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Long photo heavy post! Cone to go?

Went approx 1 hour into Indy. So far not bad, will continue. Animations in cutscenes feel a bit janky at times, but oh well. Other than that, getting a bit of a Deus Ex-y exploration vibe so far. Hoping this continues for the rest of the game.

Bucks is usually (US)Dollars. Quid is GB Pound.

Potential Santa decoration alternatives

That is an excellent article. I am alright with health care executives living with some of the fears that classroom teachers and students have been facing for the last decade+.

Fake but still

The concept of the show is good, but I don't like the main actress - find her a bit annoying. Still, I have so very few shows I like so I'll keep watching.

That's why you have a forum friend to send to the anniversary exhibition and take photos 😛

We've started watching High Potential. It's a bit like Psych/Monk/Mentalist/Castle. The last couple of episodes have gotten really predictable but I'm still enjoying it.

When I was young and in grade school, my younger sister had a Hello Kitty backpack that I wanted. I should've known then that my life was destined to end in ruin. e: I want to say that I remember it not being particularly girly outside of obviously being Hello Kitty-branded. I think it was mostly black with some pretty striking patterns on it, probably either purple or pink highlights. It looked cool!

Why is that a surprise? His industry isn't all that popular, his company is less so and he was just some suit that wouldn't care that much about regular people. Wouldn't change things, unless you kill a lot. But will go to show suits they bleed like everyone else. He should have wasted some finance bros.

Yeah, it's in Euro, sorry! Prices have actually gone up a bit, just in time for Christmas. I was looking for them on a German site for deals / price comparison in Germany (the most common ones are probably Geizhals.de (that's literally cheapskate) and Idealo.de). Oh, forgot to say: The Indy Nvidia deal is only for RTX 4070 cards and up! The RTX 3060 costs ~280 Euro, the game 70, so that's 350 TOTAL. The 540 for the RTX 4070 would be the regular price for the card plus the game bundled with it. @Humanoid I was actually under the impression that the term "bucks" would be used anywhere, e.g. just common English language slang (British, American, whathaveyou). Can't tell naturally, as I'm not a native speaker. Picked it up someplace and rolled with it. May actually have been here, dunno! 😄 And if it wasn't, it must have been from Al Bundy (Married With Children legend and TV's last ever American action hero).

I was doubting that any place that uses a non-dollar currency would use the colloquial term "bucks" for their money, but then Wikipedia told me that South Africa does indeed do that. EDIT: I now have the inverse question on whether places like Singapore and Hong Kong ever call their dollars bucks.

@LadyCrimson The cone was a crepe basically filled with whipped cream and just a little topping to make it look like you had different flavours. The national museum has a Hello Kitty 50 year anniversary exhibition. @Gfted1 Already back. Didn't stay too long. Only did a day trip to Nagano and saw Zenkōji. The rest of the week I was in Tokyo.

Even without full path tracing, you get a decent moon reflection, if you care/notice such things. Tried to pet the dog.

^ I tried to push forward re: the adventuring. Note: I have it on easy combat mode but less easy puzzling, whatever that means. I have yet to get to any puzzles, initial steps feel the usual elongated tutorial/get familiar phase. The manual checkpoint seems overall ok (even tho I dislike such), although what it means is I'm constantly watching for the corner save-hat symbol, or checking main menu to see how long it's been since last checkpoint-save, and then pondering if I want to continue or stop. I'd say I like the game so far but it's not really grabbing me in the sense I'd want to "binge play". Although I do like looking in nooks and side rooms for the occasional loot - eg, first play there's a tiny bit of "fear" of missing some important side-loot (like the point-giving books) which helps inspire looking around. I kinda want to look up whether I'm wasting my time or not tho... EDIT: forgot. It seemed that when I died (jumped off a ledge, game didn't like it), when respawned at checkpoint, I had full health again. Probably by design (or the modes I selected) but I kind of wish it didn't.

RTX 3060 / 12GB + Indy = 350 bucks RTX 4070 / 12 GB + Indy = 540 bucks (Indy included for free in a special Nvidia offer)... 🤔 Then again, the last GPU I spent more than 400 bucks on (Deutsche Mark back then) was my first ever 3d accelerator card, a MiroHiscore 3dfx Voodoo1 with a whopping 6 megs of VRAM. That think cut through Baldur's Gate as nicely as Sarevok cut through Gorion (not that BG shipped with any 3d features to show). 😄

^ Was thinking "what nice/pretty photos" and then ... I desperately want a Hello Kitty cone thingie, now. Those Japanese business men/friends my father worked for, who would come visit him occasionally when they were in the US, would always bring small Hello Kitty things as gifts to their friends adopted daughter. Erasers, pencil boxes, hair ties, stationary. I never got super into HK but still brings memories. Also, I wouldn't mind a giant inflatable like that. I could put it on our roof during holiday seasons. Santa? No, Hello Kitty!

You mean Ancestor's Memory? It will cost focus to cast it on party members, sure - but you can always get new focus from stuff like Phantom Foes and being Brilliant (Tactician) yourself. As long as there are several enemies Phantom Foes (and also Secret Horrors) is a great way to flank/afflict enemies and generate quite a nice amount of focus (if there are enough enemies left). And on top you can gain a good amount of focus with Clear Out, Kitchen Stove's Thunderous Report and all other sorts of weapon attacks, too. The good thing of the Beguiler's way to get additional focus is that it's not dependent on weapon damage at all - with lowish MIG that's an advantage imo.

Heh, reminds of the CIA black bagging a Canadian and sending him to Syria where he got tortured. Not really sure why we're beating the "Assad is bad" horse here, but knock on.

If anyone is still wondering why Syrian people prefer ex-terrorists over Assad and Russia 🤷‍♂️

That's fine but the main issue is that the mod did this without documenting it Document changes like this in the mod description so that players can make an informed decision whether or not they want to install it

IIRC these show up far later into the game, but I think the idea was to eventually get to the Club, yes. So, I'll go Might 8 with the Berath's that gives +2 Max Intellect Perception 13 (15) Dexterity Max? 8 Constitution? Rest Res? Sounds smart? Beguiler sounds like it will work well, true. But what about the Brilliant buff? Won't that suck up all my Focus?

Awesome! I really don't know why some mechanics - such as keywords - are obscured in the first place. Deadfire is way better than PoE in that regard, but still not great.

NOT YET, but I've decided to buy my first ever new GPU since 2017.... and play Indy as well. The Dishonored comparisons finally sold it to me... Also, the RT requirements may look steep -- until you realize that even a crap RTX 3050 applies (not gonna buy it, I'll go with a 12GB one). And even Ryzen 3 and Core i3 Cpus are fine. Now as to the puzzles, wish me luck. I'm a bit unsure, not expecting too much, just a few varied tasks. Games such as Kingdom Come, Stalker, Elden Ring even Zelda would never make it with one of the major Northern American industry players and publishers. They seem to have "perfected" the arts of playtesting truly. Was watching Gamespot's "The redesign that saved Deathloop" feature on YT and afterwards wanted to hang myself. Not only because of the feedback they got (some testers found the very idea of figuring things out to be... TEDIOUS!). But because it apparently lead Deathloop to be the numbing and repetitive "go here and do this" kind of game it's become -- including spoiling step by step the actual loop, which is basically the core idea of the game's entire concept... It's as if Hollywood were to screentest every single Nolan movie way in advance -- and react to that by cutting say Memento into chronological order so that everybody in the room would finally "get it" (including the dude who's not interested and plays on his smartphone). Biggest cancer in game biz, end of. How Playtesting can Make your Game Bland - Polydin

I would say that 'biological female' is not a remotely useful term, and frequently it is not used for clarity, (because that is not what it provides) it is used with the intent to hurt and deny the identity of trans women. Because frequently it is used in conjunction with calling a trans woman a 'biological male'. To demonstrate why I don't think 'biological female' is a particularly useful term, in this or any context, I'm going to talk briefly about Mack Beggs. Mack was the subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary entitled Mack Wrestles. He was a collegiate wrestler, and in 2017 he beat Chelsea Sanchez to win the Texas Girls' 110 lb championship. If you're wondering why Mack, a person I've just used the pronoun 'he' for, was wrestling against a girl in a girls' championship, it's because Texas athletic rules at the time had a rule that you must compete in the league for the sex assigned at birth. Mack is a trans man, or as someone might ignorantly say, a 'biological female'. But, crucially, Mack is obviously not who people like the author of that crappy article are talking about when they refer to 'biological females'. Now they could say 'biological females who haven't transitioned to men', but guess what, there's already a term for that, and that term is 'cis woman'. So no, Bruce, I would say to anyone wanting to use the term 'biological females' to refer to women who are not trans, do not do this, say 'cis women'. You will be achieving a better level of clarity and as a bonus, not making trans women feel trash by the comparison. Of course a big problem with using 'capable of having children' as the definition is that many are not. Not after menopause. Not if you're sterile. Not, for many, if you've had certain conditions like endometriosis. Some people prefer definition relating to numbers of X and Y chromosomes, with the issue being that some people may instead be born with XXY, or XO, or have the usual expected chromosomes but not have the sexual characteristics to match. And for most people you or I interact with, their number or type of chromosomes or what sexual organs they have will never be any of our business. In my day to day life, in the ways I interact with someone, what someone is 'biologically' is as meaningless as it is hard to pin down. Socially, in terms of how I relate to people, I'm gonna find terms like 'man', 'woman' or 'non-binary' with adjectives like 'cis' or 'trans' if further clarification is needed, infinitely more useful. As it relates to sport, however: Sport isn't fair. Some people are taller. They have an unfair advantage over me in a bunch of sports like basketball or volleyball where height matters, and no amount of training will make that not true. Michael Phelps has an abnormally large lung capacity. I'm not averse to requiring a certain testosterone level at certain levels of competitive sport, but in the overwhelming majority of cases my stance is: let women play sport with women, let men play sport with men, stop proposing dumb stuff like a whole separate league for the three trans people in the state.

I pay 200€ a year for my 98 Volvo, and 0€ for my 92 one. 😄 I do pay a 5€ licence registration fee per year though. For what it's worth, it'd probably be 4-5 times higher if you were living here.

Road tax is getting worse every year. Just shelled out 207.60€ for our cars. Meh.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office A four part drama series based on the British Post Office / Horizon Scandal, with the delightful Toby Jones in the lead role of Alan Bates. Normally I do not really watch these types of dramatic re-enactions of real life cases or situations, but this one's well worth the watch. Arnim Zola would feel right at home at the British Post Office. In case you're unaware, here's a fun little summary by the BBC. Nothing like losing your livelihood and going to prison over accounting software problems both the Post Office and its creator Fujitsu were aware of as early as 1999. Horizon had a whole host of errors and technical problems, including (but not limited to) duplicating transactions, repeating transactions during software freezes, an inability to synchronize with the servers in case of disconnects and a way for Fujitsu administrators to remotely change ledger balances without leaving an audit trail. The people involved are lucky that they're British, I guess. Elsewhere they might have gotten "DENY, DEPOSE, DEFEND"ed already. *The British Post Office has the right to conduct criminal investigations and to prosecute.

Cool. Guess I will try it then. In other news, itch.io is currently down: https://bsky.app/profile/itch.io/post/3lcu6h465bs2n