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I played through NWN2 OC twice. Both times I liked the first third and the last third. The middle third really drags. Still, I enjoyed the game well enough. I won't go on a rant about the grievous injustice that was the omission of a Neeshka romance, I'm sure Obsidian has heard enough about that to fill several full length novels. I do wish they had given me the option to slit Elanee's throat in her sleep, or at the very least let me expell that pointy-eared irritant from my party. On the bright side, Neeshka, Qara, and Sand were all delightful.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Absolutely loving it so far. Playing as a Druid/Barbarian, these classes compliment each other well. Just got the Monk dwarf in my party now all I need is a mage and a rogue and I'll be set. Really hope Obsidian returns to DnD in some form sometime in the future because I kinda dig this better than Pillars of Eternity, which is riddled with jagged gameplay. The only problem I'm having here is turning up the resolution screws my system up.

Did my taxes, I'm getting 700€ back from my 3300€ I spent on going to work, yay.

Absolutely it can be improved, but what made it terrible was that it was the exact opposite in tone to the original Gothic. OG Gothic starts out with you being read your rights, an official interrupts to hand you a scroll to take to the mages, official tells you doing so the mages will reward you, you agree and get tossed into the pond at the bottom of the cliff. Dragging yourself to the shore, you meet one of the old camp followers who lifts you up by the collar and punches your lights out. Then you meet Diego who makes it clear that the only reason he's being nice is 'cause he's there to recruit for the old camp and if you tell him about the scroll he lets you know that if he wasn't on kill-on-sight terms with the mages he'd kill you and deliver it himself. The first guards in town try to shake you down for protection money upon your entry into the old camp. Everyone treats you like what you are, the new bottom b****. The demo had some unnamed or even introduced NPC toss you the scroll with no explanation, and they send you down in a pulley. After a pointless explosion and way too long cut scene you land in a cave within the magic barrier. After a combat tutorial with multiple raptors (who are easy to defeat) you meet Diego who immediately takes a liking to you (even compliments you on how 'skilled' you are even though he found you passed out). He tells you what the scroll is and where to take it and after reaching the old camp the guard is all polite and complimentary (no one paid you real compliments in OG Gothic) tells you to come on inside. That's where the demo ends. The point is, OG Gothic was all about the grind to the top where as the demo for the remaster was all about power fantasy. It makes me thing the people who worked on the demo, at least, didn't really understand what makes Gothic so good.

And the final episode is finally here.

The problem now is that when it’s done loading I’m placed outside the ship, in space, and free falling. Thank you for any help you can provide.

Japanese, German group mating? Think I saw that one.

Gothic 4 was so bad it made me reconsider Skyrim, which I initially hated.

But so did Gothic 3? And as much as I enjoyed Elex, PB keep making the same game over and over and after 6 games they still aren't able to fix the jank and in some ways got worse.

If you want the info without having to actually play it.

being a damage shield means you can "pseudo-heal" through effects that normally are blistering for healing (sickened, weakened, enfeebling, injuries). this is a neat interaction that comes up occasionally. Another benefit is that the damage shield is instant protection, whereas ancient memory takes time. Having Her Courage first means that when you switch to it, you immediately get 10 pts of damage protection, whereas to get the same with a typical AM would take almost the entire chant/linger; there's a time-based discount factor to consider here. But by far the most powerful aspect of the damage shield is that it refreshes when the chant is re-applied to people. Ancient Memory doesn't do much when refreshed - you still get a steady drip of health, same as always. However, the more often you refresh the damage shield, the more powerful it becomes. For example: troubadour with brisk recitation and a song that is solely "Her Courage" can almost carry an entire party against Hauane O Whe; normally you have to worry about Symbiote (which normally does 9.6 raw damage/tick forever or until you move and spawn enough oozes, the latter which also functions as a distraction and for the less skilled can be a major merging liability). However, refreshing a 10pt damage shield every tick means you never have to worry about that dot ever again. That's an extreme example. But even in less optimized cases (e.g. just a normal chanter who normally uses invocations) the instant refresh can give you outsized benefits in a typically challenging fight. Obviously you want healing as well, but the combined effect of a recurring damage shield *and* other healing can really feel like more than the sum of its parts. TL;DR - 25 pt damage shield would've been entirely broken IMO. 10-pt can feel weak in some situations, but can be extremely powerful in others. 25-pts would make it powerful in all situations and entirely broken in others.

Re Sailor Moon Super S

I hope you all have the appropriate national shame.

Walrus takes a nap on an iceberg and wakes up in Ireland I hope he doesn’t feel too bad about it. After all haven’t we all gone out drinking and passed out in one place and woke up in another in our younger years? The story didn’t say anything about him waking up next to a overweight and less than attractive walrus whose name he didn’t remember but it definitely would fit in the story!

In another life where Usagi wasn't already destined to be Neo, maybe they could've both been proper man-haters together. Hell, the only other dudes Usagi ever attracted were Umino at the beginning of season 1...and Ail...and Price Demande...and probably a whole host of other dudes I'm forgetting about right now, but ignore all that because it doesn't support my point.

Oh, I forgot to comment on this. Minor Stars spoiler:

Huh. Yeah. Figures. That does hint at more input from her, but who knows at this point. Truth still is, considering that the creative team took their hat and went to do something else after SuperS, is that the Toei messed it up. Hard. Oh by the way, something I haven't talked about. By the time the anime began airing they didn't even have the stock footage ready for it. The new transformations by Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi-Moon and their new attack was... only partially on screen for the first two episodes. If that doesn't give any more credence to the troubled production theory, then what does? Probably more likely he was just being diplomatic: no producer for a show is going to be like "oh yeah we've had to do complete re-writes of the show for the past few seasons because the stuff in the manga was straight up unworkable trash", especially not for a liked author. I tried to go through some of the manga to see what it had to say about Helios, but this stuff is really difficult to even skim through: there's just so little that's fun or likable about it, everything is so danged serious almost all of the time outside of like the beginning of an arc, and it seems really repetitive. How did they ever make anything out of this?

Fair call, not all the national health agencies have followed the herd despite there being quite a lot of pressure to and those that haven't deserve credit too.

I think the Greeks used the cubit in those days. One cubit is the length of a forearm. So a 3.5 cubit floppy disk would have a diameter of a little over 1.6m. That converts, surprisingly, to 5.25 feet. Can't be a coincidence, surely.

Final thoughts on Sailor Moon Sailor Stars. As per usual, I'll mark spoilers where necessary. I initially wasn't sure if I should do this one, but YouTube just suggested a Sailor Moon AMV to me that made me type this up. I normally don't watch AMVs, like at all. I might be biased, but we had a colleague at work who constantly watched AMVs. Or rather, he listened to music with his YouTube playlists and those were full of AMVs, and they all were stupid power fantasy cuts of popular animes. Now that doesn't mean that all AMVs are stupid power fantasy supercuts. Just that all of them that he was watching are. Sailor Moon AMVs, as I have now noticed, usually aren't, unless they're from Crystal (gee, wonder why it is easier to make a power fantasy supercut out of MURDER-DEATH-KILL Usagi than from the original love and peace Hippie-Jesus Usagi). Anyway, here's the video. It contains a couple of funny and sad scenes from Sailor Stars and is a bit spoilerish in that regard, although I don't think they'll hurt given the complete lack of context. The song is, uhm, yeah, 2010 style German trash, but it's quite catchy. *shrug* Before I go into any more details, I'll go out and state it. I love this season, in spite of, or perhaps just because of, its many issues. In fact I plowed through watching it in record time, even quicker than Sailor Moon S. My personal season ranking would be: Sailor Moon S > Sailor Moon Sailor Stars > Sailor Moon R = Sailor Moon >> Sailor Moon SuperS. Prior to my rewatch I would have ranked R better, not the same as the first season. R was what really got me into Sailor Moon way back, but it wasn't as good as I remembered it to be - or no, let's rephrase that, it wasn't better than the first season. Not that I don't consider Sailor Moon to be one of my favorite animes. Out of its 200 episode run, only a few are real stinkers, and almost all of them are concentrated in Sailor Moon SuperS. In the end, the show is something like 90% good to great, and 10% terrible, a ratio that even the most sucessful smash hit shows with a lot less episodes can only dream of reaching. Animation I've talked about this before. Presuming you'll watch the video above at least once, you'll see what I mean. The animation of the characters is noticably different from the other seasons. For all its other faults, I think the anime looked best during SuperS. Except for that one episode with Naru that looked like aliens made a fan episode. That's not to say that this looks bad, not at all. I love the animation in Sailor Stars. The girls are 16 and in high school now, so a bit of an age up was a good idea. Soundtrack Oh. The first thing you'll notice, unless you already know, is that the opening theme is different. Moonlight Densetsu only comes up once in the ending credits of the very last Sailor Moon episode. That was actually a really nice decision, and it really drives the point home that you're no longer getting any Sailor Moon. Or at least, no more Sailor Moon that isn't a total waste of your time. Here's the Sailor Stars Theme: I stated last time that the German opening was always the same song, except for reruns where they introduced other songs. The theme song was initially weird for me, but at some point it began to grow on me, and in the end I was looking forward to the opening credits. It's also the opening season where I watched it in full every time, I just love the opening scenes with the girls. True to form the opening theme also gets a slower, orchestral version to underscore emotional scenes. It's bloody fantastic (but that's the Sailor Moon soundtrack in general). But... but. With a large part of the season being about a boy group at the height of their popularity, the sound track also included some of their songs, and they're... not good. Well, one could argue that boy groups were never good. Anyway, I don't really like Search For Your Love, but your milage may vary. The storyline, the episodes, and the issues The good thing first. Naoko Takeuchi hated the sweeping alterations this season made to her storyline. Which we by now know means that Sailor Stars is better than what she came up with. Much like in R, her manga chapter structure and storyline proved to be barely adaptable. If you don't leave your animation team even a bit of something to work with, then please don't complain about the alterations necessary. Especially not when they're all better writers than you are. It may actually pay off to read the manga just to properly appreciate how much of a mad dash to make everything work the production of this show must have been. The storylines of Sailor Moon have consistently been nothing special, but the ones in the manga were downright terrible at times. What does that mean in the context of Sailor Stars? Warning, MASSIVE spoilers ahead.

So... the $750 million the Gates Foundation spent on AZD1222 doesn't count? Bill Gates commits $750M to help Oxford vaccinate the world against COVID-19

It's actually kind of worse than antivax, since these people are meant to be scientists capable of checking facts and with intrinsic credibility while the average antivaxxer is worried about falling off the side of the earth if they walk too far in a straight line. Example text for anyone running into the NYT paywall (w/ emphases mine) So the exact same symptoms/ effects come from both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines as well. Indeed: So it also occurs not just with other covid vaccines, but with vaccines in general including non covid ones. Ho hum, or it would be if it wasn't so utterly irresponsible and stupid. Any day now one of the antivaxxers blessed with the ability to read will draw exactly the same conclusion, and apply the 'danger' of the AZ vaccine to vaccines in general- and those idiot experts have provided perfect ammunition to argue that if AZ is suspended then all vaccines should be. Can't believe I'm going to say this but the only body coming out of this with a scintilla of credit in Europe is the EMA, the national ones are having a follow the moron stampede.

I'm working on the village outside my keep. First step was leveling the ground. Next I dug a moat, then I built a palisade: Now I'm starting to plan out the layout by building just the very bottom of each structure: I have a garden on one end:

I would like to preface this post by pointing out that I'm a woman and I'd prefer if we could keep the personal attacks and character assumptions to an absolute minimum here. So this is my first time playing through TOW and to begin with I found the balance of male to female leading roles refreshing. I was surprised to find a number of matriarchal characters present in the universe and for there to be a healthy depiction of female relationships throughout the dialogue and broader narrative in the game. I still find this a refreshing aspect of the narrative of this unique and fun game however, I have also found that something was sacrificed to bring this about, the male image. Lets be frank. Throughout the narrative the player is essentially tasked with deposing men from positions of authority and replacing them with women. The depiction of authorative male characters in this game is of greedy, short sighted or otherwise incompetant leaders who constantly battle against women instead of working with their community and in the scenarios where you encounter greedy women you aren't tasked with replacing them or in any way reducing their status. Let me list some examples where the player is greatly rewarded for deposing men or for improving the position of power for a woman: - You replace the male owner of the boarworst factory on the greedy whims of a female. You can choose not to do this but for a completionist or somebody who wants to experience the full content of the game you essentially lose as a player if you don't take this mission up out of some sense of ethics. There is no alternative to expose the female character for doing something massively illegal for her own greed, the only option to experience more content as a player is to take the path where you depose the male character of all of his power - You replace leader of Edgewater for a female if you want the "good" ending, where essentially everybody is happier, safer and more prosperous except for the single male who was deposed - You fight a power struggle for either zora or graham, with graham disregarding the wellbeing of his people and zora begging him to think of the humanitarian crisis he is facing. Essentially if you want to back a humanitarian position you back the woman, as always in this fictional universe - Every romantic relationship you are given the option to advance is done so on a womans terms. Every romantic advance made by a man is essentially painted as unwanted or as borderline sexual assault with the prevelant use of aphrodesiacs being demonstrated to be an exclusively male pattern of behaviour Meanwhile, situations where you encounter corrupt women of power you are simply encouraged to play ball with them or there is some caveat that shows the woman as being in the right all along. The most obvious example I can find for this being the saltuna cannery line manager on terra 1. She's found to be embezzling while reducing worker pay and yet the player still has to [threaten] her in order to progress the narrative to award better pay for her workers. In this case if you want to proceed down a humanitarian path you essentially have to perform an action that makes the path seem far less benevolent. In my opinion this runs counter the the narrative of the rest of the game and the only factor that I can see is different is that its a woman whose power you are attempting to diminish. 99% of the villains in this game are men. You receive rewards for exposing men, reducing their power and improving the power of women consistently throughout the narrative. You are essentially told between the lines that the only way this colony can function is as a matriarchy and that male leadership is toxic and breeds dysfunction and corruption. Look, there's a big difference between creating a matriarchal universe for a player to explore and setting the player up to be rewarded for creating a matriarchy. I found it extremally interesting at first and I found that my intrigue in the fairly balanced power structure of this universe kept me highly engaged in the narrative, however as it became more and more clear that the overarching narrative was to pin the problems of this colony entirely on men I found it extremally off putting and I found myself making bad ethical choices just to stick a big middle finger up at the writers. Honestly this was close to being something of an egalitarian masterpiece. A story that everyone could enjoy and with characters all parties could relate to, where female players could finally find a game that unabashadly did not conform the the sexism found rampant in the industry. In the end however it just has to take that narrative and mar it by pushing the pendulum to the other side. This may seem a little off topic, but do you know what narrative Quentin Tarantino intended to express in his film Inglorious Basterds? Throughout the film you are exposed to characters who are part of the Nazi regime. Through dialogue and action you are shown that some of these nazis are evil to their core, some are just troops waiting to go home to their families and some are real men of honour who just so happen to be on the wrong side of the war. The film then shows how in German cinemas of the era, people would go to watch a film that shows a nazi soldier gunning down hundreds and hundreds of allied troops, really showing how the nazi politicians and dignitaries (non combatants) at the time were being desensitised to death and how they were taught to revel in the death of the enemy through cinema, then minutes later a mirror is held up to the real audience in the cinema watching Inglorious Basterds, as they find themselves revelling in a scene of gore as a cinema of german civillians and nazi dignitaries burns on the screen in front of them as allied spies gun them all down with abandon. The audience subliminally compares their actions to the actions of brainwashed fictional audience, they compare the actions and attitudes of their own nations troops in WW2 with the average nazi soldier. Barriers are broken and the audience is left staring into the mirror to see their own indoctrination (if they have half a brain anyway). A poignant message about indoctrination and group identity is made. Why did I bring this up? Because in my opinion the narrative of this game revels in the deposition of men from power just as those german civilians and nazi dignitaries revel in the death of the enemy displayed in that cinematic medium on our screens in Inglorious Basterds. I just wanted to be the mirror.

Yes, that's the common way to unlock a ranged Streetfighter's passive. But the one I mentioned works with every weapon and the Streetfighter passive stacks with Sure-Handed Ila what makes this shooter even faster. It's not really a fire damage build. Flames of Devotion still does the normal weapon damage - it just adds +10 ACC (+20 with Ring of Focused Flames) and a burning lash that adds fire damage on top of the physical weapon damage. Yes, a lot of melee attacks also work with ranged weapons. Not all though. Usually it's mentioned with the ability description. If it says "Range: Melee" there it usually only works with a melee weapon. I have to add that Arcane Archer has a serious flaw inthe vanilla game: its damaging imbue spells don't scale their penetration at all. That means that Imbue:Missile, Imbue:Fireball and Imbue:Death Ring will have serious penetration issues in the late game. The other imbue shots (Imbue:Web, Imbue:Eora) are not affected of course since they don't penetrate anything anyway. You can use the Community Patch. If fixes this issue. Or you mainly use Web and Pull of Eora at some point. Eternal Devotion (the upgrade of Flames of Devotion) leaves you with an effect that adds additional burn damage (+10%) on top of all your further attacks. It doesn't matter if weapon attack or spell: all your dmg rolls will get +10% burn damage as lonig as the buff of Eternal Devotion lasts. That means that an Arcane Archer's Imbue shots also will get +10% burn damage. This incudes the shot damage itself (for example the pierce dmage of the arbalest) but also the spell effect that follows (for example the Missiles from Imbue:Missile will also get +10% burn damage). If it's your MC then it would be best to pick cruel and aggressive conversation options, yes. BUT: since this is a ranged build that doesn't rely on its defenses that much you can also just break this pattern and play a "chastened" Bleak Walker who wants to become good. It will give you only a worse "Faith and Conviction"-defense buff. Which is really not a big deal with a ranged character. You could also just pick another Paladin subclass. You'd lose a bit of dmg for Flames of Devotion but could get something else what's useful. Kind Wayfarer for example could heal allies with his shots. Yes, you can use any class combination with Wizard and use Essential Phantom and Substancial Phantom. Both will get ALL your gear. But they won't get your abilites or passives. No matter what race/class combo you are - the Phantoms will always be the same generic Phantom (even though they will look like you). But their stats are not bad at all and they scale with level, so they make quite good summons. You can even summon a weapon for yourself and when you summon the Phantom it will have that summoned weapon, too. If you have the Red Hand then your Phantom will have the Red Hand, too. And so on. It will also use any passive effect that is on your items. For example it will gain a ranged ACC bonus from Acina's Tricorn. It can't use abilites on gear that you have to activate though - only ones that trigger passively. So for examples weapon modals won't work. And also you can't control the Phantom. It's controlled by AI. So it chooses its targets itself and docedes where to go itself. Still: it can be very helpful. A SC Wizard can even summon Caedebald's Blackbow and summon the Phantom --> two Caedebald Blackbows!

He did transfer it to a different administrative body, yes. He didn't transfer it to "Ukraine" (as in the nation state), but to the Ukrainian SSR And Yes to the second one. They could have chosen to join Ukraine too (but a referendum with 94% of the population in favour of saying good riddance to all things Ukrainian, fat chance of happening) or stay independent like the other autonomous areas. Although this is a bit like debating things in isolation/out of context

They'll need a control to compare to the microchipped population. The big question is, which one is the control? It's a double-blind study. Mwahahaha...

Oh, I've only taken some quick looks at some non-action scenes, so that makes sense.

The way it moves. It's hard to put specific frames, because in general the stills aren't particularly better, but stuff like Usagi and Rei fighting looks better than s1 or R.

More Sailor Moon S

With my current Cantor (one of my favourite builds ever so far) I used to have Ancient Memory in first place because I like the security of having healing constantly active, but recently I've switched to Long Night's Drink first (taken to that over modded Dragon Thrashed) because after using Their Companion, phrase crits interrupt, so after I cast an invocation and the song resets, there's a chance for a big AoE interrupt and the debuff is refreshed (you also get accuracy for Long Night from Helm of the White Void and Enduring Dance). This character focuses on the cheap invocations Her Revenge and At the Sound - which means lots of casts, lots of interrupts, lots of a single phrase. If you favour high-level invocations like Eld Nary, I would think that you could expect to be waiting enough to see your second phrase more often, earlier in the fight, especially if not using Sasha's. I don't even think I'm going to pick Eld Nary on this guy (never thought I'd say that when I started the playthrough). My chants are laid out so that I can switch chants to get AM, or FF quickly if I need them. I don't even bother slotting a third phrase. @thelee I hadn't considered how Her Courage could be really strong with the constant resetting. Do you know offhand if it will block hits and therefore preserve Enduring Dance? Cuz that would be wild! I assume Her Courage is a damage gate that will block a single instance of damage of any magnitude, instead of just reducing it by ten... Tested it and unfortunately it's just an bit of extra hp

Fails to sink a birdie...

Look, the hack frauds have a new Star Trek video...

What a very interesting observation, thank you -- you've given me a lot to think about. (This is not snarky--I mean it.) I think that if I had to hold up some outliers, I'd note that Sophia Akande is an antagonist (if you're anti-Board, that is), and Phineas Welles is a protagonist (again, if you're anti-Board). There are some other examples of quests where you have male protagonists and female antagonists, or at least jerks (I'm thinking of "Cupid of the Laboratory" and the Early Retirement Program quests -- though they are very much side quests and not tied into the main arc or subarcs like getting in good with SubLight). However, none of this IMO invalidates your point, which is (correct me if I'm wrong!) that generally speaking, major male characters (in particular, the antagonists) are portrayed in a more tropey fashion in the game. I will point out, though, that from my own personal experience*, I at no point got any sense that "the colony's broken because of men and the solution is to kick out the men and put women in charge**". I always had the personal impression that the people in charge of the colony (including Sophia Akande) were a bunch of people who placed no value on the inherent value of people (non-elite people are resources, to be used and discarded when no longer useful to those in power) and who valued utilitarian ethics, and it never crossed my mind that they were that way because of their (apparent) gender***. Again, other people might draw different conclusions according to their own experience -- it's just an observation on my part related to my own experience. * Your mileage may vary ** In the Board Ending, you essentially put Sophia in charge (as I understand it -- please anyone correct me if I'm wrong, as I haven't played the Board Ending yet, myself). My understanding from the Good Ending is that your character is more or less in charge (unless you choose the Ice Cream ending), leaving a group of people probably including Phineas, Junlei, Zora, and maybe some others (I don't believe it's explicitly laid out, but I might be forgetting) as your "small counsel". If your player-Captain is not female (and you haven't chosen the Ice Cream ending), then that means the colony is now being lead or at least directed by a not-female person. *** And I might not have noticed it due to implicit bias, to be sure. Thank you for the post! -=-=-=-=- Edited to add: I didn't want you or anyone else to think I was minimizing or glossing over your other salient point, which is that by portraying this kind of behavior as being largely carried out by men, it could reinforce/normalize negative stereotypes about men, which can be incredibly damaging to actual men. I agree. I was just trying to get to my points.