It definitely does have a lot of 'auto' options. You can basically have a fleet of ships automatically trading for you, set up a few space stations and be able to generate mass amounts of money. Definitely a good way to get used to the game and it's mechanics. There's a LOT of stuff floating around out there, tho, and exploration is often rewarded (and occasionally punished severely). I usually tend to have multiple pilots going at once in different save files so I can be a pirate one day or be a cop the next day or be a millionaire supply trader the next, etc.

There are a lot of mods for it. I would recommend snagging one of the various multitude of cockpit mods / collections. Pretty sure there's one that allows you to turn on time compression during non-computer-controlled flight, though there are good reasons why you wouldn't want to do that too often. Also pretty sure there's one that allows time compression up to something like 10,000x, though any computer-controlled flight is sometimes a risk, especially in busy sectors. My current install was made a year or so ago and I only got a cockpit mod. Out of the loop on mods now, so there might be some awesome new ones. I might have to see what's out there now.

But there are lots of mods. Large modding community for that game, and many of them are the nerdiest of nerds. Many of the cockpit mods are ridiculously detailed.

EDIT: nope, time compression mods don't work in my version. In Rebirth they've done something to it, tho? SETA is something I only tend to use in short bursts anyway, and generally avoid it in crowded places.

Also EDIT: I forgot to add that I also like Mount & Blade a lot. Another one of those games that lets you do your own thing with quite a nice bonus feature of being able to assemble large crowds of people to stab each other. I've not played that one as much as I should.

I think Zarban had a link to that one on his site, but it's not there anymore? I remember getting it from somewhere, tho. Fucking hilarious. Dorkman was firing on all cylinders on that one.

I used to only listen to it with the movie going, but when the intermission started I downloaded the first ten or so to listen to in the car. Then I had all this extra space so I dumped a bunch of commentaries on there as well, cause why not? Then I listened to the Roger Rabbit commentary in the car and found it extremely enjoyable, so now DiF is pretty much all I listen to in the car, unless I really need to rock the fuck out after a stressful day at work or whatever.

The unfortunate thing is that I have nowhere to go that takes me 90 or more minutes to drive. A lot of the time I'll get to where I'm going and sit in the car listening "just for a minute longer" and accidentally burn ten minutes of gas idling in the grocery store parking lot.

You guys owe me about 50 bucks worth of gas now.

Some of us post walls-o-text with every other post. Maybe I should have posted every paragraph separately?

I go into every movie with an open mind, but it has to give my brain something worth chewing on in the first ten or fifteen minutes or so, or i'll end up picking it apart the whole time, starting with "This movie still doesn't have a plot that I can see..."

Very rarely can a film shake me out of that nitpicky mindset once it's kicked in.

I'm not too worried about the Hobbit looking like crap. The footage they showed off was probably a lot more raw than you'd see in the theater. You look at just about any direct-from-camera footage and it just looks wrong until you go in and make it look like a movie. If there's still green screens in the shots, then it's probably not been color corrected / balanced and all that junk.

What I'm more worried about is the lack of motion blur on the versions projected at 24FPS. There have been movies that shot with a short exposure for some scenes (Saving Private Ryan had a number of scenes like that, I believe), and it's noticeable.