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Hey guys. I’m alone in the house again. I picked G up at the airport Saturday morning and took her straight to the Peabody Hotel in downtown. I had a deluxe room reserved for us with a great view. We spent the whole day in the room just, y’know, enjoying each other’s company. Then in the evening it was dinner at Rizzo’s then champagne at the rooftop bar with live music and the lights of the city below us and the stars above. It was perfect. The next day I brought her back to my place and we spent the day watching the Packers vs Bears and other games. She is a big Packers fan. I don’t think they let you live in Wisconsin if you’re not. That’s something I should probably follow up on. That’s going to be important info soon. We spent four together. I was hoping for longer, but work waits for no one. Plus, she got a little… not sure… hesitant at the end. We got to do some of the fun stuff I had planned but mostly she just wanted to stay at my place. She loved my house and all the stuff. I had hoped she would. She loved the garden and greenhouse and veggies (she is mostly a vegetarian) and the whole thing. But she really liked how much land and the seclusion and privacy of it. My hopes were soaring. I was hoping she would imagine some kind of a future here with me. It was not to be of course. But I knew that. We took a walk down Cold Creek to the river and spent the day talking about us and what our future might be. Her life is not in Tennessee and won’t ever be. She spoke to B on the phone every night we were together. She could never be so far away from her. I told her I knew that, and I’d never ask her to be. I told her I wanted to be part of her life. And if her life is in WI then that is where I’ll go. She was shocked, I think. Then I told her I’d already spoken to a realtor that was handling other stuff for me about selling. I wanted to know how she felt about that. Her reaction was not what I’d expected. I thought that idea would make her happy. It’s not that it didn’t… I couldn’t put my finger on it. We talked some more about it. She has no interest in ever being married again but conceded she might change her mind. I laughed at that comment and told her I had no problem with that. We talked in general about buying land and building houses. How I built my place. She said she would love to have something like that near her hometown. She has always wanted her own horses and a place to board and treat. One thing we haven’t spoken about is money. I got the impression her situation is still not great following what her ex did to her. And B is a full-time student and I’m pretty sure G is helping her. I’ve enjoyed some real financial success following the sale of our business. And I’ve been very careful in managing and investing it. What she is dreaming of is within my means. Especially if I sell my place. I was thinking this but held back from telling her everything. I decided to push that conversation down the road a little way. Something about her hesitation made me cautious. Plus, I’m always wary of the danger of moving too fast. I’m cool with going all in. I’m not sure she is yet. I think it’s best to let her get there on her own. She flew home this morning. She called me when she landed and again when she got home. I’m planning on going up to see her next weekend and spending time up there. Maybe even look at real estate, who knows. But I’m definitely going to slow down a little. I don’t want her feeling pressured.

So... I'm not necessarily trying to resurrect this (retrospectively very funny) thread. But, I wanted to say that I've just spent more time than I would want to admit playing with a SC Blood Mage with infinite casts of Skaen Priest's Shadowing Beyond and infinite Concelhaut's Crushing Doom. Zapping around the battlefield under near-constant invisibility to make every enemy being permacrushed by giant flying hammers is a very satisfying way to end an otherwise annoying workday. Infinite Shadowing Beyond is arguably a contender for strongest single spell that you can get with this trick, maybe before SoT/BDD... because it casts instantly without recovery - with a toon that already has low (or no) Recovery, it is close to permanent invisibility. I also have infinite Brilliant Departure for good measure.

Halloween is a holiday where: You don't have to prepare food. You don't have to meet up with family. You don't have to attend a festival. Halloween songs can be catchy, but they're never repetitive or played for months on end. It can allow pretty much anyone to partake in it regardless of religion or background. It's completely voluntary with no peer pressure to do anything or attend specific functions or travel anywhere. Halloween lets you be, however you want to express yourself, and it's the one night pretty much no-one will judge you.

God created PCs to test the faithful

is the best holiday. yeah, the celebration has religious roots, but as celebrated in us it is almost entire secular---nowhere near the religious baggage that exists for christmas or easter. is not 'bout patriotism or celebrating a cultural icon who likely ain't the hero you were taught to admire in school. on halloween, kids dress up in costumes, pretend to be sooperheroes or monsters or whatever, and then neighbors, many o' whom the kids has never met or spoken to, give the costumed kids candy... or a small box o' raisins if the neighbors is jerks. if it weren't for the fact so many pets is tormented and abused by little psychopaths on halloween... HA! Good Fun! ps a few people getting their house tp'd is a small price to pay for general halloween goodness.

The world still needs to up their own chip production before they can sit idle by and watch China invade Taiwan... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-relies-on-one-chip-maker-in-taiwan-leaving-everyone-vulnerable-11624075400 Even if Qualcomm "only" produces 12% of the worlds chips by now (down from 37%), its still something that currently sits in 60% of the words cars... Not that I'm a proponent of cars mind you. Best thing ever was the the total lockdown where the streets were empty and the air felt fresher. A memory of a world freed from cars that will stick with me

Banjo-Kazooie was great, though I remember being stuck on some level with a whale or mechanical fish that you had to enter. Kind of like the third kid dungeon in Ocarina of Time. My first PC game was NWN, which in retrospect was not great. But I had just started playing D&D with my friends and that was the video game equivalent at the time. I had no idea what the **** I was doing and rolled a Fighter/Rogue/Divine Champion that went twf. I ran into a bug where my follower fell prone and couldn't get up lmao. That's absurd. Just because Microsoft owns the forum now doe.......ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL. YOU WILL ACCEPT YOUR GENETIC DESTINY.

He posted the truth about the COVID vaccines

Governments are inherently evil. Ayn Rand was a genius. From my cold dead hands will they take my guns!

something I just discovered--don't know if this is common knowledge--that may be useful here, is azure blade. you can enchant it to have a 25% chance to interrupt if you have enough allies nearby, in addition to +10 accuracy. what I discovered is that this chance to interrupt affects anything, not just the stiletto attack. I actually ended up interrupting some enemies with the debuff portion of Devotions for the Faithful, which is how i discovered this. So if you have summons or can keep some friends close by, this will help your non-crits interrupt as well.

It builds character

I think Id rather be cold than hot. I can always add more layers to get warm but I can only take so much off to get cool. Except snow, I hate snow with a passion.

Try: just using a premade script for a while, and every time a character does an ability does something you don't want it to, take a look in the AI script, find out what's making that ability happen, and tweak it somehow. If you're just trying to completely script out your character at once, I would get overwhelmed a lot and I program as my day job. It's also impossible to really predict what will end up being useful. Also, like @crdvis16says, you don't have to automate everything, just the important stuff. There's a lot of abilities in the AI scripts, but most of them won't ever be relevant; the AI script just starts with the top ability, and if it's not there, moves on to the next. So there's tons of abilities because they wanted to the AI scripts to be useful for most players, and so they stuffed tons of abilities in there for a narrow set of triggers. A more typical AI script for me is just one that checks to see if the character has a perception inspiration, and if not, uses Tactical Barrage, with a 10s cooldown. One ability controlled by a comprehensible use case.

HA! Good Fun!

I like the first one, and I love the second one, but the third one I didn't realize how surprisingly mediocre it was until I re-visited and played all of them through probably 4-5 years ago now. Even the music is pretty bleh, which is a little shocking for Rare at that time. OH CRAP, speaking of Rare, I forgot about Banjo-freaking-Kazooie - that was also one of those very early games for me. Another one that also holds up pretty danged well, too, although early 3D controls do usually leave a little to be desired in comparison to late 2D controls like DKC. Do not speak of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named - you may well summon back that utterly vile and vacuous character by saying his name, .

You need Berserker's Confusion in order to kill your own skeletons with your "Her Revenge" cone though. That will trigger Blood Thirst - as well as giving you a phrase per skeleton kill which in turn lets you repeat the invocation again right away. Without Berserker Confusion it takes a lot longer - at least against tougher enemies who don't drop dead from one use of Her Revenge. It also lets you gain phrases against single tough enemies very quickly.

I was on the math team in high school, and competed in state wide tournaments, and we lost. And we didn't get any medals or awards. And it didn't scar me for life. Being on a math team in high school, however... 😱

Man, the east coast has hurricanes and polar vortexes. I'll take my perfect weather and expensive water, thank you very much. We actually have a storm on the horizon this weekend. So we just need about 50 more of those and we will be good.

Hard pass.

I do not think everyone should get a medal. I think everyone should have a chance to compete. In a gifted program, only the top students are even given the chance. I also don't think these game show style competitions are all that important to the educational process as a whole, but that is an entirely different can of worms.

Between fires, droughts and the San Andreas Fault, the east coast doesn't really look *that* bad

All you guys, and gal, in CA need to sell off your properties and move East before you run out of water.

You have to ask the developer. About his stance on this issue But if we take this quote more into detail "thinking about him make you see him as more than an attacker" well it is about Roman guy, they were slavers right? So thinking about them as more than an attacker is opposite, what you have said there 😄 Anyway, there is no issue with woke stuff in games in general, same if there is non-woke stuff there. It's all about a balance and the way how it is handled in the final product. e.g. ST:TNG is one of the wokest TV shows ever produced, and I do not see anyone complaining about it, and now compare it with ST:DIS

I think that was it. Brings back some memoires. I think I remember you posting about using cheat engine to make it go faster or something actually lmao. Y do u hate bards? That's hilarious, then you can recruit her as a ghost in hell. IIRC, some fake priests were serving an ancient lizard mage or some ****. It was dumb. They had a fear aura in NWN that would make your character run away if you didn't pass a will save. So in a way they were scarier. But not nearly as memorable. NWN did have the most memorable dragon fight in a RPG though, because you fight a Lich dragon. Guarded by a gang of vampires.

I only tried BG1 after BG2, and I got a couple screens out of Candlekeep before I got bored and abandoned ship. And I didn't even hate party-based RPGs back then! At a guess I probably got somewhere between a third and halfway through NWN, but I remember absolutely none of it. I even bought the expansions because everyone said it was much improved but I don't think I even started either of them. The crazy thing perhaps is that the only NWN game I properly played was SoZ, where I quit after I cleared the path to the final location, so like 95-99% through (depending if it would have been a final dungeon or just one boss fight). That's a weird habit of mine though, and one I've retained: this year alone I've stopped my Cyberpunk playthrough, an XCOM Long War campaign and a vanilla JA2 campaign all at about 99% done. And the latter I've never even completed officially before. But I just cleared up the palace map and just needed to assault the bunker but couldn't be bothered.

I think it was his gills. I dunno, I recall a couple of aquatic levels in that game and I'm thinking of one that was really industrial. It's been almost two decades since I played it so I don't remember. I have never played Baldur's Gate 1, I only played it with the EE or BGT. And only that past 2012, so I don't have the reference to compare it to the successor D&D games. NWN was rough. Tons of stuff was undocumented and just didn't match the 3.5 system I was used to in PnP. Still though it was a lot of fun for young me to play and I have fond memories of it. I tried to go back after playing BG and just said **** it, the game has aged horribly and has a dumb story even by rpg standards lmao. Maybe I'll give it another shot in the future, but I'll probably have the same reaction.

Yeah, I recall that. I saw the movie years ago...also have a high tolerance for trippy scifi...

Hi Sarex... Does the cartridge games for Commodore 64 count as "console games"? If so, the first game I owned was Commodore's International Soccer (that's heathen speak for football). If not... then I've never owned a console or the games that comes with it. Racial purity indeed 😛 I was also a latecomer to PC gaming, hanging on to my Amiga 4000 until Fallout came out, which together with the original Tombraider made me switch platform (Neither ran properly on the PC emulator)

I'm sort of curious what you think of it, so yeah, if that's no longer a viable project (and I was surprised it was one in the first place) then try it at some point. It does have some annoying elements, like Ahiru's ballet teacher, and I could have done without the anthropomorphic animals, but I liked it well enough. I still have no idea what to really make of it though. It was a nice fairly tale. Which has yet to show up, so, yeah. It's not the magical boy that turned into a ferret like I assumed at first. So yeah, so far you're two for two. Or three for three, actually, you did warn me to leave Magic User's Club be.

I had Princess Tutu in mind, actually. I don't know when/if we'll ever get back to that, . Might actually become something I check out more on my lonesome at some point after I've finished Sakura instead... Hey, my prognostication said it looked alright outside of the cat/foxgirl, and it looks like I wasn't wrong, .

The great thing about Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 2 is that they hold up, even today. Rare really did a fantastic job creating a perfectly fluid and smooth gameplay experience that was fun to play and looked really impressive for the time. Some of my most favorite Christmas memories. I got the games for Christmas, and was finished with them by New Year's, where we met at my grandmother's place for a family outing. My cousin and I would beat King K-Rool around. Good old times. The third one was a bit of a letdown though. Yeah, every now and then a bot makes it through, and even rarer still some posters feel like a spam bot but in reality aren't. I'm still not so sure SonicMage117 wasn't the result of an advanced posting bot / troll machine learning experiment.

if you mean because of Samurai Champloo, that's okay. Future Boy Conan is also something I'd like to watch at some point, mostly because we never got a release over here, and while following CLAMP around the block has been a mixed bag so far, Miyazaki always delivered something at the very least watchable. No, not really, but that's between me, my peculiar musical tastes and yours. I already surprised me by being quite decent, even if not very original. Overall my impression of the first four episodes is quite positive, but that might not shine through my posts that much.

God damn it stop editing your posts before I pull out a stone mask and reject my humanity. At least that guy wouldn't try to romance a 10 year old. Or a 1010 year old who was stuck in the body of a child before DEATH PHANTOM unlocked her puberty and transformed her into BLACK LADY. Sailor Moon is very strange.

Based on Gorth being aware of the situation and having to explain what happened, I can only assume it was a bot or some other similar kind of situation that the staff took care of. Maybe their profile information had spam links, or they tried PMing someone something, or the original post put a link in the punctuation, or something like that - seen those happen before with otherwise innocuous posters. I don't remember exactly what my first game was, but it was something in between Age of Empires, Diablo, Super Mario 64, and Ocarina of Time. I remember in my town/school district/whatever, kindergarten was only every other day, so I'd home sitting on the PC all day trying to figure how in the hell to play Age of Empires and have fun with some of the early campaign scenarios (the simpler ones that don't have the full AI enabled). Those are my earliest memories of gaming, so maybe that's actually it, but I can't say for sure that it was actually was, especially since we also had a SNES and I have *very* vague memories of playing...MAYBE Donkey Kong Country 2 before that, but like I said, I can't say for sure.

The original Space Adventure Cobra series from 1981 (cue disappointment it isn't a magical girl series). I saw the movie years ago, but I know the story is a bit more involved than the movie could show and have been curious to see the original anime series which I think is a more straight adaption of the manga, while I think the movie trades on a certain understanding of the characters you could get from the show. I have a few other anime series around so may roll into one of those (the Galaxy Express 999 tv show or Future Boy Conan if it's released by then on the upcoming new bluray release in the US) afterwards. EDIT: I don't have a streaming or cable service, so rely on rentals, borrows or purchases fir anime.

The Pats are quite possibly the best coached team in the NFL, but Belichick has always had one great flaw as a GM: projecting talent from the college ranks into the NFL. He's had a handful of good-ish players, Brady, and almost nothing but busts when you look at his drafts. Brady covered that flaw. He could make a below average wide receiver look pretty good. His short passing game can open lanes for your wasted of a first round pick runningback. Now that Brady's gone Belichick's flaw is only more important. The Pats lack talent. Trust me, I remember the beating they put on the Jets a couple of weeks ago, but they are only marginally better talent wise than even the Jets. And most of that is because of the differences in where Jones is to Wilson. This last off season they spent 80+ million in free agency to try to upgrade the roaster. 1) They'll finish with the same or fewer wins on the season: 7. 2) After the season they will have to go into rebuilding mode because it's staticatically proven that spending that much money in a single free agency period will inflate your wins for that season but not the following. I predict that unless they remove Belichick as GM, the Pats are truly over and will be for quite awhile.

Hi Sarex, I'm majestic, and the first game I remember playing was a bootlegged Pitfall on an Atari 2600 clone. Might have been the first one, or one of the other games on the clone. That was Eye of the Beholder 2 for me. No manual, no idea what's going on, not any real clue of English yet. Still, was fun to play. Even more fun to finally find out how to use weapons. Seems silly now, but the idea of right-clicking on the weapon icon under your character didn't so quickly come to mind at the time. I do have a Playstation 4, a friend of mine gave me his old one when he got a Pro. The only thing I've used it for so far is to watch various streaming services on my bedroom TV. Which a Chromecast or something similar would have done without sounding like a vacuum cleaner or producing more heat than my actual heating radiators. Eh, and did anyone catch the first post before it was disappeared by the men in unmarked vans? What was going on with the poster?

As a person of culture and taste I have never owned a console. I did rather enjoy co-op Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance and SSX Tricky on the PS2, but- fortunately- since that was a flat console I have been assured that my purity was maintained.

drawbridges, levers, pulleys and cranks.

That takes me back. Somewhere back in my parents place there is a black book, with combined Lem's Solaris and The Invincible stories. Loved this stuff as a teenager. It's been a while, but I will be honest I fail to recognise anything familiar in the trailer.

I kickstarted this one ages ago, but it looks like it is coming along nicely.

A small shameless promotion of another game made in Slovakia 😛 (still in development stage) a psychological roleplaying game, in a style of choose your own adventure https://www.gog.com/game/sacred_fire_a_role_playing_game