Keyrock

I'll see your Spelljammer and I'll raise you Al-Qadim: I miss the days when D&D had a bunch of different setting. Sure, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance were fairly similar to one another, but there was also Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft. And then everything just became Forgotten Realms, on the video game front, at least. I miss Al-Qadim.

I played a chapter with Galeb in Swansong and I was absolutely nailing it. I figured out several puzzles (credit to Big Bad Wolf for including legitimately tricky puzzles that will no doubt infuriate some people), took the time to find and complete all the optional objectives, won all the confrontations, I was acing this chapter. Then it all went horribly horribly wrong at the very end, quite literally the last scene of the chapter. I am tempted to go back immediately and replay the chapter, but I will stay the course and let things play out before trying to get the best possible result in a subsequent playthrough. I'm pretty sure that I'm heading toward a bad ending.

This is field research at its finest.

I'm afraid to google "Loverslab" to find out what it is. I don't want to wind up on a list.

Oh boy, a show about the incredibly memorable character Cassian Andor! I'm sure everybody and their grandmother was clamoring to get more Cassian Andor in their life. Obviously, I'm being facetious. I thought all the characters in Rogue One were incredibly boring. On the plus side, at least it's not about a space wizard with a laser sword, so there's that.

What makes the MI movies such a breath of fresh air is that in an age of actors standing in front of a green screen while a team of a thousand computer artists generate pretty lights and sploshuns to fill the background that's chromakeyed out, they still use a lot of real stunts and practical effects. As good as CGI has gotten, and it's come a long way from the hilariously awful CGI of the SW prequels, there's no substituting for practical effects. Also, the action scenes in MI tend to be less busy and it's easy to process what is happening, as opposed to the sensory overload you often get with CGI action scenes.

The fictional Henry Hill died almost exactly 10 years after the real Henry Hill. He's off to the great witness protection program in the sky.

Yes, a typical pork bun does have too much dough and not enough filling, likely stemming ftom the fact that the dough is significantly cheaper than the filling. This does provide me a niche to slide into in the market; a double niche, in fact. First of all, the pork bun market is far from saturated in my neck of the woods. The majority of food trucks in the area serve either Mexican food, no doubt because of Charlotte's sizeable Mexican population, standard American fast food (hot dogs, burgers, etc.), southern comfort food, and mediocre barbecue (central Texas dry rub has ruined all other BBQ for me). The pork bun market is already underserved and on top of that I could further differentiate myself by offering pork buns with less dough and more filling. I will, of course, have to charge more per bun, but once people get their hands on a significantly more meaty bun () I belive they will happily pay the premium. Also, I could exploit the lower carb angle. While a pork bun with less dough is far from a low carb food, it is nevertheless lower carb than a run of the mill pork bun. I could revolutionize the pork bun industry and become the next Harland Sanders.

While the Heat are a scrappy and well coached team, the same thing that happened last year seems to be happening again. They are falling to the more talented and ultimately better team. It's not over yet, but I have a hard time seeing Miami beating Boston 2 times in a row, barring an injury.

More thoughts on Swansong: At its core this plays like The Council; you walk around, collect information by overhearing conversations, examining items, making deductions (if you have the necessary skill), etc. Occasionally you will get into a confrontation, this takes the place of combat in this game. A confrontation is usually a test of will and cunning between characters. You can use skills and disciplines but so can they. You can focus a skill to increase chance of success, but so can they. Using skills and disciplines is not necessarily the key to victory, I have won confrontations by using regular dialogue options where I had the choice to use a skill and/or discipline. Willpower seems easier to manage than hunger, but that comes down to me using auspex quite a bit. I'm trying to avoid feeding if I can help it. Even if I could manage to lure a human to a secluded location, feeding still raises suspicion (more if you do it out in the open). I'm not sure what happens when suspicion gets too high, but I bet it's not good. Leysha is my favorite of the 3 protagonists so far. Her relationship with Halsey, her daughter, is really touching. I'm going to be super bummed out if anything happens to either of them. Given how suboptimal this first playthrough has been, there's a real possibility of just that. Edit: I've been going sort of jack of all trades with my protagonists. It's becoming clear that this is probably a mistake on my part, but I'll stick with it for this first playthrough to get the feel of how useful the skills and disciplines are.

Who cares about IPC? They have EXTREME mobos! Granted, extreme (which is code for overpriced) mobos have existed for many years but these are MORE EXTREME! I bet they have RGBs, it doesn't get more extreme than RGBs.

I'm waiting for an Extreme ASUS Xtreme ROG Eggstream X670E XXXtreme Edition mobo.

There are items that will restore some willpower if you can find them and/or get to them, plus you sometimes restore some willpower at story points. Reducing hunger is easy enough, you feed on a human, but that may come with consequences, especially if you aren't discreet about it, given that the whole purpose of The Masquerade is to keep the existence of vampires a secret from humans.

It's not challenging to manage, it's a question of making judgement calls on what's important. It's nigh impossible, if not completely impossible, to succeed in every situation, I am going to fail along the way (already have). On a subsequent playthrough I will be armed with additional information which will help me decide when to spend my willpower and hunger to make sure I succeed in situations I deem most important. On the first playthrough I can only at best guess what may come next and thus judging whether to spend resources or not is more difficult, so I go by feel and let the chips fall where they may.

I'm still waitimg for an ex-Stasi agent (preferably female) to force me into submission.

A man can dream...

I'm starting Vampire the Masquerade Swansong (henceforth referred to simply as "Swansong" for the sake of brevity). I had read that there are technical issues, I expected such and can confirm that indeed there are issues. The game has pretty bad pop-in, and that's on xXxBOxXx, with its considerable processing power, I can't imagine how bad it is on previous gen. The audio mixing leaves a lot to be desired; hearing 3 different audio quality and volume levels for the same character in the same dialogue is alarming. There are also some pretty stiff animations, but I fully expected that. There is also a decent bit of inconsistency in terms of the character models; some look like mid to late last gen and some look like PS3 models, all the protagonists are in the former group, thankfully. On the bright side, no showstoppers so far. Technical shortcomings aside, I'm liking the game so far. It's slow paced but I was expecting that and have no issues with it. This game has a more robust RPG system as compared to The Council. Resource management is a big part of the game as using skills drains willpower and focusing them to increase chance of success further drains it. Using disciplines increases hunger and upon reaching your threshold you can lose control and feed on a human whether you want to or not. I'm not going to metagame this on my first playthrough, I'll live with my choices and failures and see what comes of them (AFAIK failures don't necessarily lead to a "game over", rather they impact how much XP you get and the course of the story). I'll take what I learn from said first playthrough and apply that knowledge in my second. Hopefully some of the technical shortcomings have been addressed by then.

I'd honestly much rather Obsidian made an Alpha Protocol sequel (Sigma Protocol?) rather than NV2. Granted, SEGA owns the IP, but it's not like Microsoft is hurting for money and SEGA probably wouldn't ask for an arm and a leg, given that they're not doing anything with the IP and probably never will.

GreedFall 2: GreedHarder

It's a bummer for women in Hollywood that after a certain age their parts become limited to grandma and witch (I'm exaggerating but you get the picture) whereas their male counterparts can still play action man or whatever well into their sixties. I'm not going to feel sorry for these rich and famous people, but it is unfair.

That's what she said.

On my way to Houston yesterday I stopped in at Buc-ees. I was DEVASTATED when I found out they didn't have any Buc-ee Beaver onesies in stock.

Isn't that already the otaku lifestyle?

That was one of the most epic bed ****tings I've ever seen by a favorite from Phoenix. I wonder if CP3 was playing hurt; he was good in round 1 and the first 2 games of this series, then he fell off a cliff. The Suns are in a weird spot now. Does Deandre Ayton play for them next season? This doesn't get any easier for CP3 as he gets another year older. I guess the hope, if you are the Suns, is that Devin Booker makes a leap into the top echelon similar to what Jayson Tatum just did.