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Yes, it's pretty awesome for a caster. But I mean... if you want to really buff up your spell dmg then nothing beats Deltro's Cage Helmet on a Wizard. You can easily hit yourself with a Chain Lightning first (it jumps to the nearest enemy afterwards so it's not even 100% wasted just on you) and then you'll get a shocking lash equal to the shock dmg you received. So if you suffered 80 shock dmg you'll get a 80%(!) shocking lash on all dmg you cause, including spells. After (or before) casting that Chain Lightning I like to use Wall of Draining to prolong the lash's duration (or use a Priest with SoT). You can even stack it with Blightheart - or even better use Engoliero (which also gets the lash for all dmg it causes). It's a bit of a hassle to set it up (in RtwP at least) - but it's so powerful that it's totally worth it in harder fights. Of course it's also possible to use it with any other char if you have a reliable source of shock dmg (like a fellow wizard or Stormspeaker with Crackling Bolt/Chain Lightning or a shifted Fury or any guy with Essence Interrupter).

Total War Shogun 2 is free, also on Steam.

Went for a two and a half hour walk with my pack

Become? Bolsonaro never was anything but a stain on the human race. He's in good company, they seem to be very abundant these days.

I wondered whether "destroy when near death" spells work on Graze. So I tested Touch of Death untilI I get a Graze, and yeah, it works.

As long as it stays down there...

Spam spam spam spam spam...

Alien Isolation is 95% off on Steam for whatever reason. Criminally cheap for such a great game.

Today is my daughter's 13th birthday. We live next to a parking lot, and it has been completely empty during the pandemic, so I ordered a 120 inch fabric screen for about $30. Then I put a raised frame up on the back fence, and people drove up to watch a movie that we played with a projector and a speaker system. It turned out pretty well! Drive-In Movies are coming abck in style.

Browsing through my MP3 collection. Heh. Trips down memory lane, the bane of my sleep since... well since I've been old enough to travel memory lane.

If we set that in the Kelvin timeline it could still be directed by Baybrams, would have younger actors and a Trek 'verse that fits much better with the description. See... things come together anyway. (Also, why does the Kindle edition of that book cost 19€ on Amazon?)

On one hand Rise of Skywalker was the only Star Wars film of the new trilogy I wasn't bored at some point. On the other that was achieved by cramming three movies worth of stuff happening into an incoherent mess that I only enjoyed so well because The Last Jedi killed the past for me. What we really need is a Star Wars / Transformers crossover directed by Michael "Jar Jar" Baybrams.

The results are nice indeed... Thank you Boeroer, nearly missed that combo-wombo... Currently lasts 3 rounds without Wall of Draining btw... enough to accomplish something

Yes, it stacks with everything.

Yeah, I've been digging it. The track with Immortal Technique is great but makes me want The Middle Passage to come out, which is something I've been waiting on for years at this point. Anyways I've been on a King Crimson kick lately, party because someone who played with them died recently and partly because my roommate has been watching an anime featuring a schizophrenic mob boss.

Yep, best to keep your space fantasy both fantastical and spacey.

I wanted to take a moment to just summarise my thoughts on The Outer Worlds. As it stands, I last played the game in December as I played it with Gamepass and didn't feel a need to renew my subscription once I was finished with the game. First off, as always, I would like to start out by saying that I did thoroughly enjoy the game and I will definitely pick it up when it releases on Steam later this year (Hopefully with some DLC to enhance the experience). However, overall I would say that the game was "good." What follows are a few points that in my eyes caused the overall experience fall just short of "incredible." I am aware that a lot of these elements are subject to time and budget constraints, but I will still mention them in spite of that as Obsidian will be heading into this potential franchise with a larger budget in future. 1. An overall lifeless feeling: The Outer Worlds does not feel like an RPG in the sense that I am used to. A lot of the mechanics made it feel more like an MMORPG without other players; It was as though I had stumbled upon an entire empty server that should host hundreds of other people. The majority of human NPCs in the game act like noticeboards with personalities. They are always stood rooted to their position, ready to hand out and conclude quests. They make me think of the characters you would encounter in World of Warcraft and the like. The remainder of humans that mill about and at least follow a very basic schedule are completely oblivious to the player. This is all too apparent when the player makes choices. Edgewater for example, even though NPCs relocate over time based on your choices, it never feels like you've made an impact. You never stumble across a couple of plant workers trying to fight off creatures outside the town or anything like that. The same applies to the enemies. They are rooted to their spawn locations along with other enemies of the same type. When attacked they will charge at you or engage from a distance. If you flee, they will eventually band back to their original location and regain their health. Again, identical to an MMORPG. You never see these NPCs clash with one another, there is no hunting behaviour and it feels incredibly artificial. Some of the best moments I've had in any genre of game are when something dynamic and unexpected happens. For example, imagine scoping out a marauder blockade and planning your attack. Then, just as you're about to charge in, BAM. A couple of mantisaurs lumber into view and start attacking them. You can let the battle pan out and then take on the weakened victor, or go full bore and jump into the fray, starting a crazy three sided battle. 2. Corporations. A massive missed opportunity: Right from the first trailer, one thing I was really looking forward to was the faction reputation systems. I was looking forward to picking a side or playing them off against one another. However, when jumping into the game I was thoroughly disappointed to see that most factions are entirely separate from one another, occupying different world spaces. I would have LOVED to see two or more corporations sharing the same space and having to get along, clashing over the slightest thing and coming to blows over products. Imagine a Spacer's Choice and Cleo worker getting into a brawl over skin cream or something equally trivial. The player could wade in and intervene, using their reputation with either corporation to resolve or escalate the situation. 3. At little more RP in my G: One thing that I really enjoyed was the stat checks in dialogue, allowing my character to make quips and offer solutions based on their strengths. That has been severely lacking in other franchises recently, which I won't name. However, there are a couple things I would like to see to take this further. First of all, bring back the joke dialogue options for failed checks. A player with low charisma should be able to make inappropriate or cringe inducing comments when presented with a charm check. A weaker character should be able to draw attention to their noodle-like build when presented with a strength check and so on.. Yes, this means more dialogue, but the outcome could be hilarious. I also don't recall many situations where stats could be used to find an alternate solution to a quest objective. More of that would be very nice indeed. That's everything. I enjoyed the game immensely, but couldn't bring myself to play a second character beyond reaching Groundbreaker because it just felt so samey. The combat and characters doesn't really show significant based on your build. Maybe some of these points will be addressed, even if only slightly in the upcoming DLC this year. However, I am really excited to see what can be done with this universe in future instalments.

Please don't look at the new Star Wars films with too much scrutiny, you might cause our own universe to collapse. I beg of you!

NyTimes - He found one of Stalin's mass graves, now he's on trial for pedophilia

It did not.

The number is calculated from the Fig investment returns that were paid to investors of the campaign. Since the rules of fig shares are transparent you can deduce the revenue. If you then assume an average price you're under 200K copies. However, that was some time ago and before it came out on consoles.

New standalone expansion of Atom RPG in Soviet setting is comming to GOG soon. https://www.gog.com/news/coming_soon_atom_rpg_trudograd

Eh, does that link in all honesty compare monomyth based stories like Star Wars to epic poems and works of literature featuring a classical tragic hero (point in case, Hamlet) to make a point that classical literature never was about good versus evil before the rise of nationalism? Not only is that painting a varied and long subject with immense history in extremely broad strokes it is also flawed, I think, because that central conflict was always there, just not externalized as much, and the differences especially when compared to traditional folklore can also be attributed to the duality of good and evil as separate entities as taught by Abrahamic religion (instead of being an internal conflict beholden to divine will, i.e. fate as it was for classical Greek drama and epic poetry). Of course Hector would never stop being Trojan as much as Achilles would always be Greek. As playthings of the gods they simply had no choice. How would Darth Vader be possible in such a framework? That concept would be ridiculous to the people of the time as much as the concept of the gods controlling and playing with humanity is (well should be) to us if applied to the real world. Homer would scoff at Darth Vader changing sides? Yes, probably. Because were Star Wars a classical Greek epic, the force would be a capital "Force" and thus (a) "God" and the conlcusion of the conflict fated. Or if it were a Greek drama Luke would probably vanquish Vader, be utterly destroyed by Palpatine and then Zeus would lower himself down from the heavens to set right the wrongs. Deus ex machina was a staple of Greek drama. Today it's considered bad form (this has also something do to with how pervasive the concept of fate is in culture, no?). Back to your point I'd also argue that the term literary ficiton is somewhat arbitrary. Literary fiction is, essentially, what the literary academia decides that it is (not that academic consensus is a bad thing, it just takes a while to be formed). Go back a century and you'll have people arguing that Jane Austen wrote romance pulp and will never be considered literary fiction in much in the same way that students of the liberal arts these days argue that fantasy fiction or video games will never be true art and worthy of study. The concept alone seems ridiculous, a tenured professor at Oxford teaching Classical games of the 90ies? Bad literature is bad, but fantasy fiction isn't the only genre that has a lot of terrible books. I'll never get tired of bringing it up but the absolutely worst novels of the past few years were firmly in the housewife porn and romance genre and born of ascended fan fiction. Please, go and read Anna Todd's After series and then come back and argue that R.A. Salvatore writes bad Forgotten Realm novels. I mean he does, but it's by far not the worst you could come across.

Dun dun duhhn!

I don't know anything about rounds. But with Wall of Draining on mutiple enemies I can buff it from its base duration (12 sec or so) to over 200 seconds. INT does apply as well. If you wear the Cap of the Laughingstock with another party member then enemies always have a buff on them that you can drain from.

You can't pickpocket when observed, unless that somehow got changed.

Okay, here's my rant. First of all, lets get to the "this is exactly the same situation we had 15 years ago when we took Aaron Rodgers while Favre was at the helm". No. A big hard no. In that draft, there were two QBs who were graded, or had the assumption on them, to be the number one pick overall in the draft. It was Alex Smith and Aaron Rodgers. As we all know, Rodgers wasn't picked number one overall and fell into the lap of Ted Thompson, who of course could have passed too, but took a shot which turned out to be very smart. You cannot compare that situation to the one we had a few days ago. No one, and I mean no one, had the opinion that Jordan Love was good enough to be the number one overall pick. He was projected much lower down the board, and by some even into the second or later rounds. So to trade up to grab Love in the first round is not equivalent to when they picked Rodgers. If Tua had fallen into the Packers lap, that would have been an equivalent situation, but that didn't happen. I was so shocked and then pissed over the weekend but having calmed a bit, I've tried to look at why this happened and the more I think about it, the more obvious it is. Rodgers QBR has gone down four years in a row. Last year, the Packers were about to draft Drew Lock in the second round, but the Broncos "stole" him right before their eyes. So it's obvious that the Packers are assuming Rodgers will continue to decline in a way that they don't see him as a good enough starter in 2-3 years (by that time they also have an easier way to get out of his contract). Gutekunst and LaFleur is saying all the right words right now but what they really are saying is that they are gonna punt Rodgers out of the organization in about 2 years. The only thing that can hinder this is if all this debacle turns a fire under Rodgers ass and he goes into God mode for the next two years. In that case they'll of course have to trade Love, much like the Patriots did with Jimmy G. Is see this as an unlikely scenario though, as Rodgers doesn't have a Robert Kraft type of person to defend his spot in the organization. Jordan Love could, in theory, be a very good QB. But in my mind, the Packers did a "bears move" and got their very own Mitch Trubisky.

That's an amazing story to have shared - thanks Hurlshot!

As far as I'm concerned the boss is a spicy Latina.

Today I remedied the fact that I never sent anyone any **** pics, solicited or unsolicited.

It's a great irony that he apparently won't live to see a world that has functionally vindicated the ideology NK runs on.

Funny you would say that. I modeled my boss after Statham:

Jason Statham confirmed for a movie "loosely based on" the Saints Row franchise, pre-production slated for 2022.

I wonder how much his reflection would be about hope and resilience if he had been in a real crisis, not just a toilet paper shortage and a few weeks without restaurant visits Like, if he had had no food and water for days, survived the 217th bombing attack of his village and his family locked up and burned alive for being white? Edit: or even just one of the poor suckers who have now lost their job for a foreseeable future

That was the idea. That was also why I got the chickens. Now they all have names and follow me around and I wouldn't harm a feather on them even if I was starving. But I will take the eggs though. Clearly I'm not much good at this farming thing. I get too attached to the livestock.

considering I am unemployed I decided I will go on overnight trip with friend for fishing last 2 days, here are some highlights arrival: overnight catch (this is my friend): morning:

Sadly not, the only parameter (apart from OnEquipVisualEffects) that affects the appearance of the armor is a path to the unity asset: { "$type": "Game.GameData.EquippableGameData, Assembly-CSharp", "DebugName": "Robe_Armor_U_Effigys_Husk", "ID": "54b1899b-13d0-4e2e-a1f6-35bada15554a", "Components": [ { "$type": "Game.GameData.EquippableComponent, Assembly-CSharp", "AppearancePiece": { "ModelVisualDataPath": "prefabs/items/appearance/body/cl/cl21/a_cl21_v02.asset" } } ] }

Instead of troubleshooting the correct way to to format a character name, just use the oei_hovered instance ID. Position the cursor over the character you want to modify (no need to click on them), then: AttributeScore oei_hovered dexterity 20 (or whatever)

The cops have started designating 'no stop' zones. You can walk through but you can't sit around and chill. If you chill, you get fined.

This is a very interesting read on how modern fiction and modern interpretation of old stories have been re-cast as a conflict between good & evil: The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth I have never been a fan of fantasy fiction. Usually I would describe it as unoriginal or just dismiss it by saying "it just sucks". There are some exceptions of course. But I could never put my finger on why I disliked it. This article cleared some of that up. The lone hero vs the evil king/dark lord etc. trope. How often does fantasy give us a conflict between to equally flawed but equally sympathetic and equally worthy protagonists and antagonists? Not often. Mostly the antagonist is evil for evil's sake. GRRM said something I really liked once. The villain of your story should be the hero if the story were about them. Things used to be that way. Neither Achillies nor Hector were good or bad. Nor were Agamemnnon and Priam. Literary fiction still gets it. Somewhat. Humphrey van Weyden, the protagonist of the Sea Wolf was in conflict with the antagonist Wolf Larson BECASE Hump was moral and Larson immoral. But at the same time neither were good or evil and both were very sympathetic.

Shady is a wolf!

I fell coming down the stairs in the dark around 4 AM yesterday (I thought I was at the bottom of the stairs and I wasn't) and dislocated my second toe on my left foot. So, that was fun. I'm supposed to wear a walking boot, but because of the virus, the medical supply store was closed on Saturdays (it's usually open until 1), so I have to wait until Monday to get the boot, so I'm painfully hobbling around (and given that all my stuff including my computer is on the second floor and the kitchen is on the first floor, I'm climbing up and down stairs at least twice a day.) Fortunately, I had someone to take me to the urgent care (which didn't open until 8), because there's no way I'd have been willing to drive myself (I almost passed out a couple minutes after I fell.) Still, they'd only allow one person in the urgent care at a time, and given that medical professionals/facilities cause me extreme anxiety (to the point where I have a hard time not running away or passing out) that was....difficult.

Some Canadians are confused about which country they are in, I find.

I'd like to take this time to notify everyone that if you type ":p" with a lowercase "p", you get a "" instead of a "", which is what you get when you use an uppercase "P" in ":P". I think we can all agree that "" looks a hundred times better and more dignified than the weird emoji-like "". I would also like you to know that I will be silently judging you if you continue to use "" after learning this.