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I think he means more like expats that live full time in other countries... Also what's the difference between an expat and an immigrant? Seems like one of those trashy for the poor and classy for the rich things.

Heh. "Es gibt nur einen Gott, das müsst ihr glauben, und wers nicht glauben kann, den zünd' ich einfach an." So, basically "There is only one God, you have to believe that, and if you can't believe it, I'll just set you on fire." (obviously the German lyrics rhyme ) to the tune of the Pippi Longstockings intro. Had to think of that video reading the thread now.

Yeah, I think the Arians, Gnostics, Nestorians, Paulicians, Cathars, Lollards and Hussites might dispute that. So to the Nahuatl, Inti etc. Might, if there were any left after the Catholics killed or force converted them all... Main difference between those and the Protestants were that the Protestants didn't lose. (Indeed, it's stretched on occasion to very recently- see the enthusiasm with which Franco's death squads were supported by the Spanish catholic church less than a century ago or the Maronite Church and the Phalange in Lebanon. Definitely got a lot more rare since ~1650, thankfully, and plenty of recent counter examples of the church actually opposing what they would previously have supported such as Pinochet the pedant in me forces an edit because, technically, the Hussites didn't exactly lose either)

so this is why conservative hate education so they can say stuff like this and anyone didn't know how new world was colonized might trick themself into believing this kind of nonsense

We can all feel super smart for being able to get around/being nerdy enough to know how to alter things as we want (unlike the average consumer, which is what a lot of companies bank on, imo) but we're sorta still part of the statistical problem as users. Not that everyone has a choice in the matter, I know. I'm just in a very negative headspace re: current US state of AI/computer/digital dependence and monopolistic/privacy/profit sharing-investor desperation cycles. At least Google's being taking to task on something, recently. Something's gotta give (for a while - a new cycle) at some point.

You can't feasibly buy either the Enterprise or LTSC editions of Windows 10/11 (subscription-based volume licensing), but both of them sure are easy to obtain the official installers for and use without issue. Don't ask me how I know...or maybe do, depending on how interested you are, . It's pretty much the same situation as it was for most editions/versions of the Windows 10 installer: unplug/disable your internet as you start the installation process and when you get to creating an account, it'll try to make you connect, it won't work because you don't have internet and then you can say "nope, as you can see, I am a poor soul that doesn't have internet", Windows will go "very well, you filthy peasant", and now you can proceed with creating a local account. The whole presentation of Windows 11 feels like a MacOS facade that you have to immediately hammer and drill back into its proper shape before you can use it. Stupid.

If they are paying taxes, thats close enough in my book. Is the answer in the question or am I misunderstanding? IMO a citizen vacationing overseas should be able to vote in their home country elections. Or do you mean something like me voting for the Mexican president while Im hammered on c0cKtails at the pool bar in Cabo? I wonder what the rules are for other countries. I agree with this in principle, but unfortunately theres humans to screw it up.

The absolutely most important thing to change in Windows 11 is the stupid new context menu on right clicks. Nothing else comes even close to being this essential. Whoever had that idea over at Microsoft should be shot to the moon without a return ticket, along with the other criminals deserving of such a fate, like Putin, Xi and Trump.

The trick is to join one of the factions. The 2nd tier of equipment is locked behind them, so combat becomes a lot easier after that. As for weapon styles, axes seem the easiest, with long reach and a wide attack angle, so you'll hit often.

Nah, can't laugh about this anymore. It was funny like 5 years ago, now it's just sad.

It is a question I raise with my students every year as a writimg prompt. I start with voting age, which was 21 until the 1960's. They can usually puzzle out why that was changed with a few hints. Then we talk about voting with a criminal record. The last topic is voting and citizenship. Most of my students are either immigrants or children of immigrants, and a fair amount of them have parents without citizenship. So the question is: should a person who is here for years on something like a work visa, who is raising their kids in this country and paying taxes, have the right to vote on issues that affect them? Should a citizen living overseas have the right to vote? Anyways, I don't share my personal opinions on the matter to the kids, but my opinion is typically the more people voting, the better. I want as much input as we can get in these elections. My middle schoolers aren't really less informed than most adults. They should get to vote too.

I think the biggest problem with Dragon Age is a lack of consistency in design goals. There's a disconnect between DA1 and future games in the series that seemed to jettison more of the "rpg elements" in favor of more action focused gameplay and cinematic experiences, in addition to jumping between smaller personal story to single player mmo with a multiplayer minigame slapped on. By itself that isn't a problem but I think that Bioware just isn't good enough at either gameplay or cinematics to really make a good action-rpg, looking back now I remember next to nothing about actually playing DA2 or DA3 beyond silly stuff like the "ANOTHER WAVE" yells or spamming the magic sword power to reflect projectiles. While this new one does look like it's doubled down on action it just doesn't look good, like an inferior Dragon's Dogma with less enemy variety or real options.

I'm in the camp of people who quite liked DA:O. The combat and spell combos where you had to explore was just fun (a very subjective thing, I know). Didn't care for the romances and if I had to mention my single biggest grievance it was the npc with the big yellow exclamation mark over his head screaming PURCHASE THIS DLC!!!! in your camp 😖 That aside, I quite enjoyed it enough for several repeat playthroughs. I later got an edition with the various dlc's etc. so at least this most obnoxious guy disappeared.

I have a bit of an itch to try the character creator to see if the characters I see in reviews are outliers or if that's really the best they can manage with the tools. But it's not an itch worth burning 80GB+ of download quota on just yet. The EA Play trial will be there forever anyway so no rush. DA1 was earnest in that Bioware put in a lot of time and effort to make the best game they could while the company was still independent. For me it didn't hit, but I respect it. Conceptually another "save the world" story was not what I was after, and in terms of narrative the game made me actively not want to save the world with the way the origin stories are written. DA2 was the opposite, in that it was extremely cynical where DA1 was earnest. Conceptually I thought it was a great idea, a smaller-scale, more personal game with lower stakes than usual. The implementation though was just cobbling stuff together in order to meet EA's extreme deadlines and it's just a procession of reused content and waves of enemies spawning out of thin air. DA3 was a single-player MMO.

Also, for anyone interested in the Thiry Years War, might I point you to SandRhoman, a duo of Swiss historians doing pretty interesting videos on historical subjects? The only caveat I have is their English narrator who is, well, not a real joy to listen to. Alas. No point in posting their videos in German.

Most people seem to prefer DA:O. At least those are the ones that make the most noise, maybe the people who prefer the others don't make youtube videos about it.

Regarding dialogue, the game makes it pretty clear what's going on, ie, "X is the bad guy, and now we need to take care of their underlings Y". I think some of it has to do with what I said earlier about the game relying heavily on what happened in Inquisition, so maybe the writers felt they really needed to be clear on things. It certainly feels more boring than say Inquisition, that had a lot of stuff like "Ok, there's a hole in the sky, let's speculate on why, and then go find out stuff about it". Another thing I wanted to note, the game uses the ME2 and ME3 approach of missions (or "quests" because this is fantasy). As in, there's central hubs where you can do various minor things, but when you go on a specific quest, there's a specific area for it and you can't leave until you finish it (personally I preferred the semi-open world approach of DA:O and DA:I). And this leads to the dialogue also being very focused on what you're currently doing, ie., "let's go there to place X". Personally, the dialogue is so far at the level that I don't mind it (because there's a good skip function), but also haven't found any that's particularly good, yet.

^ Yeah, the writing being "tutorial/hand holding" or "feel good therapy" seems to be a common complaint with those who don't like it. Can't say what I've seen contradicts it much. Combat looks like flashy but nothing special arpg flailing about. But I'm not playing it first hand so *shrug*. What Dragon Age was supposed to be the "good one/s," anyway? I vaguely recall the early ones coming out and I wasn't interested in those way back then either, because of my personal interests.

Yes, it works with any abilities with "fire"/"frost" keyword (besides any bug - depending on the enchantment) if you keep in a hand of yours while casting.

Nope. Literally unplayable.

Through wholesale genocide and slaughter of entire provinces, towns and communities? It was anything but an amicable split 😝 (the protestants of the time were the "Taliban" of its age, killing anything and anyone not showing proper religious fervor) edit: the war didn't really end until the Northern Ireland peace treaty was signed and the end of "The Troubles" in 1998 (after 3000 dead and 49000 wounded since 1968)

I think this guy nailed my own observations (about the writing and dialogue) pretty well... also his delivery is funny if you like snark

Does the first game have proper horse testicle physics as well?

8 hours in. Hard to say anything about the story yet. I liked the setup. Also feel like this relies heavily on knowing what happened in DA:I, more so than any Bioware game about their preceding games. Not sure how it'll feel like for people who didn't play DA:I. I expected the combat to be more like Mass Effect with swords, but it's way more actiony. All those button combinations... I tried playing a mage, but the battle field was so full of flashy stuff I couldn't keep up with it. Warrior works better for me. Graphics are fine, most of the time. They're a bit more cartoony, but it works out fine most of the time. One exception so far is the Darkspawn Ogre, who's faces look way too cartoony.

Crewed MCM comic con London last weekend. As usual, working the Cosplay Central and Cosplay Hospital area. But this time, with half crew due to last minute illness and family issues. So, over the weekend, we hit a record of 1,894 cosplays clicked as repaired, 3 kids cosplay showcases, 3 adult cosplay showcases, 2 cosplay masquerades, a cosplay variety show, and the WCS qualifier for the UK team headed to Japan for the World Cosplay Summit championships. I was on the floor Saturday before 0730 and didn't head out till gone 2015. Also, first time I've had to share a room with someone I was not in a relationship with, and a complete stranger to boot for the entire weekend. I did not realise quite how hyper-focused and aware that would make me, and I might note, that while I am a Star Wars geek, the quiet Darth Vader in the corner because he had to use a sleep apnea machine was not conductive to sleep. I have spent the entire week trying to recover from that whole exhaustion. Given my sister a call and noted that this weekend I need a break from sorting through the house and dad's stuff and just doing a veg and recuperate.

I hear rumours that in less than a week we are getting the bestest blogpost evAr.

So is the tl;dr that Bioware heard people love Spider AA RPGs and are trying to copy that? 😛

Only a handful of hours and I feel like I'm playing a AA fantasy action adventure instead of a AAA RPG. It's going to need to really nail the landing to end up getting a positive review from me by the end. The biggest issue might be how cinematic it wants to be while not quite managing it well. The game wants to have frequent cutscenes, but very little worth having a cutscene. Very little drama or action. Just dialogue dragged on a bit too long. Needed an editing pass to cut back the word count and add some drama. Right after the prologue when the new big threat is revealed, the party gathers round to discuss next steps. The other two characters come into scene by kicking back with cups of tea and I am a little lost as to why everyone is so cozy. There's just a jarring absence of tension 90% of the time. And the new darkspawn designs are the worst yet. But, on the other hand, the blight is the best yet.

I found some elves. There's a token black elf and two asian elves, one of which is a companion. 'Tis so inclusive, it wokes me out of my immersion. To make matters worse, none of the women in the game are masturbatory material, at least so far, and Neve (one of the companions) almost sounds like that transsexual in Hogwart's: Wokacy, even though they have different voice actors. On the techincal side, turning on RT makes the game look and feel better, but it also introduces the typical glowy reflective surfaces of lesser implementations of ray traced reflections. They're not as bas as they were in Hogwart's Legacy though, so it is mostly fine. Initially, the game was excessively unstable, crashing to the desktop with an NVIDIA driver error. I changed a few things in Afterburner*, turned off the EA app overlay and use full screen mode and vsync with a 50% frame lock, i.e. the game now runs at 60 fps. Have been playing without crashes ever since. I don't know which one of these was the problem, but it is stable now. Otherwise the game's running fine with all the RT bells and whistles turned on, even without DLSS. The gameplay is a hybrid between Dragon Age: Inquisition and Darksiders, which is where I guess a lot of the dislike for the combat comes from. I'd say it is not a good fit for a Dragon Age game, but then again, what is the gameplay of a Dragon Age game really? DA:O had a more traditional RPG combat system where fiddling with the AI scripts for an hour or two was necessary to make most of the tedium go away, Dragon Age 2 had a silly click to win action combat system and Dragon Age: Inquisition was Mass Effect with melee weapons and an optional tactical mode that was by far and large completely useless. So, is it actually bad so far? No. However, there are two key elements to the game that can put off players if they actively dislike such things (but such is the case for every game). I mean, outside of the inclusive elements causing incel rage, like the companions not having Tali style thigh gaps or there being a token minority character at every turn. The gameplay is really rather action oriented, you're dodging across the screen, you have to - unless playing on Storymode - use minor combo attacks and ideally perfectly block attacks which you can use to counter attack, all the while you're managing your own abilities with mana costs and cooldowns. It is about as far removed from Dragon Age: Origins as you can possibly get. The party banter and companions might as well have been written by James Gunn or Joss Whedon. If you don't like quippy banter or actively dislike character interactions like those in Guardians of the Galaxy or Firefly, then don't bother. Just early impressions though. There was one sad moment for long time fans of the series, and that comes really early. Bianca dies. *I had a custom voltage/frequency curve set up. It was within spec, it just turned off the boost by capping the voltage and fequency at the stock spec clock of 2600MHZ. That should not have caused the instability, but who knows. Every other game, including Cyberpunk 2077, was rock solid with that curve setting so far, but eh, yeah. I can just switch back to it once I am done playing Veilguard.

Finally got the chance to watch the Skill Up and Matty videos in full, and also check some other negative reviews, and then very sadly went into my Steam wishlist to remove DA:V from it. 😞 If I ever play the game, and now that has become a big if, it will be years from now, and I don't want it cluttering up my wishlist.

You naughty But I can't really see this as much of a surprise, Cyberpunk 2077 and BG3 both did this at least a year before (dragonborn genitals are horrifying). I think we all know that a segment of the internet is addicted to being mad, but this is just getting pathetic. Please just let me hate on the game for looking uncanny and having bad combat without getting spammed by videos from some mediocre youtube guy with 100 gigs of CP hentai on his hard drive. It's like NuTrek all over again, let me hate in peace you maidenless reprobates.

I have now "Ignored" 2381 games on Steam. Maybe if I ignore 97,463 more, I might finally find/get shown something I like. If you can't tell from my blathering semi-bloggity increased presence, my sleeping has gone all to heck again. I've cleaned out (physical) file cabinets, cleaned files (virtual ones), a ton of laundry, dusted walls, baked a (low carb) cake, watched countless videos, watched some true crime episodes, tried to watch half a dozen movies, caulked a shower, watched hubby watching Prison Break, watched the rain and on and on. Can I go to sleep yet.

Split off from old thread...