Leaderboard

We got back on Saturday from a week in the Dominican Republic and I need a vacation from my vacation. Heres where we stayed: Bahia Principe Grand Punta Cana - Hoteles Bahia Principe (bahia-principe.com)

I'm not good at creating my own fun. I think I need the game to be fun. It's good though. It's just lacking in the places Bethesda always lacks. Story telling, immersion, characters, dialogue, mission variety, that sort of stuff. Show up to the biggest city in the universe. Store cashier says "I haven't seen you before, you must be new" she must have an insanely good memory. Land on a companions home planet he says "landing on a new planet never gets old" Lady is yelling at a government building about how they killed her dad. No one else is around, just yelling at a building. After I finished the first main quest, I hadn't done anything beyond explore a bit. Talk to a character and she says "nothing that compares to the stories I've heard about you though." What stories? I haven't done anything yet. It's little things that just add up to take me out of the game. Everyone treats you as the main character and it annoys me. It actually makes sense that Bethesda thought they could make a game with just datapads and computers to tell you the story (fallout 76) because their characters feel like datapads that just tell you things, and serve no other purpose. (I feel like I might have stolen this analogy from someone)

All inclusive resorts are largely similar, so if I had to sort by location it would be Cabo (by a mile), DR, Cancun and Cozumel. Were social butterflies and everyone is already in a great mood so we meet and hang out at the swim up bar with whoever sits next to us. We were in the adult section of the resort (Ambar): Restaurants and bars in Ambar - Hotels Bahia Principe (bahia-principe.com) and we ate at Portifino x 1 (ok), Limbo x 1 (very good), MEAT x 2 (very good), The Greek x 1 (ok) and Fish Market x 1 (meh).

I'd say that's a good description. It certainly shares many similarities given the use of raw egg yolks, romano cheese, and guanciale/pancetta/bacon. The zozzona has the added ingredients of onion and Italian sausage (I went with a hot Italian sausage which, combined with some red pepper flakes, gave the dish the perfect amount of spice), but there's nothing stopping you from adding onion and sausage to a carbonara.

Bethesda Exec Defends Starfield's Bugs: 'We Embrace Chaos'

Ghost Master for grabs on GOG. https://www.gog.com/en/game/ghost_master

It's not possible to land on Urectum After landing on Pluto I accidentally left the ship without spacesuit. Thank God it wasn't Venus

Italian deli and yes it's extremely expensive. Plus, I can feel my cholesterol rising just looking at the package. I can find pancetta in most supermarkets in my area but I have to go to a specialty store to get guanciale, or, as you wrote, order it online. Pancetta is a good substitute, it's easy to find and way cheaper than guanciale. If I were to make Pasta Alla Zozzona on a regular basis, well, first of all I'd weigh 400 lbs in no time, but also I'd likely use pancetta. However, this is a dish I plan to make once, maybe twice a year for a special get together and I can afford to go all out once or twice a year, both in terms of the financial and the state of my arteries.

My theory is that Avowed will be a mix between Tyranny, Skyrim and Deadfire. We can see a lot of factions, we are playing an envoy of Aedyr in a "colonized" land and the game seems to be focused around depth more than breadth, ala Tyranny.

4 minutes self fellatio and no gameplay. I dunno man. Tough sell for me. 😄

Sometimes nothing beats the right ingredients, even if they imported and expensive 🥘

Eh, I'd say Starfield is more function over fashion. BG3 is amazing, that's for sure, but you also have to wrestle with the camera. Starfield is pretty muted in comparison. It does have some nice looking moments. I also had it set to high and was surprised at how dull everything was, but once I upped the setting to Ultra, everything got sharper. It didn't seem to affect performance, so that's nice. I'm comparing Starfield more to games like No Man's Sky, X4, and Elite: Dangerous. It's a decent upgrade on those. edit: Oh, I went to the moon and jacked some big ship out from under a group of spacers. I don't know that it is better than my starter ship, but it looks cooler.

Why put in the effort when it will be modded eventually...

I think a big part of the problem is that Larian has chosen to change their approach from previous games, where none of your dialogue options were actually verbatim. It thus adds another layer of obfuscation between you and the game, where you can only guess at the intention behind the written dialogue line. Now in most cases it's fairly obvious: DOS2: *Ask him to tell you more about LOOM* BG3: "Hey, tell me more about LOOM" But when it comes to interpersonal relationship building... DOS2: *Flirt with him* BG3: "I don't want to kick your head in" Yeah... BG3 really needs to tag the lines where any interpretation other than the literal one is possible. [Flirt] "I don't want to kick your head in" Problem solved.

At least with older games, if you played a female main character, you could just butcher all the guys to make sure no sham romances would suddenly start to fire off. Isn't it that only Cernd, Anomen, and Haer'Dalis are romanceable for female main characters in BG2? I'd gladly kill all those morons even if I weren't playing a female main character, but the fact that I do makes it even better. Now, my only option is to apparently murder everyone I meet. (e): Wait, no, I don't think Cernd is romanceable - he's already got a kid, right? He really is the worst...until I remember that Anomen exists.

So me.

I've been playing BG3 and Starfield. BG3 has far more bugs and niggles than Starfield. All the complaints, be they genuine or not, are tied to the limitations of the engine and not due to bad design. Is it 'good'? That depends. Do you like Bethesda games? If so, yes. If not, no. As for the standing animation. At no point in the game are you locked into sitting down to have a conversation. You might do so for immersion. Heck, I did that just a few hours ago before chatting up a bartender. But choosing to sit in a conversation is also choosing to get your ass shot off as you're locked into a standing animation 'cause you suck at talking. To me, that seems to be emergent choice and consequences working as intended. 🤷‍♂️

Daniil Orain is doing commendable work, but to regard that as representative of how things are in Russia and with Russians in general is naive almost in the extreme. So, when the school system is being inundanted with propagandistic material, you cannot scoff it away as easily as that, by pointing at "silly Russian educators" whose schemes can be easily bypassed. No: if their plans come to fruition, the results are going to be devastating (in terms of historical truths) on a massive scale. There is no doubt that there will still be people who are interested in truth and will go to great lengths to find out about it, but you seem to completely miss one of the main aims of this drastic change in the curriculum: to ensure that less and less people will be honestly curious in the first place. Like, for example, any terrorist trainer will tell you: start indoctrinating them when they're young enough and they'll be yours. This is the aim.

Pasta Alla Zozzona: I went all out for this one. I freshly grated romano cheese and I didn't settle for bacon or pancetta, I got the good stuff. Delicious dish, but not something to eat regularly, on account of how decadent it is.

I'll never understand the need to pit these games against each other. Like, do you only get to play one game in life? They are both great RPG's, yay.

Yes, but people who pay for it get to play it on Day -5, so Microsoft are playing silly buggers here. That said, I'm not in a rush personally and am not even entertaining the notion of paying for it. I have however just paid to extend my Game Pass out to late 2026 by buying a bunch of 90-day Xbox Live Gold codes (that convert to 50 days of Game Pass Ultimate).

I’m not really a fan, so I couldn’t tell what was old and what was new. A single slow ballad, that was like half a capella, half slow guitar and one song I recognised at the end, the rest was hard rock/heavy rock/guitar rock/whatever I made a few clips on my phone, but I need to get home from the airport before I can convert them to something shareable. Just clips, not full bootlegs. I’ll put them up here later edit: the joojeh I got at the Persian place was awesome. I would be surprised if @Katphood wasn’t familiar with it 👋 edit2: My old phone has made some pretty good recordings in the past, but at this concert, it was definitely NOT up to the task. Crappy audio quality which in no way is a reflection of the actual experience (my brain can compensate a bit because I know what it really sounded like) 😖

I’m currently in Melbourne, trying out some Persian food before flying home in the afternoon. Came down here Tuesday because a friend had bought Evanescence tickets for Wednesday nights concert and offered me one if I would go with her. What kind of friend would I be to not jump on a plane and join her 😂 the concert was great though 😎

I think that its always been that an alternative to WWE has to exist when looking at national wrestling promotions. WWE / Vince by itself will just get lazy and regurgitative. Just being able to have an alternative to move to / from rejuvenates storylines and matches. I'm not convinced today is better than when we were in classic eras with the territories (although some things are better now than the territory days and to be fair, the territories are never coming back), but I think its clear AEW has helped the sport(s entertainment) get out of the funk it had been in.

A poor mans mozzarella stick. There, I said it.

I'm not sure which pirates aggroes after elevator, because we need to know which instance you're talking about. 1) There is the elevator from the Gullet to the Old City. That's the one you took first. 2) There is the elevator from The Undercroft to Delwers Row. I assume that coming from the Undercroft you might aggro the pirates guarding that elevator above, In Delwers Row. But if you can manage to not aggro them, you are golden enough to enter Dereos Hideout, via The Narrows. 3) Anyways, In the Undercroft, there is a boat. This will mean serious sneaking as the boat is somewhere to the east, near the pirate fort. That boat gets you out without aggro.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/baldurs-gate-3-characters-were-super-horny-due-to-a-bug-larian-admit

This was the hardest boss fight I've had so far. Against Faceless Void from DOTA 2 Sha'Hala: Guardian of N'Erud. It's a multi-phase fight and each phase has several different attacks and there doesn't seem to be a pattern to the order the attacks are used. Even when I figured out what to do for every attack type, it's a long enough fight that it was hard for me to stay clean the entire time, leading to many many deaths.

Finally found the man himself and his hamster. Had to the fight twice and the first time the game bugged out and he died for no reason after getting knocked out.

TL;DR: Typical Bethesda game.

So a few days ago I clicked on a video that I thought was about one thing and turned out it was a "cancer journey" vlog. The person was charismatic and inspirational and I ended up watching the whole video. Anyway the main point is for no reason early this morning I chose turn on my other PC and check my email, something I haven't done in oh, a couple months. My brother's - who I haven't seen/talked to in over a year I think (my remaining family and I are not close etc) - plus all the extended family CC'd emails filled my digital mailbox. My niece - she's probably in her late 30's - apparently has brain cancer. They removed most of the original tumor/doing radiation etc. now but it's still progressing faster than expected/hoped for. 😕 Life is strangely coincidental - or something - at times. Edit: I can't do age maths.