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The Fall of the House of Usher. Mike Flanagan (loosely) does Edgar Allan Poe in a modern setting. It's a return to form for Flanagan, a tight miniseries that feels like a miniseries as opposed to an 8 hour movie. @Bartimaeus may like this, assuming his brain doesn't short circuit over some arcane rule unknown even to him and push him into a murderous rage. I say this with love....and in hopes I will be spared from the brutality of Bartimaeus. Everyone else who liked Midnight Mass will probably dig the show, which I think @majestic did.

I think if BG3 does very well, and everything I've seen points toward it having doing very well, then there's going to be at least some interest in trying to recreate that. PoE 3 seems like an obvious contender for Microsoft to try that and I'd think Sawyer would be a natural choice to helm it. So maybe a bit more optimistic than no hope.

Different strokes. For me it hits the right notes of nostalgia and parody, like the "boy genius" who is a 37 year old man that lives in a trailer with an albino ex-gameshow host or anything with Dr. Orpheus. I have never seen a single episode of Rick and Morty but AI is consistently terrible at anything so I assume the show is worse. Just get someone to do a completely different voice and have it be a running joke.

The Venture Bros. S1-7 and the movie. I think the first time I saw The Venture Bros. was on a one-off when I was a kid and Adult Swim had just come out as the place to see dubbed "mature" anime on cable. It was different but I liked it, but since I didn't have cable and CN's schedule was insane I couldn't keep up with it. Later on I watched the whole thing again when I had cable and it was easily the best western animation I had seen, while still being extremely silly it was a beautiful long-form parody on the world of superheroes and scientist-adventurers that just felt right. When it was canceled I was pissed, when the movie was announced I was elated, and when I finally saw the movie I was satisfied. Anyways with no series that were very interesting to watch and not wanting to play BG3 for too many hours on end (I ended up loving the game, would recommend even with the jank) I started re-watching The Venture Bros. again. And it hits better than I remember, moreso than any other show I can think of. It's mocking, sincere, heart warming, depressing, and more seemingly contradictory things all at the same time wrapped up in a wide ranging parody of everything from ye olde Saturday morning US cartoons to Ted Bundy. It was an amazing ride.

I found this to be a good essay that gets a lot of the thoughts I'd been having down. It's very strange seeing what I half recall as a kid repeating itself. I just hope it isn't as catastrophic as Iraq. Yeah, I was holding off posting about it because there is just an astronomical amount of disinformation going around, even by the standards of social media. Thanks Elon. But anyways, sadly it looks legit. Looks like white phosphorus was used on Lebanon as well as Gaza.

Depending on implementation, I can see the Separatist being a good way to pick up the Animal domain for a pure 20 cleric early and without a mythic ability. Last time I played, WotR wonkiness was giving a free dip level to pets (ie a Hunter 19/Fighter 1 would have a level 20 pet instead of 19), if that still holds you could grab Boon Companion and end up with a full level animal companion on a Separatist 20 for the tradeoff of a proficiency in a single martial weapon. I don't see much other use for the archetype in the main game, and this is largely conditional on a specific interaction. Obviously Owlbrew applies, like the datamined Shadowcaster shows it getting an increasing profane bonus to intelligence instead of what pnp gets, so who knows what the Separatist will actually end up being.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/heirs-property-black-owned-land-brazos-county/ Not necessarily political and a long read full of some legalese, but it's well worth a read.

NANI!? It's back? Time to watch. This line alone would be worth a double post, perhaps even a triple post.

Yeah that's what makes it worse than if they were just laid off.

I loved the play/theater feel it had in some places as opposed to more organic neorealist fare like Sean Baker's recent work (which I love, but for different reasons), it sort of played up the absurdity of the situation and combined with the narration/narrator felt like we were seeing a story within a story. I don't think it's really comparable to The Banshees of Inisherin in terms of comedy or style. El Conde is much more explicitly a magical realist satirical horror-comedy with surreal aesthetics meant to separate it from real life while The Banshees of Inisherin keeps it's absurdist tendencies rooted in a historically accurate Ireland with natural compositions of the world. I honestly would not have thought of them in the same sentence if you hadn't mentioned it. I guess our brains are broken in different ways. And I think El Conde was silly enough, but I'll admit I would prefer more stuff like.....the smoothies to seeing the (middle-aged) kids talk. Like we get it

Looks like public education is under assault in Texas... again. In Texas the border areas tend to be less red than the state as a whole, with El Paso being particularly liberal. The idea that only now are libruls dealing with immigration is just absurd to anyone who has lived in the southwest.

I don't read reviews at all, at most I'll take recs from people I know and whose taste can align with mine. Anyways....Bioware is getting sued for not paying enough severance. I'd say I'd boycott anything Bioware puts out until they pay up, but everything they've put out for a decade or so has been mediocre bargin bin bait at best so it's not like I'd be buying it in the first place. Excuse you, I'm a (semi-)pro hater. Like The Monarch.

It's like the crime wave thing from a year or so ago, with the same people peddling it or falling for it.

While that may be true, the fact that 26 laws are being waived concerning things like environmental protection and indigenous rights is not great. Maybe this was also baked in with the money set aside, but it's still pretty ****ty and is going to **** up people's water, some graves, and endangered species for an ugly wall that doesn't work.

Look, just because those countries are largely responsible for Haiti's woes (and climate change) doesn't mean they should be the ones to take responsibility. Haiti needs to pull itself up by it's bootstraps so they can create $100 billion in industry from nothing and rise a few thousand feet into the air.

I can't say I'm surprised, while I don't understand the infamous "Bartimaeus love/hate broken brain", I did not get the feeling that this was something you'd love when I was watching it.

We got some more billionaires ****ting everything up.

The statue is real, and before they fixed it you could use the spell Command: Drop to duplicate a weapon. Now it's just a nice statue.

The last one is a Shaman. There's a guy on reddit who posts the datamines and he includes an abilities as well. My guess is the new bard archetype is going to be what the android uses, but the shifter dude has a unique subclass so who knows?

I went back to check some things and discovered that if you cast Heal on a Dark Urge, you can get a couple of different memories. Why did it take so long to figure out when I spent maybe a quarter of the game above level 11 and Shadowheart was always a fixture in the party? Because Planar Ally is too good not to use.

Probably the latter, many abilities that have the same name but different sources, like a Paladin and Cleric channel energy, are technically different abilities in WotR and scale independent of each other. This probably won't convince me to give Assassin a shot, it looks like it'd take a lot of investment to make work and doesn't provide as much as a dip as a Vivisectionist (little does to be fair) or a Thug. As written I just don't see assassinate target competing with a full attack while poison requires a lot of investment for some minor ability damage. I guess getting sneak attack on anything is cool.....but by the time you get it you've probably got many strategies to set up flanking or otherwise activate sneak attack. Honestly the Assassin seems more suited to be used against the player than be used by the player.

If it cannot break its egg's shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world's shell! ....which means I'll give it a shot. When it's free. But if I like it one of us has to start taking people on the Utena car rides.

I would, and I'd argue that denial isn't a binary of acknowledgment, but if you prefer revisionism to denial then go ahead with that. Regardless of what you want to call it the article itself is at best so afflicted with RDS it carries water for a SS member and at worst it's just ****ing evil. Either way it's vile and Hunka should have been shot. Maybe they replaced editors with AI. Certainly makes more sense than someone working for a major publication to give this the green light.

It's historical flattening on my part, but on a macro level I view Nazi client states/organizations like the Ustase as an extension of the Nazis. Not only do they share ideological currents but they were often installed by the Nazis as part of the larger political project in occupied areas precisely because they would enact the genocide(s) nazi fascism was predicated upon. What I said about all SS members deserving to be shot can also be applied to fellow travellers like the Ustase.

I saw without any exaggeration that this is the worst thing I have read all year. "This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp. Holocaust denial by the fifth paragraph. "According to Russia’s ambassador in Canada, Hunka’s unit “committed multiple war crimes, including mass murder, against the Russian people, ethnic Russians. This is a proven fact.” But whenever a Russian official calls something a “proven fact,” it should set off alarms. And sure enough, here too the facts were invented out of thin air. Repeated exhaustive investigations — including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities — led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit." Nuremberg found ALL Waffen SS divisions to be criminal organizations. By being a volunteer for the SS Hunka was a member of an organization explicitly dedicated to genocide by eliminationism and the enforcement of racial hierarchy. That he may not have personally fired a bullet does not nullify his complicity in an organization built for atrocity. "And given Moscow’s own history of aggression and atrocities during World War II and its aftermath, there’s a special cynicism underlying the Russian accusations. Russia feels comfortable shouting about “Nazis,” real or imaginary, in Ukraine or elsewhere, because unlike Nazi Germany, leaders and soldiers of the Soviet Union were never put on trial for their war crimes. Russia clings to the Nuremberg trials as a benchmark of legitimacy because as a victorious power, it was never subjected to the same reckoning. And yet, both before and after their collaborative effort to carve up eastern Europe between them, the Soviets and the Nazis had so much in common that it’s now illegal to point these similarities out in Russia." As bad as the USSR, the US, and all of the other powers/actors in WW2 were during during WW2 no one is worse than the Nazis. Equivocating the USSR's WW2 atrocities to that of the Nazis is at best an ignorant both sides brain rot and at worst flagrant holocaust denial. There is no goddamn reason you have to carry water for this dried up old Nazi **** who should have been shot in the head, along with every other SS member, after WW2. You are taking a **** on the graves of 12 million people murdered by the Nazis and pissing on the legacy of everyone (including a lot of Ukrainians) who fought to end their reign of terror. You are neither going to help Ukraine nor own the Russian government by engaging in this kind of ****, if anything you are going to lend credence to their (hysterical, opportunistic, and untrue) accusations of Nazism. Giles should never write again and the editor should quit in shame.