Skyrim Mods

The same day Skyrim was released, players started releasing mods for it. Right now I have about 40 mods installed. I have improvement for textures, star fields, snow, ice, sounds, rocks, water, waterfalls, clothing, static meshes and more. It's amazing how much people have improved the game. Someone even thought the ever present dust in caves and dungeons was too coarse and the ash piles left over from reanimated corpses weren't high res enough (I have both installed). Every now and then I'll come across some really stupid shit though like cocks for trolls (see below).


Essential

SkyUI Even before the game was released PC gamers were irate about the user interface. Bethesda developed a lot of the game for consoles first, PC's second and the menus were no exception. They just weren't designed for a mouse. Too much scrolling, no sorting, no filtering, and too much wasted space. SkyUI has been downloaded more than a million times.
Skyrim HD This a mind blowing mod of epic proportions. More than 2GB in size, they've redone from scratch over 600 textures and normal maps. The 4k resolutions are more than 8 times that of the original game and still surpass Bethesda's official hi-res DLC pack. They've redone stars, galaxies, towns, dungeons, houses, ground, trees, barrels, dwemer ruins, and on and on.
Skyrim Flora Overhaul Like the previous mod, but focused on overhauling all things foliage. Consists of high res photographs of real leaves and grass. This is made by the same guy who made a bunch of flora overhauls for Morrowind.
XCE - Xenius Character Enhancement This is a compilation of Xenius' other character enhancements: detailed faces, detailed bodies, detailed lips, no more blocky faces, high quality eyes, high resolution scars, weathered warpaint and improved dirt. I don't know how it is on Xbox, but the PC game had these blocky seams on noses, chins, and necks which are fixed by this mod.
Enhanced Blood Textures Replaces all the blood textures with custom ones 4 times the original resolution. Lengthens the duration blood stays on weapons and adds new wound textures. Check out the decapitation wound.

Absurd

Killable Children It's all in the title. There a bug in this mod that lets you create a character as a child.
Derrax Male Frost Troll Derrax has also made cocks for werewolves. If you browse through the comments page for this mod you can find people asking for bigger cocks. You know, because a frost troll with a small cock is just silly.
My Little Pony Weapons and Armor Here to make you happy.
Calientes Female Body Mod Big Bottom Edition Like the Eye Candy mod for Oblivion, but with adjustable T&A. You can select areola color and the style of pubic hair. Absurd.
Cussing Bears This mod substitutes the sounds a bear makes with the Tourette Guy. BOB SAGET!

Backpacking Trip

The time has come to decide when/where/how long we're going on our trip. Unfortunately, it would seem Andy will be unable to come as he has decided to use his vacation to go to Florida with Taryn.

Before we make any decisions, I have a few questions to bring to the table:
1. How much $$ are we willing to spend?
2. How much vacation time are we willing to use?
3. How far away are we willing to go?

Personally, I don't really care how expensive the equipment is because I'd love to reuse it multiple times. I'll take up to an entire week off and drive us all the way there in my car if that's a selling point for you guys.

Road Trip 2012

In light of the fact that a round trip to Italy will cost us around $1400 each (cost of flight only), Rames and I had discussed the possibility of hiking/camping somewhere like Glacier National Park. Could be a badass adventure (see above picture). Personally, I'd like to make a call on what we're doing and have ample time to prepare.

Thoughts?

All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

I was looking to get a suppressor for my SCAR, or at least explore what is needed to do so, and found the following within Michigan's firearm laws (of course, this was released BEFORE it was legal to own a suppressor):

Sec. 224. (1) A person shall not manufacture, sell, offer for sale, or possess any of the following:
(a) A machine gun or firearm that shoots or is designed to shoot automatically more than 1 shot without
manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.
(b) A muffler or silencer.
(c) A bomb or bombshell.
(d) A blackjack, slungshot, billy, metallic knuckles, sand club, sand bag, or bludgeon.


And I'm cutting it off there. Because I need to know what all this cool shit is. Blackjack? Sand club? What the fuck is that? I don't know, but I WANT IT.

Heavy Machining - By Bay Cast Technologies

If a 10 foot diameter part is spinning at 19 RPM and you're cutting the outside edge, then you're cutting about 120 linear inches of metal per second. Coupled with the right feed rate and depth of cut, you've got these bullets rocketing off the part. The cross-section of the chip is approximately 1/2" x 3/16"... so we cut about 1.5 lb per second. Holy shit.

A 1/2" x 1/2" notch get cut off the entire rim of a 10' diameter part in about 5 seconds. We had to shut it down because it was too dangerous.... lol.

Look who I found