Bartimaeus

ITV News says Brexit has won.

According to Bloomberg, "Bookmaker odds of British Exit [have] advanced to around 90%".

Based on the results so far, with most of Northern Ireland and most of Scotland having been counted while the rest of England is still being counted (and England moderately favoring "leave"), and with the results already favoring leave by some, it looks like leave will be winning. (e): ITV News (whatever that is) predicts 85% chance of Brexit winning. (e): Sky News estimates 70-80% of Brexit winning.

"Leave" is pulling ahead...

switched back to remain now guess this isn't determined after 1% of results being in like most u.s. elections

I never play "real"* open world games, like, ever, so the new Zelda is very intriguing to me... *Real meaning like Skyrim or Fallout, not like Stalker or Baldur's Gate semi-open world.

All packed and organized for moving. My feet, my back, my arms getting everything into my garage ready to load up into the moving truck... More fun to follow over the next few days.

Pretty much my post is what happens when you don't proof read what you wrote. There was a missing "not" in one of the sentences. I'll leave it as an exercise for the viewers at home to work out where it should have gone. Its déjà vu all over again. Then again, and the be not fair, time has improved the argument. fixd

You know, I don't think it really has. Previously, Bruce accepted the points you just went over (again) and admitted that his line of thinking wasn't that great. Now, he's back to his original position and refusing those same points that originally made him change his mind. I really don't think this is better.

Am I having deja vu? Didn't we already have this discussion with (mostly) the same people on the same issue over these same exact points?

Darn.

I mean, personally, I feel like pretty much almost literally every game I've ever played could use at least a few minor tweaks (in terms of scope and how much work it'd take to implement such tweaks) that would markedly improve the game, both for the initial playthrough and QoL (quality of life - aka, replaying). Some games need more tweaks than others, and some games need bigger changes to make use of that 'wasted potential' than others... ...which is probably why I'm into modding all my games so much.

He's tagged as "Intern" on the comic's website, so I guess that.

"For about 6 minutes on a bright Tuesday afternoon, the world was a different place. A place of hope. A place of change. A place where maybe, just maybe, things might be alright. A place where players in the NFL received justified compensation for injuries. A place where wearing the wrong socks was not worth more in fines than an illegal hit to the head. A place where we didn’t have a 17 month scandal based around saggy balls. Because for those 6 minutes, Roger Goodell was dead. For those who missed the fun, on Tuesday someone hacked the NFL twitter account and posted the tweet seen in the comic above. The internet immediately went nuts. Including myself of course. As dumb and bad as twitter can get, it’s always entirely worth those moments when something like this happens, when you can participate in the chaos as it unfolds in real time."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/06/09/hillary_clinton_sanders_brought_passion_but_hasnt_gotten_me_to_move_on_any_policies.html uniting the party

There are definitely a few points in Bernie's favor, including winning more of the typically Democratic states and some of the swing states, but overall, that seems like a pretty weak argument. On what basis are you saying that "Bernie's losses to Hillary were far closer than Hillary's losses to Bernie", anyways? From the way I see it, it seems like the complete opposite and is the reason the delegate gap is nearly 400 delegates wide.

Well, for me, it's because one, the style of gameplay is basically nonexistent elsewhere, with Pillars of Eternity being the first in a long time to come close. It's unfortunate, then, that I disliked some of the basic gameplay changes that there were in PoE, and furthermore absolutely despised most of the design philosophy changes in regards to the rock-paper-scissors-y nature of D&D and BG, which consequently affected the combat systems (including item and spell/ability design) in such a drastic and horrendous manner as to make the game as dull as humanly possible. There's also the matter of variety: there are so many different ways you can go with party makeup and philosophy, as (edit) Guard Dog, not Hurlshot (/edit) just alluded to. Even with the number of times I've played the game, there are still good items that I haven't really ever used that I could but haven't because I've never really focused my characters around them. There are also so many different types of enemies that all have different weaknesses and strengths...all sorts of special encounters that just feel so much more special and meaningful compared to other games. Fighting Firkraag, for example...it's just such a special optional encounter, and the game generally amply rewards you for rising to the challenge of those optional encounters, too. They say Carsomyr is the best two-handed sword in the game...but I've never even used it, because I've never really been much of a paladin person. ...But I could, and doing that would, again, introduce more variety into the rest of the game in a way I haven't experienced before, and knowing that I can easily experience the game again in different ways because of small changes like that is comforting in a way. It's just...good and rewarding game design in a lot of ways that I just don't feel like I consistently get out of other games. It's also all packed into a game of greater scale than we mostly would ever get out of a game today (the amount of characters, the amount of dialogue, the amount of little voiced lines from all the different NPCs throughout the game that give all these different NPCs at least a little character that you can remember them by, the amount of spells, the amount of items with lore written specifically for them...all the different monster types...all these different things...) in a mostly dead game type that just doesn't exist anymore that I would still love to see new entries for. The writing definitely has its weak points, there's no doubt about it...but it also has some high points, too. The modding community has definitely helped, too - Spell Revisions, Item Revisions, Sword Coast Stratagems...the former two take a look at all the different spells and items in the game and often redefine the ones that were completely useless, or relocate where you can get them so that they can be useful maybe a little earlier in the game - or sometimes the opposite, in cases where items were ridiculously overpowered and/or located too early in the game. After you've learned all the tricks and weaknesses of the AI and creature types and know how to abuse them, Sword Coast Stratagems revamps them to sometimes be just a little tougher in terms of stats and abilities (usually to just more closely match PnP if it messes with stats at all), but more to completely revamp their behavior to be smarter, to use their combat abilities more effectively than they were programmed to in the vanilla game (where enemies would often not take advantage of special abilities or use any sort of combat sense at all...). All of these different things help keep the game fresh even after playing it so many times. It's not a game that I feel will probably ever be replaced...sadly. I was actually just entertaining the idea of a no-reload challenge in a fully modded out game. I've never done one before, and I think I would play the game very differently from how I usually play it, particularly with my difficulty-enhancing mods such as Sword Coast Stratagems and the XP Reducer mod (which I normally set to only giving 50% of the normal values). I've never used potions, or any other limited-use items, in an IE game before (and generally don't in games period) - it would be interesting to see how much differently I treat my characters' health in even slightly difficult encounters when I know that them dying could actually be a big deal, and whether I would actually ever retreat from a battle when I think I might lose it (another thing I've never done). I think I'll probably try it, at the very least.

What are those insane HP numbers? Enemies in BG1 with over 500 HP? ...So what, dragons in that mode probably have literally thousands of HP in BG2?

Here's to hoping he tries to torpedo the Party instead, . ...although I very much doubt he will.

Yes, there are some things like that that can be changed - atweaks and TobEx do so,

You could safely reassure them that he won't ever write a woman character again. So no more tugged braids, smoothed dresses or sniffing noses, ever. He won't, as he's five years dead. Indeed...except it's been closer to ten years than five. Too bad, too: the Wheel of Time, for all its flaws, was one of the few series I very much looked forward to reading. He didn't leave enough notes behind for the other books he planned in the series, the so-called "outrigger" novels, either...Oh well.

I have no problem with anybody playing whatever they want - I just didn't care for the "but PnP!" justification, . Also, sadly, the base classes (including the multi-classes) are, to my understanding, hardcoded, and so there aren't additional base classes or multi-classes. I'd always wanted to trying solo-ing with a Mage/Cleric/Thief, but alas, it's not possible.

On the other hand, the few women I've recommended the Wheel of Time series to (about 3 or 4, all told) all stopped reading the series because they hated how Robert Jordan wrote the women characters so much that they couldn't get through it. Something about the women being so consistently stupid and stubborn all of the time and the main men characters listening to them way more than they should, and about how Robert Jordan should never write a woman character ever again... ...which I can sympathize with, given that Elayne was quite possibly the most stupid and annoying character, PERIOD - regardless of gender - that I've ever had to spend a significant amount of time reading about...but I dealt with that by just skimming over her parts as fast as possible and hoping she was dealt a quick death ASAP. Alas, it was not to be.

I know, isn't it awful?

Uh, actually, Kensai doesn't even exist in 2E to beign with, and its appearance in Baldur's Gate is a totally made up (by the BG developers) derivative of the 1E class, and it was clearly never really thought through enough to be balanced with the 2E systems (and hence why some mods change the class to disallow it from being dual-classed, which would also presumably disallow multi-classing with it). So I'm not sure I would feel so comfortable justifying using a totally broken combination by saying "but PnP!", personally...