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Happy Festivus!!!

Hubby: "I have a long weekend." Me: "Cool. What for." Hubby: "Xmas." Me: "Oh, yeah. Right. I knew that." In case I'm not around that day ... or forget ... Merry Xmas/Happy Holiday and all that jazz.

The games that win industry awards are usually what a plurality of people actually spent time talking about, experiencing, and enjoying. They may not have been everyone's personal favorite game of the year, but that's not really what it's about: it's the games that are going to stand out in most people's minds as having been a 'big thing' for the year, that had some kind of tangible and positive effect on the collective gaming consciousness - while also hopefully setting a standard for other games to try to achieve for years to come. I have my own misgivings with Baldur's Gate III that makes it not particularly suited for my tastes, but in terms of being a creative vision with actual sincerity that clearly people genuinely enjoyed (versus just yet another samey sequel, or a committee-decided mass appeal construct, or an exploitative corporate cash-pump), it seems pretty easy to accept the game getting its flowers even if I must ignore that that the game wasn't quite to my liking. Our media/entertainment is a 'victim' of its time and circumstances - for better and for worse. Films considered to be notably horrible failures at the time of their release are sometimes re-examined decades later and then re-labelled as brilliant masterpieces because of how the film industry and the way people see movies have evolved since then, and the opposite can obviously happen when someone tries to go back to watch some of the older 'greatest films of all time' without having experienced first-hand the circumstances surrounding those films when they released that made them into the major successes that people remember them as. At least some of the greatest games of yesteryear would well be naught but a fart in the wind if they were released for the first time today (even if they were given a new [current year]-appropriate coat of paint!). If you feel current 'great' games don't compare well to decades-old games, they may well not - at least in the ways that you personally value as being most important given how your own tastes developed from playing the games that you did and also when you did...but that might not be what other people currently care about given the circumstances that they have experienced. None of us is special for not loving or liking something that most other people seem to, and nobody is trying to make you a victim of propaganda, conspiracy, or anything else when it happens: it's just not your thing, and that should be perfectly okay. Trying to fathom precisely why something does or doesn't work for you at the most base level is far too nebulous even at the best of times, never mind when it seems everyone is proclaiming something as being the "best" and "greatest" when you just can't seem to even vaguely understand it.

Trying to catch up with the food thread while being subjected to conspiracy theories and culture wars all because of a brief mention of poppy seeds. Hope you're pleased with yourself, @Gfted1, .

A miracle has heppened yesterday, and it’s not even a Christmas Eve I was able to get past two Silver Knight Archers guarding the roofs of Anor Londo on third try, and I got inside the Castle Now my two worst nightmares awaits. First Knight Lautrec with his entourage, and then Smough and Ornstein. And I need Ornstein’s Soul and his ring, which will make the fight even harder

My youngest brother is the family member with the bad back... he's 2m tall and of skinny build. His back was very fragile and he always needed to be careful when driving longer trips. Before anyone says you can't drive long trips in Denmark, he was very active in his medieval reenactment hobby (doing his own clothes and armour, creating replica 15th century plate and chainmail armour (as well as the cloth and protective leather insulation that goes with it). That meant driving all over Europe from Scandinavia to below the Alps. But before that, he was an avid motorcycle driver and spent a long time before he found a motorcycle that he could sit comfortably on, for long rides (without hurting his back). I no longer remember the exact model, but iirc, some1100cc 80's Kawasaki model. Very uncommon in northern Europe. As luck (or rather not) would have it, this particular years model came with a systemic weakness in the engine block and true enough, one day he was riding, one piston suddenly exploded out the side of the engine block. Engine was history and spare engines didn't grow on trees. After a few weeks of searching, he found a classified ad from a seller in southern Germany, offering an spare engine from a wreck. Slightly newer model engine, but my brother figured, with a bit of work he could make it fit on the frame. Since I had a car and a family member had a trailer, my brother talked me into driving to southern Germany. That was in the 90's, before google map was a thing. The only aid we had was an old version of Microsoft Maps (no kidding), from which we could print out the route we had to drive as far as Frankfurt. After that, we would have to wing it We started Friday at noon, drove all day and all night (taking turns at the steering wheel, the one not driving sleeping on the backseat). Stopped a few times for the "street food" (schnitzel ) at the stops along the autobahn and motorways. Saturday night at 2am, we somehow had made it to our destination in Idar Oberstein, got the engine on board the trailer and tied down. When we got closer to the Danish border, we stopped and loaded up the trailer with cheap German beer (there were still borders at the time). If we got pulled over and asked if anything to declare, my brother would show then the beer and declare that, hoping the customs agents would overlook the engine (import tax for that engine would have run up into a thousand dollars or more). Anyway, late Sunday night, two brothers arrived in back in their home town, with a replacement engine and a trailer full of beer ...and two completely exhausted brothers. My brother managed to fit the engine on the old frame and got a few more good years out of the only bike he could ever sit comfortably on with his vulnerable back

Indeed. Obsidian does not sell cocaine, viagra, escort services by underage girls, unregistered guns, butterfly knives, knuckle dusters, viagra, fake permanent residency papers to the US, fake passports, fake university test results... you name it. On a good day, we get less than a handful, around new games or even major updates, it can be a score+ of new bot accounts. Daily Edit: Not to mention, the 5 unapproved post limit means bots, that would otherwise literally flood the forum with 100+ advertising posts, stops dead in the their tracks at 5, making the clean up a bit less ornery.

forgive us for going slight necro, but we recent watched our favorite spaghetti western and it reminded us o' this post. not sergio leone, but we enjoy pretty much everything about the great silence. we always watch this film in december for the silliest o' reasons: the snow. HAA! Good Fun!

biden is an ez target and he deserves more than a little ridicule concerning his cognitive fitness particular when necessary predicting the deleterious impact o' another four years in a high stress job. but... Joe Rogan knocks Biden over Trump’s claim of airports during Revolutionary War | The Hill clip if rogan pivoted and said, "see, neither one o' these clowns deserves to be President," we might chuckle at the deflection, but we would nevertheless agree. instead, rogan makes himself an example o' the exact harm he is accusing the media o' perpetrating.... doesn't even recognize the self-owning irony. btw, scotus not taking up the Presidential immunity question at this time makes sense in part 'cause 'cause there is no novel question o' law-- nixon and clinton cases has already answered all immediate relevant issues regarding the scope o' Presidential immunity. nothing to see. however, if the Court grants cert after the dc appellate near inevitable decides in favour o' special counsel smith, then am gonna wonder if the fix is indeed in. HA! Good Fun!

Another look at the Dnipro bridgehead at Krynky. This time from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/11/29/80-seconds-from-detection-to-destruction-in-krynky-russian-troops-have-just-one-minute-of-safety-from-ukraines-drones/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/12/21/the-battle-for-krynky-is-a-nightmare-for-both-sides-but-its-not-suicide-its-attritional-warfare/

Baldur's Gate got released just 25 years ago today. Completing a hat-trick of PC releases unheard of until today: Grim Fandango, Thief, Baldur's Gate. Man, the end of 1998 was the gift that kept on giving. And yet, this almost never happened. Bioware originally intended to do more typical Bioware things: chasing market trends, rather than saving dying genres. It was Obsidian Entertainment's now CEO who pushed for a deal with history. It's easy to imagine a parallel universe in which Feargus Urquhart slipped in the shower, broke his ankle, called in sick. One in which people never got a taste of BG to begin with. What are they playing instead of BG3 these days over there? Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs | Shacknews Oh yeah. In the context of its time, BG1 was pretty easy on the eye too. The first major promotional material focused on all that for reason. As to cinematics: For as long as they aren't seen like the first movies, I think games haven't reached their full storytelling potential yet. Movies too initially borrowed from what was already there (stage play, theatre...), and look fairly dated and stilted now because of it. The crucial bit is: Movies are static mediums that borrowed from static mediums. Games are interactive and when going fully-on cinematic are borrowing from something static...

You know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and art is subjective, but prefering this Beamdog travesty over the original is probably as close to being objectively wrong about aesthetics as you can get.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/earthraiser/earthraiser-total-liberation An adventure (?) game about animal rights. Seems interesting enough. It has been funded and 45 hours to go.

Anyone remember Beamdog's remade BG1 cutscenes, where they replaced the original full motion videos with their bizarre comic book-style slideshows...while also still using cut-ups of the original audio from the full motion videos? Woof: boy, that was a tough scene from a number of angles. I know the original videos were these like horrifically compressed 640x480 MPEGs and they probably didn't feel using them made for a professional product, buuut...sometimes, ya just gotta know when to let things be.

The Pathless. 4 bosses defeated. The game is very beautiful and the movement system has a good balance of fluid and responsive with the ability to move faster with some physical feedback (shooting talismans for speed boosts and stamina recovery). Which reminded me of training Acrobatics in Morrowind during travels by tapping the Space bar. Edit. Steam crashes every second time when I try to view and upload my screenshots. Can't quite recall after which update it started to happen.

Been out of that foot brace I've been hobbling around with and **** does my foot feel weird. And really weak. I usually walk on my toes when barefoot, but nope, not a chance. I often do some "exercises" when standing still, just using the toes on one foot to lift myself up, that's completely out the window. Not to mention the foot is amazingly swollen from fluid build ups. The worst part was discovering that the foot is too weak to depress the clutch on my car. I curse myself a wee bit for buying a reinforced pressure plate for 500nm of engine power.

Queen Karen

Warzone ... i don't know what's wrong with me. ;_;

This apparently popular video popped up in my feed. I like bass singers, so why not. I was only half-paying attention, glancing at video but mostly just listening, and it went like this: "Oh, there's four of them? ... they sound pretty good ... nice costumes ... are they a family of brothers or cousins or something? ... " Took me half the video to realize it was just one guy doing the video/sound mixing stuff. I lol'd at myself. Guy's got great range tho.