Initially, when I re-spec’d my Pathfinder I took Master Toxicist, which was something I used before. However, what I failed to realize was that this skill was better when you employ a Herald of Agony crawler because of the Virulence stacks. After ripping out Herald of Agony in favor of Malevolence and Haste, I didn’t realize how gimped I was for damage because of this node.

What I failed to notice was how important attack speed stacking means for Toxic Rain. This was especially discernible once I moved from a Quill Rain to a +3 crafted bow. While the overall damage was better, the speed wasn’t the same. So I switched to Nature’s Adrenaline and noticed just how much the dot ramps up on enemies!

Another thing I did was take out Soulrend from my Asenath’s Chant and add in Controlled Destruction and Void Manipulation. This really has helped my overall area clear. Things dissolve quite quickly except for bosses.

Beyond that, I’m looking at a few other optimizations. The biggest is to switch to Wind Dancer from Iron Reflexes and speccing into Phase Acrobatics down the road. I think those will be pretty big changes but they do require a few more levels to get to.

But the real thing I want more than anything else is a Maloney’s Mechanism. I’m trying to save up for one on Standard just because I think having permanent Onslaught, Frenzy charges and Culling Strike will truly help my single target, which is the weakest aspect of this build.

Right now, the build feels great up until you hit a boss. From there, you have to keep up your Wither totem to slow them and just spam cast your Toxic Rain. Some bosses just seem too sketchy and I’ve become afraid of doing legion. I feel that the Culling Strike out to help out, although the new Hunter quivers with the DoT multiplier probably would be a safer bet.

With regards to my latest Champion, I found that I had a fully ascended Slayer lying around with a full respect. So I did a normal lab and hit that reset button and converted him into a Facebreaker Earthshatter fister. Rather than leveling from scratch, I decided to just give this build a go since I’ve read a lot of good things about it.

First, it’s fairly tanky. Permanent Fortify and Adrenaline from First to Strike, Last to Fall really help survivability, despite employing a sketchy Abyssus. But the standout aspect is the sheer damage output. You use three war cries, Intimidate, Seismic and Enduring, which are annoying but the area obliterates huge packs.

Not only that but when facing a boss, you can just line those up with an Ancestral Warchief and practically dissolve bosses in a hit or two. Since the damage fans out around you, you can clear good sized pockets of mobs.

The main issue is that it’s super slow. Triggering all the war cries and zipping around with Dash along with flask management do require a great deal of button pushing. This button pushing makes the clear speed less than optimal compared to say the Pathfinder character I just mentioned. Also, not everything gets destroyed with a single hit. You will have stragglers frequently.

However, the damage is very reliable and easy to scale. I had an excellent Facebreaker with 797% more damage and Enfeeble corrupted, a Ryslatha’s Coil, Abyssus and Great Old One’s Ward lying around. These items give a huge amount of physical damage boost. From there you just need to get more physical damage from good Steel Rings and an amulet.

That said, your weakness is a struggle for resistance and stats (a lot of dexterity). Also, you might want to use reduced mana cost on your jewelry. Because of this, you have to juggle between damage, resistance, life and an open prefix.

I think if I had leveled this character from scratch on a normal league, I probably would’ve gone 2-hander. The great thing is that there’s no real gear requirements. Really all that’s required is a good weapon or highly rolled Facebreaker. But I think the 2-hander is much easier to start with since you don’t have to worry about resist as much. Also, you will have extra slots for gems like a better movement skill.

Overall, the champion Earthshatter wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. At least, the near end game version. If I feel motivated at all, I might try it on Heist.

The post Path of Exile: Toxic Rain Pathfinder Update and Earthshatter Champion appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to hit LC 24 until Friday. I had some good luck with the trader as well as big iron catches from OPs that allowed me to fill up quicker than expected. Also, not getting hit for a few days practically let me save up a ton of materials. Finally, I was about 300k lower than what was needed for stone and used the supply ship to fill in the rest.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’ll utilize the full load out of an LC24 just yet. The most obvious usage would be all Scorchers. But I checked out a few videos and realized that it might very hard to pull off without sacrificing my non-GBE statues and going full boost each time.

The other load out I thought about trying was some sort of Mech + Bombardier combo. I chatted with someone else who used a similar combo with medics thrown in but found that the close range of the Mechs to obliterate the medics. Instead, the solution was to take out the medics in favor of another boat of Bombardiers.

Another possibility is to use Cryo + Heavies + Bombardiers + Medics. It’s a better long range version of the Zooka except slightly more GBE heavy with less troops but slightly more life. The Cryos and Heavies would make the best use of the extra space. Here, you probably just need 2 boats of Heavies and can toss 4 boats to Bombardiers. I imagine Rocket and Shock Launchers to be this combo’s worst enemy but you should have plenty of GBE to take these out.

Either way, I’m happy that’s done with. My secondary account also started a 6th LC24 and still has another LC23 and LC22 left. I believe the Mega Crab should be on for this weekend (haven’t seen the icon) which means I can push for at least one LC24 and possibly get that other LC to 23.

For my main, a lot of possibilities will open up. Pretty much my initial goal will be to upgrade a bunch of Iron Storage units. Since those are comparatively cheap, I want to save my Mega Crab and Imitation Game events for big defense upgrades. Namely, I’m looking at Rocket Launchers and Boom Cannons to start.

However, I might not strictly do one defense at a time. Also, I might not just focus on upgrading each resource storage type one by one. I find that strategy can become dull, especially after the monotony of upgrading nothing but LCs for weeks.

But the good thing is that nothing else cost the same amount of resources by comparison. That makes upgrading my defenses relatively a piece of cake without having to worry about obtaining iron all the time. There’s still a few defenses with high iron costs but nothing quite like an LC.

Something else I’ve been pondering. I might give the troop subscription a try. It’s not a huge cost but frankly I’m bored of my Grank-Med combo. I’ve spent such a huge effort trying to upgrade my LCs that I really want to get some mileage out of them. However, Grank-Med is just too reliable and I don’t know how to operate other troop combos.

The thing with Grank-Med is that you rarely lose troops. And unless you have a complete disaster, the most troops you’ll ever lose is 1-2. Most of my troop losses were by accident or stupidity.

Other combos that appear attractive on paper in reality are probably not that great. Like I was checking out an all Scorcher video with 16 Scorchers. The guy hit a bunch of heavily fortified bases and got obliterated. The problem there is that you just need too much GBE and don’t have a healing mechanism outside of medkits to get you out of rough spots.

However, the problem with Grank-Med is that despite being great in many cases, there’s stuff like stage 7 Dr T’s Island where they fail. Or perhaps later levels in Mega Crab where too many Boom Cannons, Shock Launchers and Doom Cannons make it tough take out without expending a few free attacks. In those cases, another combo might do the trick. But if you’re already boosted, then waiting for the reload might be too much.

The thing is that I would love to try some other combos for a while and not have to worry about reloads. I want to vary up my plan a bit especially now that most of my PVP opponents are from levels 65 and up. But in order to beat them, I need other troop combos.

The post Boom Beach: All Landing Craft Level 24! appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

I noticed that my Iron and Wood met the minimal requirements for a level 9 Sculptor and that I was but 1 million Stones away from being able to upgrade. However, I was sitting at 589 VP at the end of my normal Imitation Game day run. I felt that with all the recent attacks and the ability to use a chunk of the War Hero reward for the Sculptor upgrade, it made it worth doing this big push.

What this does is set me up for next Friday where we have the Mega Crab. By then I should be able to plop down a saved up 41% RR statue and really take advantage of both Imitation Game and the Mega Crab rewards as I save up through out this coming week for a level 24 Armory. I’ve got a pretty big resource submarine dive so I’m certain by the coming week, I should be ready to have my Armory upgraded.

After that, I plan to upgrade my Vault just to get that extra 2% protection for my resources. Then it’ll be a very long grind as I push my Landing Craft to level 24. I think the way I might handle those is to push one LC at a time to level 24. That’s because LC 23 doesn’t really provide me with any major benefit as I use neither Riflemen nor Warriors. But I would really like to give Scorchers and Mechs a try in the future.

My secondary account I’m thinking to upgrade a few resource storage spaces up until the Mega Crab. Right now, I started upgrading my Wood Storage as I know that it’ll fill up next week. From there, I think my Gold Storage would be a good candidate. The Wood Storage isn’t too costly which makes it a good choice here.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned before the real goal is to do a big push for my HQ24 on my secondary account. The level 9 Sculptor is just too big of an upgrade to pass up, even for the level 23 Armory. Both of my bases nearly have a similar statue arrangement except where my main uses another +17% GBE statue while my secondary has the RR statue. Not having that GBE statue makes a giant difference.

On the other hand, it will still take time to get both the HQ24 and level 9 Sculptor. In fact, I might need to upgrade my Armory before that point. So I guess it really depends on how far I can progress next Friday. I can feel the much lower DPS as a result of not having the level 23 Armory offerings from my Artillery and Barrage capabilities.

I think the LC grind part won’t be a big thing for me initially. I haven’t seen any major Scorcher nor Mech attacks and I feel that until the majority of players can get their LCs to 24, I won’t be seeing those types of attacks for a while. And even if I do, I predict that they might not be great. The Scorcher just takes up too much GBE to do a full deploy. I suspect that Scorchers will be accompanied by another troop type, although I have yet to see what might show up.

Mechs, I believe, will take a while before someone figures out what the play is. I think part of that will involve having maximum level LCs since by themselves, they do not appear very strong. My gut instinct says that the meta for them might either be pure Mech or 4 Mechs + 4 Bombardiers. I heard Medics do not work out well for Mechs compared to tanks and there might be bugs with the healing aspect. However, 8 Mechs might provide enough cover for Bombardiers, which should out range everything except Shock Launchers, Doom Cannons, Shock Blasters and Grapplers.

At any rate, I’m quite happy with the Sculptor results along with my latest achievement. There’s not a lot of achievements remaining for my main account but that was a huge one.

The post Boom Beach: Upgraded Sculptor and Hit War Hero Achievement on My Main Account! appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

For the most part, I try to avoid the same ascendancies within a league. I feel that variance keeps the league fresh for me. That said, I also have an internal goal to eventually try each major ascendancy out. At the moment though, I would say 3-4 particular ascendancies are straight gone for me: slayer, berserker, raider and probably the ascendant herself.

The ones I’m most excited in giving it a go are Occultist, Elementalist, Inquisitor, Juggernaut and perhaps another Chieftain or Hierophant. Skill-wise, I think the main build I will do next is an Inquisitor Storm Brand. I was quite impressed leveling with Storm Brand last league but I did it as an Assassin/Shadow. Because of that, I looked into the various ascendancies where this worked well and boiled it down to both Elementalist and Inquisitor.

Right now, it seems that Storm Brand favors Elementalist a bit over the Inquisitor. But I think both are reasonably viable. The main difference is in play style. I think with Inquisitor you get higher damage output in the long run while Elementalist is slightly more defensive as it boils down to crits vs freezing.

Just before the league started, I was playing around on Standard with an Elementalist Armageddon Brand character. Since they nerfed Armageddon Brand’s damage and activation time, that skill hasn’t shown up compared to Storm Brand. But I do think both are somewhat similar in concept and in the end, I started to really get the hang of the brand play style which made it a big option as a league starter.

Most likely, I’ll go with Storm Brand next just because it looks great and seems to play well. I probably will make a few investments to get it going but I want to see it fair in maps to judge. My gut feeling is that it will be equally impressive early on but may face issues towards the end game.

Now, the big thing everyone has been jumping on is Occultist since they revised a few of the DoT skills and added the monstrous Bane. I feel if I end up taking a witch, the first one will end up being an Occultist with Bane as the primary skill. Besides that skill, the energy shield leech gem make Occultist look like a clear winner. Gearing might get tricky as you slowly move towards more energy shield but I feel the basics will help carry this build through.

Another skill I wanted to try was the revised Holy Flame Totem. Surprisingly, most of the ones I’ve seen have been Chieftains rather than Hierophants. I’m guessing the overall damage output from Chieftains exceed having the benefits from a Hierophant’s totem ascendancy skills. But since I started with a Chieftain, I’m a little reluctant at this point doing another one.

Which is why I’ve considered doing another Juggernaut. There’s two particular skills which interest me in Tectonic Slam and Molten Strike. Tectonic Slam looks like a lot of fun and I’ve used it for leveling at one point. That said, in the hands of a Juggernaut, it seems to be a natural pairing.

However, I did find a Ngahamu’s Flame and I’ve seen one Juggernaut use it in conjunction with Molten Strike. I think the two pair up nicely since you essentially get a free six link with the axe and can still output decent damage with Molten Strike. Also, if you manage to acquire certain gear, you can scale Molten Strike quite a bit in the end game. Not to mention I’ve always wanted to do a pure Molten Strike build from start to finish. This build might not be entirely 100% meta, but it looks fairly doable.

The other option would be to use Ngahamu’s Flame with Tectonic Slam. Quite frankly, I don’t know how that will end up. It might not output the same level of damage compared to Molten Strike. However, the idea here is that Tectonic Slam can cover a larger area while the Molten Burst aspect handles single target.

Beyond these builds, the only other thing I’ve thought about trying is the new Divine Ire. There’s some flexibility with the ascendancy for that. I’ve seen both Trickster and Inquisitor employ that skill.  But as with my feelings on Chieftain, I think having two Inquisitors is redundant for me. So if I decided to go that route then it might be through a Trickster.

I have seen some stuff for Shock Nova (elementalist) and Ice Traps (Saboteur). Since I haven’t played Saboteur in a while, I could give Ice Traps a go. But it’s not a priority at this moment. I think I would consider it if I found a Tinkerskin for instance. But I prefer allowing the gear to partly motivate what I want to play next.

Right now, I simply don’t have enough decent gear to make choices beyond what I outlined. I think I’d feel better once I make it past a certain point in my progression as well as finding better gear. I really want to avoid purchasing starting gear this early in the league. But if I get bored soon, I might just do that.

The post Path of Exile: Next Few Builds For Synthesis League appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The big thing that Twitch has been doing is injecting ads directly into streams. Whether you follow or are an Amazon subscriber, you pretty much will now get them. I think only actual subscribers for streamers will be immune on that streamer. But pretty much this is the last straw.

Right now, Twitch is claiming that showing the ad itself helps the streamer. While this might be true to some degree, it’s really Twitch collecting all the money. Or should I say Amazon. And of course video ads are by far the worst ones in existence and these are the most intrusive, disruptive ads around.

Ad Blockers don’t seem to be effective since the ads themselves are inside the stream. I don’t know how much the streamer can control this but I suspect it’s little to none. Either way, I expect a good chunk of the audience to drop off as this format becomes more prevalent. I think that it just shows how desperate Amazon and Twitch are if they’ve gone to this length.

Luckily, there are other mediums out there that don’t share this issue. Twitch in itself is not special and it really has been the community at large that has given Twitch its personality and support.

However, besides the Amazon acquisition, I felt that the community itself has been slowly self-destructing and that the previous near-anarchic platform now is forcing those doing this full time to sell out to an even higher degree. It’s really sad to see a guy like Kripparian who had a great deal of enthusiasm for the games he would play, appear on screen and seem soul drained.

That said, I think the community (the smart ones at least) realize what Twitch is. It was a temporary thing and people who knew its true value have managed to milk it as much as they can.

I think all the rules and regulations that Twitch has slowly been imposing while turning a blind eye to certain higher ranking members in the streamer community show the typical corporate favoritism and money grubbing mentality.

Lastly, the whole Twitch Con crap is just worthless. I think it gives streamers a false sense of self-importance, especially those who have managed to secure a great number of viewership. I recall one time watching Swifty talk to a police officer and describing himself (along with Hotted) as “internet celebrities.” Quite rightfully, the police officer never really heard of them, which is just the reality of the whole tiny pockets of fandom that these platforms have managed to brainwash into people.

For myself, it just was a time consuming distraction. There were fun times and I enjoyed the occasional “cancer/aidz chat” with toxic communities just for the memes. But if the platform has decided to fully sell out and create this annoyance of a situation, I’ll simply find something else to dedicate my time to.

I already pulled out my subscriptions to Twitch a while back just because I felt the incentives for helping streamers create communities no longer existed. Instead, I feel that Twitch has become this toxic environment where it sends a bad message to young people on multiple levels, giving the ultimate impression that being a dead beat has more value to society than someone who does real work.

I know I’m not alone in my sentiments. But I think Twitch has created quite a bit of a negative feedback loop on the gaming community itself. The whole notion of esports is a complete joke to me. Yet I find it terrible that companies like Blizzard seem to posture themselves along those lines, favoring the elite (as most sycophantic systems do) rather than the actual masses who use their product as a simple form of distraction. I still wish the streamers themselves the best of luck because I think this latest move will end up alienating a good portion of their audience and we’ll be seeing massive drop offs in the near future. But with the cost of traffic perpetually driving up and even with Amazon’s infrastructure, Twitch won’t be able to sustain itself without figuring a better monetization strategy rather than defaulting to the usual content crap of ads.

The post Is Twitch Going To Die Soon? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The Nexus memory part is just not well designed in terms of how one is supposed to interact with it. Just clumsy UI along with the unfriendly aspect of forcing players to run all the way from one spot to the area they want to reach makes me suspect that this league mechanic will probably not make it into core. Also, the lack of direction in trying to find memory nodes while the memory decays just feels downright awful.

And if it did go into core, the real issue is that the sheer number of masters will confound the ability to farm the areas you really want/need. Already, getting the right nodes and knowing what they should do feels silly. If anything, all you’re really doing is just getting XP and hoping that something good drops while chasing down memories. There’s really no fun game mechanic to truly differentiate this from most of the other masters content.

With Syndicate in core, I’ve already encountered some pretty game breaking bugs. For instance, if you don’t conclude an encounter with a Syndicate member, it seems to put a flag that prevents you from starting a new encounter. Sure, you’ll have the useless minions attempting to slaughter you, but the only thing worth fighting are the main members themselves. I think it’s silly that GGG decided to force a mechanic that makes you choose an action in order to continue moving forward with a random mechanic in the first place.

Also, I’ve read how many players are complaining on the frequency of these masters encounters. Most notably Syndicate seems to be the worse one. The way I see it there’s only one way to handle masters: get rid of the RNG aspect and turn them into a Zana mod.

I’ve mentioned this idea on various forum posts or even here I believe. But I really believe that something that’s just a past league mechanic should have its appearance depend upon RNG entirely. The thing is that there’s zero reason to use this format since old league mechanics already can be added using Zana.

In fact, I think what they could do is combine both what they have now and including them as Zana mods. In this manner, players can farm what they want and how they, providing them the best of both worlds. I mean, if you’re concentrating on getting double corruptions, then there’s no reason not to be able to purchase a Zana mod. If you’re going for deep delves, then do the same.

I have a suspicion that the game is going to get into a worse state because of too much uncontrollable RNG at this rate. It might be that there becomes too many flags that make it impossible to QA. The last two leagues felt very unpolished and this one really didn’t do anything that past leagues did any better.

Also, the whole fractured/synthesized items are silly to me. While the potential is there, the implementation as it stands is pretty bad. I feel that a better solution would have been to take how Veiled Mods would become craftable once a person unlocked them. The idea of implicit mods being good sounds exciting but just finding the right items and class to make them worth anything is a huge hassle. You’re better off just fossil crafting elder and shaper items.

Something I wonder is if GGG really knows their target audience or if they want to grow beyond 5-10 streamers over on Twitch. It feels that the game is catered to a very small percentage right now and to get into the top tier stuff the amount of grinding would force one to quit anything else.

At any rate, I enjoy the rest of the game and the things outside of this league. But the league itself is pretty much trash. Honestly, if it weren’t for my friends playing online, I probably would have switched to standard just because the core game feels better at this stage.

The post Path of Exile: How Bad Is Synthesis League Now? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The description I read for season 2 was how Jessica Jones’ conflict turns inward as opposed to outward. We see how her past events continue to haunt her from her family’s demise to the way Kilgrave resurfaces in the end. One of the main criticisms that I read was how the lack of a primary villain made the show seem unfocused and that is something I wholeheartedly agree with.

For the most part, season 2 seems rambling with the story scattered between Jessica Jones and the supporting cast. It felt as though each person involved were attempting to battle some form of internal demon that have led them to making poor decisions. I suppose that in some ways this idea was a good thing as we saw more character development that attempted to add more depth to the environment.

However, I feel that none of the characters outside of Jessica Jones really resonated with me. Everyone felt incredibly generic with only Jessica Jones having an established voice. Probably, the only character that could have been interesting was that Whizzer guy near the beginning who seemed to be some geeky type that could have made some impact outside of cannon fodder to push the plot forward.

If anything, most of the supporting cast severely annoyed me. The superintendent was nothing more than a sounding wall with Disney trying to keep the Marvel franchise connected to children by making Jessica Jones somewhat of a hero. Malcolm as the recovering addict struggling with temptation is boring and insipid. Her best friend Trish is nothing more than the blonde bombshell while Carrie-Anne Moss continues to disappoint with unsympathetic Jeri Hogarth.

There’s really nothing that makes me gravitate towards anyone in the series outside of Jessica Jones. The story was stretched so thin that they had to bring back the one character that made season 1 interesting: Kilgrave. But that only hints that the writers had so little material to work with and were forced to prolong this season with filler.

If I had one major frustration with this season is that there was little to no connection to The Defenders union. We got Foggy and Turk in very brief appearances with no lasting impact. It’s as if that whole side of the continent was intentionally ignored. Also, there’s no hint if there are any lead ins to another Defenders series.

Let’s be real here: we’re in it to see another Defenders reunion. I think at this point these characters aren’t truly strong enough to exist on their own (maybe Daredevil but only when he’s connected to another major Marvel character). The initial setup to establish each of these characters with their realms were decent (except for Iron Fist-ing) so that a nice backstory could help each actor/actress develop a sense of identity with their character in addition to the audience learning what each character was about.

At this stage though, putting effort into developing supporting characters feels like an utter waste. I like the attempt at a different direction that Jessica Jones season 2 was going towards in terms of the inward struggle. Most movies these days are nothing more than paranoid conspiracies about secret weapons manufacturing for a hidden society. So the fact that the true battle was in Jessica Jones’ mind was refreshing.

What made the series suffer as a whole was it being far too long and giving too much screen time to people who are as fascinating as stale poop. Right now, if you were to exchange Karen Page and Trish, you would not see much of a difference because their tones are almost identical as an example. It felt as though people were just going through the motions of reading off a script.

Another part that which made this season suffer is too much of an attempt to connect things to the #MeToo movement and with the recent Hollywood scandals. Trish essentially is a tool/voice for the #MeToo movement. I found that to be tiresome and typical of Hollywood writers in bringing recent scandals/Hollywood events to their writing. The truth is that Trish isn’t much of a sympathetic character to start and the actress isn’t great to really pull this type of deal off. So this part of the show just never worked for me.

Also, there was that Pryce Cheng guy. AKA the token Asian. Again, if that actor swapped with the guy playing Oscar Arocho or Malcolm, you wouldn’t know the difference. That’s because these actors suck badly. They’re just token characters with no tone thrown on screen to meet a quota. They really don’t do anything with him nor give him any material to work with outside of an initial dialog or two. He’s just there for no good reason beyond filler.

So again, I enjoy Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones. I think she’s managed to acquire a voice for the character and her language and actions make her distinct. The rest of the cast are nothing more than stock people with random folks in Hollywood trying to fill in a large void where the writers are obligated to pen 13 hours of film. Because of this situation, it made things meander. The actual season itself probably could’ve been done in 6 episodes tops.

Overall, I’m not feeling the Defenders series. I think the super heroes thing is starting to really grate on my nerves in terms of fresh material. I like how the characters from the Defenders are more grounded than most of the Marvel universe but the super hero genre in general is just running out of steam. FAST.

The post Jessica Jones Season 2 Review appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, in many ways the situation does not surprise me. Kevin Spacey often played the brash, belligerent, heavily condescending yet highly intelligent jerk in many of his roles. For me the exemplary role was Buddy Ackerman in Swimming with Sharks where he played an asshole Hollywood executive producer boss. There were others before that point but I think Buddy Ackerman is the real Kevin Spacey.

It was always entertaining to watch Kevin Spacey play similar deltas throughout his career such as Horrible Bosses, Lex Luther in Superman (where he stole the show), American Beauty (mostly for the dinner scene and the way he talked down to his character wife), even the surprising John Doe in Se7ven. I will never deny his delivery, especially the conviction for which he would strike at the world that seemingly wronged him at some level. However, it’s odd how many of these parts were common and the way he kept his personal life a secret.

Now, with the truth coming out much of this makes sense. Even prior to the revelation of him being gay, I always suspected that he was odd. Hollywood leading men like himself often flaunt their excesses and the fact that he had no wife (or wives) and kept his private life so secret made me wary. Like Sean Hayes who plays a gay man in Will & Grace, Kevin Spacey remarked that he would keep his life secretive as he wanted no one to doubt his acting ability.

For me, it was never doubting what he could play. It’s more about how a person handles the criticisms about what they do. Here, the problem is that Kevin Spacey is a powerful person in Hollywood and it’s pretty evident that he uses this position to his advantage. He (and other people with all the new allegations spreading day by day) would like to think that he can abuse this privilege and hide behind the curtain of being an actor.

Instead, it simply has made someone like myself want to stay even further from Hollywood than ever. Weinstein’s situation was pretty much the top of the cancer in Hollywood, although more than likely this disease of power permeates throughout the entire entity. Hollywood has always been about perception and manages to control its image using its deep tendrils throughout.

However, Hollywood as a whole is so damaged that the whole thing needs to be built from the ground up again. Most likely, that will never happen. I think the California government alone depends too much on the tax revenue generated from Hollywood that it would be scared to make a major move against the entity of Hollywood itself. Just the unions alone probably have more influence on the state than say the fire department.

What’s sadder is watching Netflix itself distancing themselves from the situation in just isolating Kevin Spacey. Yet they can’t drop the franchise since it’s a breadwinner for them. The thing with House of Cards is that it hasn’t been good since the first two seasons and you can tell Netflix is milking it for all its worth.

But that goes to show the mentality behind this monster connected with the entertainment industry. In truth, there are no real good nor bad guys. Just people trying to grab the biggest piece of the pie to move upward or gain more territory.

Part of me wants to pull my Netflix subscription but the real justification would be the increased fees and the fact that there’s not a lot of good stuff on at the moment (not a Stranger Things fan). At the end of the day, it’s just another stupid scandal and nothing really will get done. The powerful will remain powerful and that will never change while those victimized won’t be compensated for the pain they’ve suffered.

The post Thoughts on Kevin Spacey Being Cut From Netflix appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

just a quick sample test for bitly and twitter

The post test twitter card image appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

What I found out is that the Alienware Aurora R4 has a rather common issue where you need to disconnect both the wireless and Bluetooth cables inside then re-connect them. It was a bit of a pain to do this since the cables are quite small and require tiny hands to perform the operation. However, after reconnecting both cables and powering back my Alienware Aurora R4, my wireless network came back.

This is a very strange error. I cannot think of anything that would cause this issue. The only thing that may have occurred is the fan since it’s the closest moving component. But even then that makes little to no sense as it’s far enough where it should not affect the wiring.

The post Alienware Aurora R4 Wireless Failure appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.