LadyCrimson

@ GhostofAnakin - From what I've read, the "good loot" drops mainly from using Mayhem modes after beating the story (you have to get to Sanctuary in TVHM to activate Mayhem modes). Otherwise while there are enemies that drop decent stuff, it's still very random/fairly rare, so it's not like you'll see more than a handful or two of Legendaries in the first Normal playthru, probably. Bosses are definitely scripted to always be higher level than you, but maybe there is a max cap to it - it's just that under normal play you'll never reach it, like you've discovered. I haven't had any issues with it yet (I did avoid that Killa guy because of all the stories). In Normal, melee with 120% melee bonus weapon is so strong now that half the time I just run up and whack things to death, with occasional wild bouts of jump-running in circles, even bosses - since my main issue is the horrible aiming drift with controller. Also, like all the other BL's, there's always some trick or spot to find that at least makes a fight easier. Killing random trash mobs definitely nets you low xp. The way loot boxes and enemies respawn now is weird too, it's all timered, even if you only fast travel to ship and back ammo and cheap lootboxes mostly respawn each time (but red chests do not respawn for a long time no matter how many times you quit/reload, no clue what the timer length is - tested in the first Promethus area that has a red chest with some bandits). Edit: some enemies will not quickly respawn if you only FT back and forth but do respawn on every quit/reload

Oh yeah - that Breaking Bad film trailer reminded me that I watched "Brightburn" last night. The guy in the knit cap (Badger?) from BB is in that one. The film itself disappointed me since I was hoping for more of a thriller/superhero subversion and it's really just a (sometimes very graphic) horror movie. The guy playing the young son is decent and the very last couple minutes were more like what I was envisioning but by then far too little too late. Maybe if they'd made it 10-15 minutes longer and built up chrs. outside of the son/mom a tad more.

From light morning rain to normal to super-hot to super windy. Weather sure is more temperamental the past several years vs. all the rest of my life. Just another lazy day here, with nothing eventful going on. Just like I like it.

Between Two Ferns the movie (Netflix) I don't recall ever seeing any of the web shorts. The film is typical of a skit-idea that gets turned into a movie and nothing that great but yeah, those celebrity interview bits can be quite funny. You can ffwd and skip the "plot" and just watch those and get a chuckle. The most hilarious to me however was the very brief moments at the start of the credits that show some outtakes of them laughing while trying to film etc. I'd love to see long editions of all the filming of interviews, including those outake moments left in.

I got to lvl18/Athenas first trip (dunno if you go back again, I'd guess so based on the way the game is going). Best thing there is the for loot and xp before moving on. I think they basically failed at giving the player more of that illusion that the game is not super-linear. I mean they were all linear, don't get me wrong, but something about 3 feels more small/encapsulated, and a lot of the areas/non-boss enemy fights feel more like mini-arenas then open/expansive or interesting design. Which is the impression I got from trailer gameplay but I was hoping I was wrong. Doesn't seem like it. I don't think traveling between planets does it any favors either. I would have preferred they focus on a single planet only. So BL4 could've been another planet, etc. Edit: Found another couple legendaries, both things I won't use. Torque explosive weapons are very good now. Don't like most Maliwan (again, they made them lessser in BL2 as well). The radiation feels like Pestilent Defiler effect and works well, most of the time I don't' see a need for poison because of it. Slag seems to be gone? They made the hotfixes a hard/installed update yesterday and nerfed Killavolt some. I've been keeping my Slim unplugged from the 'net tho, until they stop updating it constantly. Can't stand constant changes.

I used to want a bunch of such things for making jerky. But jerky is all I'd use a dehydrator for and with the cost of beef around here these days + how much jerky I'd constantly want to make ( I am not a eat one or two small pieces a day person), I may as well just buy the expensive jerkys that I try/find/like. Less work. Edit: dried apples, apricots, plums etc. are good tho. I think I'd have to buy my own apricots and it'd be pricey too. They're not in the average grocery stores that much.

I do not like the first area/round of Prometheus planet. Actually, what I don't like is too much focus on car spawns meaning I can't explore in peace half the time. The "improved" UI still sucks, too busy/too many clicks, (like how many key presses to FT once you get the ship, for god's sake,). The controller aiming still sucks even if you fiddle with the "dead zone" settings. So at level 14 and able to go to the next planet my feelings thus far go like this: BL1 - 96/100 (because I like its SP and sniping play a lot more) BL2 - 91/100 (because it's great MP) BL3 - 79/100 (could change a little later) TPS - 60/100 I think I've had about enough for now tho. I find myself more irritated by a lot of design/interface decisions (and the UI lagfest) than enjoying at the moment.

I still don't quite quality for senior-citizen discounts, so I am still middle-aged. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. ** **general store/eatery/service accounts, I think AARP would take me now but I don't care about them so they don't count! :P

Decent but unmotivated mood this month. After a lifetime of being a semi-clean-freak I find myself slowly just not caring as much anymore. I find I'd rather do other things (even if it's nothing "important") than spend literally hours cleaning, dusting, washing, raking, organizing every week. I mean, I still care about it I suppose, just not enough to do anything about it most of the time. Pffft. The 2nd caterpillar succeeded in turning into a chrysalis. It didn't like the sticks I had in the container (not tall enough maybe) so it ended up attaching to the top of the lid. I glance in a few times a day to check. Can't let it emerge and then be stuck in there too long, I'd feel cruel.

Seems kind of like the fast travel points - there might be 1-3 sidequests per main mission area. I got to the 1st planet w/my main Fl4k and following that lady to meet Ryhs there was the med supplies, revenge, get us coffee, and another side quest ! mark in the area right after meeting Rhys that I didn't bother to look at yet. Tbh I always thought BL2 had way too many sidequests but it's a tad sparse in BL3 if you don't include Hammerlock, logs, Claptrap like you said. I got my 1st Legendary out of a lowly fridge - a lvl4 grenade mod on yet another new chr. Ha. Ha. Edit: I could do without the massive orange glow indicator when you find one and the "ding" sound.

ROFL - I was playing BL3 w/a new chr. and ran into a bug where NO ENEMIES SPAWNED at all, outside of a few side-quest lead/boss dudes. And with one sidequest the skags you need to kill to get their meat, those didn't spawn so you couldn't finish it. The enemy cars were missing too. Made it really easy to loot everything tho! After mucking about like that for a while, a loot-hoarder spawned and when I killed it, suddenly enemies were (mostly) spawning again. Very weird. Oh and there's apparently a bug with the storage bank where all your stored items disappear. Not sure of the details, happens on both PC and consoles. Probably not super super common but be aware of the random possibility?

That happened to me occasionally in BL2 as well. On the other hand, at least a decent weapon can last some levels and still be "ok". From what I'm reading it sounds like the drop nerfs were largely for the Mayhem 3 option, which you can't choose until after you beat the main game. So...regular 1st story run may be set up where nothing too exciting drops without awesome luck and it's the "end-game" and these other play modes where you'll get a lot more. I mean, in BL2 the Legendaries were either very rare to drop or you had to farm a single specific guy 20-100 times to get a specific one (farming the Hellfire in BL2 was soooo annoying). Even purples were fairly rare without red chests. The only common/story enemy that had a decent chance to drop certain multiple orange/purple frequently was the dragon-like endgame boss (BL2).

BL3 - let the balance adjustments nerfing begin! ... they've done some hotfixes re: some damage values (elemental and maybe some other weapons things) as well as lowering spawn chance percentage of the Loot enemies (kind of like the treasure guys in Diablo3...) ... and something about reducing high quality drop rates in some cases? Plus maybe a bit of XP reduction? Apparently tons of people are max level etc. and practically have all the Legendaries and high Guardian Ranks already from farming certain stuff. Shocker. It's why a months-wait isn't a bad thing. Why get used to the way things work in a loot game when it's going to change a lot anyway. Pffft. Well, I don't mean that they're impossible solo or something. Just that it requires a bit more purposeful grinding (like repeating clearing of some areas twice) than before to make sure you're of level to the big-bosses. I hear there's also one or two platforming jumping type situations that are super irritating/expect to die trying a lot or something too. Don't think they were main story related tho. Yeah, I'm the same with the Action skills. Pet-guy can go invisible/shoot while invisible etc. which is very useful but I constantly forget to use it.

Mortal Engines -- y'know, the first 1/4 of the movie wasn't half bad. Nice/interesting visuals, seemed like it might have some interesting lore re: those cities on wheels etc. But it then became so hugely and obviously derivative of 1000 other movies (including "Star Wars", especially its end-game or any dogfight scene SW was in turn inspired by) that I FFWD'd through most of the supposedly exciting climactic battle, bored out of my mind by then. And that undead cyborg chr. could have been excised completely in favor of better/more plot details or more focus on that non-mobile city behind the shield wall - like, were we supposed to care about them with zero focus on them? Ah well, visually it was still sometimes fun. I remember Jihae (the female rebel leader chr) from that Nat. Geo. Mars series I watched a few episodes of. She has screen charisma, it'd be cool to see her in a larger and more useful film role.

I suspect that's because more and more BL series is devoted to MP design. Thus for 4 players an enemy that's a bit higher level than expected may be manageable. In BL1 and 2 I could usually do bosses 2-3 levels higher solo (4 was tough even with hubby along) but I hear some bosses are also tougher now. Have you been doing all the sides or mostly just the main questline? There's not as many tho. I can't figure out if the scaling in the game is the same as previous, do you have an opinion on that? General enemies including badasses seem to have a range but don't always spawn as the highest possible vs. your chr. lvl.

(a bit long, sorry) I forgot how much hubby liked Borderlands. 6+ months was feeling too long for him ... since spare cash is not in short supply these days, I took my unused PS4-Slim, reset/wiped it, he made a ps4 account (which he would not have done for any other game in existence, I bet) and bought the game with it. We can check it out some and he can scratch his itch. I think he wanted me to get it too so we could co-op but plenty of cash or not, I'm not buying a 2nd copy AND two PSN+ subs (we dislike split-screen). Anyway, I've watched hubby play the Siren class (she's a Siren, that's about it) and the mech-suit wearing class. I've played the pet-class guy and the Irish device-using guy. They're all around level 7-8. Here's my (numerous) observations: ---World areas may feel bigger but a lot of that is even more empty space, with edge to edge exploration still largely rewarded with skag piles and nothing much else. It feels a bit more cut-and-paste feeling and less visually charming for some reason. Can't put a finger on it really, just feels that way. ---Being able to fast travel to a FT station from anywhere is nice. Park a car close to where you are, FT back to the town/station, then FT back to car. Mostly solves the "not enough space" syndrome, especially in solo play. ---None of the new classes interest me much. You'll find a lot of the skills from the other games in altered/improved forms scattered across the new 4 Vault Hunters. It's not that the chrs are bad, but it's become generic feeling, these BL skill trees. Ho-hum. The pet-dude is at least fun if you like chrs. with combat pets. ---The humor is not as amusing to me personally. Falls flat most of the time. That BL2 main writer that went off to write for Hulu is missed. ---Blues and purples fall like rain and show up in vending machines with fair frequency (unlike in BL2,). BL2 was originally far too stingy in this regard (I hear it greatly improved with that late-late stage edition/update), but in BL3 it feels overly generous. ---Shootin' and lootin' is fun for an hour or two at a time, but overall the game feels less interesting so far. Not getting that one more level sensation/obsession. But to be fair, it took me a while to really get into BL2 as well, and in BL2 I didn't enjoy the low-levels/early areas as much either. I don't know how I feel about the game yet. Or how far I'll go (I want to *finish* the game on PC). Maybe peek into the first planet.

....it was 2am and I finally noticed what was on the rear end of my small pet. My "poetry" skills are poor at this hour. :p Also ... those eggs hatched. Sorry for sucky pic but they're like the size of pinheads. Couldn't even tell if they were alive at first. I was wrong and I guess they're ladybug larvae. Which is fine. I'll stick them back outside and they can try to compete with the ants for aphids. I'm not sure I feel like raising ladybugs at the moment.

Yeah...I'll be slightly constantly tempted to buy it there so I could at least check it out, but then I'd still need to buy it again (twice) on Steam so hubby and I could play, so ... nah. I better not.

The video/concept reminds me a tad of that opening of Up. I tried to find a YT vid with English subs but failed. Only web lyrics I found were very broken English. So I copied the lyric subs from Netflix. I can't vouch for their total translation accuracy but they get the point across. (the concert+video skits film "Mayday Life" is on Netflix, this is the closing song). I think I like this Taiwan band, apparently been around many years (early 90's?) so they're now all mid to late 40's, still performing/touring. Sorta garage/rock/pop ballad mixture genres. Edit: those lyrics are long, added a spoiler tag.

I would mostly be curious about performance of the game. I've seen videos of 1080ti's at Ultra/1440 going 75fps and also 2080ti's at Ultra/4k going 50ish average. Probably varies some depending on other rig stats and impact of recording software, ofc. Not that I need Ultra settings with any game (Ultra is just for screenshots, as they say), especially with BL's graphic style. But considering BL2 was fairly undemanding even on my ancient old rig, I wonder what they've done/added to make it so demanding now. Also, I heard DX12 can cause crashing issues for some. I think I'll be glad to wait the 6 months or year or whatever it is so I'll get a patched game with all or most dlc already out. Edit: andddd....75GB install? Come on people/devs, do we really need so much that AAA games have to become this ginormous? In a couple years people will say FFXV's install size is tiny.

You know what I'm not playing? Borderlands 3.

Most of my game time is still taken up with the mobile Idle Miner Tycoon tablet game. 30-60min. or so a day upgrading oodles of mines to increase "money" and bonuses per second, so next time I open the game I can upgrade even more! Mindless busywork when I wake up and my brain is barely functioning. Also, still the digital jigsaw puzzles - another hour or so a day. I'm sick of ANY landscapes (sky, mountains, skylines, rivers, trees=puzzle-boring) and thus have become obsessed with UHD quality/pro pictures of food to turn into jigsaws. It's so nice you can find hundreds of such on the web now, I'll never run out. Food pics best pics for jigsaws! Other than that, not much. Occasionally 15-30 minutes going through that visual novel Psychedelia Of the Ashen Hawk (the one with the funny-bad chr. expressions, sigh). I should really trek through more of Eastshade and DQ:Builders 2 but just haven't been feeling that type of gaming urge too often this summer.

Forgot to mention that we did watch "The Mule." Not one of Eastwood's better directorial films. I was very slightly disappointed. It's not bad, and had some funny moments, just not quite up to his past efforts, especially the family-drama bits. Overall doesn't make as much of impact as his others. It did make me read up on the actual old man the film is based on/inspired by. The film condenses the time frame somewhat, from the real case, I think.

post 2 (different topic ) C-pillar ended up dying. It was getting big too. I gave him/he ate one small leaf of store-bought parsley, thinking if it didn't mind that I'd have to feed him less dill. I rinsed the parsley off but maybe it had pesticides. Oh well, whatever the reason, it was cute while it lasted. Hubby thinks I'm weird for getting "sad" over such a thing but a couple days later he found a new baby one and handed it over. It was really tiny. So I'm trying again. No store-bought parsley this time. It's already gotten much bigger. And if it doesn't survive all the way, then this morning I noticed ... Put those eggs in a jar, maybe I can raise a whole plethora of swallowtail babies! Also, the katydids are another insect that have been enjoying the garden. Aphids and ant "farmers" seem to love dill and the long green bean plants so anything that likes to eat those as part of their diet are also running all over the place (ladybugs/larva). Jumping spiders abound here and there too. I spend an hour or two each day just sorta watching it all. Makes me feel like that kid with the insect jars in her windowsill again.

Pickles experiment much more successful than those jalapenos. Hubby thought he put too much garlic in them but I was all "no no, tastes good." Alas, he says he'll put a clove less garlic in next time. He likes more actual dill flavor (del monte), I like more garlic/spices flavors (claussen/delis). The 2 plants produce loads - he already took a jar of cukes to his client's office for ppl to take (as well as boxes of tomatoes). People there snap up anything that's left in the break/kitchen area in seconds, lol