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I got put in a new truck today, a 2022 Mack Anthem. The 2019 Freightliner Cascadia I had previously was fine, but this truck is a definite upgrade. I'd still take a Volvo as my top choice, but a Mack is a dang nice consolation prize.

If I have children, they will be taught the truth. Santa Claus is either a weregoat or the Wild Hunt. Neither is to be taken lightly.

Well, luckily, there is a really easy fix for the problem with Safari: Stop using that piece of trash.

Volvo4life

Yeah, it's a 12-speed automatic. Peterbilts have good engines, I'm not a fan of everything else. Kenworths are just worse Peterbilts. Volvos are great, I don't care what anyone says. I'm pretty sure Mack is owned by Volvo, so they share some DNA.

I've already got something like that and some food that doesn't require prep. Right now I'm probably going to need to buy or store some water and get ready for pipe drips and other things.

I've relayed this history way to many times, I'm kind of sad

The Pats had the dumbest play I've ever seen to end the game against the Raiders. I know I'll get a smarta$$ comment about the butt fumble, but I can explain the butt fumble with physics. Not a single law of science, man, or religion can explain any the myriad of stupid things the Pats players and coaches did on that last play.

I'm not really a fan of those after the fact witch hunts. Before the war, a significant number of countries thought of Russia as a perfectly profitable trade partner. Should the same kind of investigation be done to see if countries have ties or monetary interest in trading with say China (lots of stuff sold to western companies manufactured by slave labour) or Saudi Arabia (the Saudi led war in Yemen has so far cost over twice as many lives as the war in Ukraine)? Should companies be boycotted for trading with such countries or buying oil from them? Sometimes "The West" is perfectly happy to do business with the devil as long as it doesn't hurt the next election. After the fact is a different issue. The moment Russia crossed the line (literally), it was time to break all connections of any kind that might benefit it. But before that moment, it wasn't really a "crime" doing business with dubious trading partners. Edit: Tl;dr; if you want rules for conduct, apply them evenly or not at all

The US Army's laser weapon platoon will be ready next month (interestingengineering.com)

It's owned by the company but I drive the same truck every day, typically for 2 to 3 years, then I get a newer model. The trailer I pull may change daily but the tractor stays the same.

At least four. And who knows what else. Makima is turning out to be helpful, is she not?

No.

When you grow up in a condo you know Santa is nonsense - what, is he buzzing in past the concierge ?

Clearly the Russians are attacking this forum.

This is usually when I introduce the concept of apocrypha storytelling in history to my classes. My favorite is the middle finger and English Longbowmen.

That I can wholeheartedly agree with. Those who know me know I abhor people in powerful positions acting without accountability.

Yeah, looking at market prices at the moment, it's kind of funny. In spite of having better MSRPs than nVidia at the same or similar performance in their respective performance class*, all AMD cards are ludicrously overpriced in retail to the point where they look like they're just supposed to get the RTX 4080 out of stock. Mileage might be a lot better in the English speaking world our outside of Europe, but if one really wants a card of this generation right now and is in the Eurozone, then there's no way the 7900 series can be recommended. *Sans the obvious 'AMD can't launch any new architecture without driver troubles and/or hardware kinks' as evidenced by some benchmarks being all over the place, there are some things that are a bit disconcerting. RDNA 3's specs to real world performance, for instance. The 7900 XTX has what, 60% more memory bandwidth and almost thrice the computing power of an 6950 XT, and in real world application it's 20% faster (outside of a few outliers that are probably due to software and driver issues)**? The 7900 XTX 'flagship' doesn't even have the maximum possible infinity cache, because... well, who knows. It becomes really ludicrous one you look at power draw charts, the stock configuration of the 7900 XTX draws 20% more power than the stock RTX 4080, and that's at a 300 m² combined graphics chiplet die size (GCD) compared to the 4080's 397 mm² traditional die. **Sure, specs don't scale linearily, but... uh... not a good look, regardless.

Yes, I understand that fully, but as far as I understand it, it is more about possible corruption in these ties? Unfortunately, we do not live in Utopia, and sometimes, there have to be done some ugly compromises. And I am one of the people, who would like to see the responsible people pay for Yemen atrocities. Anyway, If someone has undermined or neglected the security of EU for his own financial gains, like the EU MP, which is currently in custody, he should be responsible for it.

We may have to use Heaven's Door.

Watch part 4 of JoJo instead.

I'm pretty sure that I watched like 30 seconds of that show once upon a time years ago. Let's go look at the user screenshots...oh, isn't that perfect? The very first row of screenshots I see, we have one with a character wearing a gym shirt that's too tight, a nude shower scene, a nude chest-grabbing scene, and an upshot featuring underwear - all with the (presumable) main characters in the very banner image that you just posted. Anime and its current core audience are both just sooo great and definitely don't make me want to axe-murder the lot of them at all! Are you at all starting to feel like maybe Violet Evergarden being enjoyable to you was probably an accident not intended by the creators of the show?

An interesting interview from Germany, about the need of investigation of its ties to Russia. https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/security-expert-we-need-an-international-investigation-of-germanys-russia-ties-li.296074

My wife and I are not in agreement about Santa for our kid. Since we had our son later in life I got to see friends and family go through the Santa saga with their kids and while most of them didn't really care or mind being lied to about it there were a few that were genuinely hurt their parents tricked them for so long. Santa was not sold to us as real person growing up but as a symbol of the season and I don't want to make him a main focus of Christmas for my son either but my wife thinks I'm killing the joy and spirit of the season by not actively lying about it. I've got no problem exploring the Santa folklore with my son but I don't think I can look him in the eyes and tell him that Santa is a real person who brings him gifts. Maybe I am a joy killer. I'll write a trilogy of books about it but stop after I write myself into a corner with the second book, I think I'll call it the Joykiller Chronicles.

Thanks, but @Azdeus deserves credit too. I just found a way to reliably reproduce the issue based on a hint from his working posts and some of his comments.

That buff (there's at least two variations of it) is the main way to rather easily beat the entire game while remaining level 1, if one was into that sort of thing (by wearing that Nix ring thus never leveling up). Although I found even with that it was pretty tough going with a few post-game challenges at that lvl. Not to mention costly to get all the ingredients to use it constantly, lol. The funniest thing about remaining lvl 1, imo, was how the summon damage was apparently reliant on or largely based on your chr. level. Thus they became useless in short order as they'd appear, do like 1-3 dmg or whatever and one would just ignore the summon-available music. At any rate, yes, a good/very useful recipe.

It works like this: Her Revenge sends out three primary bolts of electricity , each of which procs secondary bolts like chain lightning on a small AOE scale. You can affect multiple enemies, but you'll get the multiple procs even when there's only one enemy present. If you empower it while wearing the LUC, each bolt (primary and secondary) will give you a random tier 3 inspiration, potentially giving you all 6 tier 3 inspirations. Moreover, if you are wielding SSS with the refreshing finale upgrade, it will not only give you back the empowerment point you just used, but will refill your empowerment points completely. So if you draw down your empowerment points by self-empowering to restore wizard spells, you can get them all back if you use your final point to empower Her Revenge. This also works with the Her Tears Fell Like Rain ability as well.

Outworn Buckler is a particularly strong item for swapping back and forth. I had it on a Darcozzi Paladin/Shifter on my last run and it was actually quite OP how fast I could clear out negative effects by button smashing it back and forth. Mashing between that and my other slot (Lethandria's Devotion) was really strong. Iirc if you mashed the swapping while paused it wouldn't actually work though. Or maybe it would only work once. I seem to recall that the actual mashing would need to occur with the game unpaused in order to get the effects. Doing it while paused would I think only give the effect once to you once you unpaused, but I could be wrong. Either way if you unpause and mash a bunch for a few seconds you'll get a lot of benefit out of it.

You can get phrases when critting with AOE weapons like the lance and WotEP. Having multiple enemies in then circle or cone increases your chances of critting and hence getting a phrase back. But you can only get one phrase back per attack. As for loremaster, you might consider going with a vanilla wizard/skald so that you could do all the crazy empowerment shenanigans with Least Unstable Coil, Sasha's Singing Scimitar (SSS), and the Weyc items. You can also empower yourself to get back spells, and then in the next battle empower Her Revenge with SSS to get back all of your empowerment points. @Not So Clever Houndhas written a lot about this and other Loremaster exploits in this forum.

Hey y'all, So based on what I'm reading, this is indeed an issue with the cookie settings our Euro friends have? That definitely helps confirm my suspicions. I'll have our back end developer look into it. Should be a bit easier for him since he is also from Europe Thanks a ton everyone!

Apart from that gaffe with the missiles that ended up in Poland, Zelenskyi has indeed been remarkably impressive during the war. By contrast, both Putin and Lukasenka look dreadful: lacking in poise and grace, entirely joyless, rigid, mechanical and, from what I can determine, poorly educated. I don't speak Russian, so I can't really comment on Putin's eloquence or lack of it, but it sounds to me that he speaks like a thug, in the same way that Trump does. As if having no education, or poor education. (Trump doesn't have manners, either, whereas Putin can play this game fairly well if he wants to.) I'm extremely keen on the way people speak and what their way of speaking tells of their learning, so it would be wonderful to able to say something about Putin in this regard. But I can't. AND IN OTHER NEWS TODAY: masked Russians throwing sledgehammers onto the yard of the Finnish embassy in Moscow. Apparently this is a response to the "repeated provocations" from Finland's side. News flash: there have been none whatsoever. Historical reminder: it is impossible not to provoke the Russians. Whenever they feel they want to be provoked, they will come up with an excuse for it. I also applaud the bravery of these people, wearing masks and all! I suppose we all know what the sledgehammer is a reference to. Video: https://t.me/moslentaru/17606

The game crashed for me yesterday when I entered a hut looking for the best liquor in the world. Reloaded without all my buffs and it worked ok. All I've got left to do in this act is the Dragon graveyard, the drow quest, Arue's dream quest, the island DLC, and the Ivory Labyrinth. And the Trickster council has finally decided what to do about the Worldwound.

Balls stronger than Adamantium-Vibranium alloy... Zelenskiy visits Bakhmut to award soldiers defending the city... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-visits-frontline-city-bakhmut-2022-12-20/

One more backlog goal in 2022 finished (nr.30) December 20, 13:00 – After finishing all PS4 trophies in Episode Ignis, I have decided to relax a little bit and run around in the main game to finish some sidequests. During that, I have found a meal in an restaurant in Lestallum, with Equalizer buff, which boosts your attack by 2% for each level between your level and the level of the monster you are fighting against. So I have decided to take advantage of it, and went straight to finish the quest involving Melusine superboss, which were added to main game as a free update/DLC. I have defeated her on a second attempt, although she gave me some hard beating when she was under 3% of HP, and almost obliterated my entourage. Thankfully the game offered me invocation of a summon and then, Shiva took care of the rest of her HP pool . After reporting the quest at the Hunter HQ, I have received the trophy, and with that, Final Fantasy XV – July 2017 Update is 100% complete.

I meant the recovery penalty. I just tested with my L2 save where I had no buffs fighting a boar. One weapon set is club and torch. Other is pike. Takes about 4 seconds in slow mode to go from club attack to torch attack or vice versa. Takes about 6 seconds to do pike attacks. If I switch weapons though it takes about 5 seconds. Yeah they don't stack but later on I can greatly reduce recovery time or even remove it with Blade Cascade, except it doesn't apply to weapon switches. Weapon switches still take 5 seconds (I'm guessing that's 2.5 seconds real time) even if my weapon attack takes .2 seconds real time with no recovery. I didn't know effects stacked infinitely though... Assume I can't pause. I did try to write a macro to switch weapons really fast to test out the Lethandria's Devotion thing. Very inconsistent, often ends on the wrong weapon. So next I tried an AI script, late game. Simple on hurt, do weapon set 2 then weapon set 1. Amusingly that does actually work. Heals 2 health at a time (with my healing modifiers) and it is pretty fast, but takes about 10 seconds to heal 100 damage assuming I'm not taking more damage (slow mode). Interestingly, it takes about the same time on normal speed and fast mode. I guess the engine is getting hung up on the weapon switch animation and can only do it so fast. Cool, but, doesn't seem very useful since I can just steal restore (and did steal restore), which is a .2 second cast and heals about 60 per cast. Outworn Buckler's Perseverance is more interesting. Could script that to do the same whenever I'm afflicted. Hardly ever get afflicted though, and as a blood mage I can end every affliction but strength and resolve afflictions with .2 second casts. For resolve I have psychovampiric shield though, also a .2 second cast. Testing this with Sigilmaster Auranic, I got paralyzed with fetid caress for like 22 seconds, strangely the AI would not switch weapons even though I could do it manually. I can even go to the inventory screen and just manually switch weapons until paralyze is away, but that really breaks game flow... Where Outworn Buckler's Timeless would be *really* useful is non-affliction hostile effects, particularly when I get hit with arcane dampener, which is the only real threat anyway. Unfortunately the scripting engine is too stupid for me to tell it to do things based on being hit with specific effects, so I have to manually go to the inventory screen (which does pause the game) and either change weapons there or switch AI instructions. My will defense is super high so his arcane dampeners are mostly missing though. Gotta get one to proc... Finally got one, and yes it works. Awesome. But I need a better way to script this. Maybe...if I lose all my inspirations at once? Nope, that didn't work. For some reason Energized doesn't have a time duration so that only gets removed by affliction. I'm thinking that's because I procced it with Slayer's Claw, and that made it permanent somehow? After about an hour of testing, I managed to get a script block that works to kill arcane dampener without activating at other times (like arcane cleanse, or out of combat, or early in the game when I don't have any inspirations) Self - Has Inspiration - Con - NOT Self - Has Inspiration - Dex - NOT Self - Has Inspiration - Int - NOT Self - Has Inspiration - Perception - NOT Self - Has Inspiration - Resolve - NOT Self - Has Summoned Weapon - NOT Self - At Least 90 Focus Weapon Set 2, Weapon Set 1, Cooldown 0 This mostly works but it can get messed up by Arcane Cleanse if I've already lost brilliant. My script is 30 blocks long but still really, really simple compared to what you could do in the old Infinity Engine games. Wrote a script for BG2 that was 3000+ lines long but could get me through every battle on insane with all the increased difficulty mods. All I had to do was click to move the character. Yeah that's what happens when you play a game 100 times. POE script is so so limited. I can't even check how much armor I have, wizard spells, focus if focus > 90, can't prioritze enemy targets beyond some very simple conditions, can't skip blocks, can't tell my character not to target invulnerable obelisks, can't even use an OR in blocks. Like for Infuse with Vital Essence I have to make two blocks, can't tell it to cast if I have no con or int inspiration. I can't even script anything around Vela. Tried getting it to cast withdraw on an ally but she isn't considered an ally apparently, and I'm limited to ally/enemy/self/animalcompanion. Also tried animalcompanion, doesn't work. Tried a lot of things, pretty sure she is unscriptable. Guess I shouldn't complain, the scripting for POE is better than most games. But all this desire to make everything nice graphical logic blocks is really limiting. There's probably a way to access the underlying scripting language but I bet it requires modding... Sorry, got a bit rambly there. Anyway, finished the game last night and this build should easily get through an ultimate run. Don't think I had to reload any in combat. It's basically invulnerable and shreds bosses and mooks in seconds, but I've accidentally killed Vela a few times. She sometimes hangs directly underneath the character. So like when I was trying to proc Deltro's Cage Helm and cast chain lightning on myself, that was one time I killed her. Another problem now is I want to try a different build. Loremaster seems fun. I wonder if blood mage / skald gets phrases from Citzal's Spirit Lance...if so could totally spam the charm/paralyze/stun cones.

All those high flying subjects... something a bit closer to Earth again. German private companies offering up a new tank design, with the hope of selling it to the army. I'm still not sure how much of a place there is for tanks in the modern battlefield, but wiser heads on the subject than mine will probably have a better understanding there...

Ok now that I read these carefully, ALL of them can apply to WotR. Campfire Cooking with Absurd Skill? Virtually every rest. Become a dog? Beastshape or Baleful Polymorph. Chillin in your 30's after getting kicked out of the Demon King's Army? Ember's followers. History’s Strongest Demon Reincarnates? Demon path. WotR is anime, prove me wrong. You can't. Good. Embrace it.

Yup. Bethesda, Bioware, CDPR, and now apparently Obsidian have all walked away from trying to do SP+co-op in favor of strictly SP RPGs. Only Larian is still stuck in their "co-op is awesome, who needs SP" mentality.

Chainsaw Man 11 So there are even more freaks than we knew about, right? And yet they looked tame in comparison to Makima making her request.

Chainsaw Man 11: The Training Arc ends. Aki leaves the fox for a tree that lives in his eye and the rest of the special division devils and fiends are unleashed.

Franco Harris

The forum software is now completely fubar on Safari (most recent IOS version from a couple of weeks ago, Australian English). You can't post, rate (like, thanks etc.) or perform several of the moderator functions