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A lot of people mistrust the holocaust? I would honestly lump those people in with anti-vaccinators and flat earthers.

Saw the Dr. last week. Went back yesterday to discuss lab stuff. Mostly in pretty good shape. BP, A1C, red/white, weight, all ok. I'd like to lose 15 lbs or so. And I gave up booze. Maybe for good this time. We'll see. I just don't get the enjoyment from it I once did. In other news I actually started playing a computer game (other than chess & OOTP) for the first time in years. I loaded, them modded up FO4 and away we go. So far I like it. Had a few restarts to work out mod conflicts and learn the controls and set it up the way I like it. I just found Dog Meat. The amazing thing is he actually acts like a dog for the first time ever.

Behold The Shawnshank Redemption of reviews...

Went for my first 10k in about 6.5 weeks. Think I had a major Type 1 or minor Type II sprain. Felt good to waddle again - will know more tomorrow how well healed the right ankle actually is!

James Carville Says ‘Significant Chance’ Trump Drops Out of Race Now wouldn't THAT be a lit match in the haybarn! As entertaining as that would be.... don't see it happening.

"The Schindler's List of shark games." I can do one better: Fifty Shades of Chum staring the Mat Damon of sharks.

Oh, God. Now I can't unsee this. As someone who grew up a big Detective Comics fan I'm gonna need some time to come to terms with this. I knew that the creators were into some alternate lifestyle stuff, but damn.

Hmm actually I'm wrong, it is not using either mainhand or offhand, it is using the slower recovery of your weapon for full attack recovery now...

The footage that came out of those camps at the end of the war needs no exaggeration. It depicts the worst of humanity. I agree that History, as a subject, should be kept fairly simple. We weigh cause and effect. Speculation should be kept separate, as that can lead us to completely false narratives such as the Mayan Scholar Utopia or the Great Zimbabwe/Queen of Sheba connection. But history is just one aspect of the Social Sciences, and I'd call it detached or even hard-hearted to ignore all that context and not think critically about how to improve the future. There is nothing political in saying that the Holocaust and Hitler are horrific chapters in human history. That is a pretty simple lesson. It isn't propaganda. I don't see what your objective is in referring to it that way.

Just finished Elex. It was the rumor that Elex 2 will be out later this year or early next that prompted me to replay. There were a couple of things I forgot about the game. Namely times where environmental audio was so loud that I couldn't hear what was being said (I don't usually turn subtitles on because I'm visual textual and will spend the whole time reading the subtitles rather than watching the animation). There were probably a good dozen quests I didn't feel like doing and dropped. I had three talent points I didn't even assign because I was so OP. Anyone who wants to play Elex on PC, I highly recommend the fog remover mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/elex/mods/3 Now moving on to Bard's Tale 4 elusively.

Just discovered this while I was trying to suss out some ambiguities for a prospective assassin build. Two critical insights - 1. the game dynamically updates your PEN and other stats for calculating spell effects as they change. this might seem obvious, but some of the ramifications of this were unobvious to me even until now. for one, this means that boosting your PEN or getting hit with Dazed can cause DoTs that you've already applied to enemies to change their damage. The game doesn't "snapshot" your stats upon casting, in other words. (I had previously thought that maybe PEN was snapshotted) 2. assassinate is a passive bonus that lasts only so long as you are physically invisible. Importantly, stealth and many forms of invisibility disagree on when your character should become visible. This can really mess up how you plan on using your spells with an assassin. This means: while stealth or invisible, an assassin/caster multiclass will appropriately see boosted accuracy and PEN for all their spells and tooltips, because you have an assassinate bonus and the game is updating you with what you have. however, for slower spell effects, you may already be visible by the time they happen, which means you are missing out on the full potential of assassinate. for example: if you apply a DoT, you lose the +PEN assassinate bonus because by the time the spell actually does damage (even the intial tick), you're already visible. This is true regardless of whether you are stealthed or invisible. For DoT or slower spell effects, the only way to benefit from +PEN is to become reinvisible after you've already cast the spell (and then that implies you pretty much just sit around doing nothing while giving you a slight penetration bonus). the rest i hid in a spoiler tag because it turned out from follow-up posts that it's mostly an issue with shadowing beyond, but i'm keeping it around so anyone who goes through this thread knows what on earth the next few posts are talking about. TL;DR: don't use DoTs, bounce, jump, or multi-part spells with assassinate don't use shadowing beyond to trigger assassinate, unless it's a weapon-based attack. smoke veil and potions of invisibility are your friend. inexplicably, hazard spells don't break stealth/invis, and (excluding shadowing beyond) even when they trigger they don't break invisibility, even though stealth would normally break. this has the odd consequence that a priest with good alchemy could drink a potion of invisibility and go to town just casting repulsing, warding, and searing seals, and all of them get a +25 accuracy bonus. then you finish it up with one good spell to break invisibility. not exactly the most powerful thing you could do with your time, but fun nonetheless. works less well with druid/wizard because the only hazards they get are walls that don't do too much per tick. (the really good stuff--like wall of many colors--aren't hazards) note; edited this post based on updated dat from follow up comments.

Syndicate, the Assassin's Creed where you were never quite sure if the next person you met would be some eldritch nightmare because the engine decided skin was a bit too difficult to render.

initial observation: flag displays count as symbolic speech and get full 1st Amendment protections. with that out o' the way, you do realize states do have the right to display any flag they choose, yes? tweet is simple declaring that what is, and has been since 1787, should continue to be the law o' the land. mississippi recent voted to remove confederate battle emblem from their flag. an a-hole preacher in florida, one guy, may set a quran ablaze and anger the entire islamic world, and there is nothing the government may do 'bout it save make sure he is adhering to local/state fire ordinances. an artist in soho wants to photograph herself squatting over an american flag and urinating and is nothing the government may do 'bout it. the only speech which needs protection is speech which offends. is no point in protecting speech which the public, the collective will o' the people, believes is good or at least harmless. only time you got The People attempting to put the kibosh on speech is when it makes people uncomfortable or poses some kinda amorphous and future threat. we protect nazis having a parade in the largely jewish community o' skokie, illinois not 'cause we thinks illinois nazis is ok. the only people who approve o' illinois nazis is other nazis... or so we believed until last couple years. we protect the bad 'cause more than once in history, groups and ideas which were unpopular and offensive, turned out not to be so bad after all. naacp and vietnam war protesters were not popular. mlk never had even 50% public approval during his lifetime and he were arrested and disappeared for days by the government 'cause o' his speeches. (apologies for background music, but almost every clip had similar) the framers o' the Constitution believed The People could not be trusted to decide what speech were good, (good enough) to deserve protection from government, so those framers decided to take the decision away from the excitable People and their tidal passions which would come and go with little rhyme or reason. yeah, states may choose which flag they want flying outside their buildings, and because o' that freedom to choose, mississippi continued to use the confederate battle emblem on their state flag... and there were absolute nothing the fed government could do 'bout it. thank god. first amendment protects john kerry and mississippi same. only speech which needs protection is speech which offends. you may now read our signature for the appropriate response to bad speech. would be nice if those antifa idiots would read and understand the sentiment expressed by J. Brandeis in whitney. HA! Good Fun!

Well, I'm sold. Not sold enough to get a Steam account though, but if this comes to GOG then absolutely.

Reminds me of this wholly unironic Blu-ray cover art we got here for Michael Haneke's Amour.

@thelee After some code debugging, I think this parameter cause the weirdness of Shadowing Beyond, "ClearWhenAttacks": "true", found in statuseffects.gamedatabundle "Shadowing_Beyond_SEInvisible". For "Smoke_Veil_SE_Invisible" this is set to false.

Well... ...I don't think it ever really went away.

Just like Majesty Gold HD!

Been keeping an eye out on it as well. Looks interesting, but decided I'll give it time to mature. If it's good, it'll still be good when it's finished.

Was still about a great sword build though. So it has its place in this thread.

Okay, then my comment really wasn't very relevant, sorry

the purges o' jewish people in europe started long before the nazis, and sadly, didn't even end with the nazis. after all, a significant number of people liberated from death camps were promptly murdered by local populations. nazis hardly started the problem or saw the end. as a matter o' fact, the nazis kinda mess with modern perceptions o' racism. nazi, fascist and racist is terms which is gonna frequent see overlap in rl examples. nevertheless the aforementioned is distinct concepts. all too often, people (vol) appears to use all three terms interchangeable. more than a few people thinks systemic racism is nazi attempts at genocide, or something similar. have a pundit rattle on 'bout how US government supported home loan guidance which lasted well into the 70s did irreparable and lasting harm to minority populations and too many have a hard time seeing similar to nazis loading jews into train cars and sending 'em to death camps. systemic racism is nazis doing evil, not bank bureaucrats from decades past giving a preference to people trying to buy a house before most o' the posters to this board were even born, right. wrong. HA! Good Fun!

Amazon is easy. Free 2-day shipping pays for itself. Some of this stuff is going to fail and have to join with others (looking at you CBS.) But it also is why we are getting a ton of new and fairly unique content. Shows no longer get cancelled any more, they just jump services. Firefly would have ran 20 seasons in this market and we would all complain about how bad it has become. It is a glorious time.

you are right. going through my notes, i was a bit sloppy with the testing. i did some test with both smoke veil and shadowing beyond on what i thought were "instant" spells and got similarly bad results, that i gave up on using smoke veil and did the rest of my tests with shadowing beyond. it's worse/more confusing than that, i'm afraid. smoke veil -- it turns out -- also waits until you affect a target, but is less generous than stealth. so it's not that it lasts a bit longer than shadowing beyond, but it will wait until you affect something before it breaks. so how far or close that fireball is, doesn't actually matter. however, like i said, it's less generous than stealth: stealth doesn't break upon using potions or poisons. smoke veil does. bafflingly, even though smoke veil will wait until you affect an enemy before breaking invisibility, you still don't get assassinate bonus on some spells depending on some weirdness internally, even if you would with stealth. this confused my testing. (an example spell: divine mark will only get +25 accuracy from stealth. from smoke veil or shadowing beyond, it gets no assassinate bonus) edit - this is inconsistent. sometimes i get the assassinate bonus, sometimes i don't. edit 2 - smoke vile doesn't break from your hazards affecting enemies. stealth does. gaaaaah why didn't obsidian pick on one single implementation of invisibility. sorry. a lot of people when it comes to game mechanics like to say stuff based on intuition, without having actually verified it in-game. it's a pet peeve of mine ("theorycrafting"). accept my apologies. on the other hand, between the two of us, you were able to help identify how invisibiliy/assassinate is even weirder than i thought. at least though now this means smoke veil is a better way to trigger it.

You need to cast the spell very close to yourself to make assassinate bonus work, because spell like fireball has a project speed, meanwhile it's flying to enemy, your invisible is gone and you lose the assassinate bonus, the best way is to fire it under your feet... Btw you left invisible from Smoke Veil more slowly than from Shadowing beyond, which means there are better chance for you to get assassinate bonus if you cast from smoke veil instead of shadowing beyond.

What I really dislike is the growing balkanization of TV content. There's a lot of good content being produced, but it's spread out over a slew of different providers. If you're not a subscriber, you'll not be able to watch it.

Played second one long time ago. Really nice game!

last visually pleasing game i played.... maybe Darkest Dungeon?

is a widespread effort to remove andrew jackson from the US $20. andy is a complex american historical figure, but given the trail o' tears, public opinion as a whole shifted in recent decades such that he he gets viewed as a villain perhaps a bit more than he does as a competent (if unspectacular) chief executive and a bonafide war hero. read the earth is weeping and is difficult to decide who is more deserving o' infamy, jackson or grant. President grant were calculated and ruthless in his efforts to create a war with the plains indians, although few history books bother to relate the scope o' grant's efforts. the earth is weeping is a book which challenges many firm held preconceptions 'bout the US and Grant-- details US colonial efforts prosecuted as much by subterfuge as force and how the American people were purposeful kept in the dark 'bout uncomfortable truths. is a worthwhile read, particular today as Americans is reflecting on who exact is deserving o' monuments and what happens when uncomfortable truths force opinions to change. HA! Good Fun! ps (late edit) the earth is weeping is NOT a whites= bad, indians = good book. President grant comes outta the wash looking dirty, but one reason why subterfuge were needed to bring 'bout the indian wars is 'cause so many whites, particular US military commanders, balked at the idea o' killing starving women and children.

There are too many holes and you assume too many things. Without seeing a video I have a very hard time to believe it can be pulled off.

It was an Offensive Parry&Riposte Steel Garrote/Trickster. The only construct that heals from burn damage is Dorudugan (the megaboss). The other Iron-/Steelclads are only immune. Flame Naga will heal from burn damage though.

Find out next time on Desperadoes 3!

I'm happy to announce that the mod has reached its 100th download (from actually different users) on Nexus. Apparently, it has been "hottest" PoE2 mod from its release (appears first on Nexus for PoE2 because of number of recent download, I suppose). Once again, thank you for your support ! I advertised for it on Steam forum but got a single "I-would-have-done-otherwisish but vague" comment (my favorites ). However, it received a much warmer welcome on reddit. I don't know how much this contributes to diffusion, but I wanted to share this experience.

Beautiful games... The Disciples Series.

Only if you maximize your synergistic diversity

If you pivot to agile development, what kind of value add proposition could you expect? Would this sort of retargeting help you disrupt the status quo and leverage your touchpoints?

nature screws up all the time. a natural real life analogue would be infant mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates during childbirth) before the advent of more modern medicine and science. all "nature" cares about is doing just enough to propagate the genetic material of a species. nothing more. our bodies are filled with tons of "useless" genetic material that does god knows what. our feet are anti-ergonomic adaptations of primate hands that are extremely prone to injury. imagine that instead of "hollowborn" or "weak souls" and the engwithans creating the wheel and the gods, it was "cancer" or "alzheimer's" and cure for cancer/alzheimer's/hereditary illnesses and the engwithan perspective makes a ton of sense.

I think they could do both: not delving in superepic godslayer powerfantasy AND come up with a story where the protagonist feels more in control of what happens with the main plotline. I personally don't have problems with the storyline of Deadfire, but I'm old(er) and have had my fair share of "peasant boy becomes uberman" stories - don't need anymore of those. But I remember I liked those when I was younger, too. Some sort of (substantial) influence would still be nice though.

Metro: Exodus, on Gog, because it's finally available there and was 50% off.

My ongoing peeve with Reputation gain (i.e. the pre-defined meaning and intention of conversation options) vs what I actually intended the option to mean. Currently, in PoE(2), the reputation system is, as in most (all?) other games, static. You choose Conversation Option A, and it has already been given a meaning by the writers/devs, no matter what meaning you and your PC may put in it. Example: In BoW, I convinced Neriscyrlas to find respite and release herself to the Void. My PC (paladin, dimplomatic, good) took this direction with the best intentions, since there's no option to release Neris to the Wheel (that I could find). But after playing the same dialogue sequence with Reptutations in conversations turned on, I found that this was in fact the "Cruel" option! Why? Why would this me more cruel than killing her? Well, sure, you're telling her that she's already dead and have been living an utter pointless existence for centuries, but is that really cruel? It wasn't for me, until I played it with the pre-set meaning of conversation options releaved. What I think would solve this problem, is a way to change the Reputation, i.e. the intention of conversation opotions. The example I just gave could just as well have been Honest, or even Benevolent (a peaceful solution), which was the way "I" meant it. These static "choices" breaks the immersion, restricts your ability to RP the character the way you envisioned it. You want to RP? Well, I as my character would have said this, but according to the rep-gain my character must say that in order to be aligned with the reputation-mechanic-RP aspect, if you catch my drift. You'll end up with having to pick choices just to align with the "correct" rep gains, or choose the "wrong" convo/rep options to align with what you would say, thus ending up with an ingame-personality that does not reflect your RP. Am I making sense? So, please, in PoE3, look into the possibility of being able to change the Reputation, i.e. intention/meaning of certain conversation options. E.g. dropdown for [chose your intention], where it makes sense, where you can select between a few options. I think that this would make the RP aspects of the game a whole lot more rewarding, since you can be much more dynamic in the way you approach conversations. Again, this is not something particular to PoE2, but PoE 1 and 2 are the RPGs I've spent the most time playing and enjoyed. Also, I do think that the PoE devs are more receptible to suggestions than, say, Dragon Age devs would be (simply due to the more corporate, top-down nature of how Bioware/DA is managed).

The game was balanced around normal difficulty. And all things concerned it is a very well balanced game - superior in that regard to most other RPGs. Now - "normal" players who start into the game will become better, more accustomed to the mechanics, more experienced and will have a lot more things at their disposal towards the end of the game. So naturally you have to make the late game content significantly harder (even in the scope of one difficulty tier and harder than the character level suggests) than the early game - which starts of with easy fights and have the character of a tutorial (besides the obvious "shockers" like Gorecci Street which are supposed to show you that this ride will not always be so easy as the fight against single boars at the beach). Unsurprisingly most players seem to have no severe problems with the increased diffuculty of the DLCs. It is to be expected that: a) late game DLCs are more difficult than the content before and b) players who came that far are more experienced than when they started the game - that should be the case for all difficulty tiers. So in order to somewhat balance the game for most players you have to take those things into account. You can't balance it perfectly for all players. Difficulty tiers allow all sorts of players of differnt skill level (concerning RPG mechanics) to enjoy the game. BUT: they also allow you to enjoy the content you are suddenly not good enough for (or all of a sudden you are too good for . maybe because you suddenly understtod some profound mechanics better). Because you can switch to a different difficulty setting during the game. So if you feel an encounter is too hard for you and you become frustrated: you can easily tune down the difficulty for that encounter. That's more reasonable than ranting about it while countless others seem to have no problem with it. The problem is not the balance of the difficulty tier or the balance of the whole game - it is the ego of the player who can't accept that she/he has to turn down the difficulty in order to be able to progress - his/her inability to cope with frustration, too. So the answer to the question "How can they can satisfy both ends of that spectrum?" is definetely "with different difficulty settings". Because you can not only start at different difficulties - you can also switch during a playthrough. What on earth could Obsidian offer you in addition to make the game approachable for individual players? Make a deep survey and an IQ test before you start and then procedurally alter the difficulty while you advance through the game? Sounds cool - but maybe the easier solution would be to put a reasonable amount of resources into balancing the game fairly well and then trust that the majority of players will not lose their sh!t while playing it.