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If you want to understand what short selling really is you watch Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akaroyd. Plus it was a funny and good movie

Beta starts on Feb 2 Not me though, I'm on beta blockers

Now imagine solo with all god challenges activated. It's a lot easier if you know the "tricks" with each Megaboss. Also all kinds of cheese make it a lot easier obviously. Like: pausing and switching from Lethandria's Devotion to another weapon setup... and then back and forth and back and forth: you will heal from the Pale Light with every switch even during pause - so after several switches your party is healed up again. Costs nothing... Or using Strand of Favor (unequip/equpi/unequip etc.) to prolong stuff like Blade Cascade until the end of the world as we know it. Or using the good old Gouging Strike or Brand Enemy or Lover's Embrace. Using Salvation of Time + Barring Death's Door + Brilliant or Wall of Draining + Brilliant (or Blood Sacrifice). All that duration-bending stuff. If you want to do it "rightly" without too much cheese then refreshing resources that are not tied to anything like dealing/receiving damage are a BIG plus. For example Psion and Chanter do get resources just from waiting which is very good in those tough boss fights. Especially Psion with Ancient Memory is a great thing to have because he can turn others into resource refreshers, too. If you have passive healing (e.g. from a Herald with Exalted Endurance + Ancient Memory and some regeneration gear) then also a Bloodmage has kind of unlimited resources - as does a traditional Monk (I mean non-Shattered Pillar and -Forbidden Fist). A Paladin with Divine Retribution + a Chanter (preferably Beckoner or Troubadour) with summons (preferably Ancient Brittle Bones + Many Lives Pass by) will also have unlimited Zeal because Divine Retribution grants +2 Zeal for every killed summon - and those die really quickly against most megabosses. It's also all doable with the official companions though. It's just a real drag. Imo Megabosses are not worth the hassle at all.

it's best not to think of megabosses as normal fights, but puzzles to be solved. if you go in using all of your standard tricks, you are pretty much going to be roflstomped into the ground. even with all mythic gear somehow. there's probably a lot of resources out there, but rather than regurgitate myself or other people, you might want to take a read through this: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/megabosses the good news is that 3/4 megabosses are very possible with a wide variety of character builds and party setups (sigilmaster auranic is pretty rigid in how you take the fight imo). Having someone with regenerating resources as boeroer suggests is very good, but you can also sub in a brilliant inspiration source somewhere. (loooong time ago i did the fights without resource regeneration and it frankly isn't worth the time versus having a chanter, cipher, monk, blood mage, and/or a source of brilliant)

I got a bottle of Soylent the other day and was appalled to find out that it is not, in fact, people. I think Armie Hammer was the only one more disappointed than me.

I'll probably do the beta. Any classes yall are interested in?

Also some portraits from Tyranny that'd work for Ocean Folk:

I took them all with Lifegiver/Ascendant MC, Eder(Swashbuckler), Xoti (SC Priest), Aloth (SC Wizard), Pallegina (Palladin/Chanter) on the first try each (after studying a lot of videos/this forum topics ofc). The main approach is to start the fight with Eder, then withdraw via Shadowing Beyond, MC apply Ancient Memory on Xoti who buff all (including BDD) and keep those buffs with Salvation of Time. Sigilmaster Auranic also need potions of spell deflection since one of her Sigils dispel all buffs with Arcane Cleanse. Ancient Memory+BDD+Salvation of Time is a cheap trick ofc. but those megabosses are cheap cheaters themselves so...

Alternatively there's an entire Hollywood movie about the 09 crisis that explains what a short is and is called The Big Short. Go watch it. It's really good, educational, and quite funny.

Today I’m packing up, setting up the chicken feeder, loading Sunny into the truck and heading south. It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s depressing. Going to Florida for camping and fishing on the Gulf Coast. Maybe Shired Island. Maybe farther south. Somewhere there are no people. See you guys later

So who of you guys have bought into GameStop stock?

Maybe not directly US politics per se, but for that fairly uncomplicated explanation..

So this project made a liar out of me, said I wasn't going to do the build just yet, but I was going to start out today just updating the BIOS as preparation. Ended up going all the way to a bootable system just for my peace of mind. Overall it's one of the stranger things I've done, plonked in my old 8800GT with one non-working fan on the Accelero S1 cooler that's on it. Had to cable tie the fan wire out of the way and plug it into the motherboard, but it turns out that was the broken fan so no matter. Reckon this'll be a bottleneck? Slight hitch in that I plugged the thing into a old TV because that's what's in the dining room where I did the build. The BIOS screen came out all corrupt whenever I selected an option, and I worried for a moment that something was seriously wrong. However plugging it into an actual monitor seems to work properly, so crisis averted. Booted into Peppermint from a USB stick to test, and no problems there either. I'm not going to install Windows until my video card arrives next week so that's it for now I guess.

I got my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday. Having served overseas and getting all scheduled vaxxes on time, I have never been hit so hard by a vax as I was by the second shot. There were a couple of things that definitely didn't help. First, I didn't get much sleep the night before. Second, I only had my usually coffee the morning of. Finally, I could have taken a Tylenol beforehand. To be fair, I felt fine the first day. It was the next morning that really kicked my ass. I wouldn't even bother posting except to advise folks to take a different route. Putatively, and by the FDA's own literature, the second shot typically can have more severe side effects, but you should do the same for both. Different people can expect different side effects and, moreover, the same person might be impacted differently depending of variables that are frankly impossible to appreciate fully. I would get a good night's sleep, eat at least a quick breakfast, take an analgesic before the shot (first or second), and make sure the next day is free just in case you feel a bitt run down. sadly, I did none of the above and ended up having class the next morning. I didn't have a choice about that. I went in when work scheduled me. It was okay. Just had to tough it out, but hedge your bets an give yourself a break if you can. Also, I think I asked for advice about smokers a while back. I decided to keep my wood smoker at home and I bought a pellet smoker, a Traeger, to keep at my out-laws because I knew my wife's brother wanted one. It's been great. We've used it a lot and my wife's mom even called to thank me because it's been such a hit that people are at her house more often. Whoever advised it, I wanted to say thanks. In a couple of months, when I am back again, I'll mention you by name if I can remember. lol God bless, brothers, and stay safe!

Ridiculous. It's Soros that wants to do that, but only to white people.

Remember the saltuna-canning operation in Edgewater that didn't have any actual saltuna to can? Well, Subway has been sued for not using any actual tuna in its tuna-fish sandwiches.

I bought some Carr "whole wheat crackers". I expected crackers. What I got was a thick round sweet tasting cookie. Sweeter than graham crackers. I learned about "meat glue" recently and how in the US they even put it in a lot of "bread-y" products and apparently there is something called "crab spaghetti" where they mix crab with tons of meat glue to form strands and ... ...in another 100 years food will all be labeled as "food product" because there will be no actual real food. Edit: unless you grow it yourself.

I personally dumped CON and RES. Since I really don't like getting terrified and also getting frightened against dragons and such is annoying I often pick Wild Orlan.

You can either use the Community Patch which moves the focus generation stop from gettig hit to getting crit or you make sure your Psion doesn't get attacked (a lot). For me it was surprisingly easy to do: if you play a ranged caster and put him/her into good armor and/or give a shield (don't need weapon anyways) you won't get targeted. It's always the more squishy party members left and right who will get shot. Then make sure most enemies are no able to attack you (Mind Control for example). I gave my Test-SC-Psion Deltro's Cage because I wanted to maximize the dmgoutput of Soul Shock and I also didn't want to cast too quickly. You can of course also cast high level powers. Then you'll have to wait a bit before having accumulated enough focus for the next big cast. The good thing about the low level stuff is that some of it scales really well with Power Level (e.g. Mind Blades and Soul Shock) but also that you can spam it really non-stop. Psions get +0.5 focus per second for every Power Level so make sure you stack as many as you can (Prestige + Stone of Power = 1 more focus per second). If you have a Druid in the party give the Lance of the Midwood Stag to the Psion and cast Woodskin or Form of the Delemgan on him: he gets another +1 focus per second because of "Lord of the Forest". And so on. It's not outlandish to get to 7 focus per second at the highest levels. That way you can spam tier-3-powers non-stop (with normal casting speed). You can cast Disintegration or Amplified Wave every 10 secs or so. I think that's pretty cool given the fact that you don't need to "harvest" focus. If you are casting stuff like Soul Shock or Whisper of Treason with a focus generation of 7 focus per second you actually don't need to wait for anything. You're generating focus so quickly that you'll reach max focus eventually despite spamming low level stuff. Last not least the Telekinetic Burst is an ability which is good in hard fights because you can spam it nonstop (because 10 focus) and it interrupts on graze vs. Will (?) which is great against annoying stuff like Neriscyrlas and her Lengrath's Safeguard and other caster stuff. Psion is not the fastest mob killer but it's great in those tough, long fights you will have later in the game with the DLCs, some bosses and also Megabosses. As I said: I had lots of fun with Psion/Troubadour right from lvl 1 on. SC Psion wouldn't be my favorite pick but it works well.

NASA's Mars rover Perseverance is in the home stretch of its journey to Red Planet.

Never tried a SC Psion cause i was sceptical too. I'm afraid to be be stuck with "only" low lvl spell for frequent use (at least before getting reaping knives) and to be heavily targeted (not very tanky) causing an heavy loss of psion's regeneration... Glad to know that it can be way better i think as a SC.

Here really good insect to have a Praying Mantis it is scary and could be one of the harder insect to fight in the game for some kind of more powerful gear.

I've seen them only once and they were aired after Sailor Stars finished its run, so it's hard to say. The safest bet would be after their respective seasons. IIRC they're all just standalone episodes and have only a tenuous connection to the story arcs of the show at the best of times. I think the only thing in the movies that sticks in the show - and I'm not going to put this in spoilers because with only two cats on the show how could it be any different - is Luna's and Artemis' romance. Which is a wee bit thin for three hours of animation, but hey, erm... yeah. edit: However, I just looked at the German Sailor Moon Wiki (which seems to be in much better shape than the English one) the R movie does play after the R final episode even if it heavily references the Doom Tree arc while the S movie should probably be viewed before the final six episodes of S, and the SuperS movie... is set in a completely separate continuity (explained in spoilers because spoilers).

Stickbugs would be really cool because it will be disguised as a stick and you can attack it but it is a powerful boss. When killed it drops Stickbug parts which can be created to make a better sap catcher that can be placed anywhere including in your base. This better sap catcher can catch multiple pieces of sap to be used for crafting.

Oh, well. Thanks, anyway.

I think Psion is a bad choice for a SC Cipher, actually. On a SC you want to cast a lot of Cipher powers - something a Psion can't enable trough most of the game. Meanwhile a Beguiler, Ascendant, or even a Vanilla cipher will be able to spam their powers a lot more with a strong weapon (a Beguiler doesn't even need one most of the time). A Psion is actually a MC material - for casters. Cast some spells from another class, meanwhile charging Focus, then some cipher powers, than again spells from another class....

I never got the avocado toast meme, bread and avocados are relatively cheap and as a meal it wouldn't be much more expensive to make than eggs and meat. Is it because avocados are weird? I will say the hedge funds loosing a load of money because redditors is just funny, as are all the financial types and journos freaking out.

Yeah season 4 sounds like it could be unpleasant. I'm not very far in Sailor Moon (currently watching the episode where they go to the shrine) and it occurred to me the enemies/monsters aren't particularly memorable. There's the queen and the blonde guy but they mostly do the same thing every episode and I don't feel like I know much about them. I'm still feeling it but I wish the fights were more memorable like Stand battles.

I played an SC ascendant to about level 19, then quit. It's ridiculously broken to the point that it drains the fun out of the game. Hint: you can use Thunderous Report on Kitchen Stove to instantly fill your focus almost to max. It deals 100+ damage in a large AOE and gives you focus, and better yet it's per encounter. Every single fight ended up being Thunderous Report - Borrowed Instincts - Time Parasite (until I reached 7 or 8 stacks), then spam Amplified Wave until everyone is dead (with 8 stacks of Time Parasite, you Prone them faster than they can get back up), while Xoti just drops two Salvations of Time on me.

88GB. Pretty chunky early access.

Yep. And Hillary herself was far more keen to support the whacky islamist militants in eastern Syria that were palatable to Turkey than the YPG/J up until she stepped down as SoS, with the support for the Kurds all coming under Kerry's aegis. Most of the those whacky islamists, of course, defected to ISIS in 2013-4 and ended up being fought by the Kurds and the US. Those that didn't defect developed a penchant for lobbing chlorine at Kurdish enclaves, after conventional attacks had failed. Somewhat suspect those little details will be omitted though.

Didn't Bill help get Abdullah Öcalan imprisoned? If so this is more than a little shameless.

Well, not going to post a lot of these since they're already all over the place, unless something extraordinary happens, but this is CP2077 on a GeForce GTX970 (on an AMD Ryzen 5900x, so the CPU certainly isn't a bottleneck), getting between 30 and 50 FPS. Would love to upgrade so I could get a stable 60fps but given the drama online I expected this to look like trash and be barely playable. So far it's been a pleasant surprise, at least on the graphical front.

Been there, done that, never again!

Calico - some low cost indie sim/rpg with simple graphics. (Eventually) ride a giant cat! *buy-click* Medieval Dynasty - wander/explore, build up a village (that'll do work/gather stuff for you? eventually you're the boss? dunno?), hunt, collect stuff, do quests for villagers, build stuff, survive hunger/weather/thirst. Maybe if you think of something like Banished only in 3D/survival-sim format? It's been in early access for a few months and they recently added horses (if you can get enough gold to get one...). Controller friendly so no thumb-destroying mouse needed. Seems ok at the start.

Your daily dose of the Hero Irene: Now for the pop-quiz to see how well you understand being a hero: Question 1: Fear is the cowardly method of what kind of person? Answer: Question 2: Who's common weakness are rage and conceit? Answer: Bonus Question with possible story spoiler:

Alright, after exploring a few avenues, I think the physical 'how to get her to retreat' mystery is mostly solved. Further understanding what I was looking at, and realizing how much I really could see, I realized that nothing seemed to point to the mercy path having any form of activation in its respective level file. Okay, makes sense for current content, so checked my 1.06 version and it was similar. Began to wonder more seriously if it truly was hidden somewhere very deep, maybe tied to an attack or something of the sort. But how do you look at that stuff? That's literally a whole game's worth of data. But I did notice that there was an activation for the Sky Dragon conversation in its respective file. And in playing with cheats to test things over time, I learned at some point that triggering the sky dragon conversation from its 0 node (which is what it does on intro) after the intro, just reroutes the conversation to the unused Node 16--which is where it states she regards you for a moment before turning back to her wurmling. Okay, so we know that the conversation can't simply activate Node 0 again and have the mercy path activate because Node 0 routes to Node 16 after Node 1 has been read before. As an after-note, I’ve now tested this in 1.06 as well to make sure. So why is any of this important? Well we know the game can't just glitch and repeat the intro trigger to get to Node 17 where we want to be. We know that it can't just accidentally trigger somehow. To get to Node 17, the game would specifically have to reach for it, and would have to do this in a way that ties presumably into that OEI system, which would require it to use the appropriate text string to pull up the conversation at the node it wanted to start at—then letting the OEI system handle it from then on. So I went and dumped the whole 1.06 version of the game to text. And I had Notepad ++ scan each and every file for the appropriate conversation path—all 900 000+ of them. It only came up once: right where it was supposed to for the intro conversation. I’ve also scanned other conversations in case the end result was that another conversation file actually had the escape option in it. But nothing. And it’s doubly unlikely because some other conversations (Hylea, Casfath and Onwen) respond to the mercy path base some of whether they activate or not on whether Node 22 in the normal Sky Dragon conversation was itself seen by you previously. Now, yes there were some files the UABE couldn't read properly enough to export, and yes it isn't always perfect in its exports. So yes, there is still theoretically some very backwards way things could work. But in pulling up the level in Unity, there is no separate object dedicated to this trigger. Reading the level, also none I can see. Scanning the DLL's for Sky Dragon stuff or finally part of the conversation path; also nothing. And most importantly, in the entire dumped game, no more than one reference. So though yes there are still some unaccountable-for variables, it is a very clear picture painted that as of the 1.06 GoG original release patch (uploaded in 2015), on a version of the game also originally uploaded in 2015, there truly is no way to trigger the mercy path. I can all but definitively say that even pre-White March it is impossible to trigger this. It would be half impossible for even a bug to trigger this, actually. I had also dabbled around with trying to recreate it. The hard part doesn’t seem like it would be related to letting the dragon leave. There seem to be plenty of tools in the game to create a short scene, just a fade to black, to achieve that. And though not the same, just messing with the conversation I was able to make the Dragon and blights (but not wurmling) non-hostile upon ending a forcibly triggered Node 17 conversation. The more difficult part may have been getting the conversation to trigger at all mid-combat, or perhaps, to not interfere with something else. The death failsafe, for example, seems to force a quest update if the dragon dies and the game doesn’t register it. I’m saying this because… It seems likely that in some (perhaps developer only) version of the game this did exist properly. My guess is that was probably removed rather than left unfinished, though it may have been buggy. So much of the rest of it is complete, to the point where it is only missing the intro and outro. And even the in-conversation commentary makes it seem like the intro was created at one point. On top of that, we have sporadic reports of people actually triggering it, and then there’s the pet in the second game. Again, we almost have more questions than answers, because its increasingly looking like it was Never intentionally in the game at all (though to be sure I’d have to dump every version, so we shouldn’t assume). I believe the people saying they accessed this content are being genuine. The question then is, if the game would struggle to even bug itself into this conversation, how has it ever been triggered? I have a few theories… 1) This is backer easter egg content. The oddness of three of four God quests having no middle ending, when two strongly suggest there should be and the third subtly implies as much as well is unusual compared to the rest of the game. It’s possible that there is content that was for some reason reserved. Very far fetched, yes. But it should be noted that the CD backer version of the game actually released at an older, different, version number than the digital release. 2) Which leads me to it possibly being content forgotten in an older version. If the content was truly cut before release, it’s possible that people with the older CD version, or who somehow patched with the CD-version-specific patches, actually have the content. You can actually find a picture online, and one in the game files, of an older version of the nest with piles of gold lying around and the nest symbol at a different angle. It’s also possible that as the map changed, something got lost. 3) It’s still possible that some version I didn’t dump has it—like 1.05. Or that the dump missed it. Also, mobile or Mac may have had a different release. 4) But what is also possible is that it was accidentally released and has since been made unattainable. Say hypothetically it was released only on Steam during like patch 1.05ish. When bugs went to be fixed, they reinstated the level as it was. For a period of like a month, people on one platform would have had access, and then nevermore. 5) It was mods. People may have modded their game, and without them knowing it, the mod re-enabled the quest path because there was so little to fix. Given the state of the PoE mod community, it seems a bit unlikely, but heck, no more than the ‘secret backer content!’ theory. 6) This is just another removal theory; but the removed Weald of Fates zone/quest that was planned for the Twin Elms area (or really any of the game's cut content) may have had some bearing on the sky dragon quest as well—perhaps giving some tool to wound her that was also removed. As such, perhaps the mercy path was disabled and then never re-implemented

The writer for Troubleshooter must have had a great laugh writing Irene. They also must have had some very annoying experiences with RPGs that give you dialogue options that all lead to the same result anyway.

ZAP!

Firstly, Merry Christmas! Or whatever holiday you may celebrate over the next few months! Mortim, you've mentioned viewing that kind of stuff while the game runs before, any idea if there's a way to actually do that? And maybe more importantly, how to do it? It's very possible you're right about all of that... I've even speculated that maybe they fixed it once upon a time and then pushed out an older version of the quest files by accident, breaking it. What's also a bit weird is that in Node 17, the dragon's speaker ID is given, which tends to mostly (maybe only) be done when a voice file is to be played. There is none for that interaction though. Maybe it never made it in to the game, or maybe the speaker ID is actually just being used to reach out for some other type of scripted interaction. I browsed Monkeydew's save files that I received. It's looking not super promising at the moment. Everything lines up with them actually having let the dragon stay. Now to be clear, they remember clearly the mercy interaction, and it lines up well with what the internal text says. So they do seem to have triggered it at some point, sadly just not for the run they have files for--or so it appears. There is a caveat here; the developers of this game seem to often retroactively patch people's saved files somehow. Plenty of their patch notes explicitly state that they patch in such a way that will apply to people's current save files. So yeah, that might complicate things, and I don't want to write these files off just yet. If that kind of retroactive patch is happening, it would explain an awful lot. I was actually contemplating bumping my release copy up patch by patch. Several of our accounts are of people who played a few run throughs before ever encountering the mercy option. Maybe it was only active for a very short window... Which would explain why it was never video recorded, and why early Sky Dragon attempts online never seem to trigger her either. With how quickly patches came and went early on, it's quite possible the quest only had the option functional for a few weeks to a month. I'm thinking I may also try to use the conversation files to create what is supposed to happen. Why? Because my rationale is that if its doable in the conversation tools, then why would it be secretly hidden deep down where no one can find it? It makes little sense to do it one way, when you have a proprietary tool suite for exactly that purpose. I may not jump on this quickly, because it doesn't actually prove anything, but it may ultimately provide some unexpected insight. Another weird thing I was contemplating after seeing an oddly labeled marker or two... Mortim, how did you enter the Nest? Did you go through the Northweald? I've been wondering if there's an alternate way to the Nest. I actually chose to move right from Oldsong to the nest on an attempt, and managed to bug the dragon into not being targetable during combat after she was taken to critical health (done via console command); the first bug I've seen with her. Now, this may just be coincidence... I also got her to jump thrice, which is something I haven't been able to do much, and is something I've also speculated about possibly being involved... There are a couple of things in the Oldsong pack that almost hint toward a transition point located there--this makes more sense than you might think, as the entire quest was originally planned to just be in Oldsong, with the Nest map not even existing. Casfath and Onwen are actually also in the Nest map's files, even though they never appear there. And one more question Mortim. In one of your early analyses you talked about this... Nedyn is the girl looking for the pandgram book outside of Brackenbury, so she should not be related at all to this quest. But I'm not sure the word Should even applies to this quest at this point, hahahaha. My point is, what made you think this was related? If there's some hidden flag, this could be it. Christmas Cheer to All!

I ended up backing WotR. Partly, because of BG3, mostly, because PF:KM was somehow fun. Also there were kukris.