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Starship SN15 just landed and did not explode.

It's a 5-minute walk from my house to the Pub and it's a 45-minute walk from the Pub to my house. The difference is staggering.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.” The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.” “You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist. “I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?” “Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.” The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.” “I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?” “Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault!” ---- An oldie but still true.

I'm going to let everyone in on a little secret. Education frameworks and standards are all cyclical. Every set amount of years someone comes up with some new theory for their doctoral thesis, and it is really just a new name for the same thing we did previously. None of it really matters in the long run. What matters is the kids show up, they learn how to do some work and hopefully they learn to use their brains, and then they graduate. It's pretty simple.

Why is this funny? It seems pretty tragic that somebody would waste 2 and a half years of their lives just so they could target the lgbt community. That's some pretty deep seeded bigotry.

Crashed into a giant pile of money.

Not sure CDPR has crashed that much.

Most studios would give their left kidney for 16 million sales or whatever it was. All CDPR has to do to get the hype back is announce their next Witcher Colon Subtitle game. But what they've probably learnt from C2077- apart, hopefully, from some better project control- is that 7 years of hype building is dumb.

I'll never buy another game made in Eastern Europe except for Piranha Bytes games.

I enjoyed Cyberpunk quite a bit and I have a feeling I am not alone in that. I'd say it is safe to say CDPR will be fine for their next couple games.

I have tremendous nostalgia for BG1, but have never ever written anywhere a wall-of-text post on any subject (and my posts counts are pretty low in all forums too). And, at 53, I am definitely on the older side (though still gen X and not a boomer). So a lot of assumptions here don't quite add up, at least with me. Edit: Oh, and forgot to add, I love both PoE games and have played them multiple times.

I nominate this as the greatest post in the 21 year history of this board!

I'm pretty sure that the most lengthy are actually several words mashed together by non-native speakers to make the "is there a German word for everything" a self-fulfilling prophecy.

@BartimaeusI got 15408 on mine back when I built my PC back in early February. Cooler is a Noctua U14S which should be weaker than the Fuma 2. Used the standard NT-H1 included paste. Temps capped out at 89C, which is not a concern for this CPU. This is in a Fractal Design Define 7 case with just the stock fans, but I did leave the door open for the purposes of the test. I was originally planning to set the CPU on Eco mode but on first try I couldn't get the setting to show up and I couldn't be bothered following it up. ____ And now for a significantly less glamourous build. I just picked up a i3 NUC, the older but ubiquitous NUC8i3BEH. I'd be planning to pick up something more powerful, but settled for this now at the basement price of $260AUD. Just couldn't wait any longer: my old Celeron NUC from circa 2015 which chugs on things as simple as YouTube at times. Just putting in a single 8GB stick of 2400MHz RAM and my old 250GB Sandisk SATA SSD in it for now, though there's a question mark regarding the health of the SSD, so we'll see. What I really wanted was one of the Asus or Gigabyte Ryzen-based mini-PCs, but Asus have disappointed with their recent announcement of the new PN51 series, using only Zen 2 mobile processors and leaving out the new Zen 3 ones. That is, they're using the Ryzen 5300U, 5500U and 5700U which are Zen 2, and not the 5400U, 5600U and 5800U which are the interesting ones. (And shame on AMD for the idiotic naming scheme too). Meanwhile Gigabyte could hardly get any of their previous generation ones on the market and have said nothing about a refresh. Incidentally, it's mildly interesting that this NUC8 has a build date of February this year, which means it's still being manufactured alongside the disappointing NUC10 series of the past year or two (which had a tiny improvement in CPU performance and a large drop in graphics performance), and the brand new NUC11s.

The weather is growing warmer and I want strawberry fruit popsicles.

The Spiders' games have long been Eurojank budget RPGs. They've always had the heart and the ambition, but never either the prowess or the budget to get there completely. GreedFall feels like the closest they've ever come to realizing what they wanted to create to its full potential. There's still some jank, but this is the least jank Spiders game and the closest to AAA production value they've ever come (still not quite there, mind you). This is the best that combat has ever felt in a Spiders' game. It's still pretty much the same combat system they've used in all their games, but it just kinda works better. It flows better, the feedback feels better, and you have a lot of tools at your disposal. I didn't go much into the magic skill trees until the very end when I had already gotten everything I wanted for my build and I just had a couple extra points to spend, but I can tell you that firearms feel great. I think it's a combination of good sound design and good feedback , both the recoil of firing a blunderbuss and the knockback on the victim. Guns just feel appropriately loud and punchy. Melee is pretty good too, dodging and parrying both work well. You have a normal attack, a secondary attack, and a special attack, which you need to build up your fury to use. These attacks change depending on your weapon type. For example, with a 1 handed sword your secondary attack is a kick, which is quick, hard to parry, does little damage, but it's great for breaking guard and unbalancing the opponent. With a 2 handed heavy weapon (hammer, axe, etc.) your secondary attack it a big overhead smash. It's slow, but it does lots of armor damage and can generate a small shockwave that does some AoE damage. I can't comment on m&kb controls, but the game felt great with a controller. I thought the default controller scheme worked really well. It lets you bind a whole bunch of actions to the limited buttons you have to work with on a gamepad via a modifier button (I could have done that anyway with my Steam Controller, but didn't feel the need to since the in-game controls were plenty good enough) and the way it's set up it works really well. I'm not the most dexterous guy in the world, but even with my fat, clumsy fingers I almost never wound up doing actions I didn't mean to do. I had no problem attacking, parrying, firing guns, setting traps, throwing bombs, and casting heals in the middle of an intense battle. Everything worked properly and consistently. If I had a criticism it's that there's too much black & white in the story. They do try a little bit in giving multiple points of view, but it's abundantly clear who's really in the right and who's really in the wrong in most cases. There is a very clear good path and a very clear evil path most of the time. I wish they muddied things a bit more. Also, while they've done a better job of disguising invisible walls than ever before, Spiders does still have them in there and I really hate invisible walls, especially when it's like a couple branches half a foot off the ground. You're telling me my character can't easily step over that?

@LittleArmadillo0 If you like that here is a rabbit hole for you to fall in to. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ

It's +20% damage on top of Soul Whip which doesn't turn off at max focus like with other ciphers. Not wild - but the only Cipher who not only retains bonus damage when at full focus but even gets an additonal one. In this special case it might be even a good idea to pick Biting Whip over Draining Whip. With Community Patch I would totally recommend it.

The cipher ability Tactical Meld is also great here, giving you and an ally +3 engagement as well as the aware inspiration. A shadow dancer can get an additional +1 (passive, no cast required) with Persistent Distraction.

Woops... that was me getting something wrong about the second Madoka film. edit: To explain that... it's not the scenes that are different, it's the dialogue that was rewritten to be clearer. Not sure if it's new subs or an actual change in the original too. Eh.

This seems to still be the same. I was able to get both feats only by going SH then DS and not the other way around. I haven't tested it in combat though. Also, my velociraptor's portrait is a bear. Weird but I like it.

It takes more than one misfire to turn gamers off a company. Bioware had 2 misfires in close proximiry (ME3 and Andromeda) and there was STILL much hype for Anthem. Even after the Anthem disaster, DA4 still has some buzz. As for investors, the only thing they care about is the bottomline and the bottomline is that Cyberpunk 2077 made a bajillion dollars.

If you have Blade Turning active you can also use Enduring Dance. With lots of INT and some Power Levels it's enough to sustain Blade Turning. It takes 7 hits to end it so that's usually plenty of time. But with a Nalpasca it's surely much easier to uphold. You can also generate wounds with Parting Sorrow if you engage enemies and then kill them (with Blade Turning) which will be counted as "broke engagement because dead" - but that's less reliable of course. Other ways of generating wounds while using Blade Turning is to use self damaging abilites. Berserker/Monk (Frenzy) and Wizard/Monk (Deleterious Alacrity of Motion) come to mind. DAoM deals enough damage to sustain Blade Turning but of course you need to make sure you get some healing in between. By the way: self damage doesn't interfere with Enduring Dance. Monk/Wizard is also a great choice because it leads to Wall of Draining. With that you can prolong Blade Turning endlessly. So you don't even have to generate wounds anymore to have it for a very, very long time (as long as there are more than 1 enemies in your Wall and then some). WoD also prolongs all other benefical effects - like Minor Lay on Hands from those early gloves. Which means you can prolong DAoM to gain wounds while healing up again at the same time AND have Blade Turning active. Against ranged characters you can just use a Large Shield (Blade Turning doesn't care about your ACC malus), Weapon & Shield Style, use the modal and cast WoD + deflection buffs like Mirrored Images, Llengrath's Safeguard and Soul Mirror. They will miss a ton and if they hit they will do whimpy dmg. Eventually they will shoot themselves to death. Also this helps a ton against AoE spells thrown at you (the shield + modal, not Soul Mirror).

A halfling stumbled out of the pub. He was a little drunk

It's not access, it's the sugar/carbs. Oh sure, like all such, if I ate one once a week it'd be fine but that wouldn't happen. My self control usually comes from ... not having any such in the house. I didn't buy/eat ice cream all the time but if I bought a pint, it was eaten in one sitting. When I got out of the hospital I was all "veggies and fruits, low carb, low fat!" etc. And I bought a watermelon. Apparently I should not eat watermelon (bananas are apparently pretty "bad" too). Or a lot of the high sugars fruit. When I stopped eating an apple or a pear or a handful or two of cherries with every meal my blood sugar went down/was more stable. Fruit hit me worse than eating a slice or two of bread, or a couple squares of dark chocolate. So now it's largely just veggies/low fat proteins. Anyway ... next time I actually walk-in to a grocery store I might try sugar-free fruit bars (Splenda) ... maybe they'd be tolerable and be half the carb/sugar content of most fruit bars. Amazon Fresh tends to be terrible with more specialty items like that.

Oh yeah, I don't report bugs unless I can reproduce them on my no mod install. I do play most of the time with mods installed because I want to try a bunch of things without putting in a dozen or more hours first

I don't teach math, and I don't really like the math teachers on my campus, so I have no clue. 😉 Honestly though, there is no real easy answer for math levelling. The framework is not for High School, so when math gets serious, kids are still going to have some choice on what path they want to follow. At the middle school level, I work at a place where math is the big focus. None of the high level math kids do "only" the math class. They have weird math clubs, weekend stuff, competitions to get ahead. Actually a lot of this equity stuff started with No Child Left Behind and the Bush administration, so it is funny to see it blamed on liberal Cali.

@ShadySands am personal trying not to use mods 'cause am not wanting it to impact our feedback. however, am not above asking shady to do so. there were a curious "bug" in the previous build which involved the sacred hunstmaster inquisitor favoured enemies feature and the demonslayer ranger fe. IF your sacred hunstmaster hit level 5 and chose outsiders as his/her fe, then a subsequent level of demonslayer would effective stack, resulting in +4 to-hit and +4 damage v. those nasty outsiders so prevalent in the game. did not count as a progression o' the sacred huntsmaster's fe feature, but the benefis did stack. however, if a character chose the demonslayer class before adding levels o' hunstmaster, then the outsider option would be unavailable when the inquisitor finally reached level five and were able to pick a favoured enemy. am wondering if the demonslayer + sacred huntsmaster situation is same or different. sure, we can level a character to six and then hire a merc to test our self, but that is gonna necessitate literal dozens o' hours the way Gromnir is playing. if you get a chance... as an aside, pounce for the velociraptor is nice, and we could add the bully class which is now selectable, but in such a case am wondering why we don't just choose smilodon + bully. the trike has good str and am able to add trip with bully, so am s'posing such is an option. am just not able to do w/o trip in some way. am addicted to animal companion trip. so either leopard, dog or wolf + any animal companion class OR the no trip animal companions + bully. automatic trip for leopard, wolf and/or dogs feels like it would be superior, but am gonna need play with such options. am intrigued by the quarterstaff master for monk, but am wondering how to combine eleven levels o' it with other classes. overall, only having perused a bit o' character generation, everything looks nicer in the new build. HA! Good Fun!

Watched the first two episodes of Paranoia Agent. It is about an anthology series centering around a string of attacks that is causing paranoia, it is very dream like at points. If anyone is interested watching, it is on Funimation you need an account but it is free to view. Also watched the first episode of Sailor Moon. I have never felt so bubbly in watching someone say "Moon Prism Power!"

Your argument becomes a lot less convincing the minute you resort to using terms like "boomers". Please don't generalize like that. It doesn't help.

This is a really good question. As a rule, I don't replay these games, because my approach is so story-oriented that I tend to lose interest once I know how things turn out(*). However, the smarter cRPGs have solved a part of this problem by introducing more characters than you can reasonably have in any one playthrough *and* providing those characters with enough unique content so that multiple playthroughs become a possibility. So, if I do a second playthrough, I tend to rely on characters that I didn't use on my first playthrough. That gives new motivation. But obviously the story problem remains. I think the only game I've played more than 3 times is BG2, and even there I didn't do ToB on all playthroughs (because there's so much railroading). I've done PoE three times and Deadfire twice. My current, third Deadfire playthrough appears to have stalled, and I don't know whether I will ever finish it -- there's a clear sense of just going through the motions now, because I know how everything is going to turn out. (*) If a game has a clear "good" and "evil" path, that's not enough for me, because I just don't enjoy playing evil. This is not to say that I'm a goody-good paladin or anything; I simply don't like to play evil. In DD terms, I'm generally Neutral or Chaotic Neutral, maybe Chaotic Good, but never Evil.

I am not sure the use of the word expert is warranted.

This isn't really funny, but I think the most ambitious crossover was still WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. In both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Supernatural case, they were ultimately dealing with in-house issues (Marvel and WB respectively). WFRR had to deal with (from memory) 5 different companies that didn't always like each other and their extensive rules for how their characters had to be portrayed to create a relatively comprehensive Toon Town (with some notable exceptions like Casper and Popeye) so that cartoon characters could seemingly exist in a human world. ... I know this isn't really a funny post, but this post made me think, which probably isn't a good idea.

I finished GreedFall, it took just over 50 hours. Very good RPG, easily Spiders' best effort to date. I'm sure most people here have already played the game, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say that if you've played any previous Spiders' titles then it's like that, just more open, more polished. It makes me excited to see what they develop in the future. I also finished Death Come True, it's an interactive movie where you wake up in a hotel room with amnesia, there's an unconscious and bound woman in the bathroom, and a news report on the television claims you are a wanted serial killer. The premise is simple enough at first, it's a choose your own adventure and when you die you wake up at the beginning retaining the knowledge from before and can make different choices, but then it makes a hard left turn and gets weird... then it gets really weird. It's from a new studio made up of devs that used to work at Spike Chunsoft, makers of the twisted and demented Zero Escape and Danganronpa games, so it's no surprise that the game gets really weird. It's a short game, you can finish it in a single session. I haven't gotten every one of the deaths yet, but I did get the true ending and I got one particularly twisted death that amuses me to no end. It's likely no one else here will ever play the game, I may be the only weirdo here that plays stuff like this, but on the off chance that you do play it, don't read or watch anything about it beforehand. Go in completely blind.