majestic

Got all excited about the Beast Crest in Silksong and used a Memory Stone on it (i.e. expand it's capacity to carry Silksong's variation of Charms) only to find out that the heal-on-attack mode doesn't activate instantly. I mean sure, it is faster than binding your wounds normally, but not enough so considering that you need to attack something to heal up afterwards. Great idea, disappointing implementation. Devs probably wanted to make sure it won't lead to players being able to facetank bosses, but as it stands I don't see the value. Yet, perhaps. I don't know how many hit points one can get by the end of the game and how much you could heal with the Beast Crest in a protracted fight. It might just edge out the regular healing. With the beginning five masks? Yeah no.

+1 Good thing GOG has manual downloads. The Galaxy service is completely borked. As is Steam it would, uhm, seem. Anyway, see you guys in December.

"Here lies beloved Timmy, he died of measles at the age of three. We are proud of his sacrifice to own the libs." By the way, that is one of the few ways to break the toxic positivity of current LLMs. Copilot called me a cynic for saying something similar when I used it to look up Derek Huffman's name and presented me with news about how he was stationed at the Ukrainian front after joining the army in Russia and potentially killed in action. I replied with "At least he owned the libs." and Copilot was all "That is a very cynical comment on a complex and multi-faceted issue".

The one comment about Tali that stuck around in my mind was when luzarius posted that Tali has great genes because she has a thigh gap. Dude was an off the rails incel. Sad.

I remember the time when we were discussing Cassandra's skull shape on the forum here. She's proof of some woke trans-agenda on the side of Bioware, because she clearly has a male skull model, designed to make otherwise straight players catch the gay or the trans. Reading the old threads made me realize how little difference it makes that oby, volo and co no longer post here. lol

OMG okay!! You hate the perky positivity?! Awww, that’s totally okay!! Not everyone wants to live in a glitter tornado of good vibes and rainbow confetti ALL the time! But just imagine — what if every moment was a chance to sparkle, every sigh was a prelude to a giggle, and every “ugh” was just a “yay” in disguise?! Life is like a cupcake buffet at a unicorn’s birthday party — sometimes it’s too sweet, sometimes it’s a little much, but hey, it’s always colorful and full of surprises! Sending you a virtual high-five wrapped in sunshine and dipped in glitter! You’ve got this, even if you roll your eyes while doing it!

Found something for @bugarup:

Sugababes? I'd sledgehammer the PC, and that is coming from me who unironically enjoys Eurodance trash.

Been using my phone as an alarm ever since ye olden days of the Nokia 3210. Which is basically my entire adult life, come to think of it. Huh.

Last Christmas should do the trick. Easily.

So, like, watched the new Fantastic 4 film. It's your average, run-off-the-mill Marvel film. A fun first hour where everything gets established and a less fun final hour of really schlocky superhero battles including your average sky beams, although it was the good guy's skybeams this time around. There's one pretty bad thing: The moral dilemma. Almost made me barf. There are better Marvel films. Much worse ones too.

Plenty of our real estate "investors" and "developers" who kept buying houses and apartments with those great (almost) 0% loans are going bankrupt at the moment. They also can't really pawn off their "investments" because they largely consist of large housing areas build mainly to invest in, and all the apartments in them have terrible room layouts no one wants or even can live in, as they were just built to be pawned off to investors who in turn would sell them for a 50%+ ROI five years later. Then the unthinkable happened, the ECB increased interest rates, and what was even worse, our government introduced a loan limit for banks: Private households' monthly loan installments must not exceed 40% of their income in order to put a curb on the rising private bankruptcies. Because all those great variable interest rate loans they took out suddenly went from 0.7% interest rate to 4+% and monthly installments exploded putting middle class families in financial duress (which in turn combined with rising prices due to greedflation is currently causing our economy to be stuck, who would have throught). Private demand is down and companies are sitting on massive amounts of debt they can't clear without the fake income of rising real estate prices. Housing prices are pretty much stuck because selling for less is not an option, and no one's buying. It is especially satisfying to watch because all these investors and companies paid donated millions to our conservative parties who made sure that nothing was done against the energy and supply chain inflationary shock of 2022. The conservatives let the energy companies (who they all have a stake in, mind) run rampant with their merit order inflated prices, causing a feedback loop of increased rents (now if that makes no logical sense for you, dear reader, then keep in mind that our rent prices are by far and large linked to inflation, i.e. if the average statistical inflation of a year is 10%, then rent prices will automatically be increased by 10%, and no, that makes very little sense and is just kept up by the conservatives because many of them are on the payroll of receiving donations by people growing even richer from increased rent prices) and increased labor costs, which in turn now means that while everyone else in the Euro-Zone is sitting at the target 2% inflation rate, we're still stuck with 3+%. Energy and housing is sucking up free income because there's no alternative, and groceries are incredibly expensive because three companies have 90% market share. There are goods available in literally the same store brand in Germany and only a handful of kilometers away for a 50% premium in Austria. Products actually manufactured in Austria, mind you - if that can be sold for a profit for 50% less in Germany where the income levels are very similar (if not actually better in the low income brackets that supermarket employees usually are in), then it certainly can be sold for a profit at the same price in Austria. What are you going to argue with? Transportation costs across the border (wait, that would make the product more expensive in the country exported to, huh...)? Can't be labor costs. Right, got it, it's greed. The regulartory body supposed to prevent the formation of cartels and oligopolies keeps saying they can't find any proof of price fixing between the large players. Not sure what sort of proof they're looking for to be honest. Transcripts of phone calls or e-mails going back and forth discussing how to best price gouge? Meanwhile the government has no idea why the right wing extremists are rising to power. Between living expenses exploding and the 2015 influx of culturally hard to intergrate people from certain areas of the world it makes me wonder: Are politicians in this day and age really that dumb, can't they really not see the forest for the trees or are they all just corrupt asshats best put under the guillotine's blade? Not that being dumb and a corrupt asshat is mutually exclusive, one just needs to look at the Orange Sex Offender.

As an 80ies nerd I felt right at home in Night City. The setting's not for everyone though - not even for other 80ies nerds. Game's pretty good though, easily CDPR's best in terms of writing and thematic exploration. It's also everything a FromSoftware game would like to be when it comes to storytelling by item descriptions and little bits of lore found here and there - in addition to, you know, having an actual plot. Which is a little hole-y in the first chapter due to it being seemingly hit the hardest by time constraints (i.e. cuts). I am, generally speaking, not someone who replays games a lot, with two exceptions. The original Wing Commander and Cyberpunk 2077. That is not to say that I didn't like other games more (Ocarina of Time and Planescape: Torment come to mind, among others), it's just that there's something about Night City that makes me come back. In spite of starting with my least favorite RPG setup that there is: First person and open world. Guess it helps that Cyberpunk 2077's open world busy work is limited to randomly shooting criminals for bounties, and the storyline is rather focused and not bogged down by having a lot of - mostly irrelevant by the end - choices and consequences outside of deciding which ending you want, including the Phantom Liberty ones. The gameplay itself is, well, I guess fine. Netrunning is still as broken as it was in 1.6, except in different ways. LMGs are still fun to play with, but not really viable, Assault Rifles still suck compared to virtually everything else, and a bunch of little things here and there, but there's something about the game that made me play 550 hours already, and single player games rarely get that much time out of me.

I noticed that I've become like the Q continuum and the Q in them, as depicted by the Voyager epsiode Death Wish. Just an endless, dusty road with the same people who read a newspaper and every now and then talk about the same things - because everything's been said already.

Man, you guys just made me check if Malcolm McDowell died, but no, Hurlshot can't keep Admiral Tolywn and Chancellor Valorum apart.