Bartimaeus

The movie is quite horrid, and I actually foresaw that it might be someone's only frame of reference for it, which is why I ended up editing "book" into the spoiler, . The original book is pretty good, even if it has some issues...the sequels, uh, have some interesting ideas, but largely devolve into some kind of overtly philosophical soap opera. Not for me, to say the least. Ken Liu's English translation: I thought the writing prose was fine. It's not particularly interesting or complex or distracting or...really anything. It's just fine. If you're interested in the ideas, perhaps that's enough, but it's difficult for me to say fo rsure.

I got like a third of the way through The Three-Body Problem book before I dropped it. The opening, which takes place in the throes of China's Cultural Revolution where Ye Wenjie's father is lynched during a struggle session, was awesome and I was super hooked from that...but after that, we quickly move forward to the present, and the book did almost nothing to capture my interest from thereon. I'd had quite enough when we got to the video game section of the book: I'd started to have this really sinking feeling that the series was massively derivative of (or otherwise painfully similar to) the series, and so I started reading a summary of the rest of the book, and well...both yes and no, but regardless, I had zero inclination to get any deeper into the series.

Stress-free Packers football for the first time in close to a decade, it should be a nice respite for a season...but hopefully not much longer.

The unequivocal star of the U.S. team, ANT aka Anthony Edwards, said "we're not really worried about those guys" with regards to Lithuania and Montenegro leading up to the game, .

You know, we talked about this within the past year and I thought I remembered that being the case, but I went against my memory and thought for sure Haer'Dalis had to be an option as well. Even though he's really not that much better than Cernd, he is at least not Anomen...but apparently not. How disgusting: BioWare must've really hated its female playerbase. But these kinds of character romances for me, at this point, feel like they just kind of unnaturally break the character in question. It's way too painfully obvious what the game is trying to do, it's both too gamey and transactional (especially with the constant CHARACTER DIS/APPROVES prompts for everything you do, big or little)...and too uncomfortably masturbatory. I don't want silent cardboard cutouts for party members either though, so I guess I'm kind of stuck with not really liking any of my options here. It's an odd thing, looking at BG1 and BG2 and seeing how laughably limited their character dialogues and personal developments largely are, but also being like...well, at least I wasn't annoyed by most of them being in my party, at least they weren't constantly taking me out of the game by being way too obviously playersexual, and I actually rather like a number of them, as simple as they may be. With BG3, it seems that I have to go out of my way to either not interact with characters, or maybe pick responses based purely off of balancing all of their approval levels, in order for things to not get immediately weird and off-putting. But the thing is...neither of those are how I want to play either (the amount of self-rules I'm having to implement or consider implementing in order to fix 'problems' with this game is too high already!), so again, I kind of just feel like I can't really play the game how I'd like to. Why the hell does everyone want to get into my pants just for asking some basic questions about them and for trying to be generally polite while tossing bards down cliffs? Well...actually, now that I think about it, I suppose I'd be pretty in love with anybody that tosses bards down cliffs myself, so maybe that's it. It seems that someone else apparently hates the approval system, because there's already a mod that completely disables it. Well...okay, I guess I'm going to install that, because I really have had zero inclination to play the game since my first camp (i.e. the last time I played).

At least with older games, if you played a female main character, you could just butcher all the guys to make sure no sham romances would suddenly start to fire off. Isn't it that only Cernd, Anomen, and Haer'Dalis are romanceable for female main characters in BG2? I'd gladly kill all those morons even if I weren't playing a female main character, but the fact that I do makes it even better. Now, my only option is to apparently murder everyone I meet. (e): Wait, no, I don't think Cernd is romanceable - he's already got a kid, right? He really is the worst...until I remember that Anomen exists.

That first screenshot is the line she gave to me immediately after she got done telling me that I was wretched and vile, literally the first time I talked to her in camp. I did not find it to be altogether kosher.

1. not sure i really like the look of any of that combat 2. but if they bring back my cheerleader outfit, i suppose i can at least try it out

The Pupil (2022). Rather bizarre Italian film about a bunch of young girls in a nunnery during World War II trying to make it through Christmas while being yelled at for their apparent wickedness by the nuns, selling their little orphan prayers to all the wives and moms worried about their boys in exchange for food and such. The concept is decidedly me, and the execution was...rather amusing. I mean, just look at them. Once a girl decides that cake is more important than Christ, I think that pretty much seals it.

Can you buy the premium, download/preload, refund, then buy the normal version and have it ready to go on launch date?

what i really need with modern games is a 'playstation 1 graphics' mode/switch: less strain on my gpu, less strain on my brain because all the nasty uncanny valley crap immediately goes away

What I found to be really disconcerting was that she went straight from "YOU SURE ARE AN UGLY BASTARD" to "HEY I'M QUITE FOND OF YOU, NOW I THINK YOU'RE VERY PRETTY" in literally the next line. I was dying inside so much, and was like...okay, I guess this is one of those games where I'm going to have to not talk to my companions sometimes. I'm not playing a visual novel or dating simulator here, I don't want characters to immediately glue themselves to me in the cringiest manner possible. Honestly, I wish I could just disable the approval system entirely and just leave everyone at neutral or maybe mild approval with no way of going higher. Yeah, that's pretty much my situation: there really hadn't been any combat that I needed to do anything besides cast cantrips and shoot arrows for a very long while, and I was making judicious use of always sneaking around and attacking before being seen, which usually means that my characters get two attacks before enemies get even one. Most battles end before enemies can move. (Also, while all of that could be accomplished in "a couple of real life cRPG hours", in practice it took significantly longer because of wandering around looking at every little thing I can.) It's definitely not constructed in a way that I feel I can really get into, and I think that's a shame. My sense of time, direction, pacing, and just...there being any sort of realness/grounding to the game world or its characters are all severely off for a myriad of reasons, both little and large...and though I seem to enjoy myself fine enough when I am actually playing it (which has been a handful of hours each week - shorter sessions being my way of trying to pace the game, perhaps), there's this increasingly grave feeling of discontent looming over me that I really don't like. Actually, it's very similar to the feeling I get when I try to watch a show that is just fun or funny without offering much anything else that I care about, like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. For a few hours, that might be fine, but it becomes a much tougher ask with longer durations. I've been using the "manually enter turn-based mode" 'pause' button a ton whenever I'm playing. It's too useful for a number of situations to ignore. Also, no day/night cycle is about as bad as there being very little environmental audio, if not worse: it feels like I've been in daylight for bloody forever. Never underestimate the power of a windy or even rainy night. P.S. Confession time: I thought the turn-based combat would be my biggest problem in this game, but honestly, it feels like combat moves faster in this game than it did in Pillars of Eternity, or maybe there's just a lot less of it, or its use feels more appropriate, or...something. It surprisingly has not been too much of an issue for me, which makes it doubly unfortunate that I'm having trouble sticking to the game because of other issues.

I've continued to play little bits here and there, not making a ton of progress but a little. I finally went to camp once and Astarion and Lae'zel seem to already have the hots for me real bad, and it's kind of skeeving me out. Like...guys, I just met you. Today. Literally today. Could we, like...not?

Wisconsin is widely considered to be the most gerrymandered state in the country, and the state could feasibly (though nowhere near certainly) switch from Republican super-majorities* in the state assembly and senate to a Democrat trifecta if the maps are fairly remade by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A lot of positive change could happen in a very short amount of time a la Minnesota if that comes to past - but the very least, the maps being remade and a Democrat staying in the governorship should make certain Republicans never even sniff super-majorities in Wisconsin ever again. It is what I am most excited for (as opposed to anxious or dreading) with regards to the 2024 election season, assuming it happens by then, and I pray that it does. *Actual overriding super-majority in the state senate at 22/33 seats, almost overriding super-majority in the state assembly at 64/99.

RIP Arleen Sorkin, original (and best*) voice of Harley Quinn: the only one that could ever make me like a Brooklyn accent. She also played a long-time main character on Days of Our Lives, Calliope Jones, which was actually a major influence in the creation of the Harley Quinn character. There was a bizarre dream sequence on the show where Arleen dressed up and played as a wacky jester; Paul Dini, a friend of Arleen's and a key DC Comics character designer working on Batman: The Animated Series, needed a random henchwoman for the Joker and used Arleen's portrayal of the jester as inspiration...before then getting Arleen officially cast to voice the character as well. Though it was only intended that Harley Quinn appear in one episode, they liked the character so much that she would return numerous times before eventually solidifying the character as a mainstay of DC Comics.

They should drop the "X" entirely and only mention it as "the website formerly known as Twitter".

I thought this was generated by an AI, but apparently it's real.

CRPG romance has been off-putting and kind of downright pathetic since basically forever. Seeing friendships and even romances develop between characters that are not your own would be waaay better IMO, and it'd more similar to watching characters develop like you would with a movie or TV show. I think player-to-character friendships can feel more organic, because it's usually less characters being boiled down to "you click da right buttons in order to unzip their pants" vs. "you did not click da right buttons to unzip their pants" and more "hey, the player is actually taking the time to talk to and seemingly care about the characters around them". Maybe I'm wrong and it's just rose-tinted glasses to think that, e.g., the PST party characters feel way more cohesive/grounded and less artificial in how they're presented and developed over the course of the game, I don't know. But I do know that seeing characters rubberband up and down with their "I LOVE/HATE YOU" meters as a result of usually minute decisions about (what are supposed to feel like) spontaneous situations and conversations seems farcical. That sort of thing should really be reserved for decisions with major value implications (...maybe like, um, violently stomping squirrels to death or tossing bards off cliffs for no reason, both of which everyone in your group just gives a thumbs up to and blissfully ignores), as I just don't think that's how these things usually work out in reality. Though actually unresolvable incompatibilities between characters should probably lead to conflict, and yet they inexplicably hardly ever do in these types of games as well! It's a "you can have your cake and eat it too" situation, except the cake tastes kind of bad. Never mind that only characters mirroring one another liking and/or falling in love with each other is super boring. Most works of fiction with an ensemble team of characters are about people with all sorts of different backgrounds, beliefs, ambitions, values et al. growing to respect and like each other as they learn to appreciate those different qualities, particularly as those qualities come to use in a variety of ways in different kinds of situations. Imagine if Star Trek was just 10 of the same characters running around agreeing with each other: it'd be absolutely terrible. If Lae'zel and Shadowheart magically grow to respect and/or outright fall in love (uh...well, maybe not) with one another by the end of Baldur's Gate 3 instead of keeping on with same old same old, I will happily eat at least some of my words here.

The Conquerors for Age of Empires II...Artorias of the Abyss for Dark Souls 1 (though it may be the single worst example of an expansion that is technically integrated into the base game but due to hilariously terrible design is easily missable)...Mask of the Betrayer for NWN2...Lord of Destruction for Diablo II... Well, that'd be my list anyways. There are probably others I'm not thinking of. Completely unrelated: I've been meaning to mention this: with the original BG2 CD installer, the installer was not able to parse apostrophes, meaning that if the game was installed to e.g. "Games\Baldur's Gate II", it would silently strip the apostrophe and it would become "Baldurs Gates II" instead. I don't know what it looks like for Steam, but the official GOG installer installed my copy of Baldur's Gate 3 to..."Games\Baldurs Gate III". Default install location doesn't have an apostrophe. Nobody will probably find this as funny as I do: I used to have a discrete registry key I kept on hand that would fix where Windows thought BG2 was installed to, so to see history repeat itself 20+ years later is just too much for me.

I remember watching some long-form essay video on someone playing Shadows of Amn for the first time and them marvelling at how dark, dirty, and chaotic Athkatla is, and how it made it really feel like this wonderfully lived-in and organically constructed city, especially relative to most other games' cities - even much more modern games. Environmental audio and visuals alike definitely play into that, and I sometimes think about that video when I consider how attentive and perfectly at home I feel with certain games' environments while feeling completely out of sorts and not thinking anything of or even really paying attention to those of other games. Some games just do a much better job of creating a believable illusion, and it can be difficult to quantify. From what I've played of BG3, I can't say that the game really quite gets me in this way even to the standard of BG1, and note that I love and obviously think a lot more of Shadows of Amn.

Some people should not speak on camera, good lord that video was intolerable. On a side-note, you should really manually go into turn-based mode before pickpocketing anybody - makes running away hilariously easy if you get a full turn of movement before the "I've been stolen from!" timer starts to run*. Upon seeing how broken pickpocketing was, I immediately implemented a "I can only steal enchanted and quest items from NPCs where there is no other apparent/satisfactory method of obtaining them" rule, because just stealing everything is incredibly lame and boring. (e): *Also, you can steal multiple items if necessary/successful before that timer starts to run. And also, the character can't move around while you're in turn-based mode. Overall, it just...doesn't make any sense not to be in turn-based mode.

I'm imagining taking this idea to its most extreme logical conclusion: a future where all the Democrat voters run the Republican primaries, and all the Republican voters run the Democrat primaries, with each group voting for the absolute worst candidate possible to try and outdo the other side to make their own look more palatable. Cue everyone wondering why all our candidates are always so bad. Well, that seemingly happens a lot of the time anyways, but it'd be even worse.

can they remake bg3 in the infinity engine instead

I've run into two weird bugs repeatedly (at least five times each) so far: 1. My controls get "desynchronized". Essentially, I will click to move somewhere, and instead of my character moving to where my cursor is, it goes somewhere else completely different. When this happens, it's not just that one click, but rather all further attempts at doing anything (including even using the hotbars and menus) are busted in this manner, and there is no apparent fix except to restart the game. I wasn't able to determine the how/why of this happens, but it may be something to do with minimizing the game, I'm not entirely sure. 2. The timestamps and order of my saves get muddled. My latest quick saves will suddenly start to have wrong and much earlier timestamps, and the game will place them many slots below the one prior to the bug starting to occur (maybe as much as 20 or 30 slots), and thus quick loading will load the old quick save instead of the new quick save. Making new quick saves does not help, the game must be restarted to start getting correct timestamps again (which will make new quick saves appear at the top of the list and be preferred for quick loading once again).

It was honestly already a problem in primarily text-based games like even BG1/2, but it gets even worse when you throw in fully voiced dialogue*: there are going to be significantly less options to choose from due to the expense of having to voice what NPCs say back. So you get a lot of bland and/or mildly window dressed dialogue options that will work to get the same responses. There's definitely a lot of dissonance for me as well, as I'm playing a baby-faced Dark Urge Cthulhu-warlock, who I kind of imagine as being Elizabeth Bathory, and trying to navigate between "I'm fantasizing about tearing off and eating that person's face right now", "hello, I'm Mr. Krabs, and I like money", and "oh, the poor widdle bardy bard needs some help writing her sad little song about her dead master :'(" can be a lot of whiplash. I want to try to roleplay as my character, but I don't necessarily want to play Stupid Evil and murder everyone she meets. I feel like you almost have to imagine your own responses that at least sound more suitable for whatever you're trying to play, rather than what's literally written...but that basically takes you down the path of a kind of meta-gaming, as now you're thinking about dialogue options as "what do I want to happen" instead of "what should I say", and that's not great. Of course, I know how it would take an utterly ridiculous amount of just writing (never mind voice-acting!) to really cover all one's bases, which is probably a point in favor of always playing a very generic main character that you view simply as a narrative tool rather than a real character. I mentioned a while back about it being very difficult to take roleplaying seriously in these kinds of games, and this has always definitely been one of the big problems with it. *Mind you, I'm still of the opinion that semi-voiced is much better than fully voiced. I like characters having voiced lines to give them their unique flavor while also indicating their particular style and tone, as well as using voiced lines for dramatic punctuation and whatnot, but I prefer being able to go through dialogue at my own speed, which having everything be fully voiced is a huge impediment to. And I'm not going to sit through and listen to all of this idiot bard's entire dialogue tree, but constantly skipping all of their lines feels pretty disruptive and dissatisfying as well: semi-voiced a la the Infinity Engine games made for a delicate bridge between those two competing issues rather effectively.