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So, Ukraine has to resist militarily, because that's what it got down to. In Belarus, the people have tried to resist very bravely, but at least the ruler of the country is firmly in Russia's pocket. More plans apparently underway: https://www.dw.com/en/russia-plans-belarus-absorption-by-2030-media-reports/a-64771429 In Russia, clear resistance to tyranny is effectively at nil.

I finished Dead Space remake. Twice actually, so I could get the secret ending. It was a lot of fun and remains one of my favorite horror games. They did some smart additions. And I say this having been half afraid they'd screw everything up. When my only real complaint is the sound seems a lot more subdued than the original. Not enough constant clanging, banging, and screaming. Loses some of that industrial feel. So on to Dead Space 2. I have stuff I want to say here. This is my second "real" playthrough of Dead Space 2, not counting my abandoned first run at release. A couple minor nitpicks I had in remake were the over the top new cutscenes. A ship explodes, throwing Isaac clear, then a second explosion throws him to safety on the gangway. A necromorph transforms right on top of him making sure you see it up close. Dead Space 2 literally starts with that latter scene as the opening. And in my first two hours of the game, Isaac had been blown up three times. And in my several hours since they did not stop at three. Anytime the developers got bored of an area, explosions throw you elsewhere. Except that one time where you got sucked out of an window, then blown up back through a different window in the same building. Why? WHY? A lot of people complained that Dead Space 3 turned the franchise into a big dumb action game and I'm reminded that it did not start with three. Enemies come at you in waves so large, the game engine has to despawn bodies from the first wave to to have enough memory to send the last. Three maybe just turned the dumb up a notch. Sure, two features you Supermanning through a collapsing city only to make a superhero landing when you arrive, but at least it doesn't have three's piece-de-resistance of... Supermanning around to use your super kinesis to wrestle a moon. Or whatever that is. I guess I'll resfresh my memory when I get there.

Japan promised help worth 5.5 billion USD to Ukraine. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/20/7390143/

How disappointing that the following tweet is true in the sense of how the speeches turn out (but certainly not in the sense of expectation). In mathematical terms, Putin's Speech <> Churchill's Speech.

I was playing around with Konstanten as Howler today in the BoW DLC and gave him Wahai Poraga. I was almost drowing in phrases. Was able to keep Soul Collectors perma-stunned with the help of the Helm of the White Void and "Its Crash Could Not Be Denied" which then has +25 ACC. Most enemies, even with high Will, cannot defend against that (except with immunities and resistaces of course - then Killers Froze Stiff is a nice alternative I guess, though shorter CC). Didn't try the charming invocation but that could be great, too, maybe I'll try that later. One or two swirls - stun! - another swirl - stun! and so on. It's pretty cool. The easy way to get phrases from the crits on skeletons makes phrase generation a breeze. It's more fun that I expected. Good option for Konstanten imo.

It is finished. I am actually dangerously close to platinuing the game. I miss All arnaments and all talismans achievements, so I might see how much I am missing, and if I can hunt the remaining ones in my current save. More annoyingly I didn't get the achievement for beating Morgott.... I might leave it, if I feel like doing another playthrough (he culminates what I would consider the good content of Elden Ring, so going that far one day might be a possibility) or I might see if I can hunt down a pre-Margott save somewhere for a quick completion. Great game, but darn, the final areas and bosses really sour the experience. If the game would end upon reaching the Erdtree, and got some extra polish instead, I think it would be better off.

Yeah, unlike Fireflies and other outwardly deliberate tug-at-the-heart-strings affairs, it doesn't really seem to be intended to destroy the viewer, but because it does so for at least me while also going through a very full spectrum of different feelings (both positive and negative) for many different angles regarding life, it feels so much more encompassing, personal, and powerful than practically anything else I can think of. Throw in almost every other element being chef's kiss, and it's as close to both objective and subjective perfection as I've ever experienced. Some things just feel like they must be some kind of miracle for them to exist exactly as they were made - for all the different parts to have come together so perfectly at precisely the only time they could have been made with no issues of anything about it ever being problematic, unnecessary, or otherwise negative to even slightly weigh the overall experience down. Whisper of the Heart is it, and I simply do not see any kind of opportunity for anything else to even have the remote possibility of being able to out-do it with regards to my ever so particular tastes. But that's okay, because it deserves its place at the top for me.

Whisper of the Heart is, besides fantastic, a film that manages the seemingly impossible. It is an interesting tale of a young girl figuring her life out, it is romantic, often fun, and... absolutely soul crushing for an adult viewer like me.

Whisper of the Heart (1995). The nieces are home for spring break, and they wanted to see the "prequel" to The Cat Returns. I actually tried to have them watch it once in the past probably like a year ago, but I didn't really expect them to care for it because it's not the silly fantastical adventure that The Cat Returns is, and they kind of lost interest like 20 minutes in. But for some reason, they were in the mood today and unlike last time, it kept their attention the entire duration and they loved it even with some of the sillier awkward teenage stuff that they find embarrassing, so watching it with them was positively magical. Still my favorite movie of all time, I had to hide tears from my nieces at several junctures. (e): Also, oh my gosh this movie is so gorgeous, even my older niece commented a few times on how insane some of the artwork was, which, of course, made me launch into a short spiel about everything being hand-drawn compared to the computer animation of today, which only seemed to break her brain even more. Hurts my soul we'll never see its kind again, but I can be thankful at least it exists.

Well, the difference is, that the people falling asleep at the Biden’s speech, can still accept the invite to a tea party without commiting “self-defenestration” afterwards

When I was very young I thought those were the hard disks people were talking about.

Few exclusive photos from Putin’s speech

With a new version of the Ascendio FPS Improving mod, I was able to bump up to a higher quality upscaler setting, hence the FPS counter being back in the screenies, since I'm testing it out thoroughly. So far I've never seen it dip below 60 FPS during gameplay at the new settings. It will dip below 60 during cutscenes occasionally, but I don't care about that. I also tried a different Reshade mod: This one removes most of the fog and makes everything really sharp and more "real" looking. However "real" isn't really what I'm going for in my whimsical fairy tale adventure, plus I'm one of the few weirdos that likes the fog. I'd like to see it maybe thinned out a tad, but not removed almost entirely, so I went back to the Reshade mod I was using before with the high saturation and extra bloom.

Follow up is already out

It didn’t take to long, and head of the FSB already denied this claim https://t.me/rusbrief/94669

Saw some oddball movie that was surprisingly entertaining. Spontaneous (I think from 2020). Part teenage romance, part comedy, lots of exploding teenagers

If they don't act fast, it will be Trump as president in 2024 and the end of peace in Europe... I'm sure he can find a few more fires to fan the flames or however the saying goes. Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Cyprus, The Levant, Kosovo, Belgium, Scotland, Lombardia, Scania, Moldova, whatsitsname the region with all the Hungarians under Romanian rule... so many hot spots, independence movements and armed conflicts lurking just underneath the surface waiting for the next spark.

Yes, pretty much what I think. Same for toughened fury and Divine Retribution (althought I even had to nerf it) Basically you're rewarded for doing something "challenging" but doable, sucha as getting crit with a rogue, or keeping pet alive and active as a ranger. Indeed. There is no active ability without time and without cost. Even in vanilla, Blood Sacrifice has a health cost. BPM Take the hit is basically instant and free BUT comes with a huge drawback (potentially concentrating damages on your fighter). I don't think there is a single ability that you can click mindlessly when available.

I don't see how that argument is important here. Look for example at the BPM change to Wall of Flashing Steel. In combination with Gambit (that ideally has 0 costs) you will have far higher expected resource return by using that ability... the goal of the Single-Class resource changes (as I understand it) is to bring the higher resource-pool (and the higher resource generation with Brilliant) of Multiclasses more in line with Single-classes. Hence, the internal costs (after 60 seconds!) of one ability is not relevant, but the total resource generation of the class compared to multiclasses in the fights where it matters. I also don't understand your argument against giving Bonded Fury some recovery time to increase its opportunity costs. Most buffs that are not self-only do have recovery and the recovery time will make a difference (especially in shorter fights) for the player to use it or not ... why should bonded fury in that regard be any different from any other ability in the game?

I try each when I get a new one, but so far I've mostly worn the red plaid fedora for ages because reasons ... so thus, there are not enough hats. ...I don't have them all yet I'm sure. ...the jackets/robes are even more numerous.

@Elric Galad I'll try to explain better why pet needs better durability and healing. 1) It is very hard to keep up both shadowed hunter and bonded fury and more important the pet can't tank while invisible so shadowed hunters while a nice ability is not a substitute here 2) Not the most important issue, but the most obvious, thematically ranger class is both the ranger and the pet, and the class distinguishes itself from others more when the pet can actually stay alive and be useful in combat, which is why I also suggested buffing other combat abilities for the pet (level scaling the L1 pet talents, giving the pet tier 3 inspirations with bonded fury, could possibly give accuracy / pen bonuses on pet abilities etc) 3) Ranger has no defensive abilities or healing abilities besides shadowed hunter (use of which depends on pet being alive), and you usually don't want to stick him in heavy armor, so it is important to keep enemies away from the ranger. Having a pet that can actually engage enemies without dying allows the ranger to do his thing with maximum bonuses. 4) Ranger loses a huge number of bonuses and abilities if the pet dies, which it usually will in boss fights. This is REALLY, REALLY BAD, even with vengeful grief. And despite what you've said even in well-built parties the pet WILL die in some engagements if used in combat (e.g., Dorudugan can one-shot him). Things you lose if this happens bonded grief: -10 accuracy, -2 might, -2 resolve stalker's link: -10 accuracy distraction training: effective -10 accuracy against affected enemies for your entire party shadowed hunter: lose intuitive, plus this ability is the ONLY way the ranger can heal besides potions/scrolls marksman: -5 accuracy if you can't maintain 4m+ distance, which is much easier with pet alive pet abilities: most important is takedown combo, but also furious call etc stalker bonus: -1AR, -5 deflection hearth orlan: lose minor threat for -10 hit to crit (applies mostly to solo) multiclass abilities: lose many MC abilities that require an ally, e.g. seer echoing shield, tactical meld (applies mostly to solo) Indirect attribute losses: If the pet is dead, the ranger needs to compensate stats in his build that could otherwise be dumped. A ranged ranger can have stats like 11/7/18/18/18/3, because we don't expect to be hit much, but with pet dead we want higher resolve and con so you don't die instantly, meaning you may have to sacrifice accuracy, attack speed, and/or ability duration Basically the ranger tends to fall apart when the pet dies, and the effect is worse the higher the difficulty / challenges / fewer companions. Not proposing the pet be an invulnerable tank but it needs some help so it doesn't get killed so much from 1 to 3 hits. Stated all tier 3 more for simplicity, but courageous isn't useless. Tested some against Dorudugan and boar gets interrupted even with resolute, and prones are quite bad. Brilliant is useless but not as if it is harmful. Somewhat disagree about intuitive, since keeping up shadowed hunters and bonded fury both might not be possible given the large bond cost. But I'd be happy with like energized/robust/swift/aware/resolute/acute I was just guessing on the X% bond on crit. Though with high INT bonded fury does last 60+ seconds, and most pets attack roughly once per 5 seconds, so on average would return 1ish bond (less with misses). How much bond do you want returned? 2 is too much since the ability costs 2. 1 seems reasonable, so my guess was a bit too low after accounting for misses, but adjust it to whatever returns on average 1 bond IMO. On hit/crit rather than crit is fine, doesn't really matter as long as the expected value of bond regeneration is the same. What I don't like - costing 1 bond with your proposed rate of bond regen makes SC ranger an infinite bond class, which is OP. I did some testing with Dorudugan to get conservative hit/crit rates for the pet. At L20, base boar accuracy is 103. With bonded fury and marked prey (don't think stalker's link applies to pet, though it should IMO), boar has accuracy 118. Dorudugan has deflection 147 on POTD upscaled. So the attack roll has a -29 adjustment. You hit on a 79+ and graze on a 54 with half grazes converted to hits. P(graze) = P(not miss) - P(hit+)= (1-.54) - (1-.79) = .46 - .21 = .25, P(hit+) = .21+.25*.5 = .335 So with aware or intuitive the boar hits/crits Dorudugan with probability .335. If the boar attacks 12 times over the shadowed fury duration (roughly one attack per 5 seconds, 60 seconds), and returns bond with probability .3 on hit/crit, then the boar returns 12*.3*.335 = 1.2 bond This is against DORUDUGAN. And he still returns more bond than the ability costs. I also don't like having tier 2 inspirations on the pet which are quite weak. I would prefer the effects of Bonded Fury be stronger (tier 3 inspirations or at least tier 3 physical inspirations) so it isn't just a resource farming thing. This is more impactful than making the ability cheaper IMO. Yes, there is an easy solution here in not making Bonded Fury provide more bond than it costs. Be realistic, this ability is going to be used constantly if it provides net resource gain. While I don't see this in itself as a problem, since there are many abilities so good we want them up always (e.g. cipher's borrowed instinct), having a recovery or not is not going to make any difference in how often the player uses it. Blood Sacrifice (in vanilla) costs no resources and has no recovery. There may be others. Not really the point though as I don't think Bonded Fury should cost 0 bond effective. You can remove the recovery. You have in fact done so. And yes there are buffs that require activation time, but there are more that do not, particularly with martial abilities like this (frenzy, disciplined strikes, every wizard martial buff, etc.). It makes more sense that these types of abilities with very short animation have no recovery time. It does have a cast time of .5, it isn't zero. There are many many wizard buffs with a cast time of .4 and no recovery, and other martial buffs with instant cast and no recovery. The cast of .5 is appropriate, 0 recovery is appropriate. Net bond gain without cost (unlike blood sacrifice which has large costs to health) isn't, and it won't be balanced by adding a 3s recovery. Fair enough, and...fair enough, I should have said *additional*. Although Tier 9s are harder picks than Tier 8 since you only get 3. Shadowed Hunters is also pretty expensive, particularly if we almost always have up Bonded Fury. I'm just thinking of things to incentivize using the pet in combat and make certain abilities better. Having a 15% pet damage returned to ranger (and pet?) would be a cool addition to Bonded Fury IMO. Yeah it benefits melee rangers more but even ranged ones get hit. And it wouldn't be so strong healing that the ranger could tank. You could alternatively attach it to Shadowed Hunters or maybe Distraction Training but thematically seems to go better with bonded fury. I've spoken enough about why to buff pet healing and combat (e.g. level scaling with resilient/vicious companion). And admittedly this does benefit solo more than a party with tanks, but it does benefit both, and there is no reason you can't buff the pet and buff bond regen and damages etc.? They're hardly exclusive. Basically this is a very large improvement to the class in solo, a major improvement for parties with 1 or no tanks, and a minor improvement for parties with multiple tanks. Even in parties with tanks, though, using the pet for combat is useful for the accuracy buff it provides the ranger. Fair enough, though it is the nature of things you'll get more (and usually better) input from fanatics like me who've played thousands of hours experimenting with many builds. Yeah I could have been more clear here, and admittedly this is a bit of a tangent. I was generalizing about the cost of attack abilities vs buff/healing abilities. Heart Seeker isn't the best example since you made its debuff permanent. My point was using resources on abilities that give passive buffs is usually preferable to spending the resources on attack abilities. E.g. with potion of enlightenment, for a barbarian we can keep up stalwart defiance or we can use the roars (not both). Can also look at Shadowed Hunters, which provides moderate healing, invisibility to take potions, escape engagement etc., plus intuitive for a really long time (120s with high INT). Much, much better than three twinned arrows or one whirling strikes. In general I'd rather spend bond on something like this that provides huge buffs while allowing attacks for two minutes vs one big attack. Heart Seeker may be the most powerful attack of the game, it may even be an exception to this rule, just saying with enemies that require 10000+ damage dealt (or solo sometimes vastly more) sustaining buffs for normal attacks is higher priority than using special attacks. And you may sometimes have enough bond to use Heart Seeker and sustain buffs but it is a risk in long fights relying on potions of enlightenment (or worse, not having it) where you may run out of bond trying to sustain passives where if you used heart seeker first you have 4 less max bond (probably 5 after marked prey which is pretty much obligatory). Heart Seeker could be an exception I haven't tested it enough to see if the -30% max health is worth starting a long fight with 4 less bond. Well I'm trying to give suggestions on how to make SC ranger better. In general, and this is in theme with my previous paragraph, making attack abilities better is going to be much less impactful than making buff abilities better. The changes you made to shadowed hunter for example are far more impactful than the change to twinned arrows. Why I'm focusing mostly on Bonded Fury. Shadowed Hunters is good as is except would be nice if it could be decoupled from pet being alive. Could reduce Shadowed Hunters to 2 bond, though I think 3 is fine given the long duration. To summarize: My proposal for Bonded Fury: Cast .5s, 0 recovery, Energized, Robust, Swift, Intuitive, Courageous, Acute, 15% of pet damage returned as health to ranger (and pet?), 30% bond return on pet hit/crit for 30s, cost 2 bond (if cost 1 bond need to adjust bond return downwards) (Can remove or reduce Intuitive/Courageous/Acute if they bother you so much, first three are most important, though harder to crit for interrupts without intuitive) And (but less important than above) some kind of power level adjustment for pet abilities. I don't know enough about how it scales to be real helpful, but like have better damage scaling at high level with Vicious/Merciless Companion, and more armor and/or health for Resilient Companion, as is the pet can be one-shot by some enemies which is problematic And Hardy Companion => provide 10+ health per 3s for 15s, hardy for 15s (this one may be a lost cause, but one can hope) Stalker's Link => accuracy bonus applies to pet also

Throne of Blood (1957) - Macbeth in feudal Japan. It's glorious, between the extensive use of fog and black and white photography it felt very dreamlike.

Hadn't checked back for a while since most of my posts got eaten. So I had a bit of catching up to do. I wrote this reply about Death Stranding weeks ago, so I'm gonna (update &) use it, dangit! I managed to play through NieR: Automata with a controller, but can't say it was enjoyable. I'm really not much of a controller player, it would seem. Still, I hated it less than Remember Me, which I gave up on due to my fingers hurting. Problem at that stage is that you're forced into that final fight with which I don't think you can skip (I tried) without being able to stock up, pretty much at all after you fight so being knocked over is rather likely to damage cargo since you've just spent 10-15min slogging through Timefall (potentially more, depending on how lucky you are with structures from other players spawning, I imagine). If I'd had Container Repair Spray I would have been a lot more aggressive, however having to play it safe made it feel like a bit of a slog. For most of the game repair spray is more of a nice to have rather than a requirement. It would have been more useful if it actually repaired ladders, weapons, and the likes. As to the structures disappearing, seems to be a known thing that happens. Game apparently evaluates your "links" at game load and may decide to change them if you haven't interacted with a player much, leading to structures going "poof". I guess I got unlucky and that road was the only thing of his that spawned into my world that I actually used. Any structures you do interact with (eg. repair, or upgrade) will stay forever though (unless it gets destroyed, of course). So if I had repaired it the day before instead of waiting for them to go <50% it should have been fine. Annoying lesson to learn, to be sure. Wish roads would be excluded from that mechanic. After that I went around repairing/upgrading ziplines too, because, boy would it be annoying to suddenly have parts of my zipline network missing... Anyway, been slowly picking away at maxing out reputation with all locations. Game keeps feeding lore seemingly at random (going to assume after a certain amount of likes). There's still a few buildings I've never really had a use for though, like the ramps, the chiral bridge, and the package-gun, bridges and ziplines seem to cover their use-cases just as well without their drawbacks.

Still no firm release date beyond an estimated "a few months" but certainly by year's end: Brings to mind a certain Calvin and Hobbes strip that would certainly have caught a ton of flak if released today

It continues. The only good thing about nutrek:

Crank (2006) - Jason Statham is a hitman, he got injected with a poison and the only way to slow the poison down is to keep adrenaline pumping. Completely over the top wonderful action schlock. This movie is so cartoonishly ridiculous that it goes from great to going too far but then keeps going and comes all the way back around to being awesome. It's 86 minutes of madness and it's fantastic.

@bugarup, the words "Finnish Tango" immediately made me think of this. In the 1970s, Frank Zappa and his band decided to have a go at a classic Finnish tango in Helsinki. Obviously they jammed on it quite a bit. The funny bit is the singing: obviously Napoleon Murphy Brock, the vocalist, has no idea of Finnish pronunciation; it actually takes some effort to recognize that he is singing the right lyrics (presumably from the sheet music, I can't imagine he'd have memorized them). The result is an absolute treasure.

...what kind of game am I playing?

Usagi's mother in PGSM is an absolute whackjob. That's pretty much all for now. That wasn't Minako, it was Makoto. I'm not entirely sure why I wrote Minako. She beats Tuxedo Mask up for flirting with Usagi while being engaged. Yeah, that's more like it. Within the series, it makes sense for Makoto to do that, not only has he hurt Usagi, but this Tuxedo Mask is a jewelry thief like in the manga, and Makoto really doesn't like criminals. On the flipside, it makes more sense for everyone but Usagi to distrust him with this setup than it does in the original anime, where he's always just a helpful guy throwing roses. Before basically being relegated to tertiary character by Ikuhara.

I miss when Lara had one low polygon uniboob.

I thought it was about the 2024 elections

During prohibition, Winston Churchill got a prescription to drink alcohol when visiting the United States.

My grandma and Richard Belzer. Not saying they're related but I'm not ruling anything out either.

Just there to say I love this week's matching deals on gog.