majestic

I enjoyed the platforming in Hollow Knight, and White Palace and Path of Pain. They were a little more difficult, but relatively short. Silksong, on the other hand, is nothing but a kaizo hack of Hollow Knight, answering a question that nobody ever asked: what if all of Hollow Knight was like White Palace? Nothing of it is ever as long and complicated and without break - at least so far - as Path of Pain was, but it certainly feels like the game after the first act was the result of an AI prompt asking for a full game in the vein of White Palace. One of the great things of Hollow Knight, the fun of exploring the world, has been lost. This I cannot quite quantify, the areas are connected enough, but the game lacks something that the first one had. Reaching a new environment is not like discovering a new world of wonders as they're also not nearly as distinct as Hollow Knight's were. Each one in Silksong feels so interchangeable because the design is too similar, even if the assets are different. Different enemy designs, but super similar movesets and enemy types. There are sawblades in the citadel, hanging spikes in the Sinner's Road, weird cushions in various places or the exploding poison bulbs of Bilewater. They're all variations on the same thing, something to pogo-jump off of. The worst part though? This is the game equivalent of The Force Awakens. That film has no true quiet moment where you could take everything in. Silksong has no quiet moment to enjoy the artwork or the environments, because it is loaded to the brim with platforming and enemies, but without the game design that usually goes along with games like this. For the amount and kinds of platforming nonsense you have to pull in, say, Bilewater, for instance, there are not nearly enough benches for it to remain fun to do. In some way the decision to include the crests and different movesets with them is part of the problem, I think. They had to design every platforming part in a way that is doable with all of the various downward strikes you can do, from Hornet's original diagonal downward slash to the slow Reaper slash and the fast Wanderer slash and whatever the hell you do with the Beast slash, the weird very short diagonal slash of the Architect... well, you get the idea. TL;DR: Beyond the first few, every enrivonment feels the same in Silksong. The devs made the mistake of stuffing everything to the brim with platforming and enemies, making it a chore to explore areas more than fun. Having to balance the platforming for different movesets also left them all being very similar, just with different skins. I'm still having fun, and I can't quite knock the game at the asking price, but it sure is a step down from the first game.

Just unlocked the double jump. Path of Pain was a lot shorter, but also harder, and also switched to the Crest of the Wanderer due to its massively increased attack speed. The short range isn't really an issue so far outside of some really annoying flying enemies. Can't quite grasp why you guys struggled with Moorwing so much, outside of doubling his blade attack shortly before he dies he doesn't do anything spectacular or problematic. Found the Last Judge's second phase much more annoying. I really hated the way one has to wait for a decent opening to attack, and he kept doing his Nightmare King Grimm tribute fire column ability. Which of course always ended up having a fire column right next to him. Impatience killed me a couple of times there.

Images of Shoemaker-Levy 9 (or rather, its fragments) crash into Jupiter were one of the astronomy highlights of the 90ies. 's not always you get to see the aftermath of a 300 gigaton impact.

Canned tuna isn't so bad as ironically the cheaper tuna variants used for canning are less contaminated - probably should not stuff your face with thuna sashimi every day though. Don't see anyone making a case for tuna being a superfood (if anything influences would probably try to pawn you some omega 3 supplements). If you don't know, matcha is made by grinding tencha leaves that you're then consuming along with the tea. Now, as long as you buy high quality matcha tea and keep your consumption below three grams per day that should not be an issue. Cheap Chiniese knockoffs might even contain some fun pesticides as a bonus though. Spooning it into your breakfast bowl because some influencer told you it cures every disease on the planet? Yeah, probably not that bright of an idea. Not to mention expensive. To reiterate my main point, this is a case of cultural apporpriation that actually causes detrimental effects, with Japanese people complaining that Americans and Europeans buy up their matcha, leaving them with not enough for their ceremonies where making matcha is well beyond consuming the latest silly superfood hype. Unlike wearing dreads or wearing traditional Chinese garb as an American, where no one but the Twatteria cared. Well, and Fridays for Future, a youth protest movement complaining about the hairdo of people. WhenI was young, that used to be the favorite past time of old people. Just found it funny. Where are the sh*tstorms and cancellations?

Wow, I knew that films take a while to reach overseas cinemas, but half a century?

Recently noticed that McDonald's is now offering a Matcha Latte. Lately matcha seems to be everywhere, but never in the context it is supposed to be in. Worse, even, it is more or less wasted on (iced) matcha lattes. Infuencers branded it a super food, apparently oblivious to the fact that tea is really good at sucking up aluminum and lead from the ground and consuming a lot of matcha isn't the best idea. Money is being made. A lot of it. Fantastic. People get cancelled for wearing dreads or buying traditional Chinese gowns for proms, but buying the basis of a time-honored Japanese tradition (their tea ceremony) to the point where matcha is getting sparse in Japan is fine. Clearly not cultural appropriation, but appreciation. Yep. Whatever.

Killed Widow, wasn't too terrible (took like 15 minutes, i.e. a couple of tries), but the moveset is a combination of Dung Defender, Pure Vessel and Nightmare King Grimm and the fight has the necessity to be as aggresive as possibe under extreme duress or else you'll draw it out to the point where the mistakes will catch up with you. The Reaper Crest performed exceptionally well, once you heal you can get a lot of silk back by relentlessly punishing Widow's attack openings. Most of the time even enough for another heal, for which there are also plenty of openings (as healing arrests your momentum you can just let Widow run underneath you while she's doing NMKG's diagonal jumping slash and dash attack). @Lexx did you find the warrior bug in Hunter's March? The Fractured Mask is pretty useful at this stage, it's pretty much a free hit, one where it doesn't matter how much damage you receive.

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.

Just prepwork so the national guard can "oversee" the midterm elections in large, mostly Democratic centers next year.

Have to disagree here, Professor Michaels. Even so much as printing any sensitive material on a public printer in a hotel is a breach of security. We have tighter security checks at work.

Wait, is that a rhetorical question? As a serb, shouldn't you know the answer?