Bartimaeus

My hatred for bards has expanded well beyond the simple confines of gameplay at this point: I despise the general concept of a bard and the type of character that plays them in of itself. When I clicked on the class during character creation and saw my character play the ridiculous animation in their foppish clothing, it instantly rekindled my forgotten loathing. It surely doesn't help that every time you run into one in these games, they're the absolute most annoying people that you naturally want to shove off the nearest cliff. Well, a little more than "want" in my case, considering I actually do it. There should be some kind of satisfying crunch sound for if someone dies from fall damage: what better music indeed than the succulent symphony of a bard's spine imploding into dust?

It was for the greater good. All bards are bastards.

I keep playing about an hour at a time and feeling like I made zero progress because there are far too many little things to do. I, too, am looking forward to less dense parts of the game. Though I am also playing the Dark Urge, I haven't done too many evil things. But true to my word, I did toss some awful bard that was torturing some squirrels(?) with her terrible music right off a cliff and she died upon impact, though she landed right in front of a bear who sniffed her and then went back to catching and eating fish. Yeah, I don't blame the bear for not wanting any part of that either. I rather appreciated that nobody else seemed to notice or care, which is just how it should be when it comes to murdering bards.

When we were leaving San Diego back in...I want to say probably 2007, a large section of the county was being evacuated due to fires. It seemed like a huge fire at the time, but I was only in my early teens at the time, so looking back, I'm unsure how big of a deal it actually was relative to what's been going on in recent years. A few years later, we left the state entirely, and I can't say that I miss the constant fires. Love the ocean and the climate (minus any droughts) and the beauty of the state, but I am content with instead being on the shores of one of the Great Lakes instead, particularly as I find the speed of life to be more to my liking than what I experienced in California. But...especially seeing pictures like those, it's hard not to miss it nevertheless.

Makes me miss California and the forested mountain just beyond my backyard.

Crystal Skull isn't horrible...for the first 45 minutes. Sure, most of the action looks pretty sloppy, it's a bit of a shock to see a significantly reduced Indiana Jones doddering about, there's already too much CGI, the nuke-refrigerator scene is kind of dumb (though that's really more just symbolic of the film feeling wholly silly and unreal in both tone and style - you can immediately feel that trademark George Lucas-ian lack of restraint even though he's not actually in the director's chair), and maybe Shia LaBeouf with his little tough boy act is a bit off-putting...but otherwise, it's not totally lost by that point. Most of the dialogue is fine, the motorcycle chase scene is pretty decent, and they're doing a funny thematic thing with Indy kind of turning into his father along with some other stuff... Alas, there turned out to be a few other issues with the film thereafter. I'm curious to see how much I hate Dial of Destiny.

They sure took their sweet time in making a second season. I watched the first season, but it was a "I kind of enjoy it but I also kind of hate it" thing.

Fun (or at least I thought so) discussion between GN's Steve and Intel's Tom Peterson on a new tool and associated measures that should help identify bottlenecks between CPU and GPU in a more transparent manner, and possible expansion into even identifying specific causes of bottlenecks (e.g. too high resolution textures), which could be used by end users (and hopefully developers) to better optimize settings. Discussed at a mostly low level that should be understandable to all of us here, I would think. I don't really know that much about the whole "let's make a frame" pipeline, but they simplified it enough where I felt like I got the basic idea at least.

I treated They Live very seriously when I watched it, and so I thought it was pretty awful. If I had known in advance that John Carpenter explicitly intended for it to be a scathing but humorous criticism of 1980s capitalistic America and its conservative politics, I probably would've enjoyed it more. Alas, the lack of context and my own inability to read the room doomed it for me. Perhaps worth a re-watch at some point. Man, I can't even handle one Bruce, never mind a whole bunch of clones.

The Forgotten Girls, written and obviously heavily referenced by the author for the first article, is a fairly enjoyable read - it's mostly an autobiography on the author growing up in dirt poor Arkansas and how some relatively innocuous desires and choices during her youth allowed her to escape that life while dooming virtually everyone else she'd ever known during her childhood in the face of rural America being in terminal decline. If you enjoyed the article, you'll probably enjoy the book, especially as it weaves in narratives and themes with the intertwining of poverty, politics, and religion.

From what I've played of the game so far, it's pretty much fine. Which is infinitely better than I expected, and way more than I get out of almost anything AAA-released these days. If I get farther into the game and my mind changes, I'll let you all know. I mean, I always do, don't I?

The Matildas have lost to the English, and my interest in soccer has never been lower.

I've been so trained by most other poorly designed games to think that failing something, even something completely out of my control such as a literal dice roll, always makes me feel like I need to go back and fix it. It's difficult to break out of that programming, but you're absolutely correct: succeeding at everything all the time because you made all the correct decisions is just...kind of boring and dissatisfying. If we lived in an ideal world, we'd have more video games that do a better job with this sort of thing, but we don't. I think this is some part of why my interest in a lot of 'traditional' video game gameplay has really waned over the years: I'm tired of learning systems that ultimately just come down to making 'correct' decisions, finding out what works isn't fun and what's fun doesn't work, and endless min-maxing to make the gameplay as painless as possible - while most everything else is background noise at best. It's old, it's stale, I don't care or want to engage with it anymore. Just want games that attempt novel experiences, games with compelling worlds, stories, and characters, and maybe possibly even be able to make choices without nearly so much objective value tied to each choice making me feel like the vast majority of possible choices are stupid/wrong... BG3 is by no means perfect for any of that, not even close, and I think it's pretty wild that it's currently sitting at #1 all time for PC games on Metacritic, but I can say that it seems like it at least tried, and that it does actually feel like a proper attempt at a game instead of some kind of money-making lab rat simulator, and that's better than what I can say for almost every other AAA game I see these days. Hell, the game was even released on GOG right off the bat...

Lmao: "We didn't sell it, we auctioned it." What a dip. If nothing else, at least the GN video accomplished in getting Billet Labs getting compensated for Linus stealing and selling their stuff - Linus magically remembered they exist after weeks of ignoring them two hours after the GN video released.

I feel having content you don't want to engage with is or at least can be a positive, not a negative. I do not want a sixty hour long game full of repetitive and homogeneous content that everyone who plays will rotely go through because making anything but the obviously correct choices is just plain stupid (if there even are any real 'choices' to be had in the first place, seeing as games almost never have any real choices beyond some mild window dressing before the game railroads you right back down the same path everyone else has to go). That kind of thinking flies pretty hard in the face of the literal meaning and spirit of "role playing game", and I'd rather have a 30 hour game full of variability and interesting content and options that makes second playthroughs actually worth bothering with in the event of not wanting to make the same exact choices that you did during the previous playthrough. Heck, look at what KP is saying regarding failing his rolls and just rolling with them: failures in a game system like D&D can and should be used as an opportunity in of themselves to create interesting and different content/situations. This complaint is also kind of hilarious given that BG3 is pretty darned inclusive in terms of making sure that certain character types and builds do not ever miss out on much content - so long as you explore, talk, and engage with the game enough to find alternatives. Like, there were literally just multiple posts complaining about how way too much is available to everyone! Then again, I prefer my games to be on the short and sweet side, and I don't mind making hard choices so long as I feel like I understand those choices. The latter can be frustrating when not handled properly/clearly, I will grant, but otherwise... (Also, see Undertale for a great game with radically different situations, content, and writing depending on how you play it, and which I would contend did the most interesting thing that I've ever in any game ever in terms of handling this idea with its alternative route - even if there was relatively limited variability within each of the two main routes due to the indie scope of the game.) Everyone's stats having odd numbers when odd numbers contribute absolutely nothing to their effectiveness is basically hard encouraging you to respec everyone, which I think is kind of stupid. But the way stat distribution in 5E is handled appears to be rather lousy in general, so I guess it's whatever.

I'm really torn between doing things how I normally do and being an utterly psychotic murderer. I snapped a totally helpless woman's neck for no reason and the rest of my party silently looked at me in horror with "what in the absolute hell is the matter with you...and are we also in danger?" expressions and it was kind of amazing, but like, it's really hard for me to stick with such egregiously insane choices.

The vast majority of GN's videos are around 200-300K views where they simply cover news and products; the more controversial videos reach higher numbers. If you don't enjoy GN videos, you probably only know of the more controversial videos. It's a pretty natural kind of selection bias for someone who doesn't care for or follow something that happens to most of us. Like, I don't ever hear about Will Smith's best days or anything good he does, only the big negative crap ever reaches me, so it just reinforces my dislike of him...but really, that's not particularly fair to him. But what am I gonna do about it, actually go pay attention to that bozo? Hell no.

Well, I've always just hated him as a presenter, but it's nice to hear why I can be a hater for better reasons than that.

That's usually an AMD issue. ive never heard intel being bad about amd, but maybe u right intel's badness transcends (corporate) borders

intel bad, get with the program I haven't learned if there's any time-keeping in this game yet, or any kind of calendar system, or...pretty much anything, because I haven't needed to rest yet. Haven't needed anything more than cantrips so far, and I'm not even save-scumming at all. Well, okay, I save-scummed a bit to make sure I could kill the demon lieutenant guy in the mind flayer ship again, but that's a special time-limited battle that's mostly out of your control. I think it says "used" each time, which for those who are used to gaming terminology, would sure sound like it means it was spent. If the game tells me I "used" a potion, I would assume that the potion is gone as a result.

It is weird, and I get pretty uncomfortable at times. I can at least use the free camera tactical view in this game, unlike Dragon Age: Origins, and that is a big positive even if I still have problems with it. It was literally unusable in Dragon Age: Origins and I pretty much just let the AI play every battle for me because of how miserable I would get every time I would try to take control. I have not had any performance issues...but I already demonstrated that with my 10x speed Cheat Engine speedhack .gif, which is dependent on your CPU actually being able to process everything that quickly. I'm gonna blame it on Intel, because that just seems like the right and proper thing to do at this point, . Yeah, everyone being like "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A DAY OR TWO" and me being like "but I have to explore every last inch of this beach" is your classic player behavior vs. main story dissonance. I could come back later...but characters might have moved around by then, perhaps even resolved some things by themselves without my help, so I have to do it now. And you know, there's really no reason not to talk to animals and corpses with the appropriate spells while you're at it...

I kind of just forced myself to believe that she happened to get distracted by a butterfly at that particular moment. Her default INT score is 10, but I haven't really seen anything to suggest it should be past something more like 6-8. She doesn't even seem like a good liar, and she's a priestess of Shar for goodness sake, deception's kind of supposed to be her thing. Well, maybe she's several layers deep - being a patently bad liar about some things to hide being a good liar about other things. But then that would mean her intelligence isn't high enough, so I don't think so. In other news, having spent a little more time talking to him and seeing him play with very annoying children and just talk in a generally very annoying manner, I have now gone full His hour of death shall be beautiful and perfect, and possibly tasty. P.S. Why is my character constantly cutting off her own head while running around with a great sword? It's weird, she holds it appropriately enough with two hands while standing around, looks fine, but then she starts running with it one-handed and it cuts right into her neck. Lady, didn't your parents ever tell you not to run around with comically massive swords? At the very least, they could've instructed you how to do it safely. (e): Okay, weird, I switched out a couple of items and suddenly my character learned how to run with a great sword without lopping her own head off. Well, at least she's learning. Descriptions say they don't get used if you succeed, and I just tested it: I had two, I succeeded at lockpicking a door, I still had two after.

I don't know why they're called the Matildas, but I love their name and they've got my vote. Hopefully the story behind it doesn't suck.

I've now seen the introductions of all these characters, and this is pretty spot on. Wyll has the very worst introduction and I already want to kill him, Lae'zel's isn't much better but she has the advantage of being the first person you meet and you kind of are in need of her so that helps her case, Astarion's is annoying with how telegraphed and forced it is but also Shadowheart literally saw him 'sneak' up on me and put a knife up to my neck and she did absolutely nothing to help me so it made her look bad as well, Gale's is good (though I accidentally bit his hand off and killed him the first time I met him, but really that just made his introduction even better), and Shadowheart...as you said, she doesn't really have one, but that's fine. All in all, the only person I want to kill is Wyll, which is good, because we're both warlocks and there can only be one.

I think I've told a more detailed version of this story here before, but the very first Baldur's Gate character I played when I was a young and very stupid child happened to be a bard, and for various reasons relating to that experience, I will not play or even have a bard in my party ever again. @majestic irrationally hates AMD, I irrationally hate bards. Guess I'm sticking with warlock, and if a completely normal bard NPC even says a word to me in this game, I am going to disembowel them and eat their organs. I feel like being able to kill both the mind flayer and demonic lieutenant at the end of the tutorial (which is what I did) with the help of the intellect devourer is even better, though. I guess you can kill everything, but it would seem to start getting a bit difficult - those two cambions come in and start making things difficult awfully fast. But her name is Bloodless, why would she be interested in blood? Maybe because she doesn't have any? Well, whatever, best not to question any of the nonsense that happens in anime games. When I was making my character, I was choosing between half-elf and tiefling, and the only hair that I felt worked well with a tiefling's horns was Shadowheart's hair style, which is what eventually made me go with the half-elf, as I didn't want two characters with the same hair style. Well, Shadowheart has the big braid or whatever the heck thing it is as well, which isn't usable by the player, but I mean the rest of it. I think I found a couple of zero effect hats from random loot and tried them on her and her hair became ridiculous and terrible with them, so they get yoinked off immediately. She can wear her circlet for the entire game if it means not having to see her hair spontaneously get longer and flattened out ever again.