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Ottawa finally cleared out of most of the Braveheart chanters. Watching streams of this has been interesting, is nice to see things on the ground, even if the streamers are moronic whores for the most part. Watched a brilliant bit of dialogue last night with one talking about this is just like how Hitler did things, masks are actually killing people, seatbelts don't save lives and how the NWO is real. Good to know Canadians are as moronic as everywhere else in the world. And with this over, American media will resume forgetting Canada exists

Wary of Being Left in the Dark, Americans Produce Their Own Power I was ahead of the curve at my old place. But having moved up from Florida and weathering numerous hurricanes I had first hand experience how fragile the public power system is.

Playing the '71 Oakland A's in OOTP 22. The big difference is I signed Jonny Bench as a rookie in the '67 season so no Dave Duncan. So far in 12 years of playing OOTP I have yet to win a WS. And, much like the real '71 A's it looks like I'm going to have to beat the Orioles to have a shot at it. Also OOTP 23 will be announced next week it looks like. They are getting my $35 no doubt about it.

Another idea, a nerf this time. I tend to consider Mercy and Kindness a no brainer for Chanter builds. +50% healing is massive, equivalent of 16,67 points of Might when healing is considered. You can read it as basically 50% more survivability for your party on the long run, provided you can manage spike damages etc... I almost always pick it as a late game chant (which in addition to be OP in its own, make cause other chants look meh in comparison...). Even for a Tier 7 chant, I believe this is too much and should be lowered to a more reasonable value. I propose +30% healing done (twice the value of Practiced healer, party wide). And it would still be an excellent Chant.

With Paradox's dlc policy that works out as one hour per dlc.

Elex 2 will be out this year, really. It's out in literally 9 days* (March 1st). Suppose I should even pre-order, since GOG will give me 10% off and I'll buy it for sure anyway. *I would have to admit I only found that out last week, and was pretty surprised myself it was so soon. And I thought I'd been following it pretty closely. They don't seem to have been exactly shouting the date from the rooftops.

"Although just saying, everyone that confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead."

Digimon is where it's at.

I'm gonna kill you. Yeah, bet you didn't expect your first death threat to come from me - you're welcome. I haven't been exposed to too much of the Pokemon anime(s), because it's not something I can really stomach to watch. But the entire franchise, from the shows, cards, video games, and general merchandise, just reeks of cheap addictive garbage meant to prey on children. If any of it was at least half-decent, I'd at least be a little more tolerant of it... Well, she's 8 years old now, so I guess it's time I have her watch Neon Genesis Evangelion instead. Hopefully, that'll break her out of her Pokemon habit, .

I've meet one online who was a cool guy. For the most part though, bronies in my age group either became girls or white supremacists. A 50% chance of running into a nazi is not good odds at all. It's been consistently bad. I think I had some guy threaten to kill me over saying Buffy was dull and repetitive. But whom amongst us haven't had someone threaten us with murder over the internet?

I take it you don't like Bronies? I never interacted with one, however, I know of only one of them, and that's Unicorn of War, and if he's any indication then thanks, but no thanks. I can imagine the fandumb for Whedon outings to be particularily bad. I think I'll quietly push this down the watch priority after it wormed its way up a fair bit. Not because that sounds bad, but I've had my fill of exploring the futility of war for the time being after In This Corner Of The World.

Gall Force 3: Stardust War. The title comes from the two sides of the war that's been dominating every second of this series having reduced each other to stardust, since neither side has any inhabited planets remaining and thus no way to replenish diminishing manpower and resources. Guess that's what happens when your weapons are infinitely stronger than any kind of defense you can put up - suppose that's pretty realistic, given that we face the same situation here on Earth. Anyways, the series ends with our group of main characters not being able to do much to stop the annihilation of either sides, and decide to create a capsule that would pass on all the scientific and historical knowledge that their race had amassed for some future race hundreds of millions of years into the future. Pretty dour ending - pretty much an allegory for what will probably happen to us given our propensity for becoming irrationally set on no-win courses that will inevitably bring our doom. However, it is my opinion that this series lacked the necessary tension and gravitas to really pull off such a heavy subject, and the series would've almost definitely been better if it had been sillier and more focused on fun character-driven adventures. It's not bad, but you need some serious creative chops to make something like this really work as well as it should, and this just wasn't quite it. Still, I suppose it ranks as one of the better anime sci-fi things I've seen - no, it's not Crusher Joe, much less Magnetic Rose or Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it was fine-ish.

The ladies look hideous in ELEX 2. Guess I'll stick with Caja then and hope magic isn't useless as in ELEX 1.

He wants US admin look like incompetent ****s. Funnily enough, they simply are incompetent...

Can't Putin sama invade already? He's making the West look bad.

I made chicken & dumplings: It's not as dialed in as my beef stew or chili yet, but the addition of peas was definitely a success and staying in on my next iteration.

Elden Ring does look pretty awesome but I'll probably have to hold off for a while. Stupid real life priorities you know (I hate real life). And yes! Beware of Paradox games! I remember playing Victoria 2 constantly just to try to build forts on every U.S. state. Would like to play as China an another playthrough and stop the Century of Humiliation. Also @BruceVC Hearts of Iron 3 playing as South Africa and building TONS of high quality infantry divisions, sailing them over to Sicily and beating the crap out of the entire Wehrmacht as the bad AI kept sending their divisions across the Mediterranean to be destroyed piecemeal.

LOL I can imagine her reply: "Dear Brother, ever heard of CTRL + F? Found it in two seconds. Here's your $20, use it to buy a book about Windows."

https://www.pcgamer.com/elden-ring-system-requirements/ After reading your warning I checked the link above and read the minimum memory as 128GB instead of 12GB ....I nearly fainted because I before I moved to Cpt in 2019 I upgraded my gaming machine and I have 64GB But my initial shock was real

Go into gameplay settings and turn off somatic components for spells. Yeah that is a huge pain, especially if your cleric is a shieldbearer.

You must have been in better places than I was.

I don't get that reference. Admittedly, I don't watch RLM. The Firefly thing is there to slight Firefly. Maybe half the time I see Cowboy Bebop being recommended, it is as an anime Firefly. Which really sells Cowboy Bebop short, even without considering that it arrived before Firefly, it's much different and just much better. Really the only commonality is both being space westerns, but equating both based on shared subgenre is like equating The Witcher and GoT because both are dark fantasy. I'm just booty blasted and I will fite anyone irl over this. Time to spend 10000 years at the gym.

I just saw the minimum system requirements for Elden Ring. I have a pretty decent gaming desktop and yet I don't meet even those minimums. Might be the case with other AAA games coming up as well.

God of War made me crave for some good spectical fighters. I gave DMC5 another playthrough to refresh mechanics, before continuing my work on S ranks on higher difficulties, but once I started to feel resistance I got distracted... again. I finally played through DMC reboot - which wasn't awful. Gameplay doesn't have a depth and potential of originals, but it is still fun. Story is a bigger problem. The punk Dante is insufferable at the start. It's not that originals had "better" story, but I found myself not caring for the original cast, while disliking nearly everyone in the reboot. One playthrough was enough, I don't expect to ever return to that game, but I don't regret my time spent with it. Reinstalled Bayonetta after a long while, and after playing DMC5 I don't have as high opinion of it as I used to - story is abysmal. I need to at least to know why I am fighting and for what, and Bayo story is an incoherent mess. I also dispise insta kill quick-time events and other non-combat encounters. I hate that the game hides encounters for the players and then punishes them during ranking for not doing those. Combat is still great though.

It is overrated. Chill only plays it to pass the time because we can't get another two people to play MW5 with us. Just because MW5 is kinda mediocre.

Here we enter the world of pure subjectivity, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. But just to give a different take on these two games: I thought PoE was superb, and D:OS2 was utter rubbish. It is poorly written, doesn't look good, only has turn-based combat, and so on. It took me all of two hours to toss it aside, and I'm not getting back to it.

I always liked Gothic 1 the best. I mean yeah it is kinda "Prison Pimp" and virtually no women to speak of other than sex slaves but I always liked the atmosphere and the leveling. The pacing was also good. I liked Gothic 2 but Night of the Raven was too hard for me. Gothic 3 could have been the best in the series if it had another 1 year of development time for polish and even PB admitted that they tried to do too much with too little time and budget hence the somewhat broken release. I think if they removed the whole desert area and just focused on Myrtanna and Nordmar it could have been a much better and more focused experience. Love the soundtrack, one of my all time favorites.

Eh, usually I just ignore Netflix recs and search for what I want. Back Street Girls: Gokudolls is probably worse. While I haven't seen it, I grew up with hip-hop in the early aughts so I don't think it would be much I haven't heard. Kanye is inescapable, between production and features he has been everywhere and continues to be one of the biggest figures in music, and even discounting that he is constantly doing stuff to make waves (most of which reflect very badly on him). The problem is that the dude is really insecure and somehow manages to look like a loser when he's winning.

TNG 'Sub Rosa' - Yet another episode where a characters begins acting out of character and everyone ignores it. Your appreciation of the episode probably depends on your ability to appreciate 70s Gothic romances more than Star Trek. Which makes it a bit of a bust as a Star Trek episode.

Yes, for sure better and more tolerable than most everything I see from...well, I'm sure that I don't need to repeat myself here. It did the job well enough without looking out of place or distracting, and that was what was important.

The character models took some time getting used to, but they were still better than in most modern film, at least stylistically. Reminded me a bit of older ones, like an early 80ies TV anime throwback, except more modern. Some uncanny camera zooms though.

In addition 2 changes for next version : Stag Companion : The AoE damages now also affects main target. I've changed this because it required having foes close to main target AND high crit chances (which is not obvious for the pet). This was quite annoying to get both conditional, especially with an 1.5m AoE and 5 INT. Now this version only require high crit chances. Having foes very close will make it better but is not necessary. This is still more conditional, but more rewarding than the 2 other "offensive" pets (lion and wolf) Protective Companion : +1 Engagement -> +2 I made this change to address 2 problems : - First, Ranger requires a lot of Talents to get their perks. Protective Companion is needed to get the Stalker's Link perk that is one of the main interest of ranger (stacking accuracy). And Protective Companion is really meh. I though that if a ranger has to spend so much points to get their prime speciality working, they deserve Abilities that are at least a bit good. - Second, multiclassing. Rangers aren't so good at multiclassing with casters because their main perk (Accuracy bonuses) only work vs single targets (that's why Seer is a good MC). With this change, it mitigates a bit this issue, granting Ranger a bit more interest for AoE users.

Yep, though that's a different issue to the question of the legality of the intervention itself. And, since I have the figures at hand, and it rather illustrates the point... Civilian casualties, Battle of Aleppo, population ~2.2mn, 2016 (a little less than 12 months): ~3500 (all sides, for those specifically attributed it's ~40/60 split rebel caused/ government (inc Russian) caused, but I've included all of them) Civilian casualties, Battle of Mosul, population ~2mn, 2016-7, 9 months: 6000-10,000, With outliers of 2500 and 40,000 (which was also the latest one, and only one to include actual bodies actually recovered as a basis of the estimate) Civilian casualties, Battle of Raqqa, population ~400k, 2017, 4 months: ~1700 The higher estimate for civilian casualties in Mosul is greater than the death toll (including all combatants) in the entirety of Aleppo province (pop: just under 5mn), over the course of the Syrian Civil War from 2012-2018. You wouldn't know that going by the media coverage and governmental presentations made about the two though. When you take populations and length of time into account the 'indiscriminate' campaign actually caused by far the fewest casualties. Of course, the situations aren't directly equivalent (and can't be), but still, shows a pattern of demonisation that makes it hard to take claims of western good intentions at face value. And in order to be actual whataboutism the point made has to be irrelevant. If someone complains about being punched and the response is "but you punched the guy ten seconds earlier" then that person is not practising whataboutism, no matter how much the first person might shout it. Him punching the guy first is certainly relevant to him getting punched back no matter how much he might like the conversation to be about his unique and unjustified suffering and that alone.

It reeks of hyperbole and fake news so its good to question this type of thing. I am more than happy to assess anything you worried may be false. Just let me know

Speaking of Apocalyptica and Rammstein

Ah, that made sense why he defended BG3 so much.

Fine choice to play Connor MacLeod. The more important question is who will play The Kurgan? 99.9% chance it won't be as good a Clancy Brown's performance, he was not so secretly the best part of the movie.

Writing about New York City pizza got me wanting a pie, so I got a Margherita pizza from Simonetti's: Simonetti's in Belmont makes an above average pizza for the Charlotte area and a well above average Margherita, plus it's close by. It can't compete with NYC pizza but it's about as good as I can do 'round these parts. They really nail the dough, it has just the right balance of crunch and chewiness, and they don't skimp on the basil, which is sadly all too common in this area. I've seen places not even use basil and try to pass it off as a Margherita, which is shameful.

Isometric, RTwP, single-player RPGs for PC only are quite a narrow niche. Narrowing it down even further with a lot of writing (I like), nautic theme (I like), no Kickstarter boost (fig) and bad marketing (never saw an ad for it) surely didn't help. I guess in order to have success nowadays you have to break out of that niche in at least one way, be it optional turn based combat or a tactics approach, mutliplayer, 3D-graphics or whatever appeals to a broader target group. Deadfire is a gem - but it seems it's a well hidden one.

So, here are a few other changes I'm working on currently : Shifter Healing Adjustment : Due to 60s Shifting Cooldown Shifter just received, I though the amount of health they get after a shift was a tad to high. So I nerfed it from 15 + 5/PL -> 15 + 3/PL. Fighter Recovery : In a previous version, I tweaked it to Infinite duration, but halved regen to compensate. Now I'm realizing that it makes Fighters about on par with what a Pal or Chanter (not to mention Herald) do to a whole party. Early on, it's fine, but I decide to add a bit of scaling, in a similar fashion as Bloodmage (who starts below) : Constant Recovery : 5 health per 6s, +1 per 5 char level Rapid Recovery : 7 health per 6s, +1.5 per 5 char level Constant Recovery (Black Jacket) : 2 health per 6s, +0.5 per 5 char level Rapid Recovery (Black Jacket) : 3 health per 6s, +0.75 per 5 char level Monk Wound Cost nerf : I've come to the conclusion that 3 Wounds ~ 1 Martial ressource and decided to rebalance a couple of monk abilities that were really too cheap. Dichotomous Sould : 4 Wounds -> 6 Wounds Resonant Touch : 3 Wounds -> 6 Wounds Whispers of the Wind : 5 Wounds -> 9 Wounds (Note that Shattered Pillars max wound is set to 10 by both CP and BPM) This ends up making a lot of sense as all other Monk abilities seems to have reasonable cost. Why would you even use a Skyward Kick for 3 Wounds when WotW costs only 5 ?? This is not only a monk nerf, it also a way to encourage the use of more diverse abilities. This is the only WotW nerf I plan. The ability should remain porwerful, fun to use and a selling point of SC monk, but making it much less spammable is a way to tune down its brokenness. The other 2 nerfed abilities are meant to be used only periodically anyway. Shattered Pillar buff : My analysis is that 3 Wounds ~ 1 Martial ressource ~ 30 focus. So it makes sense that Shattered Pillar get the same base damages to ressource conversion as Cipher (Cipher gets Draining Whip, but SP get Lesser Wound and Mortifications) : Shattered Pillar : 1 Wound every 20 damages Shattered Pillar with Lesser Wound : 1 Wound every 16 damages This is more than enough to Skyward Kick/Torment Reach every couple of attacks, which is the way Shattered Pillar shall be Played. Those abilities that take foe level into account : Threatening Presence, Abjuration and Dismissal compare your level with foe's. Which isn't something I like to much, but is especially absurd with upscaling. That's why I plan to Adjust these abilities so they keep an effect vs foes of greater or equal level. Dismissal : Add an effect that Destroy Summon without checking level. Basically a dismissal. Abjuration : Also remove the level checking vs Summons. Rise damages (to 65-90, same as Killing bolt) vs higher level spirits so it works reasonably well vs them anyway. Add "Veil-Piercing" KW.(BPM previously set Abjuration to 3 Zeals). Threatening Presence : Change design completely. The idea is to make Barbarian Immune to Engagement when above 75% health. This is strong but it's not like Barbarian had tons of tools to avoid engagement anyway (Staggering, Dazing, Wild Sprint, Leap, etc...) I think this is fitting and is also intended as an indirect buff to Corpse Eater since it reduces reliance on rage. A bit more Barbarian Buff : Barbarian might be the only class that was better designed in PoE1 than in PoE2. Carnage used to be so great ! I totally get why they needed to tweak it, but now Carnage feels much less class defining, and Barbarian basically losts his original soul and often struggle to be defined otherwise than "just another martial class". Adding Crit to Carnage so it can benefit from Blood Frenzy was a first step to make Carnage matters more. Blood Storm is a meh upgrade though. Spending a Tier 7 ability point just to get situationaly more duration on 1 Rage self buff is bad. So I will change it to On Crit instead of On Kills. Carnage Crits matter too. This is also a Buff to Corpse Eater who will have a way to maintain Frenzy without having to use too much Rage. But my key idea was to Buff Interrupting Blows. The idea is to have Interrupting Blows also causes 50% chance of Interrupt on Carnage Crits. This is quite strong because with the right positionning, Barb will very often interrupt some target, performing the Crowd Control role it is supposed to have. Not that Interrupting BLows really need a buff on its own, but I see this as an opportunity to make Carnage and positioning with your Barbarian about as relevant as in PoE1 (esp. with builds such as Tall Grass ones). With this version of Interrupting Blows plus either Spirit or Blood Frenzy lines, Carnage will be relevant enough, while still "capping" the effect that it can have in best conditions (PoE1 Carnage + PoE2 equipment or Multiclasses would have been arguably broken...)