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At OBS ending the first day of this annual visit. Got to see some of the new digs (aka renos) and hearing about some of those geeky things that make OBS such an amazing set of storytellers ... In the meantime, a few collages of some of the wall art for your geeky goodness ...

Indeed. I suppose that one thing that follows from this is that Russia will never attack either China or India, through sheer force of numbers.

@xzar_monty we were discussing some articles about the sustainability of the attrition warfare for the the manpower of both countries, and Yesterday Girkin has posted his view, and what is happening last few monts. And he also stated, that UA has currently manpower advantage. And expects some breakthrough soon, as RU is getting exhausted more and more due to the illogical RU offensives. He praises UA for their ability to hammer the RU deep behind their lines. Most of his predictions were spot on, despite I consider his as to big of a doomsayer. So it would be interesting to see how his predictions will fare this time… https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/11/7/7427549/

I definitely consider it an RPG - you create a character, with stats and skills, and all interactions are character driven. Most importantly it revolves around roleplaying - who your memory wiped detective is is a central part of the game. It is light on systems, and doesn't have combat, but what makes RPG an RPG - it has it in spades.

You shouldn't need booze to get HARDCORE TO THE MEGA.

Wherever we hear from Yahtzee again, it needs to be a place where he can swear like a sailor with no fear of demonization, repercussions, etc.

Yeah. The second one pretty much picks up where the first one left off... not a direct continuation, but you get it indirectly as things referenced and happening in the background, enabling you to work out what happened to some of the main characters of the first game. No small feat considering Obsidian didn't get to play the first game until development of the second game was already somewhat progressed.

I have both games and I've played both games through a few times. The second one more so, especially after a few restored content mods (for me a must). The first one has less bugs, but the story is... not good (imho) and the characters feels paper thin so to speak (very 2 dimensional). Biggest crime for me was an encounter which they repeated in Mass Effect 3... you beat the living snot out of the boss and use his face to wipe your boot soles clean, after which the game designer decided "oh, thanks for winning, but you have now lost". And then proceeds as if you lost the fight. Pissed me off no end in both games. The second one has a horrible first map, which I struggled to get through the second and subsequent times (it's a mystery/whodunnit kind of thing and after knowing the background it becomes a grind to do again when the mystery is no more). Apart from the first map, the story is way more up my alley and it has some rather memorable (if criminally underused) Sith Lords and protagonists. Just listen to @Gromnir waxing lyrical about Kreia I hope somebody some day do a if not a remake, then a spiritual successor to the second game (the swtor mmo sort of continued the first game) Edit: About the mods, it feels like almost a third of the game ended up in the cutting room, because of some extreme deadline requirements, like a year or less. The bugs are many and the wtf? moments too, when you feel something is missing (not kidding, it's obvious in several situations, more was supposed to happen).

Exhaustion, defined in the physical-medical sense, may well set in. But what I find interesting (and what has been written about in our press and commented upon by Zaluznyi and others) is that apparently Russia really doesn't care about its own losses of personnel. This is really quite something, and this war has really hammered it home for me, among others.

Serpent in the Staglands. Had a large pack of wolves appear upon loading a quick save (within their aggro range). The party quickly, but safely, retreated to the nearest settlement. So, the only things of note in that forest were a cave with at least 3 levels (I got somehow bored by reaching lvl 2 and fighting the same randomly placed foes) and the talking bandits who attacked after a short dialogue (I assume, I didn't have the right skills). Somehow disappointed by the lack of area maps. Shadow Tactics. Reached Kage-sama's camp and slowly cutting the way to the boss.

There is punctuation in the announcement that he has no rights to zero punctuation. Makes sense.

Son has been on 80s rap this week. He still likes synth pop but he also likes Kool Moe Dee videos a lot apparently.

Russian Warship Seen Badly Damaged By Ukrainian Cruise Missile (thedrive.com)

The gang have already set up their YouTube channel in preparation for tomorrow's announcement, so likely not.

Probably the closest Israel came to a real peace agreement (the Oslo Accords). Both Rabin and Arafat had come to the conclusion, that continuing the conflict would make nobody other than the respective populist factions on each side happy. Conflict and fear is the bread and butter of populist leaders, they need an abundance of it in order to gain power. Creating it, if it isn't there and encouraging it at every opportunity. I do not doubt for a moment, that peace rearing it's ugly head led somebody to motivate a man with an UZI to kill Rabin "for the cause".

They are playable. The system is based on D&D (3?). Can't remember much else. The MMO SW continues the story with the default ("canon") choices.

The Finnish president Urho Kekkonen said sometime in the 1960s that the cause of the conflict is the human race via the UN, meaning that the project was seriously flawed from the start "but now it's there and we have to learn to live with it". We haven't, as of yet.

I don't condone wholesale slaughter, BUT

Part of the problem is people see groups like Hamas as the cause of the conflict, rather than a symptom of a much longer lasting conflict that has been going on for 6+ decades.

One major problem here, and one major difference compared to the Ukraine conflict, is that Israel has been pursuing an extremely bad policy for quite a long while already, and its very recent developments (say, past two years or so) have been downright shocking, from the point of view of things like democracy and human rights. I mean, Israel has been looking like an Apartheid country with extremely harsh and punitive attitudes towards certain parties close to it. So, to answer your question: Israel's strategy should have been much better a long time ago, already. I'm also somewhat confused by how Israeli intelligence managed to make such a blunder as to allow the attack to happen in the first place. I mean, clearly that is a major failure. As for the specifics of its response to the attack, I don't think there's any question that it's not necessary for Israel to deliberately target civilians and deliberately murder children.

Here is the video of three missiles at final approach to the target.

Classic Finnish recipe for sounding Danish: put a hot potato in your mouth and speak Swedish. (Probably not the first time you hear the joke.)

Technically, it was the just done Sunday. "Remember, Remember, the 5th of November..."

The Companion AI is frustrating and problematic in FO1, its much better in FO2 because you can trade with them and decide there combat strategy I use to laugh in FO1 when my companions use to go off script in combat and attack illogically, none of them survived by the end Oh and in FO2 raise the Outdoor skill because the random encounters become very annoying and slow down your travels

Is Guy Fawkes day coming up soon?

There is a kind of perverse irony in Israel stealing all the thunder, the attention (and ammunition), giving Russia a big helping hand. Not knowing any better, you would think Putin instigated this new conflict as part of some big, cunning plan... which of course it isn't, we're talking about a guy who screwed up a simple invasion despite an initial advantage on every metric that mattered at the time...

Maybe a little niche but...

"Drop the Base..."

I randomly read the first book this summer. The aes sedai lady (can't remember any names of any characters (goes to show how much I enjoyed it)) explains to the young women that basically the whole village healer / midwife role helped the old healer before them control her magic, and guide them to control theirs in turn. I guess quite a few female wilders would fall into similar roles in other villages - becoming the wise-woman without anyone, not even themselves, realizing that this role and all that comes with it, provides the structure they need.

Keys are the key to success Ok, they are only part of the recipe for living happily ever after. Don't throw the predictions out of whack by ruining the statistics (used for the optimized pre-fetch routines internally) and if you have at your disposal, set up some data cubes that gets updated with key information over time, rather than all 1 billion on that day you want to leave early Assuming a fair sized client, they would have their stuff in a SAN. Are the data files, log files, tembdb etc. each on their own RAID10's ???

The Talos Principle 2 is ****ing awesome, it just continues to impress. I'm fairly far into the game now. Big ol' goose egg in golden gate puzzles, but that's because I haven't managed to open any golden gates yet. I've played enough of the game to say that unless something goes horribly horribly wrong in the second half of the game, this is a STRONG GotY contender. It's been 16 hours and 23 minutes of awesome and zero hours and zero minutes of less than awesome. It's a puzzle game, so it's not going to appeal to everybody, but as a gateway puzzle game it might work fairly well because the puzzles are really well done and the game is so fantastic looking folks could appreciate it just as a walking simulator. Seriously, they took all the graphics and they crammed them all in here. Well, Croteam did cut some corners, there's no deformation, meaning that when you walk through water you don't make waves and when walking on sand or in snow you don't leave footprints. It's just snow painted solid ground; really really nicely painted, but painted nonetheless. I'm not going to complain about it when the game looks this good (the UE5 games are finally here), but I had to point it out to be fair. There are so many different environments and they're all so big and ridiculously detailed. I mean, they reused trees and some small rock outcroppings and stuff like that, but all these environments are meticulously arranged. The puzzles are equally meticulously designed. I haven't found one I could cheese yet. In the first game, I'm pretty sure I did at least 2 or 3 puzzles not how they were intended to be solved, out of well over 100 puzzles that's not bad; zero so far in TTP2. I've encountered a few puzzles with decent challenge, a few that stumped me for 15 or 20 minutes, one that I slept on and solved the next day (I felt like an idiot because it was so obvious), and there's one Sphinx puzzle I haven't figured out yet. There are various types of puzzles. There are regular puzzles, these are walled off and self-contained. You are provided a set of tools with which to get to the podium at the end. The tools stay within the puzzle's arena, nothing goes in or out, only you can pass through the gate, nothing you are carrying. There are what I call delta puzzles because they have a delta/triangle symbol (I'm sure they have a name, I just never moused over the symbol, I guess?), these are just like regular puzzles, but they are not numbered and signs don't point to them, you need to find them with no guidance. Then there are 3 types of star puzzles: Prometheus, Pandora, and Sphinx. These can be anywhere, they are not walled off in their own rooms, they're just somewhere on the map. Prometheus puzzles are less puzzles and more scavenger hunts. You find his spark and you follow it back to him. It's really just finding the spark, following it is fairly trivial. Pandora puzzles are a receptacle you need to power somehow. Sphinx puzzles, fittingly, are the most riddle like. On the Sphinx monument will be a clue of some sort. It could be numbers, letters, a drawing. You need to figure out what the clue means then use said clue to find something. No clue what golden gate puzzles are like, on account of not having opened a golden gate yet. I can't imagine the amount of work that went into this. How big of a studio is Croteam?

Disco Elysium is designed to be played with a strong drink in hand. You are doing it wrong if you played it any other way. It's like you guys aren't serious about RPG's here.

One stupid thing I did early on, was take Alex (I think that's his name) to the scorpion cave. Then when I didn't need his help I told him we should part ways.... I kinda figured he'd return to his house in shady sands... now he's in that cave, and as far as I know I can't reenter that cave. So he's as good as dead me thinks

I like the companions in wasteland 3 a lot. I just would prefer to have a main character instead of starting with 2 that you can switch out and replace. It's almost more like I'm a general giving direction than actually a part of the crew. Maybe I'm just not talking to the right people, but it feels like there aren't a lot if quests. Do I rely on random encounters to level up?

In terms of gameplay I think that Disco Elysium is fine. It's a good move for a game this narrative focused to make the talking and all that the gameplay instead of slapping on some mediocre at best combat between chapters of text, like both of the Torment games, but the downside is that if you aren't hooked by the detective work or aren't very interested in the world you're going to check out. "You can now read the recipe for the Emperor's favourite soup." Finally.

Well… There’s never enough stuff to not **** up, if you are getting to desperate and your only chance for “decisive” victory is Trump in the office

RIP Zero punctuation

I have a landline and its a rotary phone to boot.