Zoraptor

Yep, if you've got channelers it's never going to be an out and out medieval equivalent. In some ways the books are also quasimodern- doesn't seem to be much if any illiteracy for example, when maybe 5% of a renaissance society would be literate. But, in most ways and for most people there was very little difference between medieval and renaissance anyway- more or less subsistence agriculture, horse power, horse or water transport, very low education etc. I guess, technically, it's most accurately described as a post apocalyptic society and if you want to get really technical, post apoc twice over. Yeah, it misses the feel except at very occasional points. It also doesn't feel consistent in what it does do- as simple as each person from the same small isolated village having a different accent. I'm sure half the complaints about it looking like cosplay is because of the lack of consistency in anything else, so far as I can tell the costuming is objectively fine. There's no sense of scale. Things are rushed, other things have too much time spent on them. And there's just enough good stuff there (put an example into the spoilers) to make me more disappointed with the stuff that doesn't work.

WoT Ep7 TLDR; it was alright. Main problem, like much of the show, is that it should be better than it is and it's very uneven. Expanse s6e02 TLDR; another perfectly decent episode. Only criticism is that it does feel rushed and a bit linear, but with only 6 episodes I can't see how that's avoidable. Guess the positive alternative take is that they're culling the fat.

They're already shooting S2 of WoT and S3 is pending confirmation. It's not the greatest quality wise but it is a solid top 10 streaming title so is nowhere near Cowboy Beflop.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

A lot of people absolutely hate that though. Games seem to handle this 'problem' three different ways. 1) Have a hard mechanic that is rigorously enforced and not at all generous. That would be something like the Spirit Meter in Mask of the Betrayer. You have to consider very carefully whether to rest, and how to manage it, and it's pretty easy to mess it up especially at the beginning. You might also include games like Age of Decadence here, where 'urgent' secondary quests fail if you leave a location having not completed them. 2) A soft mechanic, like Fallout 1 (yes, post patch, prepatch it was way more aggressive). You can do all the content within the time limit pretty easily, you only get in trouble if you try farming random encounters or really don't pay attention. 3) Just don't have a time limit, everything stands still until you hit the next plot progression point. The issue from a game design perspective is that people are conditioned to the third option as it's far and away the most popular- while people love having the 'urgency' of being told they are racing against the clock they hate having the urgency of actually racing against the clock, and that's true for a lot of non gaming stuff too. Practically, there's very little difference between post patch F1 and TW3 except not being able to perpetually farm random encounters in F1. You can deal with the monster contract of Shady Sands' radscorpion infestation as easily within the time limit as [Temerian Hamlet's] Nekker infestation; you won't hit F1's time limit unless you're deliberately messing around or trying to defog the entire map on foot. But what was the #1 most hated thing about MotB? The Spirit Meter, by absolute miles. I liked it, but it's pretty clear objectively that a lot of people really, really, didn't; plus I'd still buy MotB if the Spirit Meter wasn't there. When you're making a commercial product those people count, because they won't buy. Hence making the timers a lot more generous in the F1 patch. On the positive side, at least TW3 isn't Bioshock, and point out that the whole thing's gamey then continue on blithely with the exact same gamey stuff.

I wouldn't put it like that, since Geralt is certainly the main character- he's your avatar, he pretty much has to be. I'd probably use the term 'plot driver' instead. In any case the issue with having that as a unique point for TW2 is that Emhyr is extremely similar to Jacques/ Alvin in TW1 in terms of their role in the plot. They're both shadowy figures hiding behind proxies in Prof/ Javed or Letho (with a big assist from the brains trust that is Sìle and Philippa). Of course in TW3 you more or less know who the antagonist is from the start- it's the Wild Hunt, and Interdimensional Elf Hitler is barely more than a caricature at any point. The big difference in TW2 compared to the others plot wise is that you never meet the the antagonist and he actually 'won' the game after about 2 hours game time. The entire 25 hours of game time after that is mitigating the disaster. Whatever you do Emhyr is sitting at the Yaruga laughing at the end, it's only a question of how long and how hard he's laughing for.

Don't think we'll ever get a Dead State 2, but I'd love a similar styled game. Or a similar styled post apoc game. Closest to DS2 was probably Dead Age 2, which was one of the better spur of the moment purchases I've made in the past year- but it's really not all that similar to Dead State.

Both of them are. Though I got it around the wrong way which was which; he is NSA and was working with GCHQ in the UK, she is CIA. (10 years later and that last clause still makes me feel compelled to mention Aiden Gillen)

Good news everybody! Anne Sacoolas, the US diplomat's wife (and active NSA agent, since promoted) who ran over and killed Harry Dunn and fled back to the US rather than face any consequences then tried to ambush his family into forgiving her along with Trump is going to be hit with a wet bus ticket via video conference link to a UK court. Funny thing being that this was the best the UK could get, as a swap for approving Navalny's extradition. How utterly pathetic is that?

Don't know if I'll buy anything (meh, who am I kidding? This being the year that I'd concentrate on my backlog is as much an annual thing as The Year of the Linux Desktop) but them stuffing up the banner advert for it in Galaxy so that it 'launched' in New Zealand 12 hours early was so very typically GOG.

Expanse S6 (though only really spoilers for S5) WoT Ep6 and book spoilers

I have played it, and was completely unaware of any differences- which I guess is actually a pretty good sign, for a (free) remaster. Might have been a little more unstable, but it was like 2 crashes in a 30 hour game so nothing extreme.

Expanse S601 TLDR; already feels a lot better than S5 did.

WoT Episode 6 TLDR: "we were this close to greatness, this close"

Wow, I missed that Tilly was being written out first time. Everything really does just blur into one. Shame, she had some potential and I liked her as a concept, even if it was utterly wasted in execution. Yep, he and Tilly's actor- plus Saru and Captain Malfoy, of course, and Michelle Yeoh at least looked like she was enjoying herself- were completely fine as actors, and made the most of the very limited amount they were offered. Their main trouble is the writing, and I'd certainly add the directing too, which meant they were either given uninteresting and inconsistent rubbish, or told to be ludicrously melodramatic. For that matter even Stamets was far better as Mirror Universe Stamets, but my overwhelming memory of him was his tendency to smile as if he'd never done it himself but read how to do it in a manual. Actual real person managing uncanny valley or Pod People simulation, and there was a lot of it even from people I know are capable of acting from other things (hence the directing being an issue). End of the day though as Picard shows you can have a literal RSC legend delivering the lines, and actually trying, but if they're garbage lines then they're garbage and the gravitas counts for nothing. On the tokenism, and because it came up earlier in the week... Frankly, I'd say that Omar Little the Baltimore stick up boy murderer and drug dealer from 2003 (?) does more for gay perception than Stamets the engineer and Culber the doctor. But that's because Omar (and Rawls, if you want to count him) are well written characters first and foremost whose sexuality is secondary. And you don't have to be premium drama to do it that way either. End of the day if your stated goal is to normalise those who are marginalised then you have to, well, normalise them. And that means not writing them as if that one marginalised trait is the only thing about them that matters most of the time.

Dunno, from what I've seen it's not very popular on reddit either, except in places criticism is banned. That clearly isn't Woody Allen- it's 100% John Munch. Star Trek added to Munchverse; Homicide: LotS/ L&O holodeck crossover incoming. Weird thing for me is that I only stopped watching 5 episodes ago and I literally cannot remember who half the characters are, they're like a singularity of blandness. I last saw, say, Blake's 7 more than 25 years ago but I can remember some single episode characters better than main cast Discovery people. I watched the thing for three seasons and I actively had to think about who Culber is. And I have to say, since it reinforces the whole "road to hell.." thing the only thing I actually remembered about Culber is that he's the gay doctor. OK, and that he got killed by Michael's beardy emo cryptohuman S1 boyfriend, then resurrected in S2 because you cannot have permanent consequences. I think I'd been trying to suppress that though. Let's say 2 seasons of him being a character, and that's the sum total of what I can remember.

Practically, overhead isn't that important since it gets defrayed over potentially thousands of products. Vendor cut (eg Walmart/ Amazon for dvds; or movie theatres) is the big factor that download distribution avoids, assuming you have your own service. The cost to do download/ streaming distribution is almost zero, fabrication and distribtion cost of a dvd is higher but still very close to zero. The closest parallel is Spotify vs CD sales. Pretty much all the big names prefer the old model, and now make the vast majority of their money from live performance rather than sales. If you're getting in the region of 2c per track played you need a track to be played 1000 times to make the same as a $20 CD sale's gross. Maybe halve that for vendor cut (and distribution), but it's still 500 plays required. For most albums that would requires it to be played 50 times to make back the money. I've probably listened to a decent number of albums more than 50 times, but over the course of 30 years. As a corp once you've got the money from a CD (or DVD) it doesn't matter if it's never played once. Disney would love to cut out the middleman and stream everything, but they also want to retain the premium pricing. If you're got 5 people in a family watching a PPV movie they need to charge you maybe $30* to break even compared to 5 people going to the movies- but most people would consider that unreasonable when it's multiple months worth of subscription streaming and they know they'll get it bundled if they wait 6 months. *no idea what it costs in the US, but that would be roughly NZ pricing in USD assuming half to the theatre, half to the movie maker.

Sildenafil/ Viagra is a vasodilator (opens/ widens blood vessels, hence its primary pharmaceutical use) which lowers blood pressure. High blood pressure is a major factor in Alzheimer's. So there's a sensible/ logical reason for it. If you really want to go off with a bang though when it comes to Alzheimer's consider nitroglycerin. Other blood pressure medications such as statins have a similar effect but aren't as funny.

Ingtar was originally in S1 as well, but that actor had a scheduling clash for S2 so they've renamed the S1 version. Allegedly Uno is in S1 as well but doesn't get lines (and is probably portrayed by a random extra wearing an eyepatch).

US launches diplomatic boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics. Back in the day you used to do proper boycotts for proper reasons like the All Blacks touring apartheid South Africa.

So am I, though I started a month or so before the series dropped (and am up to Shadow Rising) WoT spoilers

GOG specifically labels In Development reviews as being In Development. You'd think Valve could do the same for Early Access.

Since Raithe mentioned Romeo and Juliet... By any objective measure its plot is actively worse than pretty much any modern movie's and almost all modern media full stop. Massively contrived at all points, ludicrously contrived ending, maudlin, and the entire plot from meeting to falling in love to eloping to suicide with duels etc along the way takes place over- and this is literally, literally- one day. If it wasn't 400+ years old, written by Bill the Bard, directed by [famous director] with [RSC alums] acting it would be laughed at by the elitists.

While the answer it trite you really can't get around the Galbrush Paradox as an explanation; anything other than consistent strength and competence is seen as sexist when applied to a female character. And unfortunately that tends to lead to boring characters who cannot get character development because they're already fully developed. To be frank I find that idea to be the intellectual equivalent of expecting all women to be bikini models looks wise. So for Egwene...

WoT spoilers re Egwene (show and book)