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I will turn 54 soon.

I'm still hoping for a Fallout 2 remake/remaster whatever. I'm playing LOTRO because they just released a new class, the Mariner. Since I hadn't played since before they introduced River Hobbits I went with a River Hobbit Mariner named Burwell and did my best to make him look like Chesty Puller. I played through the River Hobbit intro then immediately quit to make a High Elf version instead and am still playing through the unreasonably long and unskippable HElf intro.

NMS ----the way I play, big bases are largely pointless. Game keeps prompting me to set up something re: an overseer or some such. I'm happy with just teleporters, landing pad, storage boxes, and a room or area filled with resource refiners. I also read that there's a parts limit (all objects. not just walls/floors), across all bases you make in a save. After that you can't place anything else. Not that most would ever reach the limit, just the fancy mega builder types or those wanting a big base on multiple planets. ----did a few more main quests. I find them utterly boring and went back to making my own fun. ----started a new separate save. The tutorial is even more annoying/feels too long (for my impatience...) the 2nd time. It does give you some early things for "free" doing it all tho, and I don't know if you can access the Anomaly station initially if you skip it entirely. Actually, all the main missions after the first tutorial mission line ends, so far, still feel like tutorial in a way. 😛

I'm sorry but that's just utter nonsense. How is it not a military operation if territories are being fought over with armies using weapons? How would you define a military operation, then, if this is not one? The fact that it has political overtones does not mean that it is not a military operation, too. (The following is not a comment intended directly at you, but I find it very curious that the internet has appeared to significantly increase the kind of discussion culture where things have to be either one or the other and where multiplicity and simultaneity are not possible, even conceptually. It's both fascinating and quite disheartening.)

That is a pretty good example of what happens when you enjoy a film vs. when you do not. The mess - if there is any - does not matter as much. The opposite, for me, can be seen in the Half in the Bag about Skyfall, I film I had such a bad time watching that I decided to not bother with going to the cinema for Bond movies until there is a different Bond than Craig, although in hindsight I should probably have done that after Quantum of Solace. Mike and Jay, on the other hand, like it. Jay even says that the problems of the film can be ignored because it is overall pretty good. Needles to say, it is one of those instances where I disagree with them. @PK htiw klaw eriF and @InsaneCommander, would you care to seal the deal?

Dangit, I'm playing LotRO too. Must be something in the water here.

I'm making lamb loin chops on the grill and some couscous on the stove. My wife is making some kind of salad.

This weekend I completed the Tour de Cure and rode 100 miles around Napa Valley. It was a beautiful day, although the sun didn't come out until mile 50 or so. We raised $25k, so another good year of fundraising. edi edit: Finished in 5:30, which was just a tad slower than last year. I'll take it. I got a bit nauseous around mile 75 and slowed it down, but it passed and I felt ok at the end.

I've been theorycrafting a Conjurer build that makes use of the +2 PL bonus with Conjuration spells in a way that's more substantive than the conventional wisdom of using summoned weapons with them, as I find that the mere +duration you get with Conjurer summoned weapons isn't a particularly advantageous usage of the power level bonus, especially for the tradeoff of losing two other spell schools for it. I was looking at the damage spells from the Conjuration school to better leverage the subclass bonus when it occurred to me that Voidwheel can cast Necrotic Lance and Engoliero do Espirs can cast Ghost Blades, both of which are Conjuration spells. I wanted to see if the spells cast from these weapons would get the Conjurer PL bonus on top of the weapon quality scaling. To that end, I tested this by creating two single-classed Wizards, one a Conjurer and the other no-subclass, with identical stats. For a control group, I had them cast Necrotic Lance and Ghost Blades as spells from their spellbooks. As expected, the Conjurer got +0.5 higher penetration and had longer duration in the case of Necrotic Lance's secondary DoT damage effect. However, proccing these spells from the weapons did not get the Conjurer's +2 Conjuration PL bonus. While you do get scaling from the weapon quality, these weapon-triggered spells performed the same in the hands of both the subclass-less Wizard and Conjurer. One interesting thing I noted was that the duration of the secondary DoT from Voidwheel's Necrotic Lance was lower than the duration of the casted spell version. I suspect the weapon just uses base duration (it, however, still gets Intellect scaling as normal since casting Infuse With Vital Essence increased the duration). While I was at it, I wanted to test if Substantial Phantom got the Conjurer's PL bonus since it does get Necrotic Lance as part of the selection of spells it's able to cast. Unfortunately, the Conjurer's PL bonus does not get carried over to the Substantial Phantom copy when it casts the relevant Conjuration spell. Again, the Substantial Phantom performed identically between the Conjurer and no-subclass Wizard. Interestingly, the version of Necrotic Lance casted by the Substantial Phantom was slightly inferior to the no-subclass Wizard, having less penetration and secondary DoT length. Weapons copied over to the Phantoms also didn't make any difference in terms of the spells procced from them. Just thought I should share these findings to the board for the sake of posterity and in case anyone else was curious about this interaction. This is on the vanilla version of the game without the community or balance patches, by the way. I'm posting this on my lunchbreak but I'll throw up the hard numbers from the test later when I get back home.

If the sea levels keep rising my future home in the mountains would eventually be waterfront property. Any suggestions on how I can increase my greenhouse gas emissions? I suppose I could buy up a bunch of coal and just burn it for the hell of it. 🤔

I haven’t played much recently since Act III is lagging a lot. I'll probably have to reduce the graphics quality. Anyway, I reached Rivington and decided it was time to stop looking like trash to make sure they wouldn’t stop my party from entering the city. Got some new clothes for everyone and changed the view to camp clothes. They are still covered with blood though. I’m picking all the sarcastic dialogue options about refugees when talking with the xenophobic citizens and it’s hilarious. Not for being sarcastic, but because my character is not that bright and genuinely understands everything wrong. I also took Shadowheart, Gale and the kids to the circus. The latter group includes Karlach, the Dryad, the Wood Woad, an Air Elemental, Us and Gale’s raven. They had no problem fitting in among the rest of the weirdos in the place.

Enjoy it while you're still young (58 next time) 😝

Because how dare those annoying Ukrainians be courageous and brave and stand up to the Russians and fight back, and in doing so make us feckless and amoral Westerners who don't want to be bothered doing anything to help them look bad!!

I went back to check some things and discovered that if you cast Heal on a Dark Urge, you can get a couple of different memories. Why did it take so long to figure out when I spent maybe a quarter of the game above level 11 and Shadowheart was always a fixture in the party? Because Planar Ally is too good not to use.

Its fairly common this incredibly inaccurate framing of the war but repeated more as a form of Russian propaganda and or Vatnik cope Can you imagine any war where a country is invaded and when people fight back its considered " a play for sympathy " Tell the Mujahedeen that during the Soviet invasion or Serbia when they fought against the Austrian Hungarians in WW1. In fact have you ever heard of any war where people defend there sovereign territory as "people looking for sympathy " Only in the world of Internet fake news and misinformation

Probably the latter, many abilities that have the same name but different sources, like a Paladin and Cleric channel energy, are technically different abilities in WotR and scale independent of each other. This probably won't convince me to give Assassin a shot, it looks like it'd take a lot of investment to make work and doesn't provide as much as a dip as a Vivisectionist (little does to be fair) or a Thug. As written I just don't see assassinate target competing with a full attack while poison requires a lot of investment for some minor ability damage. I guess getting sneak attack on anything is cool.....but by the time you get it you've probably got many strategies to set up flanking or otherwise activate sneak attack. Honestly the Assassin seems more suited to be used against the player than be used by the player.

Saw that too, but the ratings are atrocious. 😄 Maybe that's why it landed on Steam as well.

I honestly have no idea what so ever how Haiti's problems could be fixed. It's entirely possible they would have to go through the process of communist dictatorship for 50 years, while a new generation grows up struggling for democracy and a rule of law (similar to what may happens some day int he future in China, Vietnam etc., where there are young people struggling to improve their say in government and probably will overthrow the "old man regimes" some day). But you need a generation of people that are united in their cause.... I think. But that is just me thinking out loud. Fast and furious revolutions have worked too, but it wont change things unless the mindset of a new ruling class is radically different from the current establishment.

Assassin changes Edit: besides Mythic poison, they also said in the comments that they will include mythic armor and shield training in the same patch. As for other changes to the assassin, Some people raised concerns about the int modifier and enemies that are immune to ability damage and crits. I wonder if a Legend combining this class with Executioner would have some benefit. Or would you simply end up with two types of assassinate abilities with different scalings? Too late here to think clearly, I have to go to bed...

Need more global warming. Rising sea levels will solve the problem of Haiti for good.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). I genuinely had a pretty decent time watching this. Oh sure, there were some lulls and the action scenes were a tad weak/goofy (Harrison Ford is like two thousand years old, give him a break), some of the humor doesn't work as well as it should, and I'm sure if I read detailed analysis of all the things wrong with it, it'd get torn apart, but I actually enjoyed watching it for the vast majority of the runtime. It mostly but not entirely feels like a retread of stuff done better in the first three films, but...you know, as far as completely unnecessary sequels go, if you want more Indiana Jones, it absolutely beats the socks off of Crystal Skull as a complete product. With Crystal Skull, you get such an immediate Star Wars prequels level of a "oh god" gut-punch right from the start, which you you can try to ignore for the first half (maybe even successfully!), but then it practically turns into a cage match against Muhammad Ali as you get into the second half, and that's just not a fight you're going to win: in contrast, this film just feels at least pretty alright to watch, from start to end, and that's nice. Dial of Destiny even has a lot more (and I mean a lot more) restrained and effective use of CGI to boot (yes, even accounting for the opening being approximately 95% CGI): it doesn't outright ruin nearly so many scenes like it did in Crystal Skull (actually, I think the most distracting thing was Indy's de-aged face during the back-in-time opening...that crap is getting better, but it's still not quite there when you put it directly under focus). There's nothing in this that's even within the same plane of existence compared to Crystal Skull's jungle car chase scene. Heck, right off the bat with Crystal Skull, you had the magically magnetically flying gunpowder, and I don't think this film has any one scene even as bad as that one...but, well, enough thinking about Crystal Skull. Also, and this may just be me, but I found the lady and kid way less annoying than...jeeze, didn't I just bloody say enough thinking about Crystal Skull? Sorry, that didn't last long. Okay, they're not nearly as much fun or as memorable as Short Round and Willie, but they're fine, and actually, I think Phoebe Waller-Bridge was even a little bit better than simply fine in her role. In full disclosure, the fun of Indiana Jones was never particularly about the action scenes for me, so the fact that they're a little weak is not at all the end of the world for me in the face of other things I care about a lot more being pretty decent, but if you're desperately looking to re-live your childhood through Indiana Jones doing his trademark young man swashbuckling stuff, you'll probably come up pretty empty-handed. Maybe Crystal Skull softened me up or something, but I enjoyed it. e: Red alert, red alert, this is not a drill: @Amentep, @majestic, and I all enjoyed the new Indiana Jones film. Yeah, wrap it up, folks: that should just about seal the world's fate. e2: Okay, watching the RLM video about this film, yes, it is a giant mess and I can't disagree with anything they say. Lmao. Still.

You're not imagining things with the radio station, they're releasing a patch for it.

McCarthy has been ousted as speaker of the house.

I dont know anything about WH40K, but Attenborough's smooth narration sucked me in for the entire video. The end screen showed 7 more by him but I had to get out of there before I lost an evening.

D!ck Butkus

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-neo-nazis-white-nationalists-go-on-pilgrimage-to-galicia-waffen-ss/ This whole deal gets funnier and funnier.

If it cannot break its egg's shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world's shell! ....which means I'll give it a shot. When it's free. But if I like it one of us has to start taking people on the Utena car rides.

*drops put of warp* ... "You're not a trading ship." ... "wtf is happening."

I morphed to Swarm from Azata and it appears that fully support-oriented class is really, really bad at soloing the game. Thing is, I don't think I ever did swarm preparation on any other character because one encounter with vescavors is one encounter with vescavors too many, so either I look for variables to change in Toybox for something OP like angel or somehow soldier on with a court poet. Sigh. At least the idea of a swarm bard is amusing. Wonder how they sound? Something like this, probably:

"Why me?"... not sure how I get into these situations. The granddaughter of one of my dads friends is on a trip to Australia (amongst other countries) and she realized her budget was no good, living abroad is (surprise!) more expensive than when at home, benefiting from your own place, your own network etc. She asked me (because my dads friend gave her my phone no.) if I knew of any work (part time, whatever) she could do to make funds last a bit longer, but told her it's not a good idea. Before you get on the plane to the last country to visit, immigration will put you on a plane back to Denmark right away if you get caught. Offering the next best solution, she can stay at my place for a while, get food and a roof over her head for a couple of weeks at no cost. Yeah, going to get stuck for a while with a girl that is barely more than a third of my age 😖