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Been a rough few days but things are getting better. Surgery was a success and the patient lived, 2 for 2.

Well I'm done with BG3. I'm sure it's a good game, there is just too much that bugs me. normal writing would be "i walked home" larian writing "my promenading jaunt cultuvated in my advent betwixt dwellings implanted upon the thoroughfare" Think I'll just stick to EU4 until broken roads comes out

They made 3 or 4 tiny incisions along her abdomen. This is how I pictured it

Ukraine used ATACMS to hit an airfield apparently.

My retirement plan is the same as most people I know, die before retirement age. Local politics but we have a 3 way race for mayor. That sucks for me because now I actually have to look into the candidates instead of doing what I normally do and just vote the opposite of a super conservative neighbor. This neighbor once told me they knew the election was stolen because they've never seen anyone in a Biden hat. Wasn't the first time I'd heard that, just didn't expect it in real life. City actually has a ton of info available this year and I didn't have to do much digging.

Yes the passive debuff is really tempting. It makes me want to use Aloth and use Conc. Draining Touch instead of Blackbow Yes, I just saw this today in my current run. At SSS now; I am an SC Tornado Master Troubadour . It makes me want to go deeper into the rabbit hole I am in with using Aloth as a Terrifier. I also thought of using Keeper of the Flame for the constant -8 will debuff. Dual wielding that with a club would be -20 will quite quickly

My main save in No Man's Sky, I think is close to the end of the story questline. Which became maybe 5% more interesting as the end nears, but it's still very "arrgh." But some oddball graphic glitches are starting to occur once in a while, like falling through map/wall cracks, UI white washing away. The game has only CTD once, no other performance issues so far, no clue why it's happening. Maybe I need to clear a game cache, too much info after so many hours. Anyway I started a new chr again (3rd one). I skipped the tutorial this time, and at least the settings I used = that Anomaly station was freely available regardless. Thus, I am free of the tutorial shackle re: restarts. This save is going to ignore all the story, base, settlement etc. quests like the plague and only focus on galaxy and planet exploration. I find what I find when I find it, upgrade whatever when I feel like it, avoid all npc's. I enjoy NMS much much more that way. I still see, on planets, stuff I've never seen before. Not to mention learning game stuff I didn't know before, still. That's the best thing.

I guess, if a game is really good and is available on GOG after Steam/EGS, I am likely to repurchase it*. So, I assume that some players might buy the same game for different platforms (such as consoles or mobile devices) and different editions (GOTY, etc.) as well. *Also that one time when Obsidian messed up the critical path in PoEII (which is an important reminder about the control over the digital products/artworks we own and the lack of QoL features on Steam), so I repurchased it on GOG to have the access to the better version (which was the opposite of rewarding the good effort). Should've activated on GOG in the first place, though.

From that, you may not want to watch S2. Based on spoilers/ memes rather than watching, but I'd be pretty confident even just from them.

That makes you a very rare exception. Majority of players does not buy a game twice. Unless it's Skyrim, I guess. : >

Nah, I know very well how that works, I am even willing to doubledip on some games. I get the game on release and GOTY after some time, if they offer a physical edition, and the game is exceptionally good. It's my personal way, how to reward the developers for their effort. I just loathe the Paradox way of DLC production, which Relic is a big fan of Myself I do not play their games, but I like to watch the let's plays. They do not sell it on GOG, so no sell for me. The issue is that most of the games are designed solely from the financial aspect, and they are missing soul. That's why I lately rather play indie games, even if they are flawed, because you can feel the very souls of the team put into some of them. Unlike the Triple A's

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67135163 More information about this successful attack

Steve taking the piss. tl;dw: It's for all intents and purposes the same chip as the previous gen.

I would say it is much better in terms of look and setup. The stories getting a little more mashed up to change mediums from the book to something that can be filmed for tv without a 14year contract. It's done some things I like, some things I don't like. If you approach it from a "it's not the books directly, it's another version of the story several turns of the wheel different" it works quite nicely.

Single Class Druid has the advantage of getting all spells significantly earlier. Most players seem to forget that this has a noticable impact on most encounters. And then of course you get the spells of Power Level 8 and 9 - of which Great Maestrom is the most devastating one. On top of that you get potential +3 Power Level (if you pick the Prestige passive a PL 9) which scales all your abilites up. You can do very weird but fun things with an SC Druid because of Avenging Storm. For example the Great Sword "Effort" has an enchantment named "Hemorrhaging" which applies an additional hit roll of either sicken or hobbling (iirc) to ALL crits you do (not just crits with the Great Sword itself), including spells such as Great Maelstrom or Avenging Storm (and all their procs). Those sicken/hobbling rolls are considered weapon attacks (sine they originate from the Great Sword) - and those hit rolls will proc Avenging Storm lightnings! Those lightings are considered spells - and when they crit they will again proc a sicken/hobble roll... and so on and so forth. Such a Druid is the ultimate minion wiper and it looks as if Darth Sidious is starting a blitz party again. Or you simply cast Maelstrom on everything in sight which is also sufficient most of times, hehe. At the same time almost all Druids are great healers (except Fury) and have good CC capabilities of course. Multiclass Druids have other advantages - mostly they are more interesting to play imo. Some of my favorite combos are: - Livegiver(Bear)/Goldpact: A great healer and supporter but also a good melee character because you can stack a ton of armor without any recovery which makes you very hard to take down while being a fast attacker while shifted with great damage output (Eternal Flames + Wildstrike lashed do hurt, especially with those Full Attacks and very little recovery). - Ancient(Cat)/Wizard: Sporelings shield you from enemies in the early game which is great. The Cat form provides aweseome casting speed and you will have loads of great spells to cast so you don't even need to use Bloodmage if you don't like it (but Blood Sacrifice + Druid heals is a good synergy actually). With Wall of Draining later you can keep up the spiritshift for a very long time - as well as the self buffs. This can also become a pretty tanky character. - Ancient/Helwalker: the raw DoT spells suc as Plague of Insects and Insect Swarm etc. profit a lot from bonus MIG and also bonus INT - both will add significant damage to those spells through damage per tick as well as adding more ticks. Also the Monk side ives you access to a good ACC buff (Endurng Dacne of Death) which is something the Druid sometimes struggles with (I mean accuracy). So this is a great combination for casting fewer spells but with a lot more impact. Also healing spells that work over time profit a lot from the added MIG and INT. - Shifter/Helwalker: the Boar form of the Shifter has a little quirk - the raw "wounding" DoT which the Boar Tusks deliver don't last as long (or short) as with the other subclasses' boar forms but instead the wounding DoT has the base duration of your Spiritshift(!). If you combine that with Helwalker's MIG and INT bonuses you will apply a wounding DoT effect to enemies you hit in melee that will melt almost enything quickly. If you combine that with the spell Taste of the Hunt it even bevomes pretty dangerous for most bosses. And then you have 3 otehr forms you can shift to if that one expires to finish it up... Spiritshift/Monk has a lot of good synergies anyway so it's a fun combo in the first place. --- There's a lot more Druid combos that are fun and powerful like Druid/Chanter as @mjo2138mentioned - but those above are the ones that I thought of immediately and had a fun experience with.

I'll probably watch it at some point when Amazon gives me a month free Primevideo or something. Consensus does seem to be that it was somewhat better, while repeating a lot of the same mistakes (and with an equally nonsensical final episode, which would be quite an achievement).

remember someone said biggest game developing studio have grown so big and so overvalued the only way to make easy money is to sell studio to eachother

Considering how lame shotguns are in CoD, I'm surprised if it doesn't reflect negatively on shotgun sales! Well yes, pretty much this. Also, keep in mind that you will never sell as much DLC as you made in game sales. Can't remember the stats right now, but I think if 30% of your players who bought the game are also buying your DLC, then that's a good number already. It gets worse the longer a games playtime is. Probably one of the reasons why CDPR rather works on a new Cyberpunk game than another DLC for CP2077 -- a new game release will bring them a crapton of more sales than another DLC.

Mauritius is an amazing country and definitely worth retiring to if you can It has friendly people,beautiful beaches and its very well managed and governed . Its got lots of outdoor activities but its a small island. It doesnt have the busyness of a large city but I dont think that will concern you. It does have all the shops and restaurants you will need Its also a nice cultural mix of French, Chinese, Indian and the local peoples culture But very nice place to live

Don't think I'd ever even heard of the Venture Bros. before today, and now I've come across it twice in different places. Odd. Edit: I decided to watch two episodes, worst show I've ever seen, but probably not worse than all the ones I haven't.

Hello. Ah yes I want to also try out Thundercat in my next build! So for your questions 1) Druid is really versatile and I don't think you can go wrong. I chose SC Druid w/ Ancient. I would recommend playing a class SC the first time around to really know what the class is capeable of, and then decide which multiclass is suits your goals. The other thing you can do is pick up Tekehu, a companion who is ca be a SC Druid. He, however, is a unique subclass that cannot use fire spells, so you will be missing out of a few of my favorite Druid Buffs, such as Form of the Delegman. 2) The Lightening storm spells are nowhere near as powerful as they were in POE 1, but they are a worth casting in a battle. I usually pick up the healing spells along the way, Insect Swarm, Embrace the Earth's Talon, Weather the Storm (+5 element AR is huge), Entropy (I like it for boss fights), and of course at Powerlevel 9, Greater Maelstrom, which is incredible. For a lot of the spells I mentioned, you will need to debuff Fortitide quite a bit, which tends to be high for most mobs in Deadfire as I recall. However, you will have other tools at your disposal to debuff Fortitude. Actually, Spreading Plague at PL 3 is a good one to begin with before casting the other ones. 3) As for sygnergies, there is a post on the forums now about building a chanter/druid to interrupt enemies. I would check that one out (it is on page 1) sorry I am lazy to go b

mauritius? am having a rough understanding that modern pirates is not much like those we learned about from gilbert & sullivan, but that shouldn't prevent @Gorth from living out his secret pirate king fantasy and retiring to mauritius. HA! Good Fun!

given the kinda funds involved, the numbers always go up as long as you take a long enough view. over the course o' a worker's career, assuming +40 years, you got what amounts to a guarantee o' substantial growth... unless the apocalypse happens and then none o' your investment plans matters anyways, right? however, there is gonna be peaks and valleys, and a person retiring can't necessarily wait five years to recover from a major cratering which impacts even the most diversified portfolio and occurs at just the wrong time for a person who don't have time enough remaining to take a long view. HA! Good Fun!

I just think gamers forget that from a financial standpoint, companies don't care that you play a game for years, unless they can sell you DLC. On the contrary, playing the same game for years means you the gamer may be out of the customer pool, not caring to spend money on new games.

Forgotten Anne. An adventure game with platforming elements. Reached the mid-game plot twist that was visible from the prologue. The controls are horrible and hard-coded, which together with timed platforming sequences leads to a rather frustrating experience. One of the puzzles didn't seem to work with V-Sync on (the MC didn't pull the lever fast enough), which was somehow odd and more frustrating (stopped at this point for now). Otherwise, the story is nice and the sound/visual design are lovely. The cut-scenes are not skippable, though, which somehow discourages replaying and checking how much different choices affect anything.

Well, Alecta that handles my employers pension fund invested in Silicon Valley Bank, so they lost 600 million dollars. Soooo that money is gone. Unless I misremember things they ditched Swedish Handelsbanken and some other bank for SVB just a couple of months prior. Edit; I misremembered, 600 million is just what they lost from SVB investments, they also lost an additional 1.4 billion on other bank investments that they made. They have mange over 100 billion dollars though, so it's "marginal" according to them.

The final demo I've played during this installment of Demorama, Hollow Cocoon. It's that time of year, so I had to play at least one spoopy game. The demo is quite short, so I didn't need to use them, but there are closets to hide in, so it's likely one of those games where you are collecting items to help you progress while trying to stay out of sight of the monster. Said monster: That's where the demo ended.

Really, CDPR? Really?

Yeah, healing (or more specifically, healing spells) is a trap. Both in BG3, and as I understand it, more broadly in 5E as well. Plenty of alternate sources of healing anyway, consider the following factors: - The plentiful amount of healing potions, the plentiful amount of gold you get to buy more, and the ability to make more with alchemy - Drinking them being a bonus action in BG3, unlike in PnP - The ability to throw them to (AoE) heal others as an action - The ability for any class to use any and all scrolls to cover any missing cleric utility - The lack of any limit to the number of magic items you can equip to grant extra healing or utility spells, plus raw power to increase your survivability in general - Functionally unlimited long rests, and consequentially, short rests - The ability to resurrect at camp in exchange for some loose change you found between the sofa cushions - The ability to respec literally anyone into a more support-oriented class if you insist on having one anyway - Up to two canonical druids or one canonical paladin as party members if you refuse to respec anyone - The (admittedly tedious) ability to temporarily switch in companions not currently in your active party to use their spells, including the hirelings. You don't lose buffs if you dismiss them from the party. So yeah, with all that in mind, it's easily better for the action economy to set up your party to just kill faster, be that with the cleric (many domains are pretty good at killing, just not Shadowheart's default Trickery) or with whichever class you take instead. EDIT: I mean, I initially started writing these items as just one sentence, but ended up having to reformat it as a list, that's how many ways there are to cover for the lack of a cleric.

British film Peeping Tom (1960). I watched this on a total whim while knowing virtually nothing about it going in, as I'd only taken a quick look at the poster, and to be honest, it's not a particularly remarkable one. So all I expected was a very tame 'thriller' that'd be able to put my insomniac brain to sleep, and for the first ten minutes, that's more or less what I thought I was getting. It was not what I got. Great film that accomplished the exact opposite of what I wanted it to, but I can't really complain about that. It's kind of wild that this came out the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho, though it was across the pond in a film industry that was in a bit of a different place compared to Hollywood.

You know, I don't ever remember wanting to kill any children in BG1 and BG2, where you actually can, but all of these games where you can't, there's always at least one that I definitely did. Kind of feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation: did they give children immortality because they realized their child characters were so annoying that they needed immortality to make sure that players weren't heartlessly slaughtering children en masse, or did they oh so smugly develop all these annoying child characters with the foreknowledge that there's absolutely nothing that the player can do about them? Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea for developers to remember that players will want to mutilate and butcher children if they're too annoying, incentivizing those developers to write them appropriately with that firmly in mind.

Health issues on the homefront, wife has to get her gallbladder removed tomorrow morning. Not really that crazy except that yesterday, when we got the news, was my late mom's birthday. She died of pancreatic cancer 6 months after first being misdiagnosed with gallbladder issues. Not the same at all but because of the day that's where my mind was at. It was a something

and today it is almost always a doe outside our office, but in early autumn the bucks monopolize the spot. HA! Good Fun!

Hm. I will ponder on this. Shohreh Aghdashloo will reportedly play Elaida in The Wheel of Time (winteriscoming.net)

? I don't know how it's implemented internally, but the enemies get a hostile effect named "Hunter of Hunters" and their defenses get lowered directly in the tooltip. Maybe it's just UI - but if you check the log there is no hint that you get an accuracy bonus. The enemies' defenses show the malus: (ignore Razor's Edge, it's a consoled multi-multiclass ) Since everybody profits from that debuff I think this is the only implementations that makes sense. The other way round (accuracy for everybody who attacks that enemy) would be unnecessarily complicated, wouldn't it? Like Cap of the Laughingstock's aura this just seems to be a direct, auto-applied debuff? But yeah, Ngati's Tusk is very nice, especially Hunter of Hunters. Also you can get pretty high survival values with items and Galawain's boon and such. By the way the Cap's deflection debuff and the one from the Pike modal do stack which is nice for a Berserker/Skald with Brute Force who can just attack the lower defense (Fortitude or Deflection - and both get debuffed).

An hour ago I turned on D4's patching to get into the new season, as Blizzard made many quality of life changes and I wanted to check it out. However, well, it seems that Blizzard transported me back in time almost thirty years. Good grief.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-gun-giant-remington-used-call-of-duty-to-promote-weapons-to-younger-players

Demomania continues with Star Ocean: The Second Story R. This is a remake of Star Ocean 2 and the second game in this latest batch of Next Fest demos that has me scratching my head at a bizarre design decision. If it isn't already obvious, they decided to marry 16-bit era sprites with fully rendered modern-ish 3d modeled environments. Why would you do this? The environments are fine and the sprites are great, but they clash. Why not just stick with one art style? Beyond that, this seems like your typical JRPG. It's been forever since I've played a Star Ocean game so I don't know how much the battle system has changed from the original, but it plays very much like a traditional JRPG with a real-time combat system.