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We bought a house. Well, a townhome, but it's pretty nice. We have been renting for about 15 years, so it is a big deal. We just cleared to close, so sometime next week we will get the keys and start moving.

Just heard the news that Christian Pilnacek died. Not that any of you need to have heard of him, he was a high ranking public official and legal practitioner attached to the Ausrian Ministry of Justice. A couple of years back he was suspended in the wake of leaked messages between high ranking ÖVP party officials that made it abundantly clear that he abused his position to stop unwanted investigations, help the "right" being promoted while keeping the "wrong" people out of positions of power (right and wrong determined by party affiliation, of course), and help to prepare party officials under investigation on how to conduct themselves during interrogation and raids they should not have been aware of before they happened. One of those people, our former Minister of Finance, just happened to send his wife on a walk with their newborn baby when a raid happened. Curiously enough, his wife took his notebook computer for a stroll, because clearly, who does not take their mobile computer with them while strolling through the city with a newborn? Sure, the notebook was brought back eventually, by someone else. Seems legit, really. Certainly nothing untoward happened there. Needless to say, the raid did not turn up anyhting useful. He is on record stating that an investigation into potential (read "potential" as "confirmed" in any but the legal sense) kickbacks surrounding our 2002 acquisition of 24 (reduced to 18) Typhoon fighters must be "daschlogn" (colloqual Austrian for death trough blunt force, often also used when killing insects with swatters), because said investigation would have implicated his party friends. Or, as our former chancellor liked to call his party friends: the family. Prior to his suspension the section of the ministery he worked at was split into two sections, reducing his influence, making him solely responsible for legislation. A little while later he sent a text to the govenor of Styria (who, as you have probably guessed by now, is also an ÖVP party member), suggesting that his wife's applicaiton as President of the Higher Regional Court of Graz would be a decent way to make good on the "humiliation" his family suffered. Looks like he was caught driving drunk on the wrong side of the motorway yesterday evening. Police stopped him, he lost his driving license, was picked up by someone else and then by all accounts committed suicide. De mortuis nil nisi bene, I suppose, but that's a bit hard in this case. Good riddance. Burn in hell, bastard.

With Early Access my problem is, that by the time you finally have a finished product, I am burned out on the game. A bit like Age of Wonders 4 at release...

He's got a type, that's for sure. Part of it is the world design being fundamentally different from ours with women having a lot more intrinsic power and men with that power being Dangerous. Same thing said about the Ashaman later: it's hard to tell people they have the power to shake the world yet they should also walk and talk softly. And yeah, it's kind of telling that the women people tend to like in Jordan's writing are those that don't have/ don't want power- like Min. Or at least don't want the power for the sake of it, like Nynaeve. Or are willing to give it up for The Greater Good (the greater good) like a certain Brown, or Moiraine who is both the latter. The ones people tend to dislike are exactly those who'd be obnoxious in the real world too- Elaida, Cadsuane, Egwene, Elayne. The hyper ambitious prodigy upset someone's better than her generational talent and willing to squash anything for her ambition (Eg); the princess of the people who is 'down with the poors' and actually massively out of touch and spends books getting 'her people' killed utterly pointlessly because she thinks she's invulnerable, and worse, had a chapter spent on her bath (El); the plethora of Aes Sedai who are so impressed by their title that they expect reality to morph itself around them (would be quicker to list the exceptions); Faile, who's... Faile. I'd like to use the 'Justice' Red Dwarf line and say that's her crime but also her punishment but... she's Faile, so she's everyone else's punishment. Most of them are well written though, within the limits of Jordan's writing. Elayne is deeply annoying and one of the worst for overinflated plots (which is Jordan's main problem, imo), but the character annoyance at least is mostly because she's exactly what you'd expect from someone who is massively privileged and thinks she's progressive. The classic example is not her constantly swallowing her veil in Tanchico because she has her nose in the air or being chased because her 'perfect' poor person curtsy came across as sarcastic but her thinking her mother was universally loved as Queen and everything was Gaebril's fault. Well no, we see Caemlyn in book 1, and Morgase is not popular, even then, it's specifically said multiple times that white heavily outnumbered red. If she were real world she'd be doing things like going to 'Feed Africa' rallies in her designer clothes and jewelry and wondering why people were rolling their eyes, after all she'd posted dozens of time to #StopKony2012 what more could people expect?

Yeah it was utterly surreal listening to Russia's ambassador at the Security Council a few days ago debating the resolution the US vetoed. With a straight face he went on and on about how it is so very important to ensure that civilians are not harmed in Gaza and how "everything" must be done to protect them. And then Lavrov repeated those same talking points. My real frustration, though, is that neither the press nor Western government leaders are jumping on this and publicly calling out the Russians for their rank hypocricy. Western governments are so atrocious with handling global PR.

Watching more Russian dubs of Star Wars films, as I have the lines near memorized it's great practice

You should get the Instruments of Death, Her Revenge... and Their Companion... and let buffing to more specialized classes. "Each Kill..." doesn't stack with other might inspirations, at least for me...

Faile, Berelain, Elayne, Egwene, Aviendha, well basically 90% of Jordan females are all equally insufferable. Nynaeve isn't that bad. Min is the only female who's likable. And maybe... Verin too? lmao

Looks like Israel has enough of Lavrov being lovey-dovey with HAMAS leaders

I think people buried the lede concerning the Microsoft acquisition of Activision. Call of Doody and Diablo are all fine and well, but Activision owns the Arcanum IP, which is to say that Microsoft now owns the Arcanum IP. Forget about everything else, Arcanum 2 is now possible. This needs to happen. WE HAVE TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

Hmm. Watched WoT S2E1 and it was OK. Non spoiler tldr: too many threads as people are in too many places but mostly made sense and introduced a bunch of actually recognisable book characters pretty well. Note: for the spoilers I'll be ignoring any prior knowledge I have of S2, but not prior book knowledge Also: good news! Nynaeve is no longer an assassin/ cleric multiclass.

I mean he was no Ivo Andric but his writing was ok for the genre. (Who would you say is a good fantasy writer? I'm curious.) The characters were a feminist's fever dream, but I still found them enjoyable.

*snort* and we thought Gromnir were old. hoon is so stuck in 20th century thinking. never read a cyberpunk novel? multinationals is not near concerned with the old power politics models as they is with the bottom line. when the inevitable amazon-berkshire hathaway-johnson & johnson and microsoft-disney mergers final and inevitable occur... HA! Good Fun!

. . . Well, actually, okay, if you start at the absolute bottom like you do with Book!Elayne, it does make sense that there's practically infinite room for improvement and you can really only improve the character - heck, even a small improvement can honestly go a long ways. Like, just don't have her be a total dip**** literally one hundred percent of the time, and you've already massively improved her character from the book version. I went back and forth with Egwene as the series went on, but yes, Faile is the worst, Berelain is the worst, Aviendha is the worst...however, Elayne is the worst of the worst. There is something about her that makes my brain short circuit to the point where I eventually just started skipping her chapters wholesale. Even Nynaeve with Jordan writing about her braid tugging approximately every nanosecond didn't make me that mad. Robert Jordan was a literature terrorist for a number of reasons, but especially because of his female characters: never before and never again will there ever be such a sorry lot of 'strong' female characters so worthy of summary executions. It's a marvel that I made it all the way through the series and even mostly enjoyed it with his atrocious writing and characters: sometimes, you still enjoy something in spite of just about everything being wrong with it.

Time to merge this thread with the Gaza thread

It's not about the Middle East Western countries will nuke the world rather than allow the so-called "****hole" countries to overtake them.

No, the damaging enchantment puts a "damage-over-time" status effect on every hostile creature in the area of effect. It's an auto-hit, it doesn't make attacks rolls so it is not able to critically hit. It just slowly "ticks" away the health of all hostile creatures in the AoE. You can add items that do seperate hit rolls - for example the Great Sword "Effort" with its enchantment "Hemorrhaging". It adds a hit roll of either sicken or hobble to ALL other critical attack rolls you do (including spells, chants, you name it). And the sicken/hobble effect counts as weapon attack roll, so it can trigger other items' hit rolls, mainly Hylea's Talons DoT attack and the Ring of Clenched Muscle affliction - which can also crit. In other words: you deliver "invisible" weapon attack rolls (which don't do damage but apply sicken or hobble) with your chant- and invocation crits basically. This can lead to an excessive amount of hit rolls on all enemies in the chant AoE which raises the cance for multiple crits+interrupts a lot obviously. This can be useful for an offensive Herald. But of course a Great Sword means less sturdyness than a shield.

Clever approach to market Ukraine aid as an indirect stimulus for the US economy, heh. Rest of the speech was eh. I was puzzled at people praising it, but remembered a lot are just Slava Ukraini types, hah. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/transcript-biden-speech-israel-ukraine.html

Awesome! Congratulations!

I forgot: For a support/tank apporoach the resistance chants can be very good, too. They "only" provide resistance instead of immunity - but how the system works they kind of "eat" away afflictions completely. Especially if you use Brisk Recitation. Example: if you have a paralyzed party member and sing the chant "Seven Men, Onto the Deck They Went" the paralyze will get downgraded to immobilized. But once the chant hits again (eiter 6 seconds after of 3 secs after with Brisk Recitation) the immobilized invocation again gets downgraded to hobbled. Then again to nothing if the chant hits again. Since those three chants each provide resistance against 2 attribute afflictions (DEX+MIG, INT+PER and RES+CON) you can make your party quasi-immune to all afflictions by repeating the fitting phrase. Which is not flashy - but can be very useful against enemies who makes heavy use of afflictions.

Regarding "tricks": an offensively minded Herald (Troubadour) can use Ring of Focused Flame + Dragon Thrashed + Brisk Recitation in combination with Their Champion (Energized) to get +10 ACC for the chant which raises the chance for crits (in addition to the damage the chant does) - which in turn leads to AoE interrupts via chanting. Sacred Immolation also will interrupt via crit when combined with Energized and will also get +10 ACC. Ring of Focused Flame is an early item used by many Paladins - so if one uses that already this "trick" can be an additional way to let it improve your actions. Potential AoE interrupts every few secs can be very impactful on the battlefield, especially when you face multiple enemies who use dangerous abilities (mostly casters of all sorts). Such a Herald can slowly "melt" and disturb enemy groups just by standing around. Add Brand Enemy to the arsenal and later get the Blackened Plate (which can have a life draining aura) and add the interrupts and this can be effective and fun to play imo. Brand Enemy is fast and has no recovery - it is also cheap. So you can apply it to al lot of enemies at the start of battle quickly (it's an auto-hit, too). All those little ticks of damage add up quickly. If you meet fire-immune enemies you have to do something else though (e.g. switch to Soft Winds of Death). However, the invocations Kaylon mentioned, especially Instruments of Death, are usually the more effective approach. Summons are among the best tools any character can use, and Intruments of Death are very good summons on top. The question which route (defensive vs. offensive) is more fun to play has to be answered individually. I personally find puppeteering summons a bit boring - but there is no doubt they are very useful and other players might enjoy steering them around. There's also the chant "Many Lives Pass By" which is very good at summoning skeletons every 6 seconds (or every 3 with Brisk Recitation) which cannot be controlled by the player but run on AI. That's a type of summon that doesn't require any maintenance but is still great at diverting enemies or good as "sacrifice" for special tricks that require allies to go down (for example: if you have a Single Class Paladin in the party those skeletons can trigger Divine Retribution, giving the Paladin +2 Zeal each time a skeleton dies - and they die very quickly - another example is that a Berserker (confused bc. of Frenzy) might kill skeletons with his friendly-fire Carnage - which will trigger his Bloodlust and Blood Thirst).

Yep. Resemblance is uncanny. These are words I never though I'd write: Elayne in the tv series is an active improvement on the books, so far, and pretty endearing. Really.

visual reference in case anyone has forgotten don't forget, or I'll have to post these again hopefully egwene immediately falcon punched her right outta the show

I already told people here, it wasn't a Russian job, it was disgruntled Danish oyster farmers from Bornholm that sabotaged that oil pipeline between Russia and Germany

Probably, they moved to Israel for the very same reason already (including “chief rabbi”, who was threathened because he was not willing to publicly support the war). As Russia is the country with the biggest number of neonazis in population in the World

I don't know how many Jews still live in Russia (assuming they haven't all migrated to Israel yet), but I expect their lives just got more complicated by an order of magnitude. Like open hunting season being announced?

am agreeing, but am gonna note we might not be the best judge o' such things. for instance, we heard a good way to keep a dog from engaging in destructive digging is to lay down cayenne pepper where you is trying to discourage your canine's unwanted behaviors. sounded like a good idea, so we sprinkled/poured a fair amount o' cayenne on a patch o' landscaping. *sigh* the pepper attracted all our dogs, and not just the digger. am frequent giving the pups table scraps which is featuring capsaicin-heavy ingredients, so am guessing the dogs ordinary olfactory reactions had been overwritten a bit with a counter-intuitive pavlovian response to the hot stuff. ... in retrospect, we shoulda' seen that coming. HA! Good Fun!

killers of the flower moon is released on the 20th. our understanding is that scorsese original had a faithful adaption o' the book for his script but then he met with osage tribe representatives and afterwards made considerable changes. is that good or bad? dunno. recent deceased robbie robertson wrote the music for the film. HA! Good Fun!

WoT S2 E2/3 Well, Nynaeve has chosen her Mythic Path now as well. I bet no one would have gone for Lich... TLDR/ non spoilers: not bad. I'd be struggling to say it's good, but at the same time if the whole thing was this quality there would be a lot fewer complaints. Not much outright praise, but a lot fewer complaints. The main issue is with them generating conflicts 'artificially' to get emotive scenes. And aspects of the visual design.

I've actually started to take the train with my bike, which cuts it down to 10 miles each way, so that's been great. I am moving further down the tracks, but it won't change my commute time by much.

hopefully you are still close enough to work to commute by bike. HA! Good Fun!

This is my son's favorite song.. this week Don't worry, he's never seen the video

Congratulations!!!!

US Navy destroyer in Red Sea shoots down cruise missiles fired by Houthis in Yemen: Pentagon - ABC News

Trump attorney Sidney Powell pleads guilty in Georgia election subversion case “This is a really big breakthrough for the prosecutors,” CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said on “News Central.” “And it’s so important to understand there is no such thing as halfway cooperation. If you’re a prosecutor, you would not enter into this deal with Sidney Powell unless you had been thoroughly convinced that A, she is telling the truth, B. she is going to be able to testify for you credibly in the way that you can put in front of a jury, and justify and see she is not going to be splitting hairs,” added Honig, a former federal prosecutor. am tending to think this news is not the big breakthrough being suggested, but am offering nothing save conjecture based on trump campaign treatment o' powell. keep in mind that trump called powell crazy and worse on more than one occasion. the fact sidney were advancing unsupported conspiracy theories were helpful for trump, but am not sure she were part o' the inner circle o' accused insurrectionists. the lawyers who put trump in obvious and considerable jeopardy are jeffery clark, kenneth chesebro (sp?), john eastman and rudy giuliani. am just not sure how much info was entrusted to powell, though clear she did have interactions with rudy, so maybe that is a thread worth tugging? maybe. this is how rico cases ordinary unravel for defendants-- one nogoodnik at a time. even so, am not expecting sidney to be pivotal as a prosecution witness and am uncertain if her plea will be isolated or if it inspires other defendants to reach out to fani willis. edit: 'cause the internet allows for misunderstandings, am gonna state what we ordinarily wouldn't think needs be stated: we do not believe sidney powell deserves to be harmed and we would be appalled if somebody did attack her. the movie scream messed with our head a bit and now whenever we hear "sidney," we instant recall the "hello sidney" phone call from the first scream movie, but we couldn't find a good and short clip from the original flick. ... shouldn't make a difference, but am admitting that now that sidney will be available as prosecution witness, am even more concerned with her health and well being. shouldn't make a difference. HA! Good Fun!

late reply, but just wanted to chime in on some other thoughts - 1. by itself, druid is pretty jack of all trades. that means that w/ multicalss you can angle it pretty effectively towards either a martial or caster bent, but there are occasionally some gotchas (for example, devoted + spiritshift is a trap, monk + spiritshift can be awkward b.c. spiritshift claws don't count as unarmed). 2. there's some great cheese opportunities (esp w/ single-class druid thanks to avenging storm, as boeroer mentions, but also pollen patch), if you're into that. 3. requires a bit of metagame knowledge, but druid has some good item-based interactions that can sometimes be a focus for builds. i actually had a martial-oriented wizard/druid centered on the second-tier flaming sword spell, strange as that might sound in that summary. it's because ring of focused flame (ez to buy or steal) gives +10 acc to fire-keyworded spells (a lot of druid spells), but also the flaming sword (normally summoned weapons don't interact much with keywords). combined with the high base damage of a great sword, the dual damage nature of the sword, the lash, and near-instant-cast wizard buffs (especially deleterious alacrity of motion), was extremely effective. other items incl helm of hte white wind (+10 acc to tons of druid spells), unstable coil (several ways for druid to generate lots of tier 3 inspirations), lord darryn's voulge (huge bonus to storm-keyworded spells, which is basically just druid-only), lance of hte midwood stag (good power level bonus, if you have a plant or beasts effect, of which the druid has several ways). 4. a neat all-purpose trick is that for non-furies, spiritshift cat comes with a buff that you can use to give a huge +33% action speed bonus for a little bit. importantly, it's not just limited to cat attacks, or even cat form. so for whatever build you do, you can make yourself extremely effective by picking up cat form, and then spiritshifting into cat and activating the +33% buff. (shifters have to do a little more effort to shift out of cat form to cast spells.) it's so easily effective that i deliberately no longer do this just to change things up. boeroer has good suggestions, to add on, i recommend giving a psion/lifegiver a try if you want to be a very capable support caster. you get insane healing capability, and the psion is busy generating focus while you're protecting/healing your allies, so when you're done with that you have focus ready to dump on enemy-affecting spells. i don't know how much you care about summons, but druid summons are... eh. there's a community mod that improves the blights a bit, but nothign compares to how good a chanter can be at summons, but summons won't really be much more than a damage soak until you get to tier 7 spells and up (lashing vine, fire stag, oozes).

Fun day at work when a mission critical server is identified as compromised for some reason and blacklisted from network. Then everyone who logged in to check the issue is also blacklisted. Obviously our security team is led by Ripley

I've made some test this week, and it seems that the stats can be overridden until the companion is instantiated. For example: - Eder appears to be instantiated in a new game, so you should mod him before starting a new game. - However, all other companions (Pallegina and Maia have not been tested yet) seem to be instantiated once you start the dialogue that allows you to recruit them. It's pending to test what happens if you load a previous save with other companions (Eder is not working).

I've bought a few games twice... mostly when they were first on Steam and later became available on GOG. One thing I learned about Steam reviews is to actually *read* the negative reviews. If there is a pattern to the complaints, i.e. not just the usual this dev sucks and is greedy or overpriced stuff, but this game constantly crashes in max resolution, sound stutters constantly or this game has buggy save game feature etc. then I take that into account when I look at the price asked vs. whatever fun I expect(ed) to get out of it. Edit: ...and I stay clear of "early access" games in general (no absolutes), as my life is too short to be a paying beta tester. I'm happy to pay more for the final product instead.

Thanks, your tool looks awesome too I'll take a more in depth look at it tomorrow Maybe using the RemoveFromParty / RemoveFromPartyAndLeave scripts could reset the stats? You could try running them as console commands to test: https://eternity.obsidian.net/game-data-formats/scripts#RemoveFromParty I have a gut feeling it won't work, but it's the only thing I can come up with and is worth testing at least

That's pretty much beat for beat from the Firestorm adventure from what I recall. Granted, it's been 15 years or so since I read it, but I don't think I misremember that much. Edit; I would probably put less stock in what Alt says to be honest, she wasn't present in the flesh in that attack,

one o' our aged aunts is coming for a visit and am contractual obligated to make her wasna. the dish is... ambiguous. every family has a different recipe for wasna (which if you know what is pemican, then you kinda know wasna) and to add to the confusion, wasna also applies to any number o' derivative dishes using wasna as the key ingredient. am making a not-stew with wasna and we call it wasna. *insert eye roll* our family makes wasna by combining dried bison or deer meat, dried chokecherries and kidney fat/suet from either bison or deer... but our grandmother also used beef suet. our aunt is gonna bring the wasna so am able to make wasna (stew.) for storage and travel purposes, our family forms little round disks or cakes outta the dried meat mixture. kinda greasy and bland, but the choke cherries, which is a bit like cranberries, has an astringent bite even when dried. when cooking with wasna, we break the wasna disks into caper-sized granules there is a fair amount o' kidney fat in wasna, so am always shocked at how long the stuff remains viable. chances are high that year-old wasna is still edible. we call the wasna stew a stew 'cause is not particular wet, not soupy, but it doesn't require a long braise to release collagen, so "stew" is less than accurate. however, this is a recipe which benefits much from our powdered gelatin. the kidney fat/suet in wasna makes it seem greasy and the last thing we want is those little pools o' fat you see in the pictures o' gołąbki included 'bove. if you think it is tough to keep the fat from ground pork emulsified, am assuring you it is even more difficult with suet. also, 'cause our older aunt is all 'bout tradition, am s'posed to avoid too much o' the colonial ingredients. *groan* potatoes, wild mushrooms and onion is ok, and we sneak in a bit o' tomato paste (and maybe red wine.) we got a large quantity o' chanterelles gathered this summer, so that will be the primary mushroom. wild thyme is the main herbal, but we throw in other stuff depending on the wasna which is always a bit different. we add a bit o' salt and pepper to the rendering wasna and then the onion goes in and is cooked 'til translucent and just starting to brown. potato starch is almost always superior to corn starch as a thickener, but both corn and potato starch is fails on reheat. once the dish cools, the thickening quality o' those ingredients disappears. so, as with most stews, even faux stews, flour is the ideal addition and the amount needed depends on how much fat were rendered from the wasna. add water, and if our aunt ain't around, we will include a dollop o' better than bullion beef base. 'cause o' the choke cherries, some kinda sugar is advisable, so we include a tiny bit o' maple syrup. all the remaining veggies go in as well as herbals, as well as our gelatin and then we bring to a boil and then simmer for a mere twenty-to-thirty minutes... again, not really a stew, but is thick like a stew, so... am always surprised at how good the stew turns out 'cause wasna is not great. serious. is greasy and bland with a bit o' tang from the choke cherries. the benefit o' wasna is it is remains shelf stable w/o refrigeration for at least six months and even longer. again, am having "good" wasna which were at leas a year old. anyways, am making wasna, so our house is gonna smell like wasna for days. *sigh* well, as long as it makes our aunt happy, right? HA! Good Fun!

The permanent members are all hypocrites, though, so guess no point in doing that.

I tried my first non-tutorial brawl ever after 2.0 at level 30-35ish, and got absolutely destroyed. Granted I suck at it mechanically, but even when I got the counter timing right and landed a few punches, I would say they did about 0.25% of the opponent's HP bar per hit. I looked it up just now and welp, looks like I just happened to choose the hardest fighter of the bunch, what with my 4 body and zero relevant skills/cyberware/gear.