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There's a new Trailer for Corven, a game in the spirit of Ultima. It even has the original Lord British, but that is pretty much everything Richard Garriott has to do with it.

Serial Cleaner, courtesy of @ShadySands. A very pleasant ~5-hour game (right about the time I like for simple-but-novel indie game concepts) about being hired by murderers to clean up dead bodies left behind while cops are patrolling the crime scene. Get in, avoid the cops, clean up, get out. Simple, but I thought pretty enjoyable and well-made for what it is. Thanks, Shady.

https://www.theonion.com/serbia-deploys-peacekeeping-forces-to-u-s-1819565829

Reality TV seems to be what he does best. Christian on demand? Might convince somebody. They'll probably close their eyes too when he breaks each and every one of the ten commandments, demanding they get renegotiated, because they were treating Americans unfairly.

I finally bought a micro-bead body pillow that is as long as I am. I no longer need my husband. ...more seriously, took me a bit to find "the position" (lying on side) but it's working wonders for my bad upper back. great for naps or watching tv. Ahhh, relief.

Organization is the problematic word here. There doesn't seem to be any real structure or leadership. I mean, there are some fantastic conspiracy theories out there that make them seem like some shadowy cabal, but yeah...it's a bit hard to believe. Traditional terrorist groups have meeting and pamphlets.

so medicine dan does wanna discuss hydroxy? didn't wanna discuss 'til he finds what appears to be a life preserver for trump? 'course the lifeline doesn't actual legitimize what is the irresponsible promotion by trump o' hydroxy, which medicine dan is still missing as the point o' the animosity o' trump's double-down behaviour as 'posed to any kinda misplaced anger at a drug. again, anger weren't 'bout hydroxy but rather trump's initial reckless promotion o' an unproven drug which resulted in shortages for those people who genuine do benefit from the drug. when confronted with the lack o' scientific support for promoting an unproven drug simple to provide hope to the masses (is least skeevy argument in favor o' trump's promotion 'cause otherwise is worst kinda self-serving cronyism) trump doubled-down and increased the promotion o' hydroxy contemporaneous with being questioned 'bout every subsequent hydroxy study which appears to call its covid-19 benefits into question. for chrissakes, the media, as a whole, did their freaking job insofar as hydroxy is concerned. the % o' americans who has any idea o' what is possible benefits and the subsequent side effects o' hydroxy in the treatment o' covid-19 patients at the time trump first promoted would be negligible. media sources did due diligence and presented facts o' covid-19 to understandable ignorant public. reasonable media then did responsible and asked the President why he would advocate so strong for hydroxy in spite o' so little scientific support while simultaneous observing the potential dangers o' promoting a drug not approved for treating. point out dr. fauci reservations is counting as hounding the President? observe shortages suffered by lupus patients is unfair? mention va studies and others which question hydroxy efficacy? how on earth does medicine dan see such as unreasonable? such questions is, paradoxical, only unreasonable 'cause the President doesn't have good responses. consider for a moment a change in reality: if trump had scientific data and preponderance o' expert support on hydroxy issues, such questions as medicine dan is seeming seeing as unfair would be labeled as softballs lobbed up to make trump look good. internet is only place we may have these kinda discussions. in rl we use understanding and empathy 'cause confront the obtuse with their unreasonable and irrational support o' trump behaviours does not promote constructive dialectic. such ineffectual understanding in the face o' rejection o' sound argument and clear facts is so exhausting. get to throw of shackles o' nice behaviour. medicine dan, and the like, will spin every trump criticism. why? question trump 'bout idiocy such as crowd size, cancer causing windmill sound and sharpie altered weather maps is inverted and becomes criticism o' liberal media hounding the President? and those is the minor lies and mistakes which trump promotes. is maddening. is madness. HA! Good Fun!

It does not work with Relentless Storm. At least it did not the last time I tested it.

Not completely accurate in the historical sense, but enough to make a point in general...

^ So here's the thing. It's possible that grizzly will stay "domesticated" throughout its lifetime and everything will turn out great, providing many more cool, fun, adorable, and, most importantly, money making YouTube videos to come. It's also possible, less so, but still possible, that the bear mauls one or more of those people. Granted, they're Russian, and thus SIGNIFICANTLY more tempered against bear attacks, but still, if you house a wild animal, you are rolling the dice.

^ That lady is crazy. I wouldn't do that with a black bear. I DEFINITELY wouldn't do that with a grizzly bear. I SUPER DEFINITELY wouldn't do that with a polar bear. Black bears, for the most part, just want to be left alone (that makes them kindred spirits to me) and will leave you be if they don't perceive you as a threat, but if they do come at you stand your ground. Grizzly bears are highly territorial and very well may attack you, if they do, go prone and pray. Polar bears consider you food and will absolutely kill and eat you, if they come at you then you are ****ed.

The witches I've known have never said anything about the 'unseeable' vs other religions, given that their religion is polytheistic...

At the moment the worst damage to, er, faith in science comes from deliberate politically motivated misrepresentation. Some from the Chinese, especially the local Wuhan authorities, and some from Trump types trying to cover their own arse. Plus some at least theoretically apolitical conspiracy theorising. A certain amount of charlatanism and snake oil selling is to be expected in any crisis, and it isn't like all scientists don't like money. I don't think it will matter if they come up with an effective vaccine. Even without a full peer review you'd still have to make it past the editorial board or equivalent of a journal like The Lancet, and they should be able to pick up most fakes at that stage. The old joke- such a knee slapper, makes me smile just thinking about it- is that Gregor Mendel's work on genetics would not even have made it past a modern editorial board because his data was too perfect and they'd assume it was faked.

**EDIT June 5, 2020** Hello everyone! As Steam has changed the start date for the Steam Game Festival to June 16th, we will be changing the Xbox Insider Flight to match that date so all of our players can play the game simultaneously. You will now be able to experience the tiny taste of Grounded starting June 16th through June 22nd. We can't wait to see you in the backyard then! Want more Grounded information? Then be sure to join our Discord community! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello everyone! Are you ready to get a tiny taste of the single-player experience? Then get ready, because the Xbox Insider flight now has a date! But wait, there's more! Grounded will also be participating in the Steam Game Festival at the same time! Starting June 16th 9th and extending through June 22nd 14th, BOTH the Xbox Insider flight and Steam Game Festival will start, and you will be able to play a demo of Grounded! On June 9th, Grounded flight will appear on the Xbox Insider Hub for those in the Xbox Insider Program to download. There are a limited number of downloads allowed for this flight and it will be on a first-come first-serve basis. We will announce the opening of the flight on our Twitter page, so if you aren't following us already now is the perfect time to do so! Participating in the Insider flight will also be the only way you will be able to play this demo on your Xbox console, so if you are an Xbox console player this is something to keep in mind. To participate in the Steam Game Festival, starting June 9th you will be able to download and play the same demo that will be released on the flight. You will need to have a Steam account to play, and that's it! We are excited to have you all here on this journey with us, and look forward to getting you all in the game for this single-player demo! See you in the backyard soon!

Dude just pounded back a 6 pack of https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/182/1351/

yep. they won't even switch weapons. even then I sometimes don't even have AI enabled - mostly for casters with extremely slow ranged weapons equipped, so I'm not worried that they'll be stuck in recovery if I need a super important spell cast right then (like healing).

Total War: Troy will be free for 24h on launch day on the EPIC store (13th August)

Might be misreading you on this, but the University of Texas tower shootings were 4 years earlier. You can go back to at least 1927 with other types of school attacks, with the Bath School massacre being the earliest I can think of off the top of my head.

I started rewatching all the X-Men movies with the boy over the last week or so, the earlier ones have not aged that well and they really are a little poor overall. Logan is easily the pick of the bunch.

I never take it. The +1 AR is not bad though. The retaliation is nothing to write home about.

So there's inaction now ? Sounds like aggravated assault is already something to charge people with. But terrorism is supposed to be a serious thing, Antifa's activities seem like typical gang behaviour (not even mafia like) rather than something along the lines of ETA, IRA, Red Brigades, etc. The dude with the sword ? He's still alive, last I heard.

SOROS!

well all of them! xD those in cave crawl challenges, finishing support wing now

complete inversion and you wouldn't accept such nonsense from others making such specious arguments, but you are embracing yourself. Gromnir is pointing out trump errors and mistakes. converse, medicine dan is not defending substance o' arguments, but is instead attacking the motives o' Gromnir and others... which he knows is a logic fail and weak. even if you genuine believe a person is utterly partisan and indulging in obvious hypocrisy, that don't mean their argument is a fail. nevertheless, you has replaced perceived flaw in messenger with any attempt to refute arguments. all the trump criticisms fail, and medicine dan need not respond on merits, 'cause all those attacking trump is mean spirited. bah. nonsense. am gonna give you perhaps more credit than you deserve and posit that you would never defend such intellectual flimflammery on any other issue save trump. "What I'm suggesting is that people wait for robust clinical trials of the drug." that is exact what dr. fauci suggested and is at the heart o' the criticism o' trump regarding hydroxy. BEFORE promoting hydroxy and creating synthetic shortages o' a medicine which helps keep lupus patients alive, trump shoulda' waited for robust clinical trials. when trump were questioned as to why he were advocating untested drug insofar as covid-19 instead o' taking medicine dan advice, trump doubled-down. nevertheless, medicine dan is defending trump from those who has asked trump why he did not do as medicine dan suggest is the reasonable course o' action? madness indeed. and no, you don't drive us crazy. sadly. am sad to say that medicine dan curious obtuseness on all things trump is just so... ordinary. never thought it would be ordinary, but have become numb to it. were initial curious to see such zealotry from the fox talking heads and from gun-toting crazies at (fill in the blank here with protest dujour whether it be white supremacists with tiki torches in virginia or confederate flag waving nutters fighting stay-at-home orders in michigan). not driven least bit crazy but am admitted disappointed 'cause am knowing medicine dan can be better. HA! Good Fun!

Yeah, probative, Mal. Seriously, I'm not defending the medication. I'm suggesting we not label the medication as something we haven't proved it is. Why are we even debating the medication? Would we have this same discussion about a medication that already had media coverage if Donald Trump hadn't mentioned it in a conference? If you believe that, you're a fool. There were and are reasons to be skeptical about hydroxychloroquine. We shouldn't take it for granted that it works. However, the nature of the attacks became far more personal and less substantive the second that Trump made it politicized. Is it Trump's fault he's so obnoxious that he draws fire on a constant basis? Yeah. Sure. Do the people who have developed such hatred for him that they take every desperate avenue in order to attack him share in that blame. Of course. I'll give you this, like Gromnir, you take a narrow focus on a small line of text in order to attack a larger argument, but at least you don't take so long to do it. As an aside, I think it's an effective tactic, so I can't help but admire it. I agree with Gromnir in this: if we were in person, I think we'd still have heated arguments, but I think we'd also find it easier to generate some goodwill also. Anyhow, I really do appreciate pushback on my ideas. It's simply impossible to grow otherwise. I *do* find some of the arguments frustrating, but that's probably a good sign. EDIT: just a few minor edits for clarity.

When you give a command, the AI should be respecting that (the only exception is using potions/poisons). Worst-case scenario, you can press "X" (or whatever hotkey) to stop your character and that also stops their AI script until their "Aggressive/Defensive/Defend Self" trigger is kicked off (but even then there's a delay). Do you have any mods that might be interfering with that? Or are your characters being interrupted and you're not noticing? Do you have cooldowns on your script actions? Spoken as someone who's clocked 1000+ hours on this game with AI scripts and haven't had this issue (except again, with potions/poisons post-4.0). Though in all but a handful of my runs, I leave casters without any AI script (other than auto attack) because I want to be sure to micromanage every single spellcast decision, since the default scripts are mostly terrible and the default unmodded AI scripting really limits what you can do with spells and conditionals.

Hey now, there's good hentai out there. I heard.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/iran-calls-stop-violence-people-200601184201383.html

since battlepass dropped I was grinding DoTA all days long, i must say its good fun to have incentive to play some heroes

So, Battle Forged (Fire Godlike) stacks with all of them but doesn't seem to trigger Swift Flurry - at least I couldn't see it while trying. During the same test Fire Shield triggered it several times. Still: Battle-Forged + Lay on Hands (Darcozzi) + Magran's Blessing + Flame Shield is pretty cool in combination with Combusting Wounds. You get hit and create 4 instances of CW on the enemy right away. Sacred Immolation helps to get to Blooded pretty quickly.

Thanks! My SC monk just reached lvl 19 yesterday, and WoW is just so incredible. He can wipe out trash mobs with one WoW circuits with bare fists. For the tougher foes, I use dual mortars as you've often suggested, Boeroer. They have so many resonant stacks that this ability wipes out any who survive the WoW onslaught. I'm about to head to Kazuwari start SSS to get Keeper of the Flame, so that I can try the Keeper of the Flame/Scordeo's edge/saint's war armor combo as well.

Regarding your questions, (1) personally I'd say that Eder and Maia both really benefit from multiclassing as rogues. Theosupus earlier posted an Iron Hammer build that works great for Eder; I follow this build whenever I add him to my party. And Maia as a scout (rogue/ranger) multiclass is fantastic, and does great DPS. Aloth, on the other hand, is probably best as a SC Wizard. Personally, I usually dual class my priests. Unlike classes like wizard and monk, they do not have OP tier 8 & 9 abilities that you'll really miss. As for the other class, they're very tanky multiclassed as a Paladin. Or you could make a healbot by multiclassing as a lifegiver druid. I had fun with a Bleak walker/Priest of Magran build loaded up with all the +fire gear.

Let's be clear here, the people looting don't give a flying **** about George Floyd. People protesting peacefully, those people care about George Floyd, police brutality, civil rights, etc. The people looting were just looking for an excuse to loot, they are criminals.

It is impressive. Especially when you use real black powder and not the synthetic stuff. It is a big boom, big cloud of smoke and a scary amount of damage with the right load.

Unless you're a workaholic, the amount of lost time doing a job like that hardly ever ends up being worth it. I've got too many other things I need or want to do to willingly waste away all my waking hours for a job. Salary, especially if you're in anything computer related (IT, programming, whatever), is just about the worst thing you can sign on for if you expect to ever not be working. A work culture that expects you to always be over your hours or "you're not working hard enough" is one I'm going to jump ship from as soon as humanly possible.

The power is that even tiny damaging attack rolls lead to the same raw dmg stacks. So a blunderbuss for example adds 4 stacks while an arquebus only adds 1 per shot. That's why I loke mortars with Whisper of the Winds so much. Against a group of enemies you will apply so many small dmg hits that in itself might be enough to kill enemies - but the cumulated stacks of RT are superdevastating then. Also works well with Swift-Flurry/Heartbeat-Drumming chains and Sun & Moon for example.

It also works with Avenging Storm (every lightning during the empowered duration will trigger the Least Unstable Coil). I use it with dual mortars + Avenging Storm from time to time because one volley with Blinding Smoke is enough to trigger Brilliant if you hit enough enemies. I suspect Relentless Storm would also do this and maybe even Nature's Terror but I didn't test them.

Hey everyone! Grounded won't be up on the Insider Hub until we get closer to launching the flight! Follow us on our socials to make sure you are staying current with our news! Thanks! https://twitter.com/GroundedTheGame https://twitter.com/obsidian https://www.instagram.com/obsidian/ https://www.facebook.com/obsidian

Edit: I feel I've done this before. Huh.

Grounded comes to Early Access on July 28th.

Hello everyone! We have a new post up on the Grounded website! In it you will find a link to the PAX East panel with Grounded's Game Director, Adam Brennecke, Senior Programmer, Roby Atadero, and Lead Environment Artist, Sean Dunny, along with our special guest moderator, Larry Hryb, Xbox Live's 'Major Nelson'. We also shared the link to join the Xbox Insider Program so you can sign up before we start our Insider Flight in the upcoming months. You will also find the link to our Steam Page so you can wishlist Grounded today! Review all of this and more on our new post!

Pillars 1's writing is full of unnecessary complication, of the type discussed in the first link from Literarylab. It's a chore to read through endless reams of overwrought description and awkward similes. Much of it is contained within companion dialogue, which is surprising considering that the dialogue in the game is written by a variety of different authors, many of them established experts in their field, such as Chris Avellone. I suppose this point is redundant without examples, so I'll try to provide some, but it's not as if I wrote down the worst examples I saw while playing through the game or anything like that. Example: Durance dialogue/description 'Dies' into a smile? This is just an awkward verb to use here. This is from the moment where you meet Durance by the statue of Magran. 'It shimmers in your eyes' is a really confusing phrase. 'In' my eyes? How can something shimmer in my eyes? That doesn't make any sense. 'Like water catching the light weaving across the statue.' So this is an attempt at a simile. The staff is shimmering, and the effect makes the staff... no wait, not the staff, it makes it seem like there's water there... floating in mid-air? Between you and the staff? Ok, I guess... so it's as if there is water, and it's catching the the light weaving across the statue that's nearby... god, this is a confusing sentence. It's very pretty but it's quite difficult to dismantle the meaning. 'Whatever power was bled from the staff, it doesn't make it - or the wielder - any less dangerous.' Ok so this sentence is trying to create the image that, despite the power that's gone from the staff, it's still dangerous, and so is Durance. But why? This old man dressed in rags doesn't seem dangerous to me. He's more like a runty hermit with a boss eye than a deadly enemy. How would I even know how dangerous he is? How would I know what power was bled from the staff? (this is early on, before you know anything about the Godhammer and Durance's role in it) How would I know that despite the power being bled, he's still dangerous? Nothing about this exchange makes me think that this guy is dangerous. Example: general description from prologue So this is another painful pair of paragraphs, this time from the start of the game. 'dark figures' It's not that dark in this scene. The enemies here could be described in detail and it would give much better understanding to the player. 'as if from half-split logs' This is another awkward simile. Half-split logs... so we're comparing these dead bodies to.. logs? Why? Other than similar shapes, why would you make this comparison? Does it make these enemies appear fearsome, to compare them to woodcutters? 'as they prepare to add you to the sprawling pile beneath them.' I'm already reeling from the confusing attempt at a simile with half-split logs, and now I have to dismantle this... add me to the sprawling pile beneath them..? The bodies can't be a pile. Unless they brought all the bodies together to put them into a pile. The bodies would be quite spread out. So not a pile. And sprawling? Remember, the definition of pile is a heap of things laid or lying one on top of another. So, a sprawling pile? This is just a really awkward description. It's quite difficult to think of a pile of things as being sprawling. 'at the neck of the man you recognise as Heodan' Another awkward set of phrases. At-the-neck-of-the-man-you-recognise-as-Heodan. Why not use 'at Heodan's neck'? Is it really so important to add this layer of detail, and in this sentence? 'The man you recognise as Heodan' just makes this entire sentence cumbersome. Anyway, I could go on, but again these are by no means the worst examples. They are, however, representative of writing that is generally ponderous and difficult to understand. Game writing, and really, good writing in general, doesn't have to be flowery and intricately detailed in order to do its job. One choice word, description, simile, etc is worth ten flat ones. There are a few other points I could make, perhaps about some of the supporting cast, but I already wrote a lot, and Thaos and the general quality of the writing are the two main problems I have with the story, so I guess this is ok. This was a high quality post. I don't agree with all of it, but I appreciated it. I also found the literary lab link to be useful. Thanks so much.