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Some Republican pundit I’ve never heard of stated that removing Trump from Twitter was an example of communism. In the same speech she suggested that social media platforms be nationalized. That loud bang you heard was my head exploding.

Was the election rigged? Let’s take a look. — Sen. Jeff Jackson | by Sen. Jeff Jackson | Jan, 2021 | Medium

Engineering levels like a charm by throwing grenades. Only thing that is a drag to level is athletics. It gives measly 20 exp for spending 500 stamina, which you start at 100 and it seems every other perk reduces the amount of stamina you use to do stuff and the only other thing seems to be force opening doors which there are not that many and gives 100xp.

I am really looking forward to going back to the times where these were the controversial stories of the day: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/kamala-harris-vogue-cover-182547945.html Remember when this was the biggest outrage coming out of the White House? Or when George HW Bush threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister? Or Dan Quayle misspelled potato? These are the low stakes hijinks I think we have to look forward to over the next 4 years. Ooooooh, Biden looked like he was smelling some kid's hair! How weird.

Technically that's a Monopsony when applied to Parler- effective control of a marketplace required for selling- rather than a monopoly which is a single supplier of a product. So GooglePlay on Android, Steam on PC or the Apple Store are all monopsonies rather than monopolies. Not sure what the definition would be for Trump, since as a free service Twitter was selling him as a product. How useless is Forbes is they don't treat all the information they're fed as potential disinformation? Typical Gromnir that he actually seems to think "we will only properly scrutinise those we disagree with politically"- which is what they're actually saying- is a good thing instead of something they should do for every bit of information they're fed because it's being fed to them with an agenda. It's not something to be admired, it's them admitting they're usually an acritical PR mouthpiece.

Do you ever wonder where lost things end up? I was on my way home from the feed store yesterday afternoon. The first Baptist Church of Covington was having a rummage sale so I stopped to look. They had a box of old books they were asking $.10 a piece for. There were about 12 or 13 books in it so I just offered them $20 for the whole box. It’s a church what the heck. They can use it more than I can. anyway I got home and started looking through it and most of it is of course junk. Very threadbare old library copies of books that were published in the 40s and 50s. But there was one remarkable book in there. It was a first print translation of “around the world in 80 days“. It was published in 1889 and it had a direct translation of the original French title “a tour of the world in 80 days“. It’s in terrible shape. The cover is beat up the bindings loose, pages frayed . Not worth anything to any collector. Inside the cover page though was an inscription: “To Eddie, happy 15th Birthday, June 3, 1924.” Eddie is likely no longer with us. He would be 110 years old if he were. But I did get me thinking perhaps his children or grandchildren would like to have that book so I left a voicemail for the pastor of the church to call me back and see if he can find out where the donation came from. This morning I’m sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and I started reading Eddie’s book. I was a big fan of Jules Verne growing up so I’ve read it before. But what the heck. Books really are treasures aren’t they?

Gorecci Street is extremely hard. If you could beat it on PotD then you are totally fit for the rest of the game on PotD: it won't get harder than that (if you don't force encounters with severely overleveled enemies). DLCs SSS and FS can be tough as well - but that's more about finding out what approach you need for a certain type of enemy. For example in SSS some fights really need you to not be hasty and use brute force but spare ressources until later in the fight.

The best kind of background for these characters is a goody-two-shoes one where you just happened to have lapses of judgment in scenarios leading to advantages in Deadfire. My Watcher had had too much snowcap when he pushed someone into the blood pool. *nods*

From the random category... Australian birds can be real bastards at times In case anyone feels sorry for the Kookaburra, this is often the sound that wakes me up in the morning, like between 3am and 4am 😩

Well, as they say, the F*** Your Feelings crowd sure seem to be having a f*** lot of feelings at the moment.

At some point we went from nothing on the web being true to everything on the web being true. Neither is completely correct but the former is much closer to the truth and certainly the wiser assumption. Sometimes I wonder if the world was better off without the internet. Knowledge was both earned and valued back then. Conspiracy theories didn't proliferate and nut jobs were convinced only THEY knew the truth because they couldn't network. It's been a boon no doubt but sometimes I wonder if it's a net loss. No pun intended.

This is what I said. You can expect a heavy anti-trust hammer coming down on US tech on the EU side. This display of force woke up some people. So far, there was an unspoken consensus, that even though those companies hold such buttons at their disposal, they will not use them against the political class. This is now out of the window, and there will be a lot of regulation coming. It will take some time thougj to clarify the details, as there will be disagreement about the definition of prohibited hate speach, but there are always things you can trade among EU countries to get to an effective consensus. Those comapnies were already in the crosshair for tax related matters and privacy related regulations.

i feel it's pretty much required to take out the entirety of gorecci on PotD unless your mainchar is somehow super-optimized. you're fine.

I would be very happy with an episodic form of PoE3. I mean multiple smaller campaigns instead of a big long one. You'd have a rel. small main game with one starter episode and then you can buy whatever additional episodes sounds fun. A bit like the old Hero Quest tabletop game (which was fun!). They wouldn't need to be played in a particular order (although maybe a certain level treshold would be good I guess). You wouldn't need such a huge team and once the main game's engine is set the teams could focus on story and quest designs and itemization and so on (see Deadfire DLCs). Also smaller teams could work parallel and it wouldn't be too risky to let somebody less experienced take the lead etc. Try something new... Maybe that's a stupid idea, but atm it sounds rather nice to me until you convince be it's not.

no. HA! Good Fun!

Problem is, I believe those companies do not wnt to be treated as publishers, yet they behave like sucha and demand from platforms they're hosting to curate content like a publisher, correct?

yes, 'cause whether is a random suit, or a pizza delivery guy, or a constitutional lawyer, individuals have competing liberty concerns and the government doesn't have the capacity to intervene in the deliberations and agreements 'tween such individuals... save for extreme limited circumstances. agree to terms o' service, or go elsewhere. can't force a newspaper publisher to print an opinion article. duh. obvious. nevertheless, assume a social media publisher (those random suits who run social media platforms is publishers for legal purposes) needs bend over for a random pundit? option: the people, through their elected representatives, may decide social media applications should be public utilities instead o' private enterprises. do so is slippery slope and is gonna counter-intuitive result in more regulation and censorship as 'posed to less. will also likely be more expensive almost overnight. whatever. regardless, at the moment, the liberty rights o' a rando prophet of trumpism is not superior to the random suit. thank goodness. HA! Good Fun!

For historical reminder, this is what PoE1 did. Mostly text, with some key voiced dialogue. As I probably mentioned elsewhere, when Deadfire announced full VO I was pretty ambivalent about it, since I generally read faster than voice actors talk, and having voice actors talk interferes with my ability to read. As a general rule of thumb, I assume that any game with full VO had to sacrifice a lot in terms of dialogue reactivity depth. Generally I've been correct, and Deadfire is probably the first real time I've ever seen full VO *and* extensive dialogue reactivity. Not only was the VO expensive, it was probably disproportionately expensive compared to their budget as a result. Fortunately, the success of Disco Elysium tells me that Josh Sawyer's big concern has not materialized: that OBS had contributed to escalating the indie RPG cost by making it minimum stakes to have full VO for RPGs. I don't think many people complained that Disco Elysium was missing full VO.

Yeah, I found the Quick Hack , Breaching, Stealth all levelled up fairly smoothly. Well, when I say fairly smoothly, I had them around 16-18 after that 104 hours of my first playthrough. Handguns and Blades were around 14-15, whilst my Athletics was incredibly draggy and I think was just hovering at 8 or 9. Having a proper pause from the game now, letting things settle, my memory haze a touch, and what patches might turn up in the next month before properly getting into a second play.

I agree with @Boeroer, and so does the head of MS's games division who has said in interviews he needs a range of games for GamePass, not just a range in type of games but also in small versus big games because GamePass needs a constant supply of new games to keep subscribers happy.

Including that.

Be careful what you post online. The Internet is forever. in other news it looks like the Trump administration is going to spend the rest of this week trying to boost his legacy. Talk about polishing a turd. But I do expect we will see more pardons this week than the gates of heaven 30 minutes after Armageddon.

Okay wait, let me think this over... ... .. . nope, still lame.

Interesting. Tbh: I am struggling with Path of the Damned a little. Took me three attempts to get past the thugs on Gorecci Street. I know Ive been warned but wow...its tough! 😄

Hmm, I completely forgot about PSP, I think that’s 6 more Japanese games and 0 western games in my collection 😛

Mood: Semi-despondent. I've once again been mostly lying in bed for a few days, playing the tablet-slots or watching various k-dramas - on the tablet ... the big TV doesn't fit underneath the covers, you see. Also, eating too much chocolate and jam+crackers which my blood sugar is not happy about and right this moment I just don't care. Hubby: "You ate a whole box of those (Stoned Wheat Thins) crackers in less than half a day?" Me: *brushes crumbs off her nightshirt* "We have rats....?" Hubby: *stern voice/look* "I saw you were out of them but maybe I shouldn't have bought you any (on the way home)." ^ Hubby was largely not keeping track of what I was doing diet wise for a while. I think he's gone back on wife-watch alert. 😛

Lupin just started up on Netflix. Which is in French, so you'll likely need the subtitles to watch. Its a modern day interpretation of the story of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Thief. The whole first episode is that fuzzy, not really showing the key storyline, letting you think you've seen something and understand what's going on only to have it peeled back in the last 15 minutes or so. I'm curious where it will go for the 2nd and then on episodes. So if you enjoy the concept of a highly skilled thief given to false identities, switch-a-rounds, manipulating people, and doing it all with that dash of style and French commentary it might be worth a try.

That's antifa pretending to be Trump. Conspiracy theories did proliferate (obviously not with the reach they do today) and nutjobs were networking long before either the wide adoption of the internet or it's initial development. For instance The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most enduring tracts influencing antisemitic conspiracys, was fabricated (for any dip****s lurking who may believe it to be authentic) and published in 1903 by a Russian nationalist group and made it to the US around 15 years later when one edition was edited to replace "jews" with "bolshevik" and another was put out by Henry Ford to discuss "the dangers of the international jew".

Ignore him. That isn't Skarpen. Obviously it is ANTIFA pretending to be Skarpen. *sagely nod* I am a leftist, I would know. It was in our weekly briefing.

I thoroughly enjoyed both PoE and Deadfire. I certainly hope we haven't seen the last of that IP. It was a RPG for RPG fans. A love letter to days and games gone by. Even if something like that does not have a future it was well worth the time and money spent.

I'd love to see it touched on as dialogue in one of the expansions. EX: P1: "They're led by this guy Kaneho. I'd ask nicely if I were you. He doesn't mess around." P2: "I heard he grew up on Gorecci Street." Audible gasps P1: "That... That can't be right. But ekera, watch yourself, watcher."