majestic

Well, techincally, you can't even get a Kindle without already having an Amazon login, so the only thing that's left is setting up the wi-fi on it. Which is like tap once, stay forever.

Well, purely from a writing quality point of view: That said, this final season was certainly enjoyable enough, even if it went massively overboard with the head explosions and schlong-jokes. That reality overtook satire is a whole other thing. The final episode ended being the expected rote nothingburger, although that is not dissimilar to the finale of Stranger Things.

I just had to split an overly large PM I wrote into three parts because <reasons>. Which look eerily similar to the past's "oops, something went wrong with your post" sort of problems we had with the Web Content Firewall in the past, except it is just length, not any combination of characters blocking the post. Guess it's fine since I really got into the habit of just copying everything I type here into clipboard before sending it off, but having to split one of my trademarked walls of texts into three parts based solely on length is a little boring. Good thing it's been a while since I've posted a review in WOT. That would have been massively annoying to deal with. :(

Worst show in years. Very well deserved last place though for the UK. :p

Some grindy bits left in D4 for the season journey. I hope they change a bit here and there for the next season. The devs are really high on their own farts if they think leaving the Mephisto fight in the game like that, with its two minutes of unskippable cutscenes (vis-a-vis a 10 second actual battle because lol) was a good idea.

There's something weird going with the off topic forum, it doesn't seem to realize that I'm logged in. Other forums work fine, but whenever I go to the thread list of the off topic forum, it tells me to log in. Clicking on sign in brings me back to the forum list - where I am logged in already. Jumping directly into topics in the off topic forum shows me as logged in, but the posts there don't get flagged as read by my user. Clearing all the cookies and browser cache didn't help.

So, finally reached D4 endgame now. Until getting to level 70, I liked the changes to the game, like how the skill tree contains the modifiers you'd usually have to farm gear for in the past seasons, instead of a whole bunch of passive nodes that were cookie-cutter build filler. In general I also like the idea of the war plans giving you a pre-defined path through endgame activities. That's a load off my inability to choose from activities. Kinda hate all the rest though. D4 was a fun, silly game where you'd reach endgame and were doing high level progression two days later. Now it looks like that's going to take... more work and time than I want to commit.

The thing that drives me insane is when they offer a quick "jump to next episode" button at the start of the credits, but when you do that, the damned progress bar is not full. So I always fast-forward through the credits. Like, is that so hard? Sheesh.

Makes sense. Player base probably cheered for Urivar.

So, now that it works, uhm...

Lord of Hatred. Blizzard's update to the games turned it into a zen exercise simulator. Pretty good one though. Click this button here to create a new character. Wait five minutes. Pick class. Wait five minutes. Pick from presets or customize your own character, but the assets aren't loaded in. Wait five minutes. Click play game, wait five minutes, pick difficulty (huh?) then "Reconnecting...", wait five minutes... "Lobby Server Not Available"

Knowing melkathi's cat stories, that's probably accurate. :p

Indeed, where's the petition to include classical and medieval latin?

So, who bet on Chavez-DeRemer as next to leave office?

Aged like the whole milk his buddy RFK is drinking. :p

The Boys, whatver, episode whatever: Whatever. Honestly, I... I mean being behind the times on satire when scripts are from two years ago is understandable, given how fast the political landsacpe of the US has flushed itself down the crapper, lol, or rather... not but the weird pacing of the episodes and the way concepts are introduced and then discarded almost immediately with no payoff is just plain bad entertainment, and now we've introduced a new thing into the show that everyone goes chasing after because why the hell not, we have eight episodes left to wrap everything up, so let's just spend that time on... not wrapping anything up and not moving anything into place for a decent payoff at the end. Sheesh.

Needless to say, I disagree. Voyager analogy

Let me guess, in The Measure of a Man, you side with Bruce Maddox, right? :p

Uh, in defense of Maelle's ending - sort of.

No, I haven't played the DLC yet. Not really sure I will, I started a NG+ on my save before the DLC came out and don't feel like going through the whole game again. Not because I didn't enjoy it, far from it. It's probably the best I've played in the last two decades, but it was far too emotionally draining to replay in a long while.

Prior to the DLC the go-to cheese for nuking everything in one turn is stacking burns with Verso (free aim with burn chance + AP gain until out of AP, then basic attack combo I, II + III with the sword that adds burning stacks, double burn application pictos) and using Sciel to damage buff Maelle with Medalum for Burning Canvas. DLC weapons mixed that up a bit, but it still works well enough until you actually get to the DLC and its items. Make sure that your character turn order is Verso > Sciel > Maelle (auto-die and resurrect Maelle with 1hp and equip the damage scaling pictos with lower HP = more damage, you basically want to stack every damage multiplier on her, auto-invert with more damage from being inverted, more damage from shields with auto-shield, and so on and so forth), then make Sciel give Verso another round, buff Maelle with an extra 100% damage in her Virtuous Stance and watch Simon die after Burning Canvas.

Sciel has fantastic buffs, and if you haven't found the pictos that lets you do two actions in one turn, go get that before fighting Simon.

I hated Star Craft 2's campaign(s). Not the gameplay, mind you, but the endless retcons, the character assassinations, the ludicrous storyline and cashing in on a highly popular franchise* by releasing a single game's worth of content in three full-priced installments. *Man, now that I spelled it out, I realize that all of that also applies to the new Star Wars Trilogy.

The Boys, season 5 - first two episodes. Neatly picks up where it left off. Which is to say, that the season was written before the 2024 election and tries to be satire, but fails insofar as reality has become much worse - never mind dumber - than what the showrunners came up with. Or, sometimes, they came way too uncannily close. This is depressing Firecracker is even more disturbing when you have Laura Loomer in a position of political influence and Karoline Leavitt on TV every day. Also kinda saw the surprise at the end of season two coming from a mile away: Spoilery stuff Also, foreshadowing, probably... Huh Also, like, still laughing at it taking almost three full seasons for the conservatives to finally figure out it makes fun of them. Even if this is already shaping up to not having a good finale, that'll always be a rather memorable achievement.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure this thread necro is for real, but I do have opinions, especially on The Beatles, so why not. The Beatles are a group that is somewhat difficult to judge from a modern perspective, especially, and here comes the largest problem, if you only know them from the overplayed songs that are on the radio all the time. It's hard to fault anyone who only knows Let It Be, Yesterday and Yellow Submarine (and, maybe, to a much lesser extent, Hey Jude) to think them overrated. It also takes some knowledge of modern music history to appreciate how and why they became the phenomenon they were and how they shaped the music of their time and beyond. Helter Skelter, for instance, had a Led Zeppelin like sound before Led Zeppelin released their first album, among many other things. Helter Skelter is just not really a song you run into all too much, at least in my experience of being subjected to various radio stations and music TV shows over the years. Then there is, of course, the group having both John Lennon and Paul McCartney. One can think of their body of work what they want, but there's no denying that the group's been blessed with not one, but two songwriting prodigies. It says pretty much everything that a songwriter like George Harrison, who is by all accounts, really good at his craft, is overshadowed so much by the two. He created, by all accounts, really good music even with The Beatles, but very much so after they broke up, but he's still "just" George Harrison, if you know what I mean. That alone is reason enough to not consider them overrated no matter how much you may not like their music. Calling The Beatles overrated is a bit of an edgy take that a much younger verison of myself may or may not have expressed in the past. It's a bit akin to calling Mozart overrated simply because he was massively popular and created delightful melodies and pieces. One might not like Mozart's music - but saying he is overrated is a silly edgelord take by people who listen to Krzysztof Penderecki to feel good. Having said all that, do I like The Beatles? No, I don't. That's fine, because really, I don't have to. Would the music I enjoy exist without them? Yeah, probably not, or at least not in the same form it does today.