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What can I say, I'm a kiss-ass. We're going to Islas del Rosario tomorrow, hopefully I'll have some good pictures to share.

Guess they forgot about all the minefields and stuff.

I am kind of hoping 3rd time's the charm because I plan on playing it day one or weekend one. I mean Wrath was decent on launch.

They added romance and nudity to the second game e: PS I'm not here to kink shame.. unless your kink is specifically not being kink shamed and if that's the case then...

Been a little while, IAE2953 (Intergalactic Aerospace Expo) has come and gone, so got to mess around with lots of ships during the free fly... Alien ships: Human stuff: One of my favourites, the RSI Constellation Andromeda: One of the things that's really hard to convey is the sense of scale, some of these things are just massive:

3 days until release, 3 years until it's stable.

Rogue Trader waiting lobby.

Haven't really been gaming much outside of a lot of The Division 2 (crashiest game I've had the honour of playing in a while), and the ongoing raiding in FF XIV (finally cleared the final savage boss and got my BIS set for the first time ever. Party!). Aside from that I've been mostly poking at Star Citizen after I sorta lost interest in Elite Dangerous since it feels like it's in maintenance mode on top of being actively new-player hostile (think I've mentioned that part before, but it's been a while ) It's one of the things I really enjoy about Star Citizen, there's an out-of-MMO component (Arena Commander) where you can practice against AI (can also play with/against players without having to deal with...MMO-things), so you don't blow all your starting money on rookie mistakes, like having no idea what the flight controls are. Don't know if I mentioned it before, but I sprang for a HOSAS (dual stick) setup and it's been a game changer, really. Recently I also added face-tracking to look around during flight, which was another game-changer. Unlike what the manufacturers of stuff like the Tobii Eye Tracker would want you to believe for this purpose all you need is a halfway decent webcam where refresh rate and ability to discern things in the dark are the most important (unless you like to play in bright rooms, I guess). Personally I got a Nexigo N660P (as it supports 60fps, which is more important for tracking than resolution) which I use with OpenTrack/AITrack and it's been pretty great. Bonus is that you now also have a halfway decent webcam for...webcam things It does measurably impact CPU usage though, which I doubt is really a problem with any modern CPU, but figured it worth mentioning.

I recall having three ladies in my party, the paladin with a name that reminded me of bottled mineral water, the Eskimo dwarf, and the grieving mother.

Im 20 hours into PoE and Im loving it, Im comfortable now with the ruleset changes compared to D&D and Im starting to appreciate many of the differences Full disclosure, I decided to use a mod that lets you Camp without camping gear. I realize this goes against the philosophy of "limiting " how rest is used but its unrealistic to suggest you cant rest without camping gear or that a bedroll can be used up. So I have changed my game to make it similar to other IE games where you can rest without camping gear But Im enjoying many things about this game and they include I love the lore and the narrative, the quests are interesting and worthwhile I really enjoy the combat and different strategies you need to adopt. It can get frenetic at times but if you slow down combat speed and use pause then you can micro-manage your party nicely if you want I like the classes and their abilities, I decided to be a Godlike Priest and a follower of Wael I also enjoy features like the Bestiary which allows you to learn about monsters the more you fight them I like reading peoples souls, its a pity you cant act on what you find But so far so good, really entertaining RPG in a new world with different mechanics Oh, one negative. No Romance at all and I only seem to have men in my party...where are the chainmail bikini armour women?

ignorance is never an excuse. even so, out o' all the founding fathers, am thinking washington might be least responsible for his acceptance o' slavery, 'cause he were a rube. is one o' those things not covered often in the myth surrounding the heroes o' the revolution, but washington were probable the least educated o' the founders. some grammar school and the books he read and observed as important to him were 'bout etiquette. 18th century versions o' miss manners advice. serious. don't let southerners fool you, slavery, amongst educated men o' europe and the americas, were recognized as evil and ultimately self destructive even in 1776. yankee abolitionists were some o' the most vocal advocates o' revolution and they were the ones howling indignation at the eventual 3/5ths compromise. the founders knew slavery were wrong, but too many o' the rich and landed men who were part o' the revolution and then contributed to the Constitution depended on slavery... although is doubtful they could envision just how much more slavery would become ingrained in american economic fortunes over the next fifty years. the benign and educated southerner thought slavery as an american institution would die natural sooner as 'posed to later, but they didn't have the courage to step forward and kill the beast themselves. no excuse for thomas jefferson and others. but washington? still not a good excuse, but serious, history books do not often dwell on the disdain many o' the founders felt for the bumpkin putting on airs who would become our first President. regardless, washington weren't dumb, so he don't deserve excuses, but he were pretty darn ignorant even for a man o' his time... at least relative to the other founders. maybe that makes a difference? maybe not. am not judging but am filling in one o' those unfortunate blanks in the american myth. ... converse, the notion women deserved equal rights and were at least as mental capable as men were an extreme fringe notion even amongst the educated men who authored the Constitution in 1787. the wollstonencraft movement were seen as somewhere between laughable and dangerous by the educated founders. jeopardy worthy, mary wollstonecraft whose name became synonymous with early english/american feminism, were the mother o' mary shelly, the author o' frankenstein. HA! Good Fun!

Can't beat a good pun

Islas del Rosario:

Eventually you can invest in arcana with a SC assassin, and the shadow from Vanishing Strike can give you the assassinate bonus to a Storm of Holy Fire, or others. But, of course, it is available at the level 19 so.. Or for action economy! Most of the time I start the fights with a Pull of Eora while the party is stealthed, between them and the enemies, then i wait the spell is refreshed for my caster to break the stealth. Enemies come and are trapped, for "free".

I have Tidal and it only gives simple statistics without judging my genre variety or suggesting I should move somewhere. The only thing I was able to glean from it was that I disproportionally love soundtracks, so here's a piece from Altered Carbon (wished this lady played Takeshi Kovacs throughout all of season 2 instead of that dour humorless dude who did)

1. Most of the time the strongest way to open a fight from stealth is with a spell. If you have more than one caster, you can synchronize their timings so the spells go off at the same time. Combos like Pull of Eora+Symbol of Deity can more or less win fights by themselves. 2. Non-hostile spells do not break stealth. I usually build Xoti as a stealth priest who spams buffs from stealth. While in stealth your recovery is extremely fast, almost doubling the rate at which you cast spells. 3. Keep in mind that the AI is dumb and will not attempt to run away from hazardous AOEs. Put your Chillfog in a choke point and stand right outside it, and the enemies will fight inside it and get blinded for the entire fight. Also consider using Chillfog's blind to herd ranged enemies closer to your parties so that you can hit more targets with AoE spells.

Más fotos de Cartagena: This is the little slice of paradise we're staying at. The 360⁰ panorama is a bit choppy in parts because I was getting smacked by waves as I took it.

Yes, you'll have two instances of Missile Salvo. Pretty dope when that happens. With Vithrack Silk Slippers you could theoretically get 2 echoes (3 instances of missile salvo) from one cast. Extremely low chance and I never got this, but should be great fun when it happens. By the way @thelee: did you ever test if an Evoker/Priest of Magran (who in the non-CP-modded game gets copied wizard spells tagged with evocation) could stack the echo chance from the evoker passive and Marux Amanth for those evok-ish Priest spells? Imagine a triple echo from Evoker, Slippers and Marux Amanth at the same time, tihihi.

If the official modding tools are released, there could be something interesting - there were some good modules for NWN.

Act 3. Spoilers for Orin's quest. I approve the reasonable NPC naming - a Flaming Fist called Fist who clearly does not have quests or information. The great battle of the fireworks store. No laws of space can stop the officers of the law. Act 3. Companion quests.

The notion that the US is an oligarchy, but Trump is not a part of it is hilariously dimwitted.

F-35C With Mirror-Like Coating Photographed Aboard Carrier (thedrive.com) ADM-160 Miniature Air Launched Decoy Wreck Appears In Ukraine (thedrive.com)

First confirmed kill of an F-35.

Competition is always good.

you know i just realized after writing my last post that i do have some more directly relevant pointers here, because i actually am using ydwin as a front-line character as a pure sc cipher. some things that i've been doing with ydwin to ensure success: (not saying you have to do all these, but these are how i've been thinking about it and maybe give you your own inspiration) immediately picked up spear proficiency and spent money on fine and eventually exceptional spear for main hand, for the engagement so ydwin can actually control enemy foes. eventually i got the club that grants bonus engagement, so i've been using that instead of a spear, though eventually i'll swap back to a spear that has the enchantment to get occasionally free recovery attacks. magical spears are pretty uncommon so it's a weapon type you just have to shell out for. and it's important to shell out because you have no way to penetration-boosting modal. so you need those enchantments to boost PEN (on top of the other normal benefits of magical weapons) i started off keeping ydwin equipped with medium armor, dual-wielding. i gave her items that would boost resolve or deflection. eventually i get fleshmender (superb light armor that has bonus to AR and health regen that goes away if hit). as usual i pick up tough (early on i also use an amulet to boost health instead) i use ydwin primarily as an alchemy character, with a tiny amount of athletics. action economy is very tight for melee cipher, esp with medium armor's penalties, but alchemy lets me load up beforehand with drugs (coral snuff, deadeye, and ripple sponge are my favorites), and at the start of fights, while stealthed, i quaff a helpful potion or something (like merciless gaze or deftness). i also almost always rest with Grog for her (and i have the drunkard's regret ring which eliminates hangover effects... more relevant for me bc i'm also using rymyrgand's challenge so it's frequently a waste of money to rest multiple times just to clear hangovers). also, making lesser health potions very effective is good. a bit controversially, i picked up the soul whip upgrade that increases weapon damage, not focus gain. just to try something different. in practice there's not many focus powers i want to use, because i also picked up the two beam powers, and you can't double up on each of the beam powers anyway. party support comes from pallegina with lay on hands and my merc, whose build i'll probably post here eventually b.c. it's played out very interestingly. merc is a warden (blackjacket/druid) who has out of the fire, which i use if ydwin is getting overwhelmed. overall i think it's pretty good and last time i checked ydwin was also party damage leader. those beam spells are really good. especially if you have a neat line of enemies and you empower a beam. outputs tons of damage.

Some people wanted some feedback on the Colony Ship RPG so here it is a decent (15 hours maybe? Not sure how much I put into the indev version) way through. TLDR: basically no change from my reaction to the indev version. It's far more polished than AoD and generally looks nice and crisp. UI is fine and there are some QoL improvements too. The skills are well thought out and pretty balanced with maybe one(ish) exception and that may be classic pebkam rather than a game issue. Combat is hard but there is an easy difficulty for people who aren't masochistic think RPGs are for running around feeling awesome. I, of course, am hard as nails and tough as teak so am playing on underdog. Character development is almost entirely by skill use. You get a feat on level up, and can add implants and the like for stat boosts. Could, maybe, do with some extra tools to improve skills? Maybe. That's related to one of the complaints below. There's definitely a best way to do things (ie do all skill level 2 checks, then since you now have level 3 skill do all skill level 3 checks etc) but it's far better than AoD's saving up of LPs(?) so you can add them appropriately to pass the skill checks you want. Slightly longer positives: Jack of all trades/ generalists are a lot more feasible since you have a party (up to 4). I actually haven't found any more than 3 recruitables (or maybe you don't get offers if your party is full, doing it spoiler free so not checking) but they cover the general archetypes pretty well. The world/ ship feels good, and the game has a pretty compelling atmosphere. The backstory/ factions aren't going to win prizes but are pretty believable and consistent and the dialogue is good, with a decent amount of appropriate skills/ stats being referenced. As prior, the combat is hard, but I've only found two fights I couldn't do- and that's with a stealth and chat specialist among the 4. Just don't be afraid of using grenades etc and know when to use them (and energy weapons, where the ammo is scarce). And you can avoid combat. only major gripe is stealth. It doesn't work that well with a TB system unfortunately, and... well it kind of forces you into having an out and out specialist rather than an assassin archetype. ie you need stealth, stealing and lockpick on one character minimum, and in some case computing (so far). While you can get training in computers to boost it for someone who doesn't have it tagged some hack tools or similar might be useful. OTOH, don't think any of stealth missions have been compulsory but, can't avoid the fact that someone with all stealth feats and high skill (and a stealth gadget) still finds some missions to be impossible. As above, I may be missing something and I'd spec Faythe differently in retrospect. Dunno, from what I've seen if you want maximalist stealth you'd have to build your character on a prescribed path. Minor gripes: all the combat takes place super close together, there's no 'strategic depth'. Probably too many interrupts too, occasionally they get comical where an enemy seems to get off more shots in interrupts that they can in their main combat round. Gear/ itemisation is fairly generic. Could at times do with a more detailed quest log? Some of the maps are confusing in that it's difficult to tell where you can/ can't go, and some of the blocking is clumsy. Ironically, it's kind of like how in Mass Effect you'd suddenly start encountering waist high barriers whenever a combat encounter was coming only here it's narrowed doors and similar. Not much really, and very little of real substance. Obviously it's a game for a certain type towards the grognard end of the gaming spectrum but it's a pretty unequivocal recommendation from me, so far.

With my newly arrived WinWing F-15EX throttle handles I've been getting deep into DCS: F-15E. While the work done is quite impressive, helped by real-life former F-15E aircrew Jeff "Notso" Bright, it makes me think back to one of my favourite flight sims Jane's F-15 which modeled the same aircraft and just how close the EA Baltimore team managed to get to the real thing. Pulling up the NAVFLIR HUD and A/G RDR and A/G PACS on the MFDs, compare and contrast:

The mention of von der Leyen reminds me that Borrell- whose job it actually is to speak for the EU on such matters- deserves a mention for being far more even handed than most. Not really outright condemnation of Israel's appalling approach to civilian casualties* but certainly a recognition of how it plays to people outside the western bubble (and makes his job a lot harder as a consequence). Guterres too, though his position at least officially isn't 'western' even if he is Portugese. *if Israel were bombing Ukraine in proportion to Palestine they'd have killed ~1.8 million (! no typo) women and children over 20 months, to put it in perspective. Though that relies on Ukraine's nominal last (2001) census' ~44 million population and it may be as low as half that now. Or to compare it with the allies' strategic bombing campaign in WW2 civilians (and that's excluding any male civilians, plus of course deaths are only those reported at hospitals and not anyone buried under rubble either, hence Israel targeting them as a matter of policy. Can't count deaths if there's nowhere to count them {taps head}) are dying at between 6-12x the rate from the precise and proportionate strikes from the most moral army in the world as opposed to, well, indiscriminate area bombing deliberately targeting civilians with incendiaries and the like in thousand bomber raids.

There's no ASMR thread so here goes. Nobody talks dirty like the french.

I finished The Talos Principle 2 100%. It took me 52 hours and change. I wound up going with the Leap of Faith ending and I got all the extra scenes from completing all the optional puzzles. Fantastic game, probably my GotY, though I have to factor recency bias in and it's been a long time since I played Hogwarts Legacy. Either way, it's a terrific puzzle game. Not too many REALLY hard puzzles, but I really enjoyed some of them, particularly the puzzles in the final stretch. Puzzle games are kinda niche, we don't get a relatively big budget fancy looking one like this very often, a really great one on top of that even less often, so I had to savor this rare treat.

My fears of missing the chance of completing all the puzzles in The Talos Principle 2 were unfounded. The devs were kind enough to flat out tell me "you're about to cross the point of no return, if you have any other puzzles you'd like to solve it's now or never." I appreciate it when games give you that warning. Anyway, I'm currently doing the golden gate puzzles which are now open to me. They're structured like regular puzzles, they're just extra challenging. I've completed 6 of 12 so far and they are properly tricky.

to start the endgame. There were 2 star puzzles that gave me a lot of trouble, a Pandora puzzle and a Sphinx puzzle. The Sphinx puzzle was the trickiest because the clue can easily be misconstrued and even once you're on the right path, the image isn't exactly correct.

There's a demo available which contains the first chapter and saves carry over to the full game. Probably going to go play that myself once my eyes recover properly from laser eye surgery.

That's why inventory limits in games are bad - they limit the use of the time honoured tactic of "just use everything you hoarded throughout the game". That's how I beat the original Baldur's Gate. Used all my summoning wands and scrolls to fill the room with so many magical creatures, Sarevok couldn't move anymore, then took him out with arrows.

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?

Doing another play through of KOTOR II ...

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.

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

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.

Ok, I've put in about 200 hrs of No Man's Sky now, although I still have not finished the story line although I have progressed it farther. The TLDR would be: The game as it currently is in 2023, is a fun sandbox, but gameplay value - especially if not on a sale - is going to mostly appeal to a certain type of player. Even if you are the type of player it would appeal to, over a lengthy interval it might start to feel a bit shallow vs. some other more concise/specialized sandboxy games. Overall for sandbox genre I'd give NMS something like ... 6.5/10. Maybe 7/10 at most. Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying the game quite a lot, and it's great for mindless chill, exploring, self-goals/long semi-mindless mental distraction. The level of freedom is great. But outside of freedom to explore/look at quintrillions of procedural generated planets, everything else - bases, pets, settlements/fleets, all of that, feel more at an afterthought level. Probably a consequence of trying to please those who wanted more than system/planet exploration, but still make everything in the game not required. ------------------------------- Re: Questing ---The quest side of the game for me is maybe a 3/10 at best. The quests are extremely repetitive - not surprising or anything - and generally consist of perform scans on planet or check galaxy map for markers, go to a new system, land on a planet, find/click something, repeat endlessly, pattern. All the main and larger side quests I've done still feel like tutorials, with rewards mostly being access to new structure/crafting blueprints or maybe some tech mods and maybe making you build/use the new thing as part of the quest. So if you've already bought/upgraded a lot on your own, they are an especially pointless/annoying grind. ---being someone not hugely into strong narrative arc games, I'm often fairly tolerant of shallow quest systems as long as they're short/quick. My tolerance for the ones in NMS is really low. One or two of them, so far, have made me want to turn the game off for the session, in annoyance/boredom. They are more dull - and at times, RNG-irritating - than killing 30 rats in the basement. Just me tho. ---if one is the type who wants to finish the story, I would recommend brand new players to follow it almost exclusively. Save the sandbox or side lore hunting, if you like the game enough, for after. At least then they wouldn't feel as pointless as putting them off until later. ---there are a lot of nitpicky UI, controls, npc menu, inventory menu complaints I could make but eh.

An approach that worked very well for me the last 30 years Get the second best on the market and use it until it's obviously obsolete. It gives me a number of "golden years" where it's close to state of the art at half the price of state of the art. Also, except my Alienware laptop, I've built every PC myself, cherry picking what parts I wanted.

That reminds me when of when I played a retro-ish indie game, there was inexplicably no FPS limit on the pause menu, so anytime I paused my FPS would go up to (I believe) >10,000 and my GPU would instantly reach max temp while very audibly screaming out in mortal agony. I gave them a bad review on Steam that specifically called out that issue for it and they fixed it a week later, and since I did like the game, I changed my review to a positive one. The system works.

WaPo articles on the Ukraine offensive https://archive.is/QBc7Z https://archive.is/voNgX "U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days." A bit optimistic there.

Decomposing babies found at al Al-Nasr Children's Hospital. Honestly at this point you have to wonder if the Rules Based Order's accusations function solely as projection. Though I guess, technically, Israel didn't turf the babies out of incubators; just attacked the hospital and its staff, forced them out and made it impossible for anyone to evacuate the babies and for their incubators to run.

It's just that I soooooo want to play a new Forgotten Realms game. But sadly for me, BG3 has turned out to be complete crap as far as I'm concerned. So I'm still left with that hankering. But I suppose you are right. I need to forget about not just this game but any prospective FR game and accept that I'm never going to get such a game.

It looks like Ursula von der Leyen has made her first major miscalculation in going to Israel and pretending to speak for the whole of Europe. It didn't go over well. Europe is divided on the question of Palestine. The political elite are generally pro Israel because that's where national interests like, the populations much less so. Our Danish PM blankly refused the thought of going to a memorial service for civilian Palestinian victims of the bombing campaign stating that there was "no comparison" to the wound inflicted on Israel.