Leamas

Thanks for listening.

I think my question is legitimate. Rational people are willing to identify there is a critical problem and recognize there is a urgent need to address it. But some other rational people are not. I think this comes down to some people having a higher tolerance for dead people than others. If the tolerance is for fewer dead people than infinity, then what is that number at which point they will take action?

I don't think we can take all the guns. I'm just asking a question.

You're "at a point" where you'll listen? That's nice. So give us a ballpark figure on where the death count needs to reach before you're "at a point" where you'll do something?

Thoughts and prayers. There's nothing we can do. I hope the victims didn't suffer too hard. We need to bolster our mental health solutions. Jesus take the wheel.

I'm sure you'd love to be free, maybe go out and meet some Latin guy that can dance, grind up on you, make you feel dangerous but also safe.

Has anyone gotten one of these tickets and just not paid it? Got a notice in the mail stating I ran through an intersection on a red light and need to pay a $75 fine to the City of Humble. According to the pics, it happened at 1960 and US 59. If I don't pay it, there is an added $25 past-due fee. And that's about it. Regardless if I pay it or not, there is no ding on my driving record or credit report and no insurance premium hike. It is a civil violation and not a criminal one. I can't get arrested. Currently, House Bill 1631 is awaiting signature by the governor. Once he signs, the law will prohibit cities from operating redlight cameras (except that cities can still operate existing cameras in place prior to May 7, 2019, until the contract with the camera operator expires). More importantly, the law would prohibit the DMV or the county from blocking my vehicle registration renewal coming up in August just because I have an unpaid redlight ticket. Doesn't seem like there is an enforcement mechanism for the ticket, other than the camera operator suing me for $100 in small claims court.

Not yet, but eventually. It just takes a little bit more prep time and it seems like I'll need dedicated (i.e., moar expensiver) products. Right now, I'm gradually moving away from liquid or paste wax and going to a sealant spray (Carpro Hydro2 + P&S Bead Maker) for the protection stage.

I use a small detailing brush to agitate the area and hold a damp towel underneath to capture the loose grime. You can buy a set of 5-6 brushes for around $10 and use them around the house or office.

Speaking from personal experience, the 1990s were to me the best period in human history to be a child. On the old board, I started a thread in Nasty's facetiously dedicated to 90s kidz and 90s nostalgia. You can revisit its glory here.

I like Pan, White Details, Car Cleaning Guru, and several others. They are thorough and present the information well. It just sucks I can't get some of the products used in Europe or Australia, like Auto Smart Red 7. Pan reviewed the Meguiar's Hybrid Ceramic Wax a couple of times and made me consider switching from the Quik Wax. I don't watch DPC regularly because they don't put enough effort into the videos. Their 13-minute Iron X video has Scott repeating one thought 10X on a shitty camera phone it seems. I have a lot of stuff. Maybe I'll take a photo of it all next time I do a full detail. There are maybe 2-3X more items not on the list, including things I haven't used in a while or that someone lent me and I never tried. I also didn't list the glass care stuff and other miscellaneous paint correction products.

I get the same error as troph. I need an adult please. Here is the image I'm trying to use:

I use different products at different stages and on different sections of the car. I've been washing and detailing cars for myself (mostly Hondas) and family members (also Hondas, but also a 5 series, an A4, an S5, and a Panamera) for around 9 years. I've modified what I've done by watching youtube and reading best practices on general car care and detailing-specific forums. Generally, I detail the interior of the car on one day (2-3 hours) and then tackle the exterior on another day (4 hours for a full detail every 3-4 months and brief 1.5-hour cleans every 4-6 weeks). I take my time and try to enjoy the process because I treat it as a hobby. Like most hobbies, it can be as expensive and time-consuming as I want it to be. Specialized tools and products make the work go faster and might improve the final results to some degree of noticeability, but they cost more and you certainly can get by with "generic" products. Short summaries of what I do are below. Stages Interior: vacuum, plastic and vinyl clean, leather seat clean, vacuum again, and windows clean. Exterior: wheels and tires clean, rinse, pre-soak, rinse, contact wash, rinse, contact dry, clay, rinse, wax, and finishing touches. Products List 1. Interior: Plastic and vinyl cleaner: Meguiars D10101 Detailer All Purpose Cleaner diluted at 4:1 Leather seats cleaner: Chemical Guys SPI_103_16 Sprayable Leather Cleaner and Conditioner in One Brush (seats): Chemical Guys Acc_S95 brush Brush (everywhere else): Vinyl & Leather Scrub Brush and Detail Factory blue brush Detailer: Meguiars D15601 Synthetic X-Press Spray Wax (despite the name, I use it as a detailer and not a wax) 2. For wheels: Cleaner: Meguiars D14301 diluted to 4:1 or 2:1 depending on the amount of filth Inner wheel barrel: EZ Detail Brush Big Face and spokes: Chemical Guys Acc_G09 short handle brush Lug nuts: Detail Factory orange brush Tire dressing: Meguiars D17001 Hyper Dressing diluted to 3:1 and a Meguiars foam applicator 3. For the rest of the exterior: Rinse: Ryobi 1600 psi electric pressure washer Foam cannon: Dusichin foam cannon Shampoo: Meguiars Gold Class Car Wash Mitt: Meguiars Microfiber Wash Mitt (2) Detailing Brush: Detail Factory orange brush Clay: Meguiars Mirror Glaze Detailing Clay (Mild) C2000 Pre-wax: Dodo Juice Lime Prime Pre-Wax Wax: Meguiars G6107 white wax paste for my white car and Meguiars M2611 Mirror Glaze for cars of other colors Quick Wax Spray: Meguiars G17516 Ultimate Quik Wax Comments For a long time, I used a garden hose when I washed at home and that worked fine. But my flow rate would be tied to what's available from the tap, which delivered water from a city-owned water supply through the water main at ~40-60 psi. The pressure washer is more efficient and saves on water consumption. The Ryobi uses 1.2 gallons per minute, which is close to what I would get using a low-pressure spray gun at the local self-service bay. The typical flow rate from my garden hose uses 20 gallons per minute. The greater your water pressure, the faster and more effective it'll be at blasting stuff off the car without your need to touch it. Cleaning the wheels takes time. Do it first to get it out of the way and to let the subsequent rinses remove any brake rust that gets on the car. Dress the tires at the end, if you want. The pre-soak is important to minimize swirls and marring that happen later on from all the times you have to wipe or buff the paint. I've used various foam cannons and this one has had acceptable results. I spray the foam from bottom to top because you want each panel to get a spread of clean soap. I rinse from top to bottom because you want the dirt to flow off the car. Sometimes, you're going to get swirls no matter how careful you were. If swirls appear, I use a pre-wax to fill in the swirls before I use the wax paste or spray. The pre-waxing and waxing take up a lot of time. I only apply the paste once every 3 months or so and I use the faster spray in-between. I have found no solution for the swirls on my gloss piano-black pillars. For the contact wash, I use two buckets: one for rinsing equipment and mitts and one for soap and water. I put a grid guard in each. I use one wash mitt for the top half of the car and a second mitt for the filthier lower half. Sometimes I use a sponge for bugs, fallout, or thick traffic film. I dip the brushes and mitts in shampoo before I make contact with the car to help agitate every little bit of dirt. I use the small detail brushes on and around emblems, badges, trim pieces, headlights, and small crevices (like vents). I have a brush for each part of the car, so I don't accidentally mix and cross contaminate them. I use a lot of towels. They come in so many brands that I don't remember which ones are good, but it probably doesn't matter so long as they are microfiber and you clean them after each wash. Also, I use different towels for the wheels, windows, seats, dash, and to buff off wax and other products, so it'd help to designate colored towels for different jobs. I haven't used a blower to dry. I plan ahead and sometimes take off a work day just to wash my car. I've never detailed the engine bay but would imagine it's not much different than a brush/spray job.

There is a lot to digest. It looks like Paradox incorporated some of the good parts of each successful game they've made in the last decade into I:R. I want to see how the game runs and feels now that they moved the Clausewitz engine to running on 64-bit processors. Graphically, they've taken full advantage of the increased memory capacity. There is a lot of geographical detail and the map transitions nicely from paper to terrain when you zoom out and in. The test will be how smooth you can maneuver around the screen when you're in year 300 of the campaign and the game needs to convey all the data up to that point. In CK2, it got a bit laggy after 500 years when the game would have to contain thousands of names and stats of individual holdings and characters (plus their portraits and coat of arms). The lead director worked on EUIV and some of the other developers worked on CK2. It's clear that the EUIV elements "won out" for I:R. You're playing as the embodiment of a nation like in EUIV and not as a character like in CK2. There are some CK2 elements still around since you have to deal with people who have stats, ambitions, bloodlines, and portraits. That's cool. I'm a big CK2 guy. In EUIV, it felt a little shallow that your ruler was just a name with three stats. I'd like to know how battles work. I've always been hazy about that part of the game. I know I need to build buildings, make a stack with a diverse composite of troops, and attack/defend on favorable terrain. Other than that, I never figured out how each battle phase was supposed to be won or loss, or if the results were based on a % of success modified by your bonuses and maluses. 7,000 cities is a lot of cities on a relatively small map like this. The CK2 map covers the Iberian peninsula all the way to western China, and EUIV starts in Europe and then covers the whole globe except the arctics. So the screen might become very dense with troops, diplomatic characters, and city-level details popping up all over the place. Again, I'll see how much people complain about the lag (and other bugs) at launch and wait until the game gets a satisfyingly polished update and dips down to an attractive price point. If you plan it right, you can spend $30 worth of content on a Paradox game and get 150-200 hours of play in the first year.

Map looks sexy as hell. I'm looking forward to spending 20 hours on the tutorial and another 10 hours to understand a gameplay mechanic. I've clocked in 1400+ hours on Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, and Hearts of Iron 3 and 4. So I'm down. But I think might wait until the vanilla version hits $9.99. Based on past practice, Paradox will release the base game and 80 DLCs over the next 10 years.

What trim? What type of warranty? What is the maintenance/service record? My last Corolla needed a new battery at ~4 years after I bought it new - have you replaced the battery? I'm probably 5 minutes away. Take gooder pics.

I wonder how many of you I've met in the wild and not know it. I moved to the Houston area (okay, the greater Houston area) from OKC over 3 years ago and possibly ran across at least 1 or 2 of you at a work or social event.

Yeah, but I'm not saying that to his face.

I refuse to believe Kingsbury keeps getting decent jobs because of his looks. That just sounds absurd. I am beautiful, but can't make money off of that.

Bill Murray

Next, try installing a legit version with a working license.

Is Tantric over here?

Stupid kid. Maybe he'll grow up. Or he won't and will remain stupid and continue to not learn. Not a millennial. I'm 32, I'm a millennial. I don't think anybody's asked me what I did when I was in high school.

It's free. I unfroze mine a few weeks ago. This thread reminds me that I need to freeze it again.

A matter of preference and the technology isn't there to see 4K at its best. I wanted a monitor with a higher pixel count than my last 1080p monitor but with a higher refresh rate than almost all of the 4K monitors I could find. 1440p hits the sweet spot. Plus, it's ultrawide. My brother has a 4K monitor to edit videos and photos, and doesn't play any games. In my research, I found that they are wonderful monitors to generate creative or artful content, which I don't know a thing about and wouldn't do. My uses include email, word processing, doing Westlaw research, listening to music, and playing games a few times a week. I think that behind video editing, games are what normal people do that stresses a PC the most. So I wanted a PC that could run stressful games. This means getting a monitor with a high pixel count, at least 120hz refresh rate, IPS, and G-Sync modules. Like it has been stated in this thread, I did not find many 4K monitors that have all that and cost under $1,800. Even if I were to drop that much for a 4K monitor, there may not be a consumer-grade PC with a single GPU that can capably run a game without turning down more detail settings than an owner of a high-end GPU would want. DLSS may change my belief in the future. But as of now and after a few weeks of use, I have been impressed with the monitor I have. I didn't even consider getting an ultrawide. Now I don't think I can go back. Not all games/applications support 21:9 yet (are there many that support 24:10?), but there are hacks to make it work for a lot of them. I may have gotten lucky by getting a panel with negligible amount of IPS bleed, no flickering, and no dead pixel that my eye can detect. I heard this monitor, and several other 1440p monitors, tend to have more duds than normal in the quality control department. I've had time to play 1 hour of GTA V with every setting maxed except I kept MSAA on 4X (not 8X) and grass detail on "high" (not "ultra" or "very high"). Everything else - extended distance scaling, all the shadow details, reflections, post fx effects -- maxed out. I ran a benchmark last night and all 5 "pass throughs" taken together resulted in a 73 FPS average, with dips in the low 60s in grassy areas and spikes in the 110s in the City. To me, that is acceptable-to-optimal performance. The game looks fantastic and runs without a hitch. Extended distance scaling maxed out and 4X MSAA probably combined to cost 50-65 FPS in most of the scenes. If I were to turn those off, I likely could see 120-145 FPS, which is what many reviewers did when they tested the 2080ti cards. This caused some people to get confused when they watched YouTube videos showing the card powering GTA V or the Witcher 3 or the Division at barely over 60 FPS. But either the uploader fails to mention, or people fail to ask, questions about the settings. When I cranked up MSAA to 8X, turned grass to "ultra", and ran a GTA V benchmark, the FPS average went below 40. Out of further curiosity, I entered the Nvidia control panel and enabled DSR at 4X my native resolution. I went back into the game and ran a test at 6880x2880 resolution or something. ~27 FPS average. GTA V is a 3-year old game and has been fine-tuned for the PC as well as any console game can be. Yet this game can be extremely taxing at 1440p and with nearly-maxed out settings. With my monitor, I can almost get the best image possible and comfortably play at over 60 FPS. On a 4K monitor, I think I would need to turn down settings to get 60 FPS or keep the same settings and play at 35-40 FPS. That tipped the balance in favor of a 1440p monitor. Ultrawide just made the decision easier. For fun, I fired up Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and played around 45 minutes. With max settings, I was seeing 220-300+ FPS, as recorded by the system on-screen display. It's a dated game (8 years?) that still looks nice. I exited the game back to the menu, cranked up the resolution to be 6880x2880 by again turning DSR on and at 4X the native. It was STUNNING how clear and detailed the faces, clothing, buildings, and foliage became. FPS went down to 80-90 (~70% performance hit). Personally, I cannot tell the difference between 60 and 90 FPS, so I kept it for that game. DSR really is a marvelous technology for older titles or titles where you have a lot of FPS headroom you can spare to get better image quality. I understand you wouldn't want to do that all the time, especially for esports/online competitive games where you need the high framecount.