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Gromnir's post in the Coronavirus thread reminded me of an old joke. An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying at a hotel. One night there's a fire. The engineer gets up, picks up the nearest fire extinguisher and quells the flames. The physicist does a few quick calculations, then jumps ouf of the window and into the hotel pool. The mathematician wakes up, sees the fire, says "on that's solvable" and goes back to bed.

Oh man I envy you! Fishing season just started here but I need to wait a bit because of my operation. I can't wait to get to the water. there is pic from last time fishing!

having read the new guidelines/phases, couldn't help but be reminded o' the old joke: A ‪‎physicist, an ‪‎engineer and an ‪‎economist are stranded in the desert. They are hungry. Suddenly, they find a can of corn. They want to open it, but how? The physicist says: “Let’s start a fire and place the can inside the flames. It will explode and then we will all be able to eat”. “Are you crazy?” says the engineer. “All the corn will burn and scatter, and we’ll have nothing. We should use a metal wire, attach it to a base, push it and crack the can open.” “Both of you are wrong!” states the economist. “Where the hell do we find a metal wire in the desert?! The solution is simple: ASSUME we have a can opener” so, assume we have enough testing and ppe... HA! Good Fun!

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Complete Edition Borderlands Game of the Year Enhanced Borderlands: The Handsome Collection The Darkness II Sid Meiers Pirates! Carnival Games VR Spec Ops: The Line The Golf Club 2019 BioShock: The Collection Civilization III NBA Playgrounds 2

This is the best picture of my character, Keyrockaethom Thaxymperum Kresusiso IX, I was able to get:

Sounds like something Gorgon would say. Also, this reminds me one of my favorite Sir Pterry quotes:

Today, I wanted to feel less useless, so I volunteered to help with some grocery shopping for the elderly. So I did. But now I feel useless *and* not very altruistic to boot. Can't have it all, I guess. On an unrelated note, I did my shopping in a large supermarket at a major street in Warsaw and despite certain countrywide restrictions (like staying 1,5 meters apart from each other and hard limits on the number of people inside), it was pretty much a chaotic free-for-all for everyone involved. At least everyone wore masks, so there's that.

I have a conference call at 9. After that I am going to walk down to the river with the pups for some fishing and communing with nature. If I actually catch anything it's going in the pan tonight with grits & hush puppies.

To be fair, it's probably better to use Denmark as the example. We've been very lucky with our oil findings (though smart enough to nationalise it).

I managed to unlock the Unworthy Entrepreneur starting scenario in X4, along with another starting scenario called The Accomplished Scientist. I was 1 step away from doing it all along, so I could have unlocked it days ago. It's all good, though, I've managed to get a lot more comfortable with the game during the time, and starting over with the Unworthy Entrepreneur starting scenario still puts me further along economically, since I'll have a sunrise flower production station to start. I'll have to work to get a decent fighter again, since you start with a scout and a freighter, but with all the knowledge I have gained and a station running from the get go, I'll get the credits quickly. Edit: Now I need to think of a good Teladi name. The have 3 names and a roman numeral at the end, and they tend to be very long and sorta Greek sounding. I got it, Keyrockaethom Thaxymperum Kresusiso IX

Sword-wielding scientists show how ancient fighting techniques spread across Bronze Age Europe

New Fiona Apple album is very good indeed. Check it out, people!

Nah, she's just Maduro on a period.

That's what I was thinking as well. Thank you for confirming it.

There's so much more, like dual mortar SC Helwalker (WotW + Resonant Touch), Scordeo's Edge/Fire in the Hole SC Stalker (Whirling Strikes), dual mortar SC Streetfighter (Vanishing Strikes + Gambit), SC Furyshaper (Blood Ward + DoTs), Heralds in general, SC Stormspeaker (or SC Fury) with dual mortars and Avenging Storm (Blinding Smoke triggers Avenging Storm), Berserker with Grave Calling and a Beckoner friend (killing Beckoner's Skeletons procs Chilling Grave) and whatnot. Depends on the party and how long you can wait until the build fulfills its potential. One can't simply name like "5 best builds" for a party in general.

Pukestabber with rum it's a trap choice, you end with the same numbers dual wielding like with cpt,banquet, worse on rest fast weapons. Yeah ,you loose +20%dmg on 10-14 base weapon 😂 DoC armor vs Miscreant lether is 0,1 sec slower on recovery with two fast weapons and max DEX( cpt banquet 1,5vs1,4, 1,4vs1,3 with Abraham , mari crudia 1,6vs1,5 with Abraham 1,7vs1,6 without) but gives 2 extra guile. Another option is to max guile. DoC, The Bathyal Drop and Adriatic Glow will give you 15 guile (5 vanising strikes, or going Swift plus 4, better hit to crit with Gambit, options is many) Longest duration of vanishing strike you will get with Cabalist/Mari crudia/ooblit ( I was getting 14,5 sec with 27INT) If you wan't to spam Wit of Death Herald maybe Mari Crudia would be the best.

There are two build categories - for solo and for parties. For solo they're almost non-existent in the list but you can see most of them in action in the videos of the people who did the ultimate or soloed the megabosses (like priest/streetfighter, priest/blood mage, tactician/blood mage, SC monk, paladin/troubadour, assassin/tactician, blood mage/paladin, etc). The builds used in parties are more specialised and are built around items offering great synergies. You have Frostseeker builds (ghost heart/ascendant, gost heart/helwalker), Lord Darryn's Voulge builds (berserker/tactician, berserker/monk), Rust's Poignard builds (SC rogue or SC assassin), Sun and Moon builds (soulblade/trickster, soul blade/paladin), Sasha's Singing Scimitar (SC bellower, priest/troubadour, bloodmage/troubadour), Red Hand builds (rogue/ghost heart) and I'm sure I still forgot...

You know, there is a reason why the banking sector is universally despised and hated in Australia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_Misconduct_in_the_Banking,_Superannuation_and_Financial_Services_Industry I know it's a wiki link, but as someone who saw the whole thing unfold, I'm actually surprised that bank CEO"s didn't get assassinated in dark alleys 😂 (the background section is the interesting bit) Basically, the biggest hive of scum and villainy you can imagine.

At any rate a 5400 RPM sata disk is going to suck no matter what you put on it. That **** was old fashioned 10 years ago. I mean even standard SSD is already out dated.

Also wear boots of speed. Moving to targets eats up lot of duration, too. You don't want to spend precious Guile on Escape too often. Miscreants Leather with an armor speed pet like Abraham makes you faster than naked, so that's an armor that's good for this task. Of course best is to do both: speeding up your attacks and prolonging Vanishing Strikes. I don't know where the break-even point is when it comes to alcohol vs. Mari Crudia but that can be tested easily: how many attacks can you get off during the duration? I personally would prefer Mari Crudia because moving around as melee always takes some time and Pukestabber's alcohol induced speed doesn't help there at all while the longer duration from Mari Crudia always helps. One can if course have both in supply: if you don't have the food use the alcohol and vice versa.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The political system is very different. Say hello to 10+ party systems, creating a patchwork of alliances and compromises when creating governments. No powerful presidents. Nobody being above the law (Impeachment? What's that?) If the prime minister breaks the law, he goes to jail. End of story (not sure about the other Nordic countries, but in Denmark, the queen is the only one that has Sovereign Immunity and is effectively above the law. But not having one or two powerful parties makes a big difference, as most laws will have to pass through the approval process of several parties, meaning they are generally better at passing "centrist" laws and also less likely to be reversed when opposition parties are in power (because they or their allied parties may have been signatories to them) Margrethe Vestager (European Commissioner for Competition) is a typical product of the system. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple probably still hates her guts for cracking down on their business practices in Europe (slapping billions of dollars of fines on them when they abuse their market positions and to show them, that no matter how big they are, they are not above the law either) Things like free healthcare, free universities, basic income etc. paid through taxation, passing on most of the bill to the richest part of the population, is sort of "socialist" in nature, but in the end, helped a country that had little natural resources to have an educated, skilled work force and a good "happiness" rating in those various charts. Free speech is one of those things that became a bit of a talking point when the infamous Muhammad Cartoons got published by a Danish newspaper. First the government tried to stop it from escalating (filing a judicial complaint against the paper), but when it failed, they bowed to public pressure and stood firm. Not sure how it is now, 15 years later, but the press is/was very, very powerful and always there, watching the various governments and calling them out on any BS Edit: Don't get me started on unions, labour laws, 6 weeks paid annual leave etc. 😝

Started up a new game as Keyrockaethom Thaxymperum Kresusiso IX, aspiring Teladi entrepreneur. Here is my starting Kestrel Vanguard: It's a scout and, like most Teladi ships, it has average firepower (for a scout, which is to say very little), a very generous cargo hold, a beefy hull, and is quite slow (for a scout). Here is my Vulture Vanguard: It's a freighter and it's Teladi, so again, big cargo hold, strong hull, slow. On the far left of the picture below is the Kestrel, for scale: Here's what it look like from inside the schlongpit (since this site auto-censors ****pit for some reason): There's the ship's pilot and captain Gantelios Trosulis Yahanis V. Also, the station we're on is my Sunrise Flower Farm. As a fun bit of attention to detail, my view, when on foot, is that of a Teladi and Teladi are considerably shorter than humans, so humans seem like giants when I come up to them. I don't think there are any mirrors in the game, but if I ever find one, I'll take a screenie of what I look like.

First couple of seasons of 24 are pretty good. After that it very rapidly succumbs to threat inflation and scenario repetition. It was still (mostly) entertaining though even when it was stupid.

i feel like there definitely needs to be more brigandine - all my tanks feel samey because they all seem to converge on plate armor or Reckless Brigandine. Also in general, i think there should be "caster-enabling" heavy armor, even if it's not ideal, i think there's a lot of game design space here. I'm thinking of a slow, ponderous "battleship" combat (slow, ponderous, heavy-hitting) caster approach - the full +55% recovery penalty but maybe some bonus concentration or bonus spell keyword PLs to reward or enable the slow casting. ok, maybe even like a "crit on spell cast removes next recovery" thing. Not a lot though (at most two), just to provide some options because in general Deadfire tries to open up a lot of options, but heavy armor + casting is definitely one they don't even seem to try to enable. there also needs to be magical clothing. I hate that for my +0% recovery partymembers, after customizing their aesthetics and color choices, after like an hour of playing the game they are all looking nearly identical by wearing robes. One thing i miss about PoE1 is being able to take some clothing that I like the look of and manually enchanting them into something custom and nifty. I would even accept existing robes just re-branded into some variety of clothing. Similarly, I would also prefer armor to not be so eager to override your color choices - especially annoying with robes since even the neon-pink characters my daughter helps create end up looking the same when wearing Effigy's Husk or Humility. Lastly - more keyword interactions! There's tons of keywords everywhere, and I think it makes for more interesting game design if those keywords are used or referenced. Not just the standard fire, frost, etc. keywords, but priest or druid keywords, even monk or chanter keywords (e.g. some pacifist themed-armor that grants +1 or +2 non-offensive invocation PL).

Playing Fallout for the first time in over fifteen years, and oh boy, is this game a tough pill to swallow nowadays. To say it's aged badly is an understatement, there's things here that almost feel designed for the express intent of obfuscating basic mechanics and frustrating the player. At the same time it's somehow a lot of fun on that level too - it's fun to do something akin to a post-mortem run of it, to break down all the places where the game could be improved in the modern day and think about all these flaws. It's one of those cases that feel very rewarding as a case study of what not to do. Of course the game still holds in a fair few departments and is overall quite fun in spite of its age. Mark Morgan's score especially does a lot of heavylifting throughout.

yeah, there were some dev updates where they actually showed it. they also talked about the difficulties of doing dynamic lighting and reflections in deadfire, because they basically have to do a lot of "fakery" since the world has no actual depth. it was actually astonishing to see one of these updates because it seemed like a whole lot of work to emulate the low-tech IE engine in a decent way. (Kind of reminds of the lego movie looking like being made completely of legos but having been made with top-of-the-line CGI rendering farms)

It is not. It's prerendered 2D environment which is then handpainted over. There are 3D-objects in it though (trees, characters etc.). You can tell once you want to cast some line-of fire spells like Rolling Flame up or down a stairway: perspective doesn't work then because actually the environment is flat. There's also some video footage where the devs rotate the camera and you can see how the environment (which is basically only a background) behaves then. Maybe I can find it. That's the main reason why the maps have to get reloaded (screen goes dark and then comes back again) if something of the environment changes.

BBC - Captain Tom Moore finished NHS fundraiser as it tops £12million

It's been a long time coming, but I finally have my Teladi Buzzard Vanguard: It's almost completely decked out, the only thing missing is that the center hardpoint, right below the ****pit, is currently empty; it will eventually house a mk2 tracking missile launcher. Top of the line engines, top of the line thrusters, top of the line shields, top of the line software, and 2 mk2 shard batteries (basically shotguns). Until I get my missile launcher (soon), I won't have much return firepower at range (in theory shard batteries have a maximum range of nearly 3 km, but in practice they're not very effective past 800m or so), but if I close distance on a target, the shard batteries will shred enemies rapidly. I can go toe to toe with any other heavy fighter, I obliterate light fighters, and scouts... well, they're a problem because they're so damn fast and maneuverable, but at the same time, they present no threat to me, because they simply don't have the firepower to get through my shields unless I do something really stupid. All I need is one dumb mistake from a scout and my shard batteries will vaporize them. As for larger vessels, I can definitely take on freighters, not that I turn to piracy, generally, but gunboats and frigates would be a big issue, since they have so much more firepower than I do, and I don't have the correct loadout to deal with them (if I ever do decide to try to take on a gunboat or frigate, I would swap the shard batteries for plasma cannons, and swap my eventual tracking missile launcher for a torpedo launcher). Still, I would at least not get instantly vaporized by a gunboat, so I at least would have the opportunity to flee. (The Buzzard's biggest drawback is that it is relatively slow for a heavy fighter and a gunboat or frigate could mostly keep up with me, but I could certainly outmaneuver them, my turn speeds are way faster).

a clever quick solution if you don't have masks and don't have skills/supplies to craft one. HA! Good Fun!

We're not really getting a Star Trek Picard Re:View of the final two episodes. It seems like Rich really doesn't want to talk about it. He's baaaaaaaaaaack! Mike must have really hated the ending.

It also doesn't help with the long talk-info scenes ("Give me Vault Key, now going to talk mission stuff for 3 minutes"). But at least I can finally get cool shots of Meat-Puppet. Worth it. 😛

Driving a truck to be painted in Saints' colours:

can you see the light? gospel choirs do have a unique capacity to take sombre and mournful songs and make 'em hopeful and even joyous. swing low, sweet chariot (written by a choctaw man btw,) is positively ebullient when sung by etta james and backing choir. amazing grace might be a rare exception as it is one o' the gospel hymns which rare get uplift. yeah, you may find exceptions, but is an inherent reserved quality to amazing grace which affects most performers. @Azdeus is likely apocryphal, but supposed, mozart managed to "steal" the secret o' allegri's miserere mei. written music were a close guarded secret o' the vatican, or so the story goes, until mozart heard once and then put pen to paper. the music were deemed a powerful tool o' conversion and faith by the church. am also a big fan o' mozart's requiem, though a few o' the portions we like bestest might not actually have been written by mozart. go figure. and our favorite movie theme o' all-time is having choral and is evoking mass even though such is secular. am not certain o' our faith, but if God does exist, he speak to us more clear through music. HA! Good Fun!

Because Keyrock and Hurlshot aren't the only people who can fly:

Working on the Jeanette Voerman look

^ I love this shot, even if it ultimately didn't lead to anything.

if you're paying attention to the story at all you shouldn't have any trouble figuring out which characters are ride or die with their faction

I will bump my request just in case anyone want to give it a try Thanks!