems to be free of any major QC issues and has a strong shelf presence. I'll give him a soft recommend.

Priced a build from Maingear. Came out to around $2500 for one with a Ryzen 7 9700X, 32 GB of RAM, a 1TB NVME SSD, and an RTX 5070ti. The GPU is definitely getting marked up by them, though. Swapping it out for an RTX 4060 lowers the price by $780.

It's been a dream of mine to own a Porsche ever since I was a kid and got a Hot Wheels of a mid-'80s Carrera. Can't really do a 911... I still need a mostly-practical daily driver and my kid's too little to ride shotgun yet, but the Taycan still seems like a great choice. A common refrain I keep hearing about it is, "genuinely good, not just good for an EV, it's a genuine Porsche experience." I'm also wondering if it might not be easier to get the GPU I want in a pre-built (I know, heresy). I think my plan will be to upgrade my laptop in late spring/early summer, then I'm GTG if we go somewhere on vacation this summer, then do the desktop around Black Friday like you were thinking.

Man, I saw "1/100" and got excited thinking Bandai was finally doing a 31 HMR. ... ...Imma still get it, though.

Fingers crossed. It's a 2022 Taycan with 13k miles, previous owner leased it and turned it back in when he/she was done. $61k, basically half what a new one goes for in my area. The catch is that the interest rates on used cars right now are terrible, so if I buy it I have to wait until some CDs we have mature in a month or two and borrow as little as possible. Possibly not borrow at all, after I sell my Maxima. Then instead of playing Forza Horizon 5 on max settings, I'll just drive around in it and try to remember that setting a high score on a speed trap isn't appropriate for real life.

It's not just you. From what I've heard, it's very common/everybody. Personally, while I've enjoyed the good Doctor's work, Decibel's obscure enough that I'm content taking a pass on this one.