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I just accidentally learned that you can resize your desktop icons by Ctrl + mouse wheel. *mind blown*

Red Dead Redemption 2 Sunset by a lake near Rhodes The Braithwaite Estate The Braithwaite Estate St. Denis, a pretty place in the late hours of the day. Beautiful game, I especially enjoy the southern parts - although the mountains in the north are quite stunning too.

We've released Fallout et tu v1.0 today. The Fallout 1 to Fallout 2 engine conversion is now (core-) feature complete. That means, every Fo1 feature that was missing in Fo2 (red dots on worldmap, "Tell me About"-button, and lots of under-the-hood stuff) has been re-implemented by us. The changelog since the last update 1 month ago has become gigantic. Personally I didn't expect we'd be fixing so many issues in such a short time. Most of these are either vanilla Fo1 bugs/issues, or stuff introduced by the Fixt mod. Anyways. If interested, follow this link: https://github.com/rotators/Fo1in2/releases/tag/v1.0.1700 or this link: https://nma-fallout.com/threads/fallout-et-tu-release-v1-0.218045/page-18#post-4360863

On a gameplay level, I have one big wish, and that is (assuming RTwP) a strictly pause button. Obsidian expanded upon RTwP with a rich variety of auto-pause triggers. And these are good, but "read my mind" is not among them (I would like it, but without violating my privacy, figure it out). So a situation happens, and you want to pause, but between you finishing the thought and pressing spacebar, an auto-pause triggered, and you unpaused. And now, you wanted the game paused for two reasons - whatever you tried to pause manually for, and whatever trigger caused the autopause - but it's actually running, things are getting worse, you have to pause again, and maybe the same thing will happen again when you do. The strictly pause button can only pause the game. It's not a toggle. If the game is already paused and you press it, nothing happens. I want that button. (It doesn't already exist, right?)

with another superbowl in the rearview mirror, it is now officially (well, maybe not official) nfl draft season. two consensus best players available are qb joe burrow and de/olb chase young. qbs will once again get disproportionate press. justin herbert senior bowl practice week has propelled him up the board a few notches and nfl.com suggest he is now the #2 qb on many/most draft boards. http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-draft/0ap3000001099024/Justin-Herbert-highlights-2020-Reese-s-Senior-Bowl http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000001101022/article/threeround-2020-nfl-mock-draft-10-dolphins-pass-on-tua tua camp has been kinda hedging on his post-op progress o' late and while they remain positive, they is now saying the 3-month post op mri will be determinative. *shrug* regardless, is 3 qbs (for now) who appear locks for first round: burrow, tagovailoa and herbert. additional, is likely 1-2 o' the following three will also go first round: eason, love, and fromm. HA! Good Fun!

Excerpts from the transcript of the latest Take-Two Interactive quarterly earnings call: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/02/07/take-two-interactive-software-inc-ttwo-q3-2020-ear.aspx

Greetings employees of Halcyon, At this time, we need to inform you that the Nintendo Switch port development has been halted temporarily. The team at Virtuos had their offices closed temporarily due to the coronavirus for their safety. We are happy to report that they are all healthy, but development has been impacted. The release date needs to be pushed back to provide this team with more development time. We also want to share with you that when The Outer Worlds does release for the Switch, you will have the opportunity to purchase a physical cartridge with the boxed version of the game for those of you wishing to own a physical copy of the game. Thank you for reading, and we appreciate your patience while we continue development for this port. We will continue to share more news with you as we learn more.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189270621926/its-become-a-bit-of-a-meme-lately-that-obsidian I can understand where feeling comes from, and I think a lot of it has to do with the relative ages of people in leadership positions. Depending on the specific game we’re talking about, it’s a type of game that some of us have already iterated on 2, 3, or 4 times. And when it comes to things like dialogue structure and quest design, there’s even more structural commonality between our projects, regardless of the underlying genre or camera perspective. I’ve been a game developer for 20 years now. Regardless of my intelligence or creativity compared to a junior designer, I have seen enough quests move from idea to document to alpha implementation to beta to launch to have a pretty good sense about how certain approaches are going to go. There are some quest concepts or details that are - and I stress that I do not mean this pejoratively - naïve. The quest designer does not, and could not, understand the technical implications of what they are trying to do. When it comes to quest design (especially) a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, because as with learning any discipline, it’s hard to comprehend how much you don’t know once you get the basics down. One of my favorite bicycle frame builders is Richard Sachs. He’s been essentially building the same type of brazed steel frames for over 45 years. I have one of his 1978 frames and it looks very similar to the frames he builds now. He’s one of the higher-profile living frame builders and he’s vocal about his opinions. In an interview, he recounted interacting with a talented young frame builder who had been working for a few years, built several dozen frames, and concluded he had pretty much learned everything there was to it. Sachs’ reaction was, “You don’t even know how to make the right kind of mistakes,” This is one thing for a craft like frame building, where it’s often (today) one person working alone as a hobbyist. It’s another thing in a big team environment like game development where 30-100 people are trying to work together on a big, interconnected project. More experienced leads tend to be more conservative and critical about design, not necessarily because of some ideological stance, but because we have seen things go very wrong and we want to prevent the kind of collateral damage we have seen play out in the past. Players remember quests like Beyond the Beef, and rightly so, because it’s a very fun quest with a lot of interesting ways to approach and resolve it. What players don’t remember, because they weren’t there, is how long Beyond the Beef took to complete, and the impact it had on the designers’ schedule and the project as a whole. And players don’t remember the cut content, some of it the product of months of a designer’s time, because it was hopelessly broken or inherently not fun to play through. When I write this, it’s not to put blame at on the quest designers. It’s my responsibility to review their work and to approve or disapprove it. On a game like F:NV, which was almost half-my-career-ago, I very often said, “I don’t think you should do that,” or “I wouldn’t do that,” with an explanation of why and some suggestions for alternative approaches. These days, I am more likely to say, “Don’t do that,” because I have seen 10 out of 12 soft warnings go ignored and yield some really tremendous headaches and heartaches. In contrast, when I see young teams (and by this I mean inexperienced developers with inexperienced leads) working, I am often pleasantly reminded of what naïveté can produce - as long as you have the time and money to burn through your mistakes. I talk with and visit a lot of teams at other companies, and there are some high profile developers I’ve visited where their design process is less of a process and more of an ad hoc “fling **** at the wall” experiment that goes on for 3-5 years. Sometimes the cost of this is just time, which is money. Sometimes the cost is polish. Sometimes the cost is burning out half a generation of young developers. Sometimes it’s all of these things. If you’ve never been at the helm when your project goes so over-budget that the company is in serious peril, this might not seem like a big deal. If you’ve never been in charge when the game comes out and gets slammed for being sloppy, buggy, and messy - when a reviewer straight-up says the team that worked massive overtime to get the game out “phoned it in” - this might not seem like a big deal. And if you haven’t watched the people on your team, people for whom you were responsible, get burned-out or laid off because of crunch, or stress, or a project cancelation, it also might not seem like a big deal. But if you have been in that position, it’s hard to see the consequences of inaction and not try to mitigate them, consciously or unconsciously, by pushing for more tried-and-true approaches to design. I’m not saying it’s an objectively good thing, but it is, I think, a natural reaction for leaders who see things go wrong over and over. Personally, I do hope we take more chances at Obsidian in the future, whether it’s on big projects or small ones. Some of this will involve putting less experienced people in leadership roles. Limiting the project scope itself also helps. Small projects and DLCs are easier to experiment with in good conscience because the impact on the company will probably be low if it fails. But when it comes to our big projects, our more experienced leads will have to be more open-minded about letting certain things wander a little bit. There are additional layers of experience and perspective that I will (hopefully) gain if I remain in the industry another 5, 10, 15 years. Hopefully that will allow me and other people working in leadership positions at the company to let people take more risks in good conscience. I want to help people make the right kinds of mistakes.

Many apologies, but I have just been playing through the game a second time. I have noticed that after the early game, even with level scaling, difficulty does tend to.... taper off a bit, even on POTD. In particular there seem to be a number of encounters that are unexpectedly easy, in particular when a large number of lower level enemies were used to try to buff difficulty. This has got me thinking, as a person who DMs occasionally for pen and paper games, whether it would be worthwhile to tune up those encounters in particular (rather than say increasing the strength of all enemies e.g. via the difficult table, which would be perhaps excessive at low levels, or increasing the strength of enemies used in multiple contexts). I recall a number of mods for e.g. Baldur's Gate 2 that did this, quite fondly. Sword Coast Tactics and some other thing that I can't recall. As such, is there any way to edit the location and number of enemies on various maps, or swap out the level or type of individual enemies? Heck, if I could even find the area-specific intended levels (to force scaling for specific areas), I suppose that might be helpful? PS: I realize I could turn on more God Challenges or what not, but I just feel a number of these encounters need.... tuning up. PPS: is anyone noticing that Unbending Trunk seems to heal much more than 33% of all damage taken? This may be contributing. My, and my enemies, health still seem to actually increase from using it. PPS: There also seems to be insufficient scaling (and baseline growth) of human enemies in particular. They peak at Gorechi street and sortoff.... go downhill from there.

we always asked applicants we were interviewing at least one oddball question complete unrelated to job qualifications. literal asked somebody, "if you were a type of pasta, what type of pasta would you be? why?" interviews revealed to us what the applicant thought we wanted to hear from them rather than anything 'bout who they were. sure, we would ask obscure technical questions which would tell us if an applicant were genuine qualified, but were tougher to figure out if we were being shined on 'bout character and personality. the stoopid questions which would not have been something they prepared for a thousand times were often more illuminating 'bout who we were interviewing even if it seemed like such were just Gromnir being a jerk. ... don't think we ever used google for such unrelated questions. woulda' kinda defeat the point if it were something which would come up frequent in an internet search. oh, and our favorite answer to a stoopid Gromnir interview question were as follows: "that is the single dumbest question anybody has asked me in my entire life. ever." honest thought we would get such more frequent but it only happened once. hired. HA! Good Fun!

The House isn't where the trial happens. My understanding - congressional committees (like the House Judicial Committee) takes evidence or accusations of malfeasance and investigates. The results of the investigation is passed on to the full house who votes on the Articles of Impeachment, or the formal accusation. The Senate is supposed to take the formal accusation and try the accuded. So my layman's understanding is the congressional committee is like the police and prosecutors who bring their evidence to the House, which is like a grand jury, and if the grand jury recommends proceeding, the the senate acts as the trial venue for the accused on the charges brought forth (in the Impeachment). I'm sure someone will be along shortly to correct me.

Just as long as they don't ask you why you're not helping that turtle on its back.

Leak of MS Flight Sim 2020

In my place I suspect a lot are doing the same. Well probably to drink Corona. Am a groomsman for my friend's wedding, means I get to spend hours in a tuxdeo, joy. At least I can avoid the requirement of needing to dance, I just need to get a Gucci and Louis scarf to swing in the air.

What is so great about Switzerland? Couldn't say really. But their flag is a big plus!

Ha! I remember declaring when it was released that I would never a pay a cent for it until they added mages. Now it looks like I don't have to!

I typically drink my whiskey on ice. Sometimes straight up or with water. I really don't like mixed drinks all that much. Anyhow, I moved mead to secondary a couple nights ago. I typically drink the lees. Even after five weeks of fermenting, the stuff is still throwing out CO2. It needs to age, so it's raw, but the blueberry stuff was actually pretty good already. The stuff will just hammer you. I changed up my brew method with the fresh blueberries and it worked better for the end product, but it means I get less usable product, which means I end up with a lot more in the lees.

Three fingers in a glass with two ice cubes. Don't you DARE dilute Four Roses! Good whiskey has a distinct taste. Four Roses is a rye mash so it has a light and spicy taste. It's very smooth and clean on the back end. Something darker like Knob Creek or Blanton's you might be happy with a splash of soda water or a bit of lemon or lime to even it out. Four Roses, Woodford Reserve, Buffalo Trace, and Belle Meade are all best enjoyed neat or on ice IMO. Especially the small batch versions. Old Forrester Prohibition Style is also very nice but really hard to find. If you are going to make ****tails I'd suggest Makers Mark, Larceny, Bookers, or Eagle Rare. They all use shorter aging so the flavor of the mix blends better. A Maker's Mark whiskey sour is my favorite mixed drink.

On PotD stats. We're on the same page. My current character is M-10, C-8, D-15, P-16, I-17, R-12, with the R-12 granted on RP grounds. She was initially M-10, C-8, D-16, P-17, I-18, R-9 but I respecced her at L1, in Guilded Vale, because the R-9 didn't feel right, character wise. Int was prioritized over Per on RP grounds, too. On PotD differences. Here's a semi-comprehensive list of differences for my rogues: 1. Exiting Raedric Hold via vines rather than sewers advisable. 2. Shadowing Beyond cast required in Caed Nua hall 3. Reaching L6 before major combat in Defiance Bay advisable 4. Shadowing Beyond cast required near Icantha, out and back 5. Killing spiders outside of Korgrak cave advisable 6. Shadowing Beyond cast required near second druid group in Through Death's Gate 7. Pulling and killing sporelings in Through Death's Gate advisable 8. Unlocking final door in Through Death's Gate with Mechanics 8 preferable to retrieving key 9. Additional questing in Twin Elms advisable to increase acc for final fight 10. Thaos battle noticeably tighter

this kid has standards

Well, small update incase anyone else decides to take a crack at this problem. For world map encounters, level and NPC type can be edited by editing encounter entries of the worldmap. I think this largely covers encounters with a default small map to which a set number of enemies are loaded. I haven't tried it, though, but it seems simple enough. For set encounters: As noted elsewhere, the levelxy files contain most areas. They do not correspond to area numbers, e.g. AR_0610_slums is not in level610, it is in level38. Some of them appear to be menus and things. It seems like it might be possible to modify creature spawn locations by use of Asset Studio to export the scene hierarchy for an area. This will export the locations of encounters (and creatures) as part of the scene as a .fbx file, which can be imported e.g. into blender. This allows you to see, and modify the location of various creatures an spawns. How one might alter which creature is which, I have no idea as yet. My attempts to decipher the monobehaviors associated with the levelxy files have not, as yet, been successful. I suspect they somehow attribute creatures to these locations. I am also not entirely sure how to cram the .fbx scenes back into the levelxy files.

How to get the Watcher back at level 1 for a sequel: At the start of PoE 3, the Watcher is captured and put on trial by the Steel Garrote for the murder of Thaos and for “aiding” Eothas. One of the gods or another force intervenes before the Watcher is executed by the Strangler, and instead, Woedica siphons the Watcher’s Essence into herself.