majestic

"The Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently." -- JD Tarkin

I thought about that almost through the entire finale. Except for the ending bits, which I obviously liked, because a group of people just recently out of High School (Steve and Robin and the gang) with their real lives beginning is just bound to make me nostalgic and sad, especially when there's also the original kid gang just graduating. Found myself wondering: is a nothing finale like that really a good way to go out? It's the most forgettable ending to a series ever, and it ends one of the, if not the, most successful - for better or worse - shows on streaming ever made. Honestly, they should have just replayed a mixture of NGE's original ending and End of Evangelion (mostly in Vecna's mind), with Instrumentality, err, sorry, the thing that is about to happen in the finale that our heroes are trying to stop, playing out in the background. That would have been the best thing ever, and I don't say that lightly. Just follow that idea for a moment and see Kali (with better development and a better actress), El and Will as Asuka, Rei and Shinji for a moment. Just with psychic powers and monsters instead of genetically engineered alien hybrid mechs fighting Angels. It could even end with El and Mike washing ashore on the sea of the Human hive mind. And yeah, the retcons? Not a fan. Worst decision ever. Totally unnecessary. The Upside Down was fine as a eldritch horror mirror dimension / Shadow Plane take. The last 20 minutes are character sendoffs - the best part of the episode, by far and large.

Try playing Auradin, Lilith pops before she gets any mechanics off.

Stranger Things finale: By the Bookside Up. I'm not sure what to say about the finale. It does not happen often that I watch the final episode of a longer running TV series and think the ending was basically by the book, going through all the motions - but this one sure did. Even the only mystery left about the ending was later just narrated out by Mike, because in this day and age and with what apparently Netflix' customers are these days, it is not possible to just let people figure anything out on their own. Anyway, there really is nothing else to say about the finale as it all happens just the way it... had to. In a sea of terrible TV show finales, that is perhaps a good thing, but memorable, it is not. We're still talking about some series endings to this day, even if the shows ended thirty years ago, but even in three years nobody's going to talk about this episode. Which brings me to the big problem here: on an objective level, this season was not good. It had a runtime of over nine hours with material for perhaps an overly long movie, but not three of them. It is very much like Bilbo Baggins on his 111th birthday. Butter, spread over too much bread. The big moments in the season were more often than not badly paced, the setup after the first episode did not really allow for slow character moments, but they still put them in there. People are really hung up over a certain really, really slow scene with Will, but that is by far not the worst one. Jay Bauman's probably got it right, the thing that is wrong with Will's scene is that it just screams Emmy bait moment. I didn't hate it, and it does have a storyline reason for it being there, but it doesn't have a reason for the entire cast to be around for it. And speaking of the entire cast, it sure looks like the production team was contractually obligated to give everyone screentime. Not that it saved Lucas from being the token black guy in the season - he literally had nothing else to do than stick with Max in the hospital. Instead we added a bunch of new characters, and even though they once again are the highlights of the season (especially Derek), one has to wonder why. The new kids are just a McGuffin for Vecna's plan. The pacing is terrible, the performances of everyone in the US military, acting wise and storywise are just plain bad, if you thought the Russians in season three were dumb, they top it all. And still, you know, at the end of the day, I sat through it all without pausing. Binged the episodes, after the first one, even. That is simply because, while I can see the season being bad when I look at it objectively, my attachment to the series and the characters (and by some extension, the actors too, I suppose) makes it impossible for me to truly dislike it. For now, at least. If I ever rewatch Stranger Things some years down the line, I should probably stop after the first season. Back when the third season of Andromeda first aired, I actually found myself disagreeing with the scathing reviews it (rightfully, mind) got, simply for the same reasons. A couple years of emotional detachment later I can't even finish season three on a rewatch, let alone go on to season four. Christ did that show become terrible under Kevin Sorbo's showrunning. It's a good thing it is over.

Game of Thrones' final seasons set the bar so low that a show is going to have to do much worse than Stranger Things to ruin the show. But yes, I agree, that is also part of what @Bartimaeus mentioned. The characters (or most of them, anyway) had complete story arcs in the first season, leaving only the new ones as really interesting in the newer seasons. The storyline of the second and third seasons were never nothing more than a remix of the first one. Sure, the first season had an 80ies style sequel hook, but that was pretty much spot on for the genre. From a purely artistical point of view, yes, Stranger Thing should have been left alone after a single season. From a business point of view, I can't really blame anyone involved for wanting to make more episoes - and much more money, obviously.

Stranger Things wins the award for the most pointless retcon of the year by There's this neat little concept in fiction that when you have something that is somewhat inexplicable, like Eldritch horror hive mind beings from another dimension, there's really no need to come up with a sci-fi'ish explanation for it. Nothing's gained by doing that, and it just adds a completely convoluted set of plot points into the final episodes that - while being somwhat "set up" by two minutes of dialogue in a previous episode - feels very much out of the left field and seriously messes with the pacing of the episodes. I'm kinda loving the fallout of Will's special scene in the seventh episode. Overall the second half of the season was a bit weaker than the first. Not as unecessary as the entirety of the second episode, but scratching the ludicrousness of the Russian plot in season three.

Merry Christmas.

Made a Paladin in D4. Instead of levelling normally, I just farmed 15 or so Whispering Tree gifts on my main. It basically boosted the Paladin to almost max level and gave him enough ancestrals and aspects to come out ready for Torment IV farming (with some gambling for a unique ring). Basically the same gameplay. Charge into a group of enemies and watch them die. Just pressing evade instead of casting Ball Lightning.

How many Republicans does it take to change a lightbulb? None. Trump will just declare that the lightbulb has been replaced, and everyone's applauding in utter darkness.

Eh, there are use cases. Chatbots and image creation might have the spotlight at the moment because they're rather visible and easily accessed by the public, but they're far from the only ones out there. Back in 2024 the Nobel prize in chemistry went to a group of scientists behind an AI project called AlphaFold used to predict protein folding. The potential for AlphaFold 3 is basically endless, down to creating custom proteins for specific individuals to treat their medical conditions (and for everyone outside the US for reasonable prices even). AI models are already better at finding tumors than humans. That doesn't mean that OpenAI and the other tech companies aren't at the heart of an insane investment bubble at the moment. OpenAI is bleeding money by the tens of billions each quarter but still wants to buy 40% of the world's DRAM waver supply and buy northwards of 30 billion dollars worth of AWS computing power. Datacenters are being built with no hardware, no power and no water to supply them. It's probably no longer a question of if, but rather one of when the overheated market will correct itself, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money in the process while a few will gain a lot. Like with every gold rush and investment bubble, ever since ye faithful tulips of yore. Or, for a more recent one, the NFT hype. AI on the other hand, that is here to stay, and not all of it is bad.

In a similar vein I'm playing a Crackling Energy Sorceror. Basically just press one button and watch everything die. Fun, reminds me of Season 2.

True, I got bored out of my mind with all the combat in Rogue Trader even when you could make your characters one-shot every enemy including bosses. Wrath of the Righteous on Unfair is in a similar boat. Granted, that difficulity is mostly for people who can't stop themselves (like me, I guess), but it was painful even before they fixed the most overpowered and broken game mechanics, like AC double dipping and Ember's Rays of Enemy Deletion (she basically one-shot Baphomet on Unfair for me) or breaking prerequisites with Loremaster, etc.

I watched a bit of Josh Strife Hayes' new video on Cyberpunk 2077, and once again I am reminded how different experiences can be. All of the problems with the game he talks about are there and valid criticism, but for me, they just don't matter that much. Like the problem that so many games with side content have. V has only a few weeks left to live, but you have all the time in the world for side content. A problem that Baldur's Gate 2 already had with having to chase after Imoen. Or not. It makes no difference - plot wise, at least, and I am completely indifferent to the dissonance it introduces. Being able to fully experience all of a game is much, much more important than having the added stress of having to complete something within a certain timeframe. This is a very big reason why the only achievements I have left to do in Hollow Knight and Silksong are the speedrun ones. That's just not how I (want to) play games. Enough so that I actually don't bother doing them in spite of it driving me crazy to have the achievement completion percentage not at 100. Anyway, there's one thing I want to talk about that I found interesting: Josh's reaction to various game elements that were introduced bit by bit and changed in various updates along the way, with the big overhaul of Phantom Liberty bringing the greatest changes. Many of the things he criticizes were, funnily enough, quality of life changes that were introduced in various patches and updates. Like grenades and health items not being limited, but auto-regenerating. They used to be limited, and you as the player spent a non-trivial time in the crafting menu building more of them. The change to auto-regenerating with perks to increase regen-speed or effectiveness of the items was an incredibly good change to the flow of the gameplay, but as a new player, you can't know that, having never experienced the game as it was before. It is not unreasonable to say that limited consumables would have been nice because you'd have to prepare for fights more than you do now, and yes, on the surface level that is correct. It is correct for many games. It just isn't for the flow of combat in the game. There are a hundred tutorial popups that were added for different mechanics or systems that the game didn't launch with. Yeah, the auto-fixer wasn't introduced in a tutorial mission because buying cars was this nightmare of having to drive around the city and buying them directly from garages and parking lots after getting a text message from someone (mostly fixers after completing side quests for them). He complains about the more or less unenecessary stamina bar, but there was a time in the game when out of combat sprinting was linked to stamina and to improve the athletics skill you basically had to sprint-bunny-hop through Night City. The stamina bar of Cyberpunk 2077 2.x is a holdover that was turned into something affecting shooting and melee and you pick perks that make it matter less and less. Again, not a bad change from what it used to be, but from a fresh perspective it is really weirdly implemented. My point is, here, that being part of the development of mechanics changes one's perspective. It's not always for the better, like when the constant balancing of Pillars of Eternity made the game expierence worse for me because all the combinations and mechanics I used to progress more easily through the troves of pointless combat encounters of the game constantly got weakened. For someone new to the game, having the product now as it is - that might not make a difference.

It's the only good thing about the game, if one likes the 3(.5)E ruleset: ToEE combat is quite the faithful implementation of the tabletop combat system. The writing's also an absolute highlight. I very much recommend trying the opening vignettes for the neutral and chaotic evil parties, they might just be the best way to start off with an evil party in a game ever made. Because nothing tells you how EVUL your group is like burning churches for no reason or casually butchering peasants.