Just do what Bobby did: That's my purse! I don't know you!

You have an interesting car..

The weather is a bit wacky again this year. We've had a couple of blizzards accumulating 6 inches (~15 cm) overnight, followed by above zero rain storms... Fortunately, we still have snow. I'm hoping it stays for the season this time.

Instead it should be teaching men to protect themselves from child support and alimony and general inequalities.

Schnee aus Deutschland! [EDIT: err, Australia]

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Also... BRICKS!

Nothing is off topic here, Rodolfo.

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We get lots of snow here each year.
This is what it normally looks like outside my place (from the winter of 2015)
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I've been playing Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. They finally added another map to the Test servers, but they're hardcore overloaded with players so everything is laggy and buggy as hell. Still, it's fun to play with friends. If you want to join me and Bam, give me a PM.

I recommend it for anyone who likes competitive games played with friends. But playing it solo is like dragging your scrotum across a gravel road.

As for single player games, I bought all three STALKER games on GOG last year. I owned the original at-release in boxed copy but it was buggy-as-hell on release and could barely run on my PC at the time. Now, years later, it's much better.

I beat the third one. It's the prettiest and most polished. And the anomalies are great because every one is almost like a unique puzzle. It's VERY MUCH like what Fallout 3/NV/4 should have been. Fallout 1/2 are great RPGs but the RPG elements basically get in the way of the fun in 3/NV/4. They pull AWAY your immersion. Instead of exploring and thinking "oh no what's that bad thing" you think "I've got 182 hitpoints, nothing can hurt me and I can simply hit the VATS button and freeze time." STALKER is scary as hell.

All three are technically "STALKER 1" (they were going to make a 2 but the company collapsed for politics/money/etc reasons.) So think of them as all expansions and they're worth it. Shadow of Chernobyl is "ep #1", Clear Sky is "ep #2", Call of Pripryiat is #3.

So it's SoC, CS, and CoP on the forums.

SoC is much cruder interface (e.g. no hotkeys for various useful items), no upgrades for weapons (unless you find an upgraded one), no repairing items so you have to replace good ones. I actually like the "no repair" mechanic though because the "best" stuff you find... will eventually wear away. So it's like a temporary (~2-6 real-life hour) boost.

Artifacts (which provide stat boosts/protection boosts) are very basic, however, and "almost" pointless compared to the later games. They're just littering the ground everywhere and you pick them up. Contrast with CoP and it's REALLY FUN because every artifact is like a puzzle to solve. How do you "get to it" without being killed by the anomaly that shoots fire, or pulls you into a gravity field and rips you apart.

But SoC (#1), is definitely the most immersive and fun. The few scripted sequences really add a lot to texture the environment. There are powerful factions that are at war with people, loners who have no faction, and bandits who are like leaches that ambush people and steal. They exist in the other games but this one has the most scripted sequences.

In #3, you can carry lots of stuff but even on the 2nd-to-last difficulty (Veteran, which I'm playing all 3 on), it was way too easy. I also can't remember too many 'notable' events. The game felt way too short even though hour-wise it's been around the same as the rest. So I can only imagine that the 3rd one has many hours of boring walking around.

I'm going to be putting a review of the series up soon.

[edit] Separate question though: Does anyone have experience with bluetooth headphones? All I want is wireless headphones I can wear while my TV/computer/phone/whatever plays a video/audio so I can walk around the house and clean. But so far, all the sets I've tried are HORRIFIC for distance. On my laptop my most recent set goes... 3 feet... before cutting out. Connecting to my phone, it goes maybe 6-10 feet. Which is absolutely pathetic for a "wireless" standard.

I mean, I get it. It's far enough to eliminate short cable runs like headphone cables. But the standard is supposed to support upto a 100 feet! So it's like they're not even trying to support significant ("room length") distances.

I've never had Bluetooth fail under 10 feet. I thought the original Bluetooth standard was I think 30 feet or so. That's all that I expect from Bluetooth anyway. Higher versions might have increased that for all that I know. I generally would carry my phone in a pocket or something, but you should probably be able to walk around the room at least without it dropping off. You should probably actually be able to walk around most of the house, unless the house is large or the building materials (or other objects) somehow interfere.

My original "meeting" rig was cheap Chinese crap (~USD$10) that my brother got me. My current rig cost me more like USD$30 at Meijer, but I recently saw another unit at a "TJ Max" for about USD$15 that looked just as good (not very, but good enough). It can sometimes be hard to find a set for a reasonable price, at least where I live, but they exist if you can wait.

If I had a Bluetooth headset that was failing within 10 feet I'd return it unless I thought there was something else interfering. It is of course just using electromagnetic radiation so if you have other devices polluting the space around you with colliding frequencies of electromagnetic radiation it can interfere with the signal strength..

I also bought the 3 games in the most recent GOG sale, and enjoyed them. Slightly disappointed by how trade is so limited and the faction systems seem to lead nowhere, but it's an interesting game experience all the same. Each of the 3 games has some points where it succeeds more than the 2 others.
Misery 2 provides an interesting challenge ('Black road') where you start in a very difficult situation, and I really enjoyed playing this part. But afterwards, balance seems completely off, I gave up because I don't see how you're supposed to earn more resources per day than what you need to stay alive. Misery 1 is less advanced (no crafting), but much more balanced in this regard.

STALKER is great. Never won any of them but had fun anyway. My brother enjoyed them more--he actually won them!

I did watch the movie that (may have?) inspired the games, though. That movie was beautiful.

The first stalker is the crudest but the story... oh man... it can't be beat. I don't want to spoil anything, but there are multiple endings and they are not exactly what you're expecting. I definitely recommend reaching the end and then Googling the wiki to figure out WTF was going on.

Clear Sky is a prequel. Call of Pripryat is a sequel to the first.

The worst (and only real harm) of snow and rain driving isn't the snow or rain. It's the other drivers.

Black ice doesn't magically appear when a Wizard gets angry. And how to handle it is the same way... every time.

If your car stops responding, you're using your tires too much. Use them less. Reduce your brakes, and reduce your turning. Your tires can only put so much force into the ground and the ice and other inclement-conditions are reducing that maximum force. Turning uses force to turn. Stopping (or accelerating! But most people don't have as much power to accelerate as they do to brake). Now, ABS helps because it's actually braking less. Hundreds of times a second it's checking if all wheels are rotating the same and releasing your brake pressure for a fraction-of-a-second if they're not. This "hit-release-hit-release" is better for panicking drivers. But smart drivers should know "how much brake they have" so they don't have to get into a panicking scenario. You can always "test your brakes" in bad weather while you're driving to get some sample points of how much you can brake before they start to slip. If you can barely touch the brakes before slipping (the ABS kicks in and the pedal sinks a bit and vibrates loudly), get the hell off the road, or slow down big time! The faster you are, the more kinetic energy it takes to change your speed or turn. (kinetic energy is, KE=1/2mV^2 <-- velocity is SQUARED. 2X fast is 4X the energy! Meanwhile a twice as heavy car is only twice as much energy. Slow. Down.)

So if your car starts to drift and you can't steer. LAY OFF THE BRAKES (free up the force for steering!), and center your steering to the direction you're going. The second your tires are going the direction you're "floating" they will re-engage and give you the ability to steer again. They say "turn into the spin" which is the opposite of most people's natural instinct of "it's not turning, so I'll turn harder" which only increase the demanded force from the tires. A tire "plowing" sideways through the road/snow/etc is not as efficient at stopping (putting energy into the ground) as one pointed in the direction you're going.

Also, 4WD means nothing. All cars have 4 wheel brakes! The only time it ever is useful is because the way differentials work. Every car has a differential to allow one wheel to turn faster or slower than the other. If you drive along a circle, the wheel on the inside of the circle has to travel less than the one on the outer. HOWEVER, the big drawback is the differential puts a force equal to the max of both tires. If any ONE tire is slipping, then BOTH tires do nothing. For 99% of people, situations where you can actually utilize a 4WD(*) car, people will never encounter.

Meanwhile, what's actually dangerous about driving? OTHER. PEOPLE. You can't predict how these stupid people, who are panicking, and all have "their idea" of how to "win" against climate weather. They'll hit the gas then slam the brakes. They'll slide down the CENTER OF THE LANE (including heading at you) because it's "safer" than the normal lanes. (Except they're too stupid to realize that tire-worn paths of the street are the safest and the center of the road hasn't been driven on and will likely be extremely slippery.)

So, "less is more", "steer into the spin", and my personal recommendation is "know your brakes BEFORE you start slipping." But again, the biggest danger... is other people driving their 4000+ lbs machines straight at you thinking their "ABS and AWD" will magically turn their cars into tanks with treads that grip like glue. Most of the time slippy conditions have tons of warnings before you enter a panic scenario and you shouldn't be relying on your normal braking distance / following distance to the next car if you don't know for sure that your brakes are going to work just as good. ABS doesn't make a bad driver a good one. It can't tell you the tires are going to slip until after it's too late to make decisions. Like slamming your car into the one in front of you because you hit a just-started-to-rain greasy spot at an intersection when you could have slowed down early if you were aware of the driving conditions instead of on your cellphone. (When it just starts to rain is often the worst because it helps the oils/grease/etc start to float from the pavement providing more lubrication than say, heavy-duty rain that your tire has to slosh through and has already washed much of the gunk off the streets.)

*Technically, people call "4WD" a part-time AWD where you manually turn it on and shouldn't be ever used on clean-condition streets. It doesn't have a center differential so if your front and rear tires "Want" to move different rates, it has to eat the tires away (the weakest part in the physical link between engine and ground) and puts additional wear on the gears. "AWD" is "always on" AWD and does have a center differential, but usually it's a viscous coupling. A viscous coupling allows a small amount of slippage between front and rear, but, it's a fluid between two discs. That fluid heats up as the discs rotate at different speeds. So, if you're rapidly spinning the rears or the fronts, that "differential" between the two heats the fluid and becomes effectively a solid link. The fluid coupling ... couples... and it demands that all tires rotate together allowing a "one or two" wheels slipping scenario to keep the other two tires rotating. This is basically only useful for people who are off-roading / adventuring. If you need AWD for your daily driving, you probably shouldn't be on the road.

**You can test your tire power easily with a five speed too. Slam the gas for a brief moment. Depending on what gear you're in / power you output, you'll be able to be able to feel it slipping. The higher the gear that it slips, the more dangerous your driving conditions. If you can slip your car in 5th gear (the least torgue gear), get the hell off the road. If you can slip by slamming it in first gear (the more torque gear) you're still probably fine / impacted a minor amount. But the "slam the brake" testing works even with automatics. The only issue with autos is... you slam the gas and they try to downshift. So it's harder to get a measurement. (Also a torque converter actually multiplies torque but that's way too much math/detail.)

Oh, lastly, like Bam says: Practice. Practice. Practice. It's fun, and good to learn in a relatively "safe" environment. You want this stuff to be memorized / muscle memory. You don't want to have to think "which way am I turning the wheel" in a split-second panic scenario.

[edit] Man, that was way longer than I expected it to be.

Playing Skyrim and barely able to move because I pick up everything in sight!