It's ten years after the events of Origins, and the brief peace following the Warden's victory has all but collapsed. There's open conflict among the lords of Ferelden, between the lords and the crown, between the mages and the Chantry, between Ferelden and Orlais. The only reason Orlais hasn't stepped in and taken over is that they aren't faring any better, nor is any help to be expected from Orzammar, which is in open civil war, nor the Dalish Elves, who have completely vanished.
And there are reports of a new Blight from the north... And from the west, and from the south.
And into all this steps the Warden, the saviour of Ferelden. Only you have no idea where you've been for the past ten years. If you died at the end of the first game, doesn't matter, you're back. You still died, but that's still you walking around. (Indeed, whoever died at the end of the first game is back, very much alive.)
You have even more trouble on your hands than the first time, and all your former allies are dead, lost, or struggling with their own problems. You have to gather the scattered remnants of your party and try to save Thedas from the greatest peril it has ever faced.
You certainly have a taste for more...apocalyptic favoring than I do, though it would make for an interesting story.
Speaking of apocalypse and blight...I think it is north of you, but it seems the online reaction to the Queensland's election is excited, to say the least.
Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, March 25 2012 11:51 AM (Hep/0)
2
Hadn't been following the election news, actually. Let me see...
Heh. Yeah, ain't that somethin'? Labor (the incumbents) lost, probably 78-7 with 4 independents.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 25 2012 03:00 PM (PiXy!)
Galaxy Note and iPad.next both land in Australia in the next week or two.
I'll take one of each.
Well, I'll wait for my next pay cheque, and then take one of each. Right now might be a little improvident.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:25 PM
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Mongofied
I survived MongoDB Sydney!
Don't think I would have lasted much longer in those lecture hall seats, though. My back is aching again, but it's more a long-day-need-to-lie-down ache than the help-I-am-severely-injured pains of two weeks ago.
Spent some time talking to one of the MongoDB engineers, whose wife, by curious coincidence, is named Meenu. No, really. He was staffing the desk when I picked up my name tag, and I had it listed as my company (since in fact it is).
Pretty impressed with the talks, and I'm eager now to put it to use at both my day job and mee.nu.
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Friday, March 16
Mongolated
In theory I'm off to a conference on MongoDB in about nine hours.
In one sense the timing couldn't be better, because I'm about to deploy MongoDB in anger (or at least, sincere aggravation) for the first time.
In another sense, I'd rather sleep all day.
In yet another sense, I can sleep just as well at the conference. Really. You haven't met my neighbours' kids.
'Night. Don't forget to set HoiHoi-san on bedbug patrol.
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Thursday, March 15
With A D
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Wednesday, March 07
Enemies Everywhere!
There were only two games I was looking forward to this year, and both of them were sequels: Mass Effect 3 and Torchlight II.
A spiritual successor to Terraria, a new game from the creator of Day of the Tentacle, probably a new Wasteland game, possibly a new isometric tactical RPG from Obsidian...
And SimCity 5.
God only knows when I'll have time to play these things - I didn't finish Planescape: Torment until 2007 - but until then, I'll be in my bunk.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Three Terafloops
I may have jumped in too early on my new video card.
I got a Radeon 7950 for Shana, my new Windows box. That's a huge upgrade from the 4850 in Nagi, but it looks as though a better idea would have been to wait for the 7870.
While the 7950 has 40% more shaders (1792 vs. 1280), it runs at a 20% slower clock speed (800MHz vs. 1GHz), leaving it only slightly faster in shader performance. Both chips have 32 rendering units, but the clock speed on the 7870 gives it the advantage, so the cheaper card has a higher pixel fill rate despite the 7950's greater bandwidth.
My 7950 is factory overclocked to 900MHz, closing half the gap, but there's still probably little advantage to the more expensive card for most games.
Using the 7950 as a double-precision compute engine is a different story; the 7900 cards have full double-precision units giving them about four times the performance of the 7800 models. But I don't spend that much time on computational fluid dynamics these days.
1
Back when I was trying to balance on the bleeding edge, I learned a lesson: everything becomes obsolete three weeks after you buy it. There's always something new coming that's faster and better. If you let yourself worry about that, either you'll never buy at all, or you'll be disappointed in what you do buy. Which takes all the fun out of it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, March 07 2012 01:35 AM (+rSRq)
2
Yep. And it's still a great video card; this is not so much a regret piece as advice for anyone looking for a card mostly for gaming.
An interesting tidbit I picked up while looking at comparisons is that my three-generation-old 4850 has 25% better double-precision performance than the brand new 7870 - despite the latter running 60% faster and having 60% more shader units. Can't judge every case by one number.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 07 2012 02:06 AM (PiXy!)
3
I didn't even bother trying to cut myself on the bleeding edge... I purchased a year-old version of a three-year-old card, and I wanted a seven-year-old card.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, March 07 2012 10:33 AM (O9XO8)
4
After reading your bit about the Radeon 4850 I went out and bought one and vastly improved my World of Warcraft experience. I'm starting to think about a new computer, and I'll probably just get a new video card to go with it.
A Radeon 7870 sounds good to me!
Posted by: atomic_fungus at Friday, March 09 2012 01:35 PM (si27V)
5
My 4850 has been great, fast and completely reliable. Just not quite enough to run new games and full resolution on my new 27" monitor, so upgrade time!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 09 2012 04:41 PM (PiXy!)