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Probably offending somebody right now...

I drove to work for the first time since September. It is strange how much I missed my classroom. I usually take a break from this room for about 2 months over the summer, but it has been my workspace for the last 17 years, and it was strange to have such a long break. It is a lot easier to get stuff done without the distractions of homelife. Also, I had to log in here on my work laptop, and I had a bit of an issue, until I remembered to change an h to an n.

Times like this I feel I could have made it as a game developer.

Especially :

I just started a theurge run, with an animist/skald with the boar spirit shift. While level 4 and battling the beasts in the arena, I started wielding a staff, then summoned firebrand, and then shifted. After the battle, my staff disappeared, leaving a dual set of boar tusks in my first weapon slot. They were removable, and I could put them in my inventory, and strangely enough they were valued at 150 gold each, so I suppose I could sell them if I wished. I was wondering if anyone ever encountered this bug before. If would be a real bummer if the weapon was an irreplaceable unique, like the Spine of Thicket Green. Fortunately I only lost a generic quarterstaff.

Yes, institutional racism is very much phenomenon that happens everywhere. But the question was not if UK is somehow exceptionally bad on this front, but if UK is somehow has been able to solve such issues and minorities there don't face any disadvantages because of institutional issues. Reading the report I noticed that they try to make things look better than they are by excluding many common factors from their study like family influence, socioeconomic background and religion, as they don't any way analyze why these factors are more common among minorities than among majority. But of course it is true that poor are poor because they are poor and therefore there is no need for putting any effort to analyze why people are poor in first place.

I have a mild desire play an Ubisoft game. I haven't played one since Watch_Dogs 2 several years ago. The thing about Ubisoft games is that they're all generally pretty good, they're not earth shattering, but pretty good. It's just that they're all essentially identical. If you play all of them you get burned out, but if you only play one once in a while it's good fun. It's like eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles; if you eat Fruity Pebbles every day you'll get sick of it, but if you only have a bowl once in a blue moon, it's a perfectly tasty cereal. Ubisoft - The Fruity Pebbles of video games.

It's a problem- everyone loves a good party. 🥳

Good point - even though we're dealing with Nehellenia again, it does feel more like an attempt of a continuation of S otherwise instead. Episode 3:

Obligatory :

I didnt click the link, but "the economic collapse blog dot com" made me lol.

Mercifully my "SJWs are RUINING _______" recommendations are gone. Just endless Mass Effect 2 videos (clicking on them is a heavy risk.....but the priiiiiiiize)

Now waiting for the groveling phase in apologies to China. https://www.barrons.com/articles/h-m-pledges-commitment-to-china-after-backlash-over-cotton-decision-51617226350

Today I woke up, had coffee and a piece of bread with some peanut butter for breakfast. Looked at my garden and was pleased to see everything has sprouted. Then sat on the couch and read a book. At some point I dozed off. Then I woke up and moved to the chair. After all this excitement I think sunny and I might go for a walk. i’d go look for a job that the states kind of paying me not to.

How have I made it this far in life without knowing about this YouTube channel! It’s freaking great!

I'd buy XCOM 1 just for the sake of having it on GOG if it were that price, but alas, only 80% is not good enough. Wait no longer.

I may be wrong with the sequence of events that spawned it. I didn't notice that the staff was gone until after I was down below the arena. My description is based upon my recollection of what happened in that battle. I'll see if I can reproduce it, and will report back if I can.

Hm, the ones you can give yourself with the console don't have the raw lash. I guess it's tied to the actual spiritshift ability. Also I cannot reproduce your bug. My quarterstaff is still there after the procedure.

I never encountered this specific bug with Spiritshift weapons, but I reported several of similar ones with Draining Touch, Spirit Lance and Citzal's Enchanted Armory. You could summon those, use Form of the Fearsome Brute or Spiritshift and then let the encounter end while still transformed (don't know if that last part was really necessary). You ended up with permananent, removable Draining Touch, Spirit Lance and so on. This was then fixed shortly after my report. It seems they missed what you discovered now. Edit: I would hire a Shifter adventurer and then get my a nice pair of raw lash Shifter-Boar tusks. Those are awesome weapons and it would be fun to use them on some non-Druid builds.

oo, yikes, I haven't heard/run across this before, but I can definitely believe that the interaction of spiritshift weapons and a prior summoned weapon is uh... not ideal. good to know for my own run, was going to juggle firebrand, spiritshift, and occasional uniques.

To paraphrase an old American quote: "Nobody ever got fired for picking Troubadour" I would virtually never pick a vanilla chanter. If any time one considers a vanilla chanter, get a Troubadour instead. The fact that pallegina, vatnir, and fassina come as generic chanters is a huge hit for them as party chanters unfortunately. (original quote: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", though nowadays they probably should)

You'd be surprised, and again, a lot of government forms have English as its own ethnic tick box. So on the one hand you have that everyone knows English is not a race or ethnicity, but at the same time, it gets treated that why by certain check marks and forms.

You get that fun argument on exactly how to balance things out and "level the playing field." Short term processes to resolve it can cause issues in the long term and heighten racial / ethnic divides. You want to make sure the minorities are not put at a disadvantage, and have the same opportunities as the majority. But depending on how you go about it, you can then end up where chunks of the population feel that the tail wags the dog. To use the very rough metaphor; You have a group of 10 people. 2 of them are a minority, and have suffered a history of persecution and potential unconsidered discrimination. To balance it out, in any decision they get to have 3 votes each. The 8 remaining only have 1 vote each, and because of that, start to feel aggravated with the 2, which causes them to act out on the minority. Long-term solutions and social psychology are a bitch to work with, and there is rarely a clean and simple answer to it. Also of note that you might find interesting @BruceVC https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-lammy-lbc-african-caribbean-english-b1824029.html

Yes, INT increases the duration of the curse. But maluses like from RES have a bigger impact than the numbers suggest (due to some mathematical shenanigans under the hood) so it's not too bad as long as you have a lot of "-x% hostile effects" going on. Without Berath Blessins you can simply substract 2 from every stat and be good.

GM: The evil wizard shrinks you down to tiny creatures and puts you in a glass dish. Party: .... GM: Then he casts Scorching Ray and you all take 10 fire damage. Party: How could the get worse? GM: Well, none of you can move now. You've been "Petri-Fried"

Hm... so kinda like in Pathfinder: Kingmaker... prior to last patch.

Up late last night reading this one. It was a fun read:

You have described Ubisoft games in an accurate way like you normally do around your feedback of games. The way you explain your gaming experience often resonates with me They good but not excellent and yes you can become fatigued/burned out which is why I generally play then 1-2 times a year ....but not more than that " Ubisoft - The Fruity Pebbles of video games " ...classic

I love your bunny meme, its cute Oh yes, eating of Easter eggs is mandatory Funny you mention cancelling flights but I was suppose to fly to DBN but I cancelled my flight ....again like I did over Xmas But now I have a voucher which is about 80% of the value of the original ticket which I can use for any flight within 12 months. And I am not going to book another flight until the vaccine strategy is implemented and we free from these virus waves

"You think we'll judge him? Remember, if there's anyone who knows about being different, it's us!" *literally 30 seconds later* "DONKEY FACE" "HORSE FACE" "ALBINO RHINO" "YETI BOY"

Escape inconsistently closing sub/menus is a serious pet peeve of mine. I remember when I tried to play one of the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Editions, they made what were previously consistently closing menus in the original games no longer closable via escape. I take my keyboard shortcuts very seriously - that one little change drove me quite mad.

XCOM 2 is super cheap, am tempted.

I know where mine is, but it's telling that the best song on it was an ABBA cover. 😆 edit: Not saying I don't like Therion, 's just that their earlier stuff is better than Secret of the Runes. Or anything else that came after it. I've tried to like Lemuria and Sirius-B for instance, but... I don't think it's going to happen. Oh, and I'm not knocking 80ies metal covers, they're awesome.

Seriously though, disabling the tutorial, while making the start a lot harder, improves the game a lot. But they need serious balancing work. You build an infirmary. The basic medbed requires 10 power. The power generator you can build at the start of the game produces? 10 power. You want to train guards? You need a prison with a holding cell and an interrogation chair. Those will require a power generator to cover their power needs. You will need a training room, and as the punching bag requires another 4 power, you'll build another power generator. The chalkboard to train a scientist is 4 power, so that generator covers it. But to equip the research lab to do the requires tier 1 research to get to tier 2 research and the new power generators? That will require two generators worth of power. Of course you have at this point built a generator to cover the cantina, two generators for the ops room... So not having wasted energy and build more than the bare minimum of power using items and no traps, you have built 10 generators instead of maybe 4 in the old game?

Most (not all, but most) survival type games become a grindfest at some point. Whether for resources or for keeping up repairs or for food stocks or weapons or ammo or whatever it is ... it's the basic gameplay loop after all. Like in 7 Days, I don't know how (or why) anyone would to play the same save to try to reach lvl 300. You'd have your mega base and best gear long long before then and all you'd be doing is grinding upkeep and XP. Or ignoring all of that and building castles instead. 😛 Re: Evil Genius 2 - hmm, doesn't sound good. Don't really care about sale prices but does sound like one should wait and see if they fix/change any of these QoL/UI annoyances.

Yeah Yes, but no Yeah Sorry I agreed so much with the previous statements that I had to react 🙂

I wish! Obviously, I was supposed to be born into a wealthy family, perhaps royalty even, but alas my reality is much closer to the other end of the spectrum.

My current Steam review for Evil Genius 2. It may be unfair. But do I care? The game looks pretty. Prettier than many base building games. Sadly that is what it has going for it.Controls are wonky. Having recently replayed the original game, everything about the controls in this one felt off.The game allows you to rotate the camera by keyboard with the Q and E keys or by mouse by holding the mouse wheel. Pretty standard - until you try to rotate while in build mode. Then keyboard rotation is blocked. Why?Some menues I can close with ESC. Not all menues.The UI is intrusive. It takes up too much of the screen when I would like to have room to see what I am building. The tutorial pop ups make things worse. Especially as, after having popped up, you can't make it go away. Traditionaly, when a message pops up, you are allowed to click OK. Not here. It is there to stay until it decides that it wants to leave. Of course it won't stay gone. It pops right back up. Again and again. Because large flashing messages increase your enjoyment of the game...Alerts for the world map will show up, but you can't tell what they are. Yo jsut know something is going on, not what.You may get a generic alert icon persistently sitting there on your screen that doesn't alert you to anything. So within the first couple of hours, the game is training you to ignore it.In preview videos - and there were a lot of amazing preview videos - the developer talked about the old game and how it forced you to build rows upon rows of lockers to get minions. How you ahd to build so many power generators. This game would slim that all down. Indeed. You build multiple lockers at once. Generators are slimmer. Yet, I have in the first hour, build rows upon rows of lockers, just as I would in the first game. Perhaps more. And I definitely have build more generators than I would throughout a whole game of Evil Genius 1, while still following the tutorial.I am not going to criticise the changes to the world map. I haven't seen enough of it to judge whether long term they make sense. Do I want to find out?There may be fun down the road. But with the way the UI is and the controls work, my eyes are too tired and I am too frustrated to care.

Restarting Evil Genius 2 without the tutorial. See if I get fewer pop ups and spam. Regretting the pre-order. Not for any of the gameplay reasons reviews commented on, but quality of life issues. A scientist researching at my whiteboard goes to eat. As he steps away from the whiteboard, with another waiting to take up his position right away, research is interrupted for 1 second. I get a voice message "Research has stopped". Seriously? I have 60 minions and I get voice messages for what they do? SHUT UP game. If I have an alert, let me click it to see what it is. Just having a generic alert marker pinging up because something may or may not have happened, is not useful. You can rotate the camera with Q and E or by holding the mouse wheel. Unless in build mode, then Q and E stop working. I hate using the mouse to rotate though... Second first impression is: don't wait for sale. Just get Troubleshooter instead.

I was just posting the response I had received. This was before they finally admitted that there was an actual issue. Now they have at least admitted it but who knows how many days/weeks/months we will have to wait for them to fix the game so we can actually play what we paid for.

Hardly

https://whalescientists.com/russian-ship-entrapped-belugas/