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I was studying Meteorology in college during the semester that I first watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, might be part of why I loved this scene so much.

^Sokka, the one true avatar.

In a twist: there was a really awful film that occured and reduced earth benders to requiring to dance to throw a small pebble benders. Thankfully, such a film never happened. Never.Happened.

Not. Ever.

Never. Ever.

But i'm not a fan so it did occur. How did M.Nighty plotty twists of plot twists [&@%!] up an easy concept?

Cutting an entire 20 episode season of a cartoon down into a live action feature film actually seems hard. Don't get me wrong, it could have been not awful, you can adapt it and make it good. But it's hardly a sure thing.

Is it good or bad that Suki wasn't in that film? I dunno, what does suck is Suki's never mentioned in Legend of Korra.
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I never get overwhelmed by nostalgia for my childhood but then I saw this and oh god, it's like I'm 7 again.

Young me was really into turn based toy car racing as a way to have fun. Every car would get a push in order around the track until I'd see which one wins. I used to draw tracks for them outside with chalk.

Meh.. Doesn't depict enough of that dystopian future scifi feel.. Are you sure this is nostalgic to you Kerr??

True but what isn't hard is protraying earth benders as powerful people. I mean, 3-4 people do this dance to throw a rock in the film. Show? One uses the earth to flip a fricking tank! A fricking tank!

Not dystopian? The town only has one parking lot of any significant size and it's right next to the airport. Seems like an awful place to live.

Anyway, I've changed a tonne since I was a kid.

Ah yes, that thing. Who didn't have it as a kid? Seriously, i swear every kid has that or has been exposed to it at least once.

Tis rather run down or it's Silent Hill if it was on a very small budget.

I mean speaking seriously, among first world countries I would imagine Ireland would be one of the ones more prone to inspiring dystopian works.

But that can also just be attributed to reading any sort of tabletop media at all. Makes the world seem so lame. These dudes in my imagination get to fight dragons and techno-liches and I got stuck in the universe where we have tax rebates and plain rice cakes.

At least it's not guard duty.

From TWHTYTT:

Your poor computer, Union! That description sounded horrible.

Oh, my laptop is a right Granny then! lol. It's done well, it's done well. Many years of honest, reliable service. *Smashes it to bits with a mallet*
No, I kid.

@Dovah
So your lenovo was good?

I've been looking at cheap 11.6" laptops, and the Levovo Thinkpad looks quite good. (Also looking at Acers and HP Stream, but I've seen lots of reviews saying the latter is slow.)

It was. I heavily suspect the early years of me not treating it as well as i could(i.e. very short sessions were common and could have been a factor into it.

My current one is a Lenovo G50 and it is a superb laptop. Crap for gaming because the graphic's card but tis perfect for what I need it to do.

Don't get an acer! They are trash. Though i am basing it all off their awful netbooks which were prone to overheating, awful to use and yeah, just awful in general. Acer has a reptuation for shoddy products . HP, they generally tend to not be worth the cash unless you are a business. Their laptops may be better then netbooks but i wouldn't trust them.

Sssh, granny will hear you!

My frazzled one is an Acer, which was fine, and my Mum has an Acer too and she says it has been fine too (though she doesn't use it much, just for games and the occasional web browse).

Good to know about the Lenovo though. Shame they don't have it in the stores I'm looking at. (Not that I'm intending to buy yet anyway).

Our HP at home was a beast for a mid-2000's computer. We had a family Acer that lasted for four years and performed fine. I'm not sure where you're getting that information.

Aarah, I recommend checking out the Build Me a PC subreddit. If you post your budget and your desires there, you will generally have knowledgeable people swoop in and tell you what you should get.

Building a computer is generally more cost-effective on the dollar than buying a pre-built machine.

Is also not bad, but much smaller.

Re old laptop stories:

I have a 10 yr-old laptop still happily chugging away in the corner. The battery got taken out ages ago and it runs offline only nowadays. I basically use it for programming/tech projects and writing. It's still using XP, has a database server and a load of development stuff on it.

It not only works fine but actually seems to work better than my "new" PC which struggles under Win 8.1 sometimes. eg Word 2007 on my old laptop is my preference for any writing I want to do because it's so much more responsive than Word 2016 on my newer PC.

There is plenty of life in these old machines if you can find a use for them.

A lot of newer PCs have a lot of redundant registry problems or whatever, I find. I'm not a software expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I've had to delve into my Windows 10 laptop and clean the registry personally a few times before I finally got a program to do it automatically. CCLeaner is dope.

I guess all that front-end presentation comes at the cost of operating efficiency sometimes.

Awesome that you still have that ol' girl chugging though.

My PC is damn near 10 yrs old but it doesn't matter because I play like 2-3 games all of which are damn near 10 yrs old haha. Funny cause I can play Skyrim on high settings no problem but browsing the web can be awfully slow at times.

@Union
Thanks, I'll give Reddit a whirl.

@Timster
What make is your ten year old laptop?

I used to use a Toshiba Satellite before I went to college, I think I got it in 11th grade in high school. I probably posted about it here, but at the time I didn't really understand things like FPS, so I just played any old game on it. The laptop never crashed or BSOD'd because a game was too much, but it always ran hot and it's FPS was pretty garbage. I played through The Witcher 2 on that thing, and I am not really sure how I played it with <20fps. I think by the time I got to playing LA Noire and the FPS was always tanking, I realized that the laptop wasn't that great.

I remember seeing everyone else's computers in my first year of college and being jealous, because they could run games that I couldn't. I lived next to a spoiled rich kid from Arizona who had both a Razer and a Macbook, but never even touched the Razer. I convinced him to let me use the Razer to play games and it felt pretty nice to have good fps. Eventually, I bought an MSI Apache Pro (GE72) later that year and enjoyed for it quite some time. It still ran pretty hot (the graphics card was right underneath the mousepad, so it would get uncomfortably warm) but was able to get modest FPS on newer games.

The thing was too big and bulky though, with a poor battery life and ran on an old HDD. Eventually I bought a chromebook (which I still use) later that year to use for school, and left the laptop at home. Two years later I decided to shoot for a desktop build when the 1070 came out and now I am running with that. The desktop + chromebook combination is too good, especially for someone in CS like me.


@Aarah
So why a laptop and not a desktop? What's your general use case? It sounds like you want to play games, but how portable will you be with it (where you'll be playing games away from home)? What kind of specs are you looking for, beyond a 11.6" screen?

@Kestral

I won't really be playing any games on it. Maybe the odd puzzle game now and then but nothing more, so don't need any fancy graphics card and fast frame rate, etc.
Would basically just be using for web browsing, photo editing, word processing, and then just storing some pics, and documents on there.
I do want to be able to move around with it, yeah. Even my old laptop was used less frequently because it is a bit bulky.

A like the look of Chromebooks, but they seem quite limited in terms of minimal offline capabilities (I prefer to work with wifi off if possible) and the lack of current compatibility with Google Playstore (or few apps for the chromebooks that are) means less choice and flexibility when it comes to downloading things.
Is this the case?

Chromebooks work well because they integrate well with the Google ecosystem. I would honestly recommend using those features (photo storage, Google Docs, etc.) because once they integrate with each other, it's all very top notch.

But the photo editing would be difficult to do on a chromebook since they're usually not very powerful, and there is no good photo editing software for ChromeOS. I might recommend something else in that case.

It's a Packard Bell. Picked it up in an 'End of Range' Clearance Sale for £450 I think.

Only problem I've had with it was when that little bit of plastic that you slot your DVDs onto in the DVD Drive came off. One dab of super-glue later and it was good as new though.

PC talk? Fun fun.

I'm heavily considering upgrading my GPU next year. Rest of my components are fine, but my I like to switch out the odd parts every 2 or 3 years.

Anyway, looking at the 1080 Ti, but that depends on what is out by next year.

I aim to get a desktop gaming PC within the next 5 years. Probably won't build it as i can see it being a time issue along with potential space issues but a gaming PC is part of my stage 2 of life's goals. I don't like gaming on a laptop as it's rather awkward. TESI and II is a bit iffy due to controls. Combined with a lack of mouse pad for my mouse(tis a room issue and likely to not work that great), tis easier to wait until I get a gaming one. That and lenovo is rather crap when it comes to gaming. It seems anything before 00 is a definitive but anything up to Morrowind is iffy. According to Can Ye Run it? it is the graphics card. Otherwise, i would pick up Vvanderfell:Game of the Year edition(Yes, I am being that techincal. Vvanderfell4lyfe!:P) from CEX. If i had the cash and wasn't unemployed. I just don't want to be distracted by major games on my laptop.

I do hope that the day where PCs are touchscreen only never happens. Call me an ol' fart but i prefer buttons and mouse. That and i'm not quite fond of touch screen tech. I may or may not get annoyed with it.

When I was doing a bit of gaming on the laptop I got a PC keyboard and just plugged that in.

The positive side to laptops being subpar for gaming is that you get to check out some cool older games. I spent ages on Quake 1 & 2 and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri back int' day. And Doom 1 & 2, which actually I still play now and then.

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And on the subject of holidays, does no-one fancy a bit of Italy?

I'd love to see Florence, Venice and Rome some day. And not because I keep obsessively re-playing Assassin's Creed 2. Well, not just because...