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I turned 32. Maybe it's eating (marginally) better or exercising or reducing the intake of certain substances but I feel and look better than I did back in covid year 1. Huh.

We put buttons in meat fillings in our "zeppelins" (think of a big zep-shaped potato dumpling). Also supposed to bring luck and it's a wonder I never witnessed it bringing odontology expenses instead.

Made some casserole type thing to consume leftover macaroni, cheddar and I got ground beef on sale so might as well use that. Turned out ok, family liked it. Which is good as they're eating that for the next 5 days. Lacking vegetables though.

These traditions are fun. There is one in Finland where you put an almond into the traditional Christmas rice porridge (https://scandicuisine.com/finnish-rice-porridge/) when it's ready to be served. The person who gets the almond is supposed to either get married the next year or just have good luck in general.

Worked the last couple of weekends. Sucks, but it's an opportunity to advance a couple of roles up the ladder and get out of QA. The only question is what the new contract would offer, if I get the offer at all, but things are looking good so far.

Nope, it's +1 gained every character level including level 1. So +20 Acc, +5 PEN, +100% duration at level 20 Rolled back to 9s when I realized it has PEN 9 (I thought it was 7). Granted the bigger AoE, I think it is OK. That means I just doubled damages for the 5 working traps. Done. Note that this AND ARTERIAL STRIKE have 0.33s ticks, not 0.3 ticks as displayed. Basically Arterial Strike is 10% less efficient than you might have thought. Changed to : 1.5m radius 20-40 fire damages, PEN 9 vs reflex (it was PEN 9 already in the gamefile) 9s shaken vs Will I remove the DoT because the PEN of trap DoT does not scale (so 9 without +5 when I tested). Another thing that doesn't work with traps. So I went with an instant effect.

Sounds like Owlcat's QA department is a nice place to work.

Back in office, so much collaboration going on with literally no one in a 15 m radius.

actually, is multiple becauses. yeah, we mentioned the sauce in your pictured steak appeared to be ketchup, but perhaps a year latter when we shared an atk video, you brought up the ketchup on steak guy all by your lonesome. have personal shared the dirty harry clip regarding ketchup on hot dogs a couple times. the curious fascination o' scandanavains with ketchup has occurred multiple times on this board, usual with @Azdeustaking a few well earned shots regarding what foods is so not improved by ketchup and resulting in numerous tangential ketchup observations-- we did share our personal and labor-intensive ketchup recipe. collectively we can be a bit predictable at times. HA! Good Fun!

Big fan of the original film, watched it and the Wallace & Gromits many times when I was young, still really like or love them even re-visiting them as an adult. Apparently, they're releasing a new W&G film in 2024, hopefully it's more sound than this was. The nature of Chicken Run was always going to make it tough for worthy sequel adaptations, whereas that's not really the case with W&G...plus, it'll probably help with the original creator and director returning for it.

I usually get mine well done. Was fun to provoke a fight with coworkers who used to be outraged over choosing that option. Usually put BBQ sauce on mine, but I just really like Sweet Baby Ray's

It gets worse in chapter 4, so basically post-beta content is a lot less polished. Most of the quest bugs I've had are just related to rumors not updating or completing.

Trump eats well-done steaks with ketchup I've seen it but I grew up super poor and rural. Almost all of my family still orders steaks well done, which is why I'll never make them steaks or take them to a steakhouse. I still remember the first time I was brave enough to order a medium steak at a family dinner outing, they all looked at me like I just committed some unspeakable crime but I was the only one that didn't require a sauce to put some moisture back in. Never looked back and now I usually get my steaks medium-rare to medium. My personal preference is closer to KPs, most I'll usually do is a pan sauce. I asked my family why they do this to their steaks and it mostly stems from a fear of getting food poisoning by being given some bad meat. This might make sense for the older generations that lived through segregation while eating out but makes no sense for family cookouts because as I said we're very rural. Our meat is/was typically super freshly butchered. Habit maybe, I dunno. I don't understand it because it's not like they really enjoy a dry steak.

we mentioned earlier how broken builds is an owlcat thing and they clear indulge the powergamer impulses o' their fanbase with the 40k title. pathfinder, particular with all the splat book material, allows for broken, but human dm/gm near always prevents such behaviour in rl-- makes campaigns and gaming sessions boring when one or more players is able to destroy every encounter without any effort. owlcat took potential busted pathfinder and then added their own take on mythic content which leads to stoopid busted builds, particular when combined with stoopid busted gear. curious, owlcat fans like busted and defend it. is nothing wrong with liking busted, but am personal thinking such diminishes the value o' having many character development and gear options when there is clear a handful o' best/right options. even so, is no shock busted builds is a thing for rogue trader 'cause that is exact what many owlcat fans want/expect. am also having observed how the challenge o' owlcat encounters would appear to be premised on players embracing broken content. normal difficulties in owlcat games is frustrating challenging unless you embrace broken. not all encounters will be frustrating difficult for a more casual or role-play oriented player, but there will be enough such obstacle battles as to discourage players less focused on exploitive gameplay. we chose to play an officer for our first rogue trader run. we chose officer not 'cause it is our favorite build concept but 'cause we expected there to be threshold encounters in the game which would make the game decided unfun if we didn't have a powerful character/party. the owlcat approach is kinda odd from our pov. crpgs rely on maths which invariably lead to exploits being discovered by gamers no matter how hard a developer trys to balance a title. am s'posing the difference is that in a more balanced game there will be a handful o' exploits whereas owlcat offers players more choice... maybe? regardless, owlcat's rogue trader exploit or fail approach comes as little surprise to us. as for bugs... there is a reason why we rare play a title until six months has passed following release. particular for complex crpgs, there is always gonna be broken content both obvious and subtle. am thinking owlcat has actually improved insofar as the stability and quest integrity o' their titles at release, so credit where credit is due. however, we expected later game quests (content not available in the beta) would be problematic and am suspecting it will be a couple years before the vast majority o' minor and major mechanics bugs in rogue trader is fixed. am not making excuses for owlcat, but their design approach which promotes broken builds and the bugginess o' rogue trader is predictable and were expected based on previous owlcat releases. not exact caveat emptor, but... and again, our personal rogue trader experience is more stable than we expected. yeah, the mechanics bugs is legion, but am genuine pleasant surprised by how few broken quests we has suffered given the fact the game is an owlcat title. 'course we only just finished chapter 2. regardless am thinking is fair to say, based on our admitted limited rogue trader experience, that each owlcat release has improved quest integrity and stability issues at release. progress? HA! Good Fun!

Yeah, I can see that. I do occasionally buy nacho cheese cups to dip my fries into but most of the time it's slathered on top. Heresy detected Sorry been playing too much Rogue Trader. My wife isn't a big fan of ketchup either but she does eat it in the strangest and ghetto-est of places. Not on steaks or we wouldn't be together but still.

The best FREEDOM fry dipping condiment is spicy ketchup (for something quick, mix ketchup with some hot sauce like sriracha). Believe me.

They have a slightly more humane tradition in Denmark... the finder of the almond usually wins a small prize, like a box of chocolates 😋

We put coins in Christmas pudding, not gold but normal coins and they get boiled for ages Im not sure where we get the tradition from?

Finished Returnal and main campaign of Uncharted4. So Returnal I am quite disappointed - not necessarily because it is that bad, but because I expected it to be the Sony port that will be for me. Roguelite third person bullet hell with little meta progression? Hell yeah. Unfortunately, outside audo-visual experience, I found it rather underwhelming. Procedural generation is minimal. While individual levels are swapped around, level layouts, and what you can find are pretty much the same, and enemy variety is pretty low, so runs do tend to feel the same. Biggest change run to run is what weapon you pick up (you can carry only one at a time: Booooo), and I found some weapons to be simply more effective than others. This is is even more visible for bosses, which will really make it really tedious if you enter the arena with a wrong weapon. I dug the atmosphere and story and first, but unfortunately it turned out to be a convoluted allegory for a very basic thing, rather than a SF story. Uncharted4. Reallly enjoyed the story and characters. Game looks mostly great. But god, what an awful video game. Shooting is really clumsy and basic, and I feel bad for criticising Jusant for it's straightforward climbing - compared to U4 it was boundary pushing simulator. Worste of all - I really felt like game part didn't belong to the story part of the game. The set up is so slow, and characters so human, that when Nate starts gunning down auction house security in cold blood, it feels very off. In general, the unending army of Shoreline, white grab ledges, and conveniently marked grapple points feel like an artificial addition to what is a pretty good animated action adventure flick. Oh, and I am still not sure if melee system actually exists or if it's a QTA mascareding as a melee system. But dang, I would watch an Uncharted movie. Well, not THAT movie.

Usually the person who finds the coin keeps it, but usually people also use common currency coin (value of 1 cent or 5 cents depending on which coin they put in). In my family we use a gold coin and we keep those for use every year. We just return it as soon as we find it, we don't carry it around as it's valuable, not terribly so in monetary value (although the coins are more than a hundred years old so who knows(around 500 bucks in value)) but simply because they have been in the family for a while. Just found a quarter dollar from 80s among them, go figure.

I've grown bored with all the bugs in the game now, not to mention how badly balanced it is with stacking bonuses and whatnot, but one of the bolters I got hold of somewhere kept upping its burstfire rate so that I empty the mag each burst. It also dealt demolitions/10 bonus damage on each shot. With concentrated fire and some other stacking items I splatted what should be a pure horror boss in the first salvo.

@BruceVC, You should really play Rogue Trader. You can live your dream to the fullest as fascist aristocrat.

I'm busy with NWN2 MoB and Im loving the narrative and the epic level gaming experience, Im about 20 hours in Obsidian really knows how to create captivating stories and as usual I appreciate the Forgotten Realms integration because its my favorite fantasy world with Elder Scrolls being my second I am getting a little annoyed with the mechanics of hunger and how you need to feed but thats because I misunderstood how it works and I let my energy drop to 10-15% so just to survive I am literally camping and feeding on animal spirits in the Ashenwood forest but once Im done with these quests I will feed properly on undead which will restore my energy to manageable levels I got so frustrated I was even considering loading a mod that lets you restore the energy immediately but I wont do that because that will destroy the immersion and point of being a spirit eater....so it would be a real "cheat " that undermines the point of the game. So I decided not to do that

My dad got out of the hospital a few days ago, I thot I posted about it but forum software must have eaten the post. He's going to be on oxygen for a while (if not forever) and has got a couple of oxygen compressors. Obvious issues with that aside, he's doing better than he has in a long time.

Our air fryer is easily the most used kitchen gadget in the house. Highly recommend for anyone who ever cooks.

Finished Psycho Pass I very much liked it, perhaps even loved it. Frankly it's the kind of thing a lot of (western) live-action series on streaming services try to pull off but can't because they get cancelled too quickly to tell the whole story, which is exactly what I thought when I began watching it. There's apparently a couple of sequel series and some movies, I'll maybe check those out and see what they're like but imo as a limited series this can stand alone. I'd tepidly reccomend it to the folks here, though as always the naughty brain of @Bartimaeus may short circuit and drive him into enough of a rage to complete his unholy ritual to summon a demon that will try to kill us all.

Harpoon master Chris Roberts relentlessly hunting whales.

This is something that never gets old and I couldn't find a similar thread. Maybe I made one before?! Let's hope not... On topic: When wads reach the level of a movie. Absolutely creepy. What wads have you been playing recently?!

According to Gamers Nexus, Starfield being nominated for and winning "Most Innovative Gameplay" was a meme campaign started on reddit to dunk on it, not that it stopped Bethesda from accepting it as sincere. Guess that's what happens when you let the common clay of video games (you know, morons) decide the awards. We all know these awards are a bit of a joke for one reason or another (simple popularity contests inevitably result in whatever's most popular winning awards rather than any honest evaluation of an entry's individual qualities in relation to what award they're up for - an especially prominent problem when most people have only played a fraction of the nominees!), but not all of us actually take the time out of our day to prove that they're a joke. Sigh. Oh, that's really soon. I can't help but notice that the main character seems to increase in size with every new game in the Momodora series...think Momodora 3 is kinda where I thought it most appropriate to stop, but certainly no farther than Reverie Under the Moonlight. Eh, as long as the developer didn't try to integrate anything from their awful Minoria spin-off, it should be fine.

I got a pasta maker for Xmas and I put it to use for the first time yesterday. You can, of course, make fresh pasta without a machine, but it's quite tedious. The machine makes it significantly less tedious, which means I'll actually do it. Anyway, I just made spaghetti, nothing special. Still, fresh pasta tastes so much better than dried, it's a night and day difference.

January 11:

NCSoft gave Homecoming the licence to run their City Of Heroes community server in an official way. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/47223-ncsoft-homecoming-license-announcement/ City of Heroes was a super hero mmo that NCSoft eventually shut down. Homecoming was a relatively recent attempt at a fan-run revival of the game.

Maybe I should learn to play one of these as a new hobby. Not that I actually will. But I should. The sound is lovely.

But he is right 🤷‍♂️. Popular votes in every category ever invented were always just a showcase of bad taste among “common” populace. 🙈

Against the Storm should have won all the awards.

If BG3 can win for its "story" and "characters," then why not Starfield for "most innovative gameplay"?

RDR2 also won.. Labor of Love.. which is especially funny since R* almost instantly abandoned the game. Barely cared about RDO as well, which is now pretty much unplayable.

Something for all of you 'Falling Down' fans out there.

Placki ziemniaczane Simple Polish comfort food, essentially the best possible version of hash browns. You can top them one of two ways: Sweet, typically with powdered sugar, occasionally apple sauce, or what I do, sour cream and chives.

And as we must all remember...

You can make it through the first "double" door in the back of the hangar by opening the first one, then waiting for the elevator. That doesn't really help though because later on, another elevator inside the large shaft is inaccessible without any means to call it. At the moment, Tartarus is broken if accessed Murder on Eridanos by using a save game just before finishing Tartarus. That's because Tartarus isn't 'reset' as I'd have expected, but you're simply transported back to your ship, and everyhting on Tartarus (enemies, elevator positions) remain unchanged. I have no idea how this could get past beta testing.