So I'm not the only one falling into the trap of wanting to be informed about things that I know will make me upset. I honestly don't know what to do about it either.

My own bitching about life in general is the heat this summer. I just can't function with a temperature of 25 Celsius or up. I wanted to enjoy my vacation, doing lots of day trips, biking and walking, but I'm indoors feeling tired most of the summer because of the heat outside. Often 30+, even here in Holland. It's Holland, shouldn't we have cloudy rainy summers?

That is why you should love monkeys. They don't do mass killing. They do mass poo flinging. Not because monkeys lack the intelligence to do mass killing but because monkeys simply don't have any evil inside of them.
Yeah, it seems like the world is turning into a giant oven. Global warming, maybe? The heat is so horrible here, I stay home too much next to the AC and that is not good because not enough fresh air and exercise.

Was that the only symptom, or did they get really broken later on (as in, the PC not working at all anymore)?

Anyway, for me on another PC a graphics driver update fixed somewhat similar problems. So apparently these things can happen for so many different reasons, even if symptoms are similar. We'll see, I guess. At the moment I don't really believe in the overheating theory, though. Nothing points that way IMHO.

The freeze-ups eventually got more frequent and longer, and they started appearing at the weirdest of moments such as during booting. It got intolerable for me pretty fast, so if the same thing is happening to you, it won't take too long until it drives you up the wall.

It takes just one person doing something horrible to make these news incidents. But nobody reports on the millions, or even billions, of small bright spots of humanity that occur every day. I guess my point can be summed up in one word: perspective.

Your absolutely right. I forget that too often. Sometimes the shit just piles up too much, and its hard to see anything good.
I used to only get my news from a site called Good News Network (that, like the title implies, only reported good news.) But a few years ago, out of the blue, they started charging like $15 a month to read it.*

I do try to see the good in the world, even in the most horrifying situations. Seeing the Boston Marathon bombing, as horrible as it was, I couldn't focus on anything but how amazing it was that so many people - not just police and emergency responders, but race officials, competitors, and spectators - rushed right into this massive explosion to help. And when there was a second explosion, they rushed right into that one too. Of course I mourn for those who were killed and wounded. But the goodness of people outweighed the badness of people at least a million to one in a single minute.

Have some free rep.

*edit - goodnewsnetwork.org just recently (last couple months it seems) became free again! Awesome!

Feels like I'm finally manifesting some sort of burn-out. Have spent the the entire weekend laying on my couch watching TV. This may not sound very disturbing but I normally loathe TV.
It's just that I somehow couldn't muster the strength to do something else especially something that may have offended someone. For example my girlfriend is easily offended by me playing computer games instead of being mentally "available" for her. I hope my level of mental availability over the past days pleased her. Of course nothing happened. We didn't visit anyone or went to concerts or something like this. We didn't even have some decent talk.
I know one thing for sure though. The moment I start to enjoy my life again by doing things I like to do something will happen that prevents me from doing them.

Fjuk it. It always stings when you realize you have worked hard on something (at work) which is obsolete by the time you finish it (like, just an hour ago I finished something I have worked on and off from Friday, and right after that receive a mail that it will not be used after all, but another set will be needed soon). And then they request you do redo it from the start, and you hope that this time it doesn't become obsolete by the time you finish it. I guess some automatic scripts could help a bit, but there is still quite a lot of manual human work involved as well.

The good news is that I get my monthly salary, even if I perform obsolete tasks in vain. So in that sense I have nothing to complain about, but I would prefer doing mainly tasks that matter.

Finally bought Skyrim during the recent sale on Steam. I've been excited to play it for a while, but I've had other money priorities. So, when I finally saw it for $15, I went for it.
So far I have spent about 2 hours playing it, and about 5 hours trying to fix the FOV and fugly-ass shadows on this shitty port. Tweking some .ini files, I finally got the FOV where I want, and just turned off the shadows altogether. Looks much better now.
But I am still really disappointed. It looks good, but the game feels like they went backwards in every direction. And then ported to PC without even testing it - scratch that - without even LOOKING at it. I'll be staying away from any future Bethesda titles.

Issue 1: I've got a crush on my best friend who' off at the Naval Academy. No idea how to resolve that.
Issue 2: It hit me full force today that I blew my chances with the girl of my dreams.

Is the target of your desires the same or different in the two cases? I know it is good to have eggs in several baskets and such, but still... :)

I need to blow some steam about Steam Gifts. I have a private Steam profile which means I need to turn it public once a week to sync. For the past few weeks this hasn't worked well. When the profile isn't synced I can't even contact support to report it. I don't enter any giveaways, I just read the forum and sometimes post, and I think I will just stop posting. I don't want to deal with this annoyance any more.

Really Larian, really? Advertise a discount on Dragon Commander for those who pre-order, then release it at the discount permanently? That's pretty dirty, glad I didn't pre-order.

Well, it's pretty nice for anyone who didn't pre-order. ^^

I promised myself to never buy full priced steam games again .... but I didn't took ROME 2 into consideration.
I didn't really follow the news around Rome 2. I just know that preordering on steam give 3 playable factions, I want to support Creative Assembly as much as possible, I really loved all their past work one way or another (those which I tried at the very least) ....

is making this dent in my budget and going back on my word a bad decision in this case ? Why is there SOOO hard choices in life (this last bit is sort of self loathing). What do you people think ?