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Hey! You weren't invited! ...some just show up occasionally. They take a dip, wander the yard and eat grass. They're obviously used to/unafraid of people, if/when we notice, we have to walk up pretty close to "shoo" them so they'll exit pool/fly out of the yard. 😄

It makes sense in the context of prior established lore, as Darth Sidious was Darth Plagueis' apprentice, and it was established in canon that Plagueis found a way to immortality, and Star Wars quite clearly has viable cloning technology, so bringing back Palpatine makes sense in the setting's established rules. It is still a poor choice as it both shows creative bankruptcy worse than having a second Death Star in Return of the Jedi and it retroactively makes Anakin's sacrifice meaningless. To be fair to Jar Jar Abrams though, what else could they have done after Rian Johnson killed off the main antagonist in the second movie of a trilogy without any thought as to what to do afterwards? It was a little too late to set up a new villain and Kylo Ren would have made an even poorer one. Alas. True, and I do not expect everything to be consistent in a show of this length and with that many changes and mysteries added to elongate the series past the point of what the creators wanted to do, just because it was wildly popular. However, most of the problems are the less problematic retroactive continuity changes, like when it was established that the Man in Black cannot kill candidates directly, even though he quite clearly killed Eko when the actor wanted to leave the show, or how he was supposed to only be able to take the shape of dead characters, but often ran around the jungle as Walt before that rule was thought of. This is in contrast to the issue with the outrigger that should not travel through time with the group. Here the violation follows the establishment of the rule, without any added clarification. My thoughts on How I Met Your Mother should be somewhere in a thread on this forum already. It is pretty much the only sitcom that I enjoyed, and I particularily also liked the latter seasons where the general consensus was that the show already stopped being funny, but that is on me and my kind of humor. One may or may not like Ted because he is an idiot and the premise of the series was probably not good enough to actually carry nine seasons (the strength of every character who is not Ted on the other hand was more than enough in my opinion), but the quality of the scripts and the work that went into the overall craftsmanship of the series is leaps and bounds ahead of other sitcoms, or most comedy in general. Well, except for the ending. I cannot comment on Newhart, but "it was all a dream" endings are more often than not just terrible. You may not enjoy everything, but certainly more than I do, which makes me a little envious, to be completely honest. I cannot for my life fathom how you managed to like Rings of Power, but I admit I am almost curious enough to try Wheel of Time just to see how bad that must be for you to dislike it. To be fair to religions, they have been around for much longer than the time it took to make the six seasons of Lost, so that is not a very good excuse. I am not sure I would go so far as to say that Lost is an intentional religious allegory in the strictest sense (watch Revolutionary Girl Utena for that, although it not based around Western religion), but it certainly has its roots in the various religions and philosophies of the world and makes heavy use of religious imagery, much like Neon Genesis Evangelion did before. Fun fact, that series also had an ending that was wildly controversial, with a similar problem: offering no narrative closure in lieu of a thematic one. The similarities are striking enough that one might think they were intentional. Most likely not though. Neon Genesis Evangelion was very much allegoric too, albeit on a much more personal level: it was a way for the series director to work through the trials and tribulations of running an almost failing studio and his depression. Lost, as a whole, can be seen as the clashing of Western and Eastern philosophical and religious thought. The changes on the island, especially regarding the Man in Black / Smoke Monster and his relationship to his brother Jacob can be interpreted as the rise of the duality between good and evil as brought into the larger world by Christianity (also represented also by the commonly played Backgammon, and as Locke said, two players, one light, one dark). It seems strange from our point of view perhaps, but the conflict between good and evil and the inherent duality of the two sides, with the ability to actively chose and even switch the side you are on (through redemption arcs or a gradual fall towards villainy), rose with the prominence of Christianity. Look at the theater plays of ancient Greece, for instance. The ancient Greeks would have most likely laughed at the preposterous idea that Darth Vader would just switch sides at the end of Return of the Jedi as your lot in life is preordained by your destiny - as set by the gods. They would most likely not have batted an eye at Zeus showing up and setting things back to what they were though.

I ain't afraid of no ghost

slight thread necro, but Kingmaker and especially Wrath of the Righteous are extremely inaccessible IMO. Very relentless curve to learn the extremely complicated mechanics quickly and very punishing for suboptimal builds. Some people are really into that aspect, though. I ended up having to watch a ton of youtube build videos (despite being familiar with 3/3.5e, the PF1e ancestors) because I was getting extremely overwhelmed by the mechanics and decision points. i only played a couple of casual 5e sessions, but imo BG3 is better thought of as an immersive sim RPG (immersive sim = think like the Prey remake which had very open mechanics and world exploration) that just happens to have a D&D 5e flavor, than a D&D 5e game. Lots of very important mechanics that are Larian specials and not D&D rules (the massive interactions with surfaces of various types, extreme verticality, interesting itemization [I don't think stuff like Lightning Charges or Arcane Acuity are D&D]). Even when they are D&D rules, Larian adapts them in a way that make them pretty special or distinct (jumping is a lot easier, the extreme verticality makes athletics a very valuable skill, etc). Combat in BG3 is legit great and is a great argument for turn-based, i don't think it could possibly work as well in RTwP. edit: put another way, if I spend an hour in a single battle in pathfinder crpgs, or classic BG, it's extremely annoying or something has gone really badly. Spending an hour in combat in Deadfire or BG3: very satisfying.

I have no idea why you would think so. I have not seen Loki. Nor have I read anything by Robert E. Howard, so I would not know. I liked the Conan the Barbarian movie, but I doubt that would serve as qualification to judge his writing. I also did not hate Conan the Destroyer, but that is probably because I watched it at the age of ten. I was not specifically talking about endings, but series endings are often situations where characters behave like they should not, or events happen that do not logically follow from what happened before, or a lot of setup is wasted with no payoff. This is often because the writers want or have to achieve an ending that they have in mind while the natural flow of the series no longer makes the ending properly achievable. Two examples are the ending of Game of Thrones, and the original ending of How I Met Your Mother. Game of Thrones ended in a way that will probably make more sense in writing, if the books ever come out. Dany in the books is much more likely to burn down King's Landing in a fit of anger than show Dany was. How I Met Your Mother on the other hand was an example where the showrunners actually filmed the series' ending several seasons in advance, and it made no sense any more, but seeing how it contained shots of Ted's children that were long since grown up by the point the series ended, they could not go and re-shoot an ending that worked better. I probably expect too much from professional writers in this day and age. The flood of content must be written by someone, and clearly there are not enough good writers to go around, which contributes to the overall feeling that there is a steep decline in quality. Still, my expectations stand, and they are not even that high a bar to clear. I do not really need witty dialogue, although it certainly is nice, I do not need deep, thought provoking entertainment, although it certainly is nice, and I do not need Shakespearean prose. Fun fact, just yesterday I ran across an egregious consistency problem. I am rewatching Lost, and there is a series of episodes where the characters on the Island are randomly jumping through time after the island becomes disloged from the regular timeline. In an earlier episode they made it clear that only the items they had with them when they time jumps began move through them in time. Cue them finding a paddle boat on the shore two episodes later. They time jump while paddling, and one would expect that they just get dropped into the water afterwards, right? Because the paddle boat was certainly not amongst the things they brought with them, right? Yeah, nope. See, that is exactly the sort of thing I am talking about. The rule was originally introduced so they can bring the Zodiac they were on with them, when the time jumps began. That is fine, really, beacuse who cares about how time travel really works in a work of fiction (one could certainly make a case that introducing time travel is almost always a bad idea in and of itself, but that is not a point I want to argue here). It also helps that they can just always have their small arms and, well, their clothes. Just as long as the rules are applied consistently, which they, in this case, are clearly not. I just do not think that it is too much to expect from a team of professional writers to catch that one.

Thank you Gfted1, I thought my game was screwed. The last RUZ.T was behind a branch that I SOMEHOW managed to not find. That helps me immensely.

I don't know, I've played at least a handful of Switch games; that's better than the exactly zero from both the PS5 and whatever the name of the current Xbox is. So you tell me, I guess. On what other game console am I going to hear Princess Daisy scream "WOWIE-ZOWIE!" over and over, anyways?

Theyve been able to damage some too: Ukraine Situation Report: Battle-Damaged HIMARS Return To United States (twz.com)

Voted. Non-committed delegate 2024!

I rotate streaming services and grab a month about once every quarter. There is no enough decent programming on to justify a month on month subscription to anything imho.

Yeah that's worse than I'd have thought. Mostly I'm just sad about Nintendo both being sue happy IP trolls and bizarrely unwilling to curate their classic titles. I can see doing one or the other, but doing both is just head scratching.

I bought it as soon as it came out, just to support the studio. It's just that I haven't played it yet. I understand that it isn't particularly good, but I will give it a whirl eventually. Pentiment, by the way, was one that I had rather high hopes for, but it did turn out to be a disappointment. Not that it was poor, per se, it just wasn't especially good, and some of the hard-coded choices didn't fit my character at all, as far as I'm concerned, so I felt heavily railroaded.

Did I really write "paided" in my previous post? Good lord.

Knowing nothing about this I have to say it sounds incredibly dumb on the part of Yuzu. We all know Nintendo can be extremely litigious and to test them by trying to scalp them on their biggest release in years is asking to get your ass buried in lawyer drama. That said Nintendo's track record of preservation is atrocious and it's sad that what was one avenue for preserving a rich catalog has effectively been demolished. I'm thinking back to the N64, GameCube, and even Wii games that will likely never be able to be played legally without hunting down old consoles and physical media.

No I trust you 😁

Highly popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu was sued by Nintendo last week, and today agreed to fold and pay 2.4 million dollars to Nintendo to settle it, along with some other terms like the dev team never being allowed to work on emulators for the rest of their lives. Although painful for the future of Nintendo Switch emulation and preservation, I think they pretty much deserved what they got: they did the stupidest thing possible, the one thing you absolutely cannot do unless you want to bring the law down upon your head, which is blatantly advertise and monetize leaked/pre-release content. How stupid do you have to be to sell Patreon-only builds (they were earning tens of thousands of dollars a month, by the way!) that can run The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before the game has even officially released? Any support for pre-release/leaked content is bad enough and will draw the ire of crime investigators and lawyers alike in of itself, but then going so far as to actively monetize it... Woof.