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I think I'm through the worst of the rona, but the temperature dropped hard so I'm a bit clogged up. Boy am I happy it didn't get too bad.

Both my wife and son tested positive, so I am the last man standing in my household. They are both recovering pretty well, but going stir crazy. My daughter is fully recovered and thankfully has helped me all week with dinner and other chores. I feel great. I am a bit stiff from sleeping on the couch, but I have been keeping up withy training. I have a 10 mile running race in a week, so fingers crossed I stay that way.

This discussion is exactly why JE Sawyer is burnt out.

Just a poll asking the common questions regarding Grounded

there is a shocking scarcity of meat in the upper yard in the ptr. need more weevils, aphids, and grubs up there because as it is i have to leave the upper yard in order to farm meat. also need more base meat types. it's lame that most insects can be eaten... but only if cooked into a meal. they should all drop some chunk of meat that can be dried or roasted.

well they did nerf the antlion sword in the ptr. right now it does less damage at lvl 9 than it did at lvl 7 in the hot and hazy update and is even more expensive to upgrade. something this poll clearly shows that players don't want, but they did it anyway.

This essential photography lesson shows how selfies distort what we really look like (upworthy.com)

no. ... wait, you wanted more? https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Drow the dark fate stuff is the big reveal o' the fifth installment o' the third pathfinder 1e adventure path, and the process o' transformation is a bit more complex than owlcat's wotr implies. is a whole lotta sh!tty elves and they got little chance o' becoming drow. w/o unique circumstances and/or direct demon lord intervention, an elf becoming drow doesn't happen even if the elf is the most hedonistic and sinister a$$bag who having suffered terrible betrayal wishes to punish all elves, but it could happen and the winter council doesn't want such info known. HA! Good Fun! ps look at us nerding out. *groan* thanks for ruining our day... not that we blame shady. am now gonna need play rugby w/o a mouth piece, bench press past our limit or something equal stoopid and jocklike.

Hah, thought that this was pretty spot-on. Joss Whedon is a mess.

When I was at the grocery store yesterday some older angry gentleman was huffing around blaming the long lines and empty shelves on Sleepy Joe Biden. I'm just standing there shaking my head because the shelves were actually pretty well stocked but the one item in the frozen food section that he was looking for when he started ranting was gone (our line was backed up into the aisle) and the long lines could easily be blamed on the fact that the store was packed because the main grocery store chain in the metro area is on strike and despite that they only have 3 lanes open. All this is just to say that if you try you can interpret anything to fit your political worldview.

"Apogee and 3D Realms’ “Rise of the Triad Remastered” is coming to PC and consoles in 2022" [Image is the link]

I backed the second game, but still have yet to play it. I just barely finished the first. At the risk of sounding like a filthy casual gamer, the mechanics was a bit more than I wanted to deal with in the first game and all through the production of Deadfire it just seemed like they doubled down on the mechanics. It seems to work well for some people, but it made the game feel a bit of a chore to me.

An ungoshly amount of filler battles that takes so long to get through. The BG series had hundreds of filler battles...but they usually only took literally maybe 30 to 60 seconds to get through. In PoE, they still take just about as much time and consideration as a "real" battle, and it's such a danged drag when it just keeps happening endlessly. You would really have to enjoy the core combat mechanics in order for that not to be an issue, and I just...don't.

For me, Pillars' biggest misstep was the ungodly amount of filler battles you had to suffer through. Also, there were so many enemies that would teleport around the battlefield that tactical positioning of your meat shields to protect your squishies was meaningless. Also also, I don't remember if tank classes had aggro pulling skills, but if they did then they weren't worth a damn, because I surely would have used them and I couldn't hold aggro on my tanks.

The writing clearly suffered from the "more = better" crap that was going on back then. I still blame Planescape: Torment for this. We all thought that more text = better rpg, because of a single miracle case of a game that came out like 20 years ago. Oh boy how wrong we were. Turns out it's really not the amount of text, but the quality of text that matters. Lots of the stuff in PoE1 could have been cut out and nothing of value would have been lost. Stuff like reading the "souls" or whatever that was didn't help it either..

It's not something they'd agree to, especially the pro-Ukraine folks, but as opposed to switching back to a Russian aligned country they(in-laws) think the country would split and not peacefully.

If you have to ask, the answer is probably not what you want to hear. So I guess this is the best place to ask as any, but is there a German word for "Disappointed but not Surprised"? Because that's the general feeling everytime I hear some bull**** like "virtuesignomics". By some miracle I have avoided hearing any political rants when waiting in line at the grocery store. Maybe I've unknowingly mastered the art of minding my own business that I instinctively tune out such nonsense. Lord knows that there are plenty of folks around here who think that any inconveniences to them are a plot by Sleepy Joe to destroy western civilization with virtuesignomics or some other ridiculous fantasy.

I just realized there's something I haven't talked about yet in the wake of spending a whole lot of time post about other stuff in this thread. Watched the second episode of Magic User's Club TV series earlier today. Here's what happens: Nanaka has a fight with her mother after she refuses to go to a teacher and parent talk at school, while Sae's parents make the time to come from their farm at Hokkaido in the middle of harvest season. Nanaka leaves home and visits Sae with her luggage in tow, stating that she'll be staying over night and possibly longer. Some dialogue with Sae's sister makes it clear that this is something that happens with some regularity as she simply says they can give Nanaka her usual room (well, here's how you do exposition). Sae and Nanaka talk about their respective families and after Sae is a little annoyed that Nanaka just shows up and behaves like she owns the place and they start fighting when Akane appears out of the blue after a shooting (right, for that to make sense, Akane is a part time model, and most of the men she's going out with she meets at her job). Akane and Sae end up cooking dinner for everyone, and Akane brought three pieces of savarin (a french cake). They talk a bit about Akane's job and how she didn't take someone's dinner invitation this day. Nanaka and Sae make up, everyone's eating and having a great time until they figure out that three cakes is not enough when Sae wants to leave some for her sister. Akane suggests magic to fix the issue and they attempt duplicating the cakes. Instead, the cake they try this on simply starts expanding up to a point where it threatens to kill everyone in the room. Actually, the cake almost manages to choke the three and makes Nanaka realize that she's sorry that she'll die such an ignominious death on bad terms with her family, and then some random magic working through Sae's wand makes it explode. Covered in sticky goo, the three have a hearty laugh while they watch hundreds of miniature savarin fly through the room. They end up in a bathtub together, but only because they pushed each other in, fully clothed. Nanaka gets up early to bring her family some of the cakes, and Sae walks with her for a bit, when Sae goes back, she meets the mysterious magical figure again that appeared after they saved the giant cherry tree from the military last episode. Everything I've described here was full of nice character moments, was well written, had some nice animation and was thankfully free of silly fanservice, and that includes a scene with all three of them in the same bathtub. So what's the rub? There HAS to be something, right? I mean... this is Magic User's Club, is it not? Indeed it is, so before they attempt to duplicate the cake and almost kill themselves in the process, Sae calls Takeo at home to ask if it is okay to use magic to copy cakes for her sister. Takeo's sister is bringing him the phone, opening the door to his room while we're once again treated to DIO's voice and Takeo's moans. This time Takeo is doing situps to get in shape. While talking to Sae, Sae mentions that Nanaka and Akane are visiting and that they want to do something taboo and wonder if it is all right, and of course Takeo gets a nosebleed while he's imagining... well, I doubt I need to spell that one out, but in case I have to: He ends up being a bit annoyed when Sae says it's about duplicating cake with magic, and tells her it is okay when they think of it as training. So, we're two for two with the silly gay joke. I hope that's not going to become a running gag. Sigh. Anyway, this was an episode where a fantastic 21 minutes of runtime are ruined by a two minute phone call. The worst part about this is I'm feeling a little like Captain Sisko at the end of In The Pale Moonlight: Because if this is the quality of the upcoming episodes vis à vis the fanservice in them, then... I'm actually looking forward to the next one. Save me, please.

Regardless of the evidence, Hurlshot, you must endeavor to make California an ethnostate.

As for other topic here around Ukraine/Russia thing. Nothing major will occur. It's jawboning from both sides of the isle to largely move away focus from pandemic related failures and mismanagment of economics. Russia's only startegic gain would be to secure a land connection to Crimea to ensure a stable flow of goods, water, elecricity, but the cost is too high. It wants to get NATO commit to a deal. In no way they would ever commit to occupation of full Ukraine. They are even hesitant about anexing a much easier Belarus, and you'd think in real terms that they would invade Ukraine? US does not want the conflict, as it would most likely result in a loss anyway, due to no real capability of commitment, other than starting a global conflict. ( a reminder of which is the most recent drill of Russia, Iran and China navy) That's the last thing they want. It is also to make a political play and look competent and keep the anti-russian mask prior to midterms. (and a prestige/reliability loss in such a short time after the Afghaniatan failure, would only bring more pain on the Dems image in the mideterms election year) EU is much divided on the topic, but you can already see that Germany will fold and other than current posturing, they won't do much... (well, they actually block arms transfers to Ukraine). Not in the land of shutting down nuclear plants and issues with energy and economy.

You got past "virtuesignomics" and are surprised it ended with "go woke and go broke"? Really?

This post was off to a good start until you started talking about 'wokeness'. What does that even mean? You think stocks are tumbling because companies are too woke?

Wow, what a result for a year of Bidenomics/virtuesignomics Rampant inflation Damaged business due to failed covid lock policies And now stock market crashing with such companies like Netflix (25% in 24h!), Twitter (50% vs 6m ago) and Disney (40% from its high) shedding a lot of value (and a bailout cannot come this time so easily for the market, due to inflation) What a beginning of 2022 - some would say, this was predictable, once excessive budget expenses and extra stimmies were signed, and FED was soft pressured to keep dovish policy, as mr Powell wanted his next term... (tone changed surprisingly in December). Also, going too far woke in entertainment is a bad business practice. I wonder how quickly boards will be pressured to go back to what worked and brought money in the past? Phase 4 reshoots already at Disney/Marvel? Cant wait for end of Q1!

Some of the Javelins the US sent ended up in Russia. Ukraine supplied North Korea with rocket engines too- though there have been extensive efforts to cover that up, including labeling them, ludicrously, as 'soviet' to imply Russia sent them and despite the USSR not existing for decades before they were sold. The NLAWs are old and expiring, and much like all the TOWs that made their way to the moderate head choppers in Syria they'd cost more money to dispose of than to transfer and make someone else's problem. People might care if John Smith of the British Army gets blown up by malfunctioning kit, they won't care if Ivan Smithovich or Henna bin Muhammed do. Gotta say, I find the messaging around Ukraine absolutely hilarious because it's so very very muddled. Can't take land by force- except the Golan Heights, Kosovo, Jerusalem and Western Sahara, of course, they're all fine. Ukraine has developed so far under the western aegis and everyone is happy now corruption is gone- its economy is worse than Moldova's now, and it still has uncontrollable brain drain and rampant corruption. The Ukrainian army is western trained and armed so will provide a massive obstacle and cost to Russia- but 100,000 Russians are enough to launch an imminent invasion, at the small matter of 1:3 odds. Russia has nothing to fear from NATO, has no say on where we deploy and anyway our deployments are purely defensive- but every Russian deployment near a NATO country is wanton aggression; their fault for putting their country in a stupid place and they should stay at least 500km within their own borders.

Yeah, White March was a massive improvement and Deadfire built on those improvements too. Deadfire is a good game, if it has an intrinsic weakness it's still the Quest for Balance, though it's toned down a lot from PoE1. The irony with that is despite all the balancing you hit the level cap (pet peeve of mine) with about a quarter of the game to go- and it's worse for PoE where I hit the level cap in part 1 of TWM. Most of the issues with PoE1 have been covered- too much of everything, really- but I think that the fundamental problem was, paradoxically, that too much effort was put in. So it was too big, had too much writing, too much combat and everything had been exquisitely balanced. But, balanced gameplay is one of those things that people say that they desperately want, but don't actually want (well, excluding multiplayer type games). What they want is something that is interesting, and not too imbalanced. If you look at well regarded RPGs and hybrids from the late 90s to early 2000 you see... System Shock 2, hopelessly imbalanced; Deus Ex, full of exploits; Baldur's Gate 2, full of exploits and not very balanced; Planetscape: Tournament, where literally (and seemingly literally literally) no one likes the combat. And the successful contemporary RPGs have much the same pattern- the 'fun' of DOS2 is finding the appropriate ludicrous exploit for a particular battle, not its finely balanced systems because they aren't balanced at all.

They had aggro pulling skills, and I used them extensively during my playthrough. Maybe it was a case, where you maybe did something wrong, while leveling up your tanks. Dunno. The only battle where I had issue with tanking was the battle with Kaoto, and his monks adds, or what was his name... But I have used a lot for deaggro the cleric bubble level 1 or 2 spell (dunno the name)...

Post-2000 anime was so incredibly off-putting and insulting to me for all the reasons you said and more that I wrote the entire medium off until the past couple of years. Style, framing, and direction all offended me to my very core in the popular animes so it felt very difficult to draw any other conclusion. There are certain to be exceptions here and there, but they're so buried under waves of stuff that isn't that it was impossible to find them without doing a research project. Personally, I've become more of a late 80s to late 90s guy (I'm finding 70s and early 80s to be consistently too weak on characterization and writing to be able to enjoy them, unfortunately), but otherwise, I'm about in the same boat as you - Samurai Champloo is currently the sole exception to my "no post-2000 anime can be good" rule, . Yeah, we've had some discussions on how fandoms pretty consistently suck. They tend to highlight the absolute worst parts of anything and everything - they make great shows and games that I personally love (like Undertale or Steven Universe or Sailor Moon or...) look and sound like complete garbage, and it's no different for majestic or probably anyone else here. ...Probably, . ...The author of Sailor Moon wrote a non-canon story about Sailor Moon? Alright.

A few random points about the current topic (I was going to post more, but then I finished reading the whole thing and realized much of what I said had already been said) - I think its easy to forget that people feel loss more keenly than gain. A lot of people - rightly or wrongly - feel that popularity of a thing makes that thing less special. I think this fuels a lot of the antagonism fans have against other fans; its less about the 'fake fan' and more about fear at the prospect of losing ones own fandom by having it transformed into something you don't recognize. Its less about the fake fan and more about the fan with the issue, really. I think I've mentioned here that fans obsessions can be a bit off putting if you're not a part of the fandom - I've never read A Song of Ice and Fire - even back when I was reading a lot more than I am now - because fans (around the time the second book came out?) turned me off of it (after being told about how great it was that it was gritty and realistic and the singular description of why it was gritty and realistic was that it had a brother ****ing his sister and a lot of death.) I also left a Doctor Who group because the leadership decided at a convention to make fun of Pern dancers. I may not get other fandoms, but I'm not going to mock other people for it. I admit that part of why I haven't gravitated towards more recent animes is...I'm not really that big of a fan (ha) of what I perceive (rightly or wrongly) as the modern fanservice elements in it. Sure, Cobra has had nudity in it, but the nudity has been (so far at least) appropriately situational. Arguably a bit gratuitous, but contextually it makes sense and doesn't detract from the narrative, really. Its probably a lack of experience with modern product, so I'm really put off by my perception of a lot of current anime that may or may not actually be accurate, but I haven't been interested by what I've seen that seems to indicate that fanservice (upskirts that aren't even disguised as coming from a contextually appropriate camera angle to frame action or story, jiggly breasts jiggling all the jiggling time, etc) is at an all time high. It probably doesn't help that there's a certain type of modern character design I don't really like either - which may be a product of growing up on 70s and early 80s anime designs.

No pressure. No pressure. No pressure. No... *mumble* I'm pretty confident that the second season is less frustrating and more consistent than the first one. It does have bits and pieces that are ups and downs, but outside of the first arc of Cardcaptor Sakura, which show doesn't? I already mentioned that some faults in the setup remain, but overall the second season was a lot more enjoyable than the first. What I am not confident of is just how much you'll end up liking it, if at all, but that's something I've said like ten times now, so yeah... That it really is. I expected it would make fun or be a scathing exploration, and it ended up being a really interesting take. There is a non-canon side story from Naoko Takeuchi where Makoto has a daugther. But that's... non-canon. Oh, hello White, how are you today? *mind control*

Despite at that point already knowing that that style of game was no longer to my tastes, I did give PoE a good honest go. Not on launch, where I got bogged down before even getting to the big city, but a few years later where I managed to will myself to the point I unlocked the stronghold. However that slowed the game down even more and I just stopped playing not long afterwards. Now, I believe I did this at some point after PoE2 launched, but before it gained the turn-based mode, or at the latest while it was still in the experimental build. I did play PoE2 when it launched too, in two phases, one where I tried to play normally for the first starter island, then I threw my hands up, set it to story difficulty, and tackled some stuff in the big city. Turns out in story mode you still die quite a lot if you try to let the party AI resolve combat while wearing starting gear. So that too, was the end of that. I have no strong opinion on the writing in either game.

Unrelated to the discussion: I finished the first season of One Punch Man. It was...uh, alright, I guess? It's kind of funny to contrast it to K-On, in the sense that One Punch Man isn't really a show that appeals to me at all but is okay-ish because it doesn't do anything particularly wrong and has a few things I like about it...and it's ridiculously easy to go straight through because there's basically nothing about it to mentally digest. I mean, really, I just kept hitting the next episode button and didn't feel like the show was ever asking anything of my brain except to occasionally read the subtitles during some of the dialog-y bits...and there were a lot of action bits that I didn't need to pay attention to at all to because it was obvious how all of them would be resolved and the show didn't really do anything to try to get me interested in them. In contrast, K-On is a show that on the surface does appeal to me a lot more, but it constantly demands my attention to watch and understand it, and it does a few things so clearly very wrongly which makes it frustrating...and so the show kind of just drains my energy whenever I watch it. I probably won't watch the second of One Punch Man - I feel like I got all I could get out of it. Meanwhile, I'll probably eventually try the second season of K-On in the hope that majestic isn't a hack fraud and that it is actually less inconsistent and frustrating compared to the first season. Thanks for the link, much more interesting and fair than I expected. Yep, and what I said absolutely applies to all people too. It's just not healthy for anyone...except Minako in Sailor Moon, because apparently it's canon that she and the other three will never be given the opportunity to have boyfriends due to being Sailor Guardians - they can do as they please.

In a way, that does make sense, sadly. It's victims of (violent) abuse, for instance, who often turn out to be abusers themselves later. Often the bullies at school come from a broken home, and repeat what they experience at home. It takes effort to break the cycle. In a way this seems to hold true, whether slights are real or only perceived, and that followed into this entirely new and really alien incel community that sprang up around this. In other words, a marginalized minority has by definition an easier time lashing out against some other marginalized group, or minority group, and for nerds, that more often than not is still women and girls both within their community and without. There's a nice video essay on the Incel community by ContraPoints, and it's not made the way you think (unless anyone has seen it already, it really wasn't at all what I expected initially), because she's pretty understanding and references her own issues with it, and draws parallels. I watched it a while back in spite of not being able to deal with her videos all that much. I want to note that I have nothing against her personally, nor about what she does, makes videos about or what she is. There's something else, I also understand just how easy it is to fall down into that mindset of just blindly turning around and "retaliating" on unrelated people when you suddenly find yourself being able to. There's also the constant wear on the community as more and more people want in on it all of a sudden. That's - for me - the most baffling thing about it. Do I really get angry when I see nerd chic people with fake glasses pretending to be a part of the community appear on YouTube because it's all the rage now? No, but it's really easy to understand how that can happen. I mean, take your fake glasses and leave. I've had to wear them ever since I was six to be able to see and reaped all sorts of abuse over them, and now you're showing up with fake glasses as chic accessory? Are you kidding me? And that's usually the same people that turn around and complain about ableisms here, or something or another there on Twitter. What? See how easy that goes? A little further and you could just type "I'm going to break your face when I see you and stuff your glasses up your arse!" and we're right at threats, and I could easily justify that to myself in the same way the Twitter mob justifies ruining existences. Never mind that the getup of random YouTuber #10 is probably not even his or her idea, but the one of their producer, because the videons on the channels in question are more often than not produced professionally. That's not even the point I was going to make, but it's really the same thing - or something similar anyway. Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire that came from the TV show? Yeah, those are lesser things that shouldn't be here in the first place. It doesn't take much, and it forms a dynamic all of its own, and suddenly you're part of a reactionary force of complete buttheads willing and able to lash out at anything that's remotely encroaching on their domain or different, or whatever - or anyone telling them that they're a bunch of reactionary asshats. I had my eye opening moment when it came to that a long time ago, and I made a very dear friend over it that I still regret losing contact with, along with some of the things that happened which are now coming back to the surface. Sigh. I think three or four years ago I already wrote a post on it, but I can't find it, and I'm not in the mood for another several pages long post. The moment (which was unrelated to the post I wrote) lead me to take a step back and ask myself what the hell I really was doing at the time. I decided for myself that I'm better than this, took a step back and started over. Because what's the point when I'm no better than the others? What IS the point when you go on an heap the abuse you got yourself right back on others? Yes, absolutely. The problem with fringes is it is alluring to fall down the rabbit hole, and a lot harder to get out of them than going in. That's in an entirely different ballpark alltogether. It's something that a lot of women in streaming or on YouTube end up having to deal with when the fandom suddenly finds out that they're married, engaged or otherwise in a stable relationship and maybe have been in one right from the start. "Fans" start feeling deceived and there's this sudden realization that they've donated to someone that you may have imagined as being... available, whom their own obsession was based on, and the insane idea that you're special for the interaction you at worst perhaps even just imagined, or at best bought. Although in all fairness, that's not behaviour limited to men, it just appears to be that way online. While I don't personally know anyone involved, there've been suicides over boy groups breaking up, which is a similar thing, just taken to an extreme in in terms of self-harm (the other extreme is stalking).

Well, here goes a follow up. Warning, contains some more discussion of porn. Minor follow up to the discussion about anime and subculture: edit: Yeah, that was it.

Four and a half thousand year old board game uncovered and played. I have a fondness for board and card games, so it was a lot of fun to watch.

I dunno, I think the other isometric games of the time did well enough for that not to be the issue. I mean, I didn't like PoE very much but I still gave Deadfire a shot and thought that it was much better in most respects. Maybe others didn't give Deadfire a chance not because of isometric but because of the first game.

Why not milk the Gabe is God crowd for as much as you can? If people insist on only buying on Steam they're asking to be exploited if not by devs/ pubs then by Valve; and why would developers be 'nice' to Steam when they leverage that market dominance and the presence of so many steam only drones to keep their cut higher than anyone else? The simple solution for someone who wants to play it is to (1) but on Epic to save yourself 50% or (2) rent it on gamepass for ~80% discount- legally you're renting it from steam anyway, you just aren't being charged monthly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the EU will actually block the sale on competition grounds. ARM/ nVidia will be blocked too, for that matter.

Ooh, they are hiring. I wonder if they'll have a job opening for an in-house "jaded cynic"

I wish MS would buy Disney. I mean, I wouldn't use a genie wish, or a monkey's paw, or the spell wish or anything like that but thoughts and prayers all day e'ery day.

Remember my two drones? I made them bigger, because it's funny. Then I found out how to duplicate that glitch. So I could have four. But... ...that's a little too big. ...and that's a little too small. ...that's about right. ...but somehow, maybe not as much fun as a single giant one.

I can imagine.

Looks like I spent the last ten years not knowing that Scooter actually made an official music video to their New Kids Turbo theme song. Ah, to have missed perfection for so many years. Scooter is truly the apex of European dance trash from the 90ies, and they're still going strong. In the unlikely case that anyone here is not familiar with these glorious Germans, take a peek at their prime 90ies trash: