LadyCrimson

After keeping my game-playing pretty low for a bit, the past few days I've been obsessively playing Path of Exile again. I will create the perfect Scion-mage yet, darnit. My last one was dps powerful but too glass cannon for the dungeon maps endgame, need one with a bit more durability... The special summon skeleton army skill gem is so much fun...up to 28 minions when cast, now. Doesn't last long/has a long timer mechanic, but so much hilarity, and good for bosses.

Warlock (1959) - I remember watching this as a kid and liking it. I still like it. Typical era US Western, but it has Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, DeForest Kelly, Anthony Quinn, and a few brief moments by actors who'd later appear as guests in ST:OS. What's not to love?

There is a written universe law that says when one cooks any type of red pasta sauce, one must end up with said said on one's shirt. ...spicy It. sausage, olive, mushroom spaghetti sauce, tossed with rigatoni, dumped into a baking dish and baked further (with cheese on top of course) ... I'm not a huge pasta person (hubby is) but this one came out perfect. Yum.

Nope. I like exploring and I don't mind fog of war/walking around to get rid of it. But then I'm used to that mechanic from so many past games, not all of them rpg's, either. I mean, it's not like I can see what's around the corner or over the hill in real life, either. My favorite was still in Nox, where it had a line-of-sight visual cone type thing for buildings/some dungeons, IIRC. That was interesting for the time.

"Finally, I feel great when I wake up! Maybe I'll go to the park and ..." *thunder, light rain, thunder* "Maybe I'll clean the tub and cook a big pot of spaghetti!"

^ The cutest dirty snowball ever.

Supergirl? CBS getting in on that superhero wagon train... I feel like it's a long ad for some CW show, but who knows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm46-envrHo

Agreed. This season is all over the place, story arcs coming and disappearing, no central focus. Well, except for the Mark of Cain business I guess. But that's not very compelling the way they've gone about it. I suppose Dean needed a push into Mark Madness again, or something. At least we saw Bobby again. I still miss his character.

Never ending May birthday parties. I keep waking up super-sore/stiff back/shoulder and hip wise. Spend 20 minutes stretching myself all out when I wake up in order to feel half way normal and not stumble into walls from stiff hips making me lose my balance. Keep telling hubby we need a new mattress. He keeps going "it's fine for me." I guess I'm the Princess and he's the sleep-on-a-rock guy. Maybe we need a Sleep Number bed. And I need to get away from this town again. I find it ultimately depressing, here.

Getting close to lvl72 with my Scion-mage in Path of Exile. More levels will likely take a long time to achieve, with the severe death-XP penalty. Mostly a matter of item grinding or working on my other chrs, now. And decorating the Hideout. While I managed to go 4 years with having spent only the price of a typical new release (mostly for inventory tabs and a few pets), my more recent forays into playing the game (and my liking the current version much more than I have in the past) have meant that I've now officially entered the Spent Too Much On A Single Game territory. Oh well, someone has to help keep the game "free" for the majority.

Sometimes when I log into Path of Exile for an hour or two, I spend most of it fiddling around in my "hideout." One day I'll have all 3 Hideout sections, but the Master's daily quest for this Hideout theme gets really tough at high levels so it'll be a long time probably. I've seen videos of elaborately decorated hideouts but I probably won't get that fancy with it. Still fun to tinker with it tho.

Supernatural, as I ate a light brunch. "Haha, that Crowley's a card - talking to a hamster." "Sam's a terrible liar. Also, he's being stupid again." "Ooo, Dean's gonna be mad." ... "Wait, what??? NOOOOOOOO."

Saw Touching the Void (2003) - or, "why I'll never personally be interested in extreme mt. climbing." Then saw part of Jaws 2 - or, "why I'll never personally be interested in water skiing over open ocean."

At least Stallone's Dredd resulted in some awesomely funny YouTube videos. Which I won't post again. But ... yeah. I love what people do with bad movies, these days, sometimes.

I watched the 3 available VoD episodes of this National Geographic Wild (Truth About Cats) series. Pretty fun show, with the bits tracking city/farm cat daily routes via gps trackers and cameras being especially interesting. Although, most of the habit/body language etc. info they're gaining, I could have already told them how it was. But I suppose it's nice to have more official test results vs. "cat ladies possibly subjective observations." Motion dots on a cat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1bVd57qszY

Previous thread Last couple of posts:

Onward and beyond... (post limit).

Since this is a new/updated version, I went ahead and closed the first incarnation of this thread.

I personally like reaching a cap somewhat before an endgame, because I can't stand it when I can only use the last-level powers/abilities/whatever for a few fights. As to the main questline being short - that could be said of most rpg's. Doesn't have much to do with anything - there are always people who play a first run by just following what their questlog says to do, and sometimes that ends up with them doing little outside of the main path. If you increase the max level, then you (likely) also have to rebalance the endgame for chrs. that are going to be higher level, which is tangentially related to the "it's too easy/too hard" syndrome and so on forever in a cycle. At some point you just have to decide "this is the level." There's already a mod that can reduce the amount of XP gained, so if one really needs XP-gain as their sense of progression motivation, can use that.

There's a point of no return. The game will make a separate, new save at that point (not in the auto-save slot), so even if you don't realize it, you can reload that and start back from there to finish stuff, if you wish - as long as you don't delete it, of course.

Most of the side quests I skipped were in Act3. I entered Act3 around lvl 9 (just turned, I think), having done everything I was able/found except that I'd only done 4 of the Paths levels. So...are a lot of people finishing the Paths before going on to Act3? Maybe that's what's pushing most people over? 2nd half of Paths could have been inaccessible until mid-Act3 or something, too, in terms of pacing, maybe. I'm going to take a wild guess that all the bounties available in Act3 were for those who skipped a lot of sidequests, reach the end at too low a level, and don't want to or are "locked" out of earlier quests at that point...I do think there were too many bounties. Maybe should have been the one group before Act3 and only one group after reaching Act3. Or fewer per "grouping." At any rate, as someone above said, it's always difficult to balance for those who want to do "everything" in one playthru, vs. those that tend to just follow the main quest. I've seen it done better in other games than Pillars manages, but not a whole lot more so. It's probably one of the biggest complaints of all leveling games (that one is over-leveled or under-leveled or reaches a cap). Not sure how one would really get around it (edit) outside of making a game much more linear.

I have to say it: Woldan's shoes are stylin'.

I didn't reach the level cap until most of the way through Act3 ... I skipped the 2nd half of the Paths, didn't do all companion quests (don't like swapping in and out a lot) and I didn't finish the last round of bounties. Probably some sidequests I missed as well. I don't have an issue with reaching the cap, but my motivation did wane a lot by Act3 simply because of the combat issues (tedious) so while I could have gone on to do the rest of the stuff before going to the endgame, by then I just wanted to get to the end. I've meant to reload a save to finish anything I didn't complete, but sadly my motivation to plow through more combat still hasn't come back. This doesn't mean I don't like the game. I do like the game and had a lot of fun. Combat just wore me out and that's where motivation was lost, for me ... not level caps/lack of experience gain or whatever else.

Life Itself - this is not a stand-offish, objective documentary (of Roger Ebert), just to say. I remember when it came on VoD and I was not ready to watch it. It's on Netflix now and I watched it this morning. The bits about him and Gene's relationship then when Gene died, and then the end of the film, had me weeping like a little girl. Some because those two were childhood icons, some because such endings often reminds me of my own father (Christopher Reeve really hit home at the time, too) and some because ... whether I agreed with them or not on any specific film/points, or even, at times, as people/personas, I still miss both of them and haven't been interested in following any "film critics" now that they're both gone. Thumbs up.