Leaderboard

10k idiots out of a population of some 85 million? I wouldn't sweat it. You can always count on at least a third of people to be idiots, and especially so in wealthy, advanced democracies.

My miso soup: Not authentic since I forgot to buy wakame and I'm too lazy to drive to the nearest asian market. Despite this, the soup is quite good. Lessons for next time: 1) Don't forget the wakame, dumbass 2) Use more daikon on account of daikon being much milder than a western radish and super delicious 3) Soft tofu was a good choice, held its shape and melts in my mouth

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/protest-berlin-over-arming-ukraine-against-russia-draws-thousands-2023-02-25/ Those people piss me off so hard.

Weve been working our way through the house painting a room at a time and today is master bathroom painting day. Theres few things I dislike more than painting but honestly, the prep work is the worst.

The Forgotten City. The game looks gorgeous on medium settings, and there is a photo mode.

Ukrainian Defense Inteligence, has revealed goals for their counteroffensive. Last time, that they revealed goal of Kherson counteroffensive, they liberated Kharkiv, so this will be interesting, what they manage to pull off. During this weekend, the spring rains started in the south, so there will be no action at least for a month. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/26/7391041/

Isolation is pretty bad for just about anyone. Isolation is particularly bad for people with paranoid tendencies. If you're prone to paranoia and you've also got megalomaniacal ideas, isolation is going to, well, maybe make you start a war, if you can. There are very few things I'd applaud Jordan Peterson for, but he made a good point in criticizing both Freud and Jung for making mental health so much a question of the individual and ignoring the collective. This is a good observation: social ties can keep a lot of people from drowning, because they improve us in so many ways. The manifold ways in which the collective keeps us afloat often become apparent once that collective disappears. Interestingly, this is something that I think almost everyone can anecdotally confirm. There are problematic cases in nearly all high schools and their equivalents, people who only just about manage to hang on. Once high school ends, they are in deep, deep trouble.

Halibut with lemon butter sauce, roasted cauliflower, and a spinach salad. Not bad and healthy.

I'm going deep down the Dagoth Ur rabbit hole. If this is what we get when Skynet ChatGPT takes over then I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. Side-note: I really need to replay Morrowind, what a great game that was. /checks progress of OpenMW.

My finest creation https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/ZXBwMxSAia3OY73D0V99

The Forgotten City. Replayed the beginning as a soldier (had a gun and 10 bullets), discovered that a. (most of) the NPC don't have their keys on them (e.g. Horatius, the Philosopher, Desius) and b. the bullets can stop the shooting golden statues. So still had fun with it, though would prefer to be able to get the keys.

Extremely interesting stats on equipment losses during the battle for Kiev right at the start of the war.

The Iceman Cometh (1989) - An utterly bizarre mashup of Hong Kong cinema. This movie starts out like a kung fu movie from a decade earlier taking place during the last days of the Ming Dynasty. The main protagonist and antagonist are brothers in the royal guard with the older brother being a psychopathic rapist and murderer. They fight and seemingly both die then both somehow wind up in "modern" (1989) times. Then we get a wacky fish out of water tale as our protagonist Zheng is taken advantage of by a prostitute. His evil older brother Feng San has acclimated to modern times faster than him and is still his murderous and raping self. Stuff only gets crazier from there. This movie wound up being a lot more comedy and less martial arts than I anticipated, and I think it's for the best. There's still a decent bit of kung fu action, especially at the beginning and end, but a lot of the movie is carried by strong comedic performances from Polly, the prostitute, and Feng San, the antagonist. For his part, Zheng , the protagonist plays a great fish out of water, then the straight man once he figures out how things work in modern times. That said, the prostitute Polly and evil older brother Feng San really drive this rather fun wacky action comedy. The ending makes no sense but given how weird the movie is overall, who cares. Side note: Top quality work from the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome, as usual, on this beautiful 2K blu-ray.

TLDR: I haven't quite finished the main story but I'd give Hogwart's Legacy something like a 7/10. For me, the first half of the experience, more or less, is the better half. Don't take that too negatively - for me a 7 is still a quite positive rating, the game simply could have used a little more complexity here and there to keep it from becoming too repetitive or "pointless" (outside of following the Story I mean). EDIT: one system would be consequences for some actions/dialogues to add a little weight - because there aren't any. Or at least almost none. I'm not huge on needing mega consequences in RPG's but at least a little bit would've been nice. I at first used stealth while lockpicking for example, until I realize there was no need. No one cared, outside of one or two specific quest times. >.> =========== I think I am nearing the end of Hogwart's main story and am sorta rushing to get that finished now. Haven't explored the lower half of the world very much. It must be said that this is partly because with my thoroughness, I'm already level 36, have the Collections at 90%-100% finished (which does not mean you've done, collected or seen "everything in the game", mind) and my combat abilities seem to be such that most fights last 15-20 seconds. So...there isn't a ton of motivation left for me. One could leave a lot of that for after Story, instead, but that's not my way. 😄 It's still beautiful and exploration is still fun in short doses, but like many open worlds there just isn't quite enough "to do" - or more specifically, there's things to do but it becomes very repetitive, and the loot-hunt aspect is not very engaging or imperative past a certain point. So it's just whether you have personal, small goals of your own or just love scouting the castle/landscape etc. Some of the longer side quests have been more fun, although I wish the temp-companions during those quests had more heft. Only one of them has any significance in that regard, imo. the game economy felt pretty nicely balanced at the start, in terms of being a little bit of a struggle to do what you want, but after you've bought what you can buy, there is almost no use for money that I have found, and it just stacks up uselessly. I've stopped picking it up even. That all said, I definitely got my monies worth, had a pretty good time, and while it's simple, it's a well made game world and a great effort. With the success, I hear WB recently announced more games and maybe a tv series. Hm. Well, we shall see.

Three Pines 1 and 2. It's somewhat like Canadian Twin Peaks starring Doctor Octopus, but more normal and focused on mysteries than a surreal deconstruction of small town America and television. It looks like every two episodes are about Doctor Octopus solving a strange murder while also searching for a missing indigenous woman who ran off to New York or got killed. I like it, would reccomend. I don't use emojis because there are way too many combinations of them that are propositioning someone, such as 🤣 😜😏 being widely used as an invitation to [redacted]. When I do use the emojis it is almost as always as part of a bit, because I am naughty In all fairness after seeing what Swedish people eat I think calling their tastes crap is less toxic than eating ketchup on plain macaroni. This looks like one of those AI that can't comprehend hands tried to cook. Feeding this to your kids should be considered child abuse.

I finished Cyberpunk. I was fairly happy with the ending I got. There was still a ton of side missions and gigs left to complete, but my vacation is almost over, and I wanted to be done. Watching the credits for a bit really makes you realize what a massive undertaking this game was. It scrolled for about 10 minutes. We are talking about thousands of hands in the pot. I played on normal difficulty and was really enjoying the swordplay in the later levels. I wouldn't say it was very challenging, but there was enough style to keep it enjoyable.

Eye of the beholder and all that: I love Undertale's visuals, . Also, Morrowind looks more visually appealing to me than either Oblivion or Skyrim, so I just don't think we're going to agree on visuals very much at all.

Nah, it's not ugly because it's 2D, plenty of fugly 3D games like e.g. Morrowind, this one is ugly because it's just really really ugly. Not as ugly as Undertale, but certainly close. 😬 I really liked Forgotten City for the most part, that sequence with combat was fun too, but I got one of endings which wasn't the "true" one and then suddenly lost all interest so I still don't know what's its deal. Guess the ending I got was satisfying enough.

It's not weird at all. If I took all your favorite things and turned them all into steaming piles of dog poop, and then it turns out you don't like dog poop, well, what the hell is wrong with you? Why don't you like your steaming piles of dog poop? These steaming piles of dog poop were committee-formulated and market-tested specifically to appeal to your dog poop tastes - there must be something very wrong with you to not like your steaming piles of dog poop! Maybe you're even an -ist or two for not liking your dog poop... Everyone else in the world loves these steaming piles of dog poop, why don't you?! It doesn't help that we're all more connected than we've ever been. Before the internet, if you didn't like something, maybe you told some of your closest friends and you all talked about it and then you usually moved on - no hard feelings, or at least there shouldn't be. Now if you frequent a forum like this or view comments on social media, you could post about how you tried but didn't enjoy something, and immediately the next person that replies talks about how GREAT it was while making sure to hit you with their imbecilic emoji spam. One doesn't really have to do with the other, but it is difficult not to unconsciously associate them nevertheless. Negative feelings about something have infinite opportunity to grow while allowing practically nothing for it to reverse course thanks to the internet.

Did some more goofing around with a Skald - and man: with Wahai Poraga it's even cool to go SC Skald. With a fast setup (high DEX, low armor penatly etc.) I can generate phrases from skeletons so quickly that I can basically spam Eld Nary's Curse. Sometimes I can cast a second one before the first runs out, hehe. Also a CC-focused build with almost any second class is very nice. I can stunlock or paralyze-lock all sorts of enemies because those invocations are so cheap while the phrases keep flying in.

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

You are generally right, I was just venting a little there, that kid kind of likes me because I also have long hair. He's still scared ****less of me when I speak though, but atleast he doesn't cry anymore 😅 His little sister is a bit more brave though, she hugged me the last time she met me, much to the astonishment of her parents and me. We've got a 20 year old program at work to track, assign and register arrivals/departures that is only able to run through Internet Explorer. This week has been fun and not at all chaotic for traffic managers. They developed a "cloud based variant" that barely works so they had to type everything up in emails and send to the central office and have them deal with it instead.

Don't worry, Chat GPT will solve the creativity problem in the movie/tv industry.

I'm inclined to agree with you. I consider the best movie Statham had a major role in to be Snatch, but that movie was great because of a big cast of colorful characters, whereas he is absolutely the driving force of Crank. I'm watching the sequel next.

I believe that was peak Statham.

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.

For the quirky interest:

@ShadySands Congratulations! Me and my friends spoke about this the last time we were in the sauna, one of them works as a preschool teacher and the other has kids, and has just enrolled his oldest in one. His oldest kid is very feminine, long hair, he loves his dresses and dolls. There hadn't been a single issue at the preschool until one of the parents flipped their **** as they found out a boy was looking so much like one of the girls, and at that moment they started tormenting him. Once an adult said it was wrong. Things calmed down though after the parent was given the threat of having to take their kid to another place, and was given a little speech to memorize and say infront of the kids.

Thanks for that, was curious if soft tofu would hold up. I don't cook with a lot of tofu but I make a pork and tofu stir fry with a sweet chili sauce and a decent hot and sour soup and both call for firmer tofu, especially the stir fry. Was thinking of making a fideo soup today but now I'm considering miso.