LadyCrimson

Enshrouded: reached a spot where one can periodically farm lvl 50 gear. Good spot for a base altar. Chr has done all the main, non-side/animal husbandry stuff and I'm now just running all over re-collecting oodles (and oodles) of resources, crafting items/blocks etc, for a 2nd "semi-creative/builder" chr/world. Main chr. will be the grinder and other chrs can just build anywhere, with maxed altar upgrades and the like from the get go. I also discovered one doesn't have to fish in any particular biome. What you can max catch seems bait type dependent. eg, can catch high lvl fish with frog bait, anywhere, any biome. So I found this waterfall near Lower Meadows (semi-starter area) that fell into a literal puddle not big enough to fish in. I pickaxed a large hole under it, and it filled with water. Build a pier over it and placed glowing blocks so I could see at night etc. Fished for an hour. Suddenly realized my created pond's water level was still rising and flooding my pier/base. Had to put in a couple drains at the water level I wanted. So that's what those are for. :P

^^ What is with some "default" program layout designers these days. What is that monstrosity for - touch screens? I guess you're supposed to be able to put some image over every forum sub-category? Ugh.

Chosen "forced" font at size 22 and minimum font size at 20 (custom FF setting) works for me. ;p It's what I've been using for a long time, ever since higher res. monitors and many sites/forums still using stuff like 12-14px font sizes.... What's going to take some getting used to is not having the user avatar/info sidebar. The post columns look strange, lol. EDIT: forum no longer seems to turn the any smilies text into icons, if you make a text smilie it pops up a list you can choose from, or not. Which is actually fine to me. These days I'd rather be able to use an actual :D instead of an icon, if I want.

Ok, I've now seen the modern version of The Running Man. It was ok, as such things go. Not a very good film, really, but at least it did feel more like it actually used the book as inspiration. The main chr/actor tho - I was assuming the uber angry/max bad temper posture/walk/expression was intentional, and it didn't work. It was like a bad SNL angry-man satire. The pacing/editing killed it, like many things these days. I mean, I felt more attachment to everything going on (and chrs) in ye old Lethal Weapon series. These days it's just set piece after set piece sewn together with nylon threads. Edit: actually, a lot of stuff these days feels akin to doing a TikTok scroll pattern. "Set piece", finger-scroll, "Set piece", finger scroll. Makes sense I suppose. 2nd Edit: I saw Matt Damon/Ben Affleck's interview re: Netflix asking them to put a huge action sequence in the 1st 5 minutes to keep phone-users attention at the start, and they made it sound like that's a totally new thing/ruining movies. Matrix? Bond, sometimes? It's more how it's done - plus whether the film makes that 1st attention grabber worth the rest of the time, to the end.

It's Costco day. Which is where one spends a silly amount of money, to supposedly save money. At least we've never left CostCo with a giant inflatable boat or $5k patio set. Wouldn't fit in the car, anyway.

Ok, got Altar upgraded to 9. For some reason I thought there was one more past that, but that option is now greyed out like there's nothing left. Hm. So there is now either: ---actually try to finish most/all of the, uh, 50-70+ "quests" I've been ignoring, as well as some optional dungeons, the last few NPC's, as well as fill out any of the rest of the map (maybe 15% left). But game isn't really item-hunt worthy and revisiting/marching through areas multiple times to reach quest marker locations is already growing old. ---ignore all that and finally just resource grind to build giant bases and/or an entire "village", probably with a 2nd twinked chr (that wouldn't have all altars taken up as map markers....). Do I care about that. Undecided, really. Building is fun but never been one to make giant fancy stuff. Probably because I'm not good at it and/or it takes more time vs. longevity of my motivation. ---find another game --binge watch some TV --binge-sleep the rest of the winter. 🤔

^ If they at least made it so it wasn't percentage based and easy settings let us old/slow farts react before being dead, that might help. Or the meteor attack didn't cover half the donut, or its laser beam wasn't six miles wide and follows you around. The design of the fight arena tho is always going to problematic. You can easily "slide/teleport/glide" avoidance yourself off the edge. Seriously, it's a super skinny donut with a mile wide center hole as well as the outer edge drop off. Did I mention the boss can fly? And has adds? And yeah, I think nov. 2026 is their current projection (delayed a couple months), although per usual re: EA, I always have my doubts. Although I don't get the feeling it'll be 10+ years, haha. There are a couple other "indie" games I've had my eye on but I like (mostly) completing games before I move on, first, otherwise I never finish anything. I was also looking at StarRupture but it seems a bit too Satisfactory/factory type building for my tastes.

I would have liked that movie more if the entire film had had that ludicrous over the top feel. But to me it felt out of place vs. the rest of the movie. If you want to be a horrific satire/comedy, pick that and stick with it. Is Evil Dead 2 a great cinematic film. No, not even close. But (back when) I laughed my butt off from beginning to end. Long live Bruce Campbell.

@Hurlshort -- have fun with the Enshrouded Altar upgrade 8 boss. After taking a mental break from that game for a bit I went back and filled out some more areas, got more stuff/npc's - I have 17 NPC's, and even if some aren't crafting stations, holy that feels excessive. Anyway, there's a long long task (as usual, I get lost a lot) before Altar8-boss. You need lvl8 to be able to have frost-death protection (no death-timer) even while in your base in the actual snow. Could you live without that, sure, but hey, it's progression. So that boss. Yeah, nope. Even on easiest everything, I died in like 15 seconds during 6 tries. I might've done a sliver of damage to its health bar. The spike is unreal vs. everything else in the game. Its main two attacks seem to do percentage damage so doesn't matter your health, clvl or settings, your health dies in seconds. The area you have to fight = must be master with glider, double-jump/glide, slide/constant avoidance timing, speed/reaction etc or die in meteor puddles or slip/misstep/fall and/or be lasered or pushed to fall death. Sure, it's a skill issue and I suppose a few will like the challenge, but imo very unfair - again, vs. all the rest of the game. Out of place, all of a sudden. I could've maybe dealt with the dodging of near-insta-death attacks themselves (been there done that in other games) but the fight area for me was impossible with no room for "hey I suck, ok", navigation (imagine a very very skinny donut shaped piece of land). After reading online comments about this perhaps over-tuned boss, I gave up (I'll never have that type of "skill" and don't care to bother), and used a (kinda buggy) cheat-engine table to insta-kill it 5 times (so I can have spare heads for other chrs), removed cheat-engine-table, then continued on my sandbox-y way. Altar upgrade 9 is easy peasy in comparison, have head already, almost there. Just to say, you can easily not bother with this boss/last few upgrades, and still build tons of sim-y castles and towns/do most everything else. I have a feeling a lot of people haven't even reached this point in the game, because they're too busy building obsessive deco-towns. Or this is where they quit. Or they went to a "resource" server and just grabbed a head from a chest that someone else farmed (that's a thing in this game, if you don't mind Online).

Just to say, I recall spending too much time making that cat avatar work - partly because tiny size ruined the visibility of eye-squinting expression, plus the circle cut off the ears etc. I gave the cat more and more "eyeliner" and filled in the pupils darker and darker until it kinda worked. 😛 Not a fan of circle avatars either.

HBO - The Pitt, season 2. First two episodes that are available were pretty good. It's another shift, 10 months later (from the 1st season0. Not much to say so far, outside of that they seem to have maintained the quality. So looking forward to the rest.

That nerve destroying op for hubby's lower spine is now on the horizon. Just waiting for a booking opening to open up. Doc says there's 3 vertebrae that are the "worst" but 5 total are problematic so they're going to do all 5. And if THAT doesn't help him, it's down to the spinal-fusion thing, which is a lot more dubious re: could get better, could not, could actually be worse (and just like with the nerves, can't reverse it). Don't know if we'll stay over night in the area or not, depends on time of day (3-4 hr drive). Maybe just rent a room for a few hours of rest/traffic avoidance first.

Tiffany? Who's Tiffany? Also: I miss American Bandstand, silly dancing and lip syncing and all. I remember seeing this on the old tubeTV back then and I'm pretty sure I have it recorded on VHS tape in a closet somewhere. Famous film composer Danny Elfman used to dance funny, hehe. It's how we saw our fave bands outside of in-person live concerts, back then. Now YT over-saturates us all. But at least it also lets us nostalgia.

This is how I picture my husband being at this age. So cute.