majestic

Like hell you are, liar. Nobody's interested in COBOL.

There's a new drink in Japan: First I thought that would be fake, but looks like it isn't. That's a real product. I'll put the explanation in spoilers, be sure to read it on an empty stomach.

And we were supposed to avoid eating mushrooms. Not much of a problem for me, having never really liked them anyway. Good old times.

We're now at talking about options to turn off options designed to make people feel included in order to make people feel included that don't feel included because they don't like inclusionary options even though there's the option to just leave them on their default setting. Did you come up with the Starchild in Mass Effect 3? edit: And with that, I think I'm out. Have fun.

Are you suggesting to create a safe space for Joe Somebody the Slightly Conservative snowflake so they (*snicker*) don't get triggered by an option in a game? Sorry, but that makes no sense in the context of a silly toggle that lets you set your pronouns in the game. It already is a toggle, and everyone is free to keep the default pronouns for their picked character gender. In all the games I have played so far that have a pronoun option, it was pre-filled with the default for your picked gender, and it is entirely optional to switch between the usual sets, i.e. he/him, she/her, they/them. It changes nothing else about the dialogue because that really just puts your choice into placeholders in the dialogue files that already have to be there to account for your character's gender choice. No dialogue was hurt in making the feature.

Trump vows tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China on day one I think someone should tell the Annoying Orange that tariffs aren't licencing fees paid by nations for exporting rights - and even if they were, that fee would still be reflected in pricing of the goods coming into the US. Luckily for you guys neither Mexico nor Canada exports daily necessities to the US. I mean, it would suck if a majority of food and oil imports would become 25% more expensive over night. Right?

Aria the Animaton episode 5. I started watching this series last year in March. It speaks volumes to how much happens in these episodes that I have basically forgotten about it and only realized I haven't finished it after going through my notes. Aria and the gang visit a secluded beach after a mysterious invitation. Turns out they came from their teachers, and they're in for training designed to make them puke blood and then some. There are a couple of obligatory crotch shots that simply have to be in an anime beach episode (probably government mandated), and then the training montage turns into spending the rest of the day at the beach and swimming in the sea and having fun, because this is still Aria the Animation. I still have no idea what to make of this. Even a year and a half later, it was not really a problem getting back into the series, because it's basically just a handful of characters and no plot to speak of, which isn't a bad thing. If I was a good deal younger and this would air on a weekly basis like it was intended to, I'd probably tune in every week and end up having fond memories of watching the series. While being enjoyable, it is one of these series that seem to lose charm when watched in a non-linear fashion.

It's not just typos, some sentences were missing their second half. That's what happens when you rewrite a post to be less offensive. I tried really hard to not insult incels or use any slurs to agitate the pretty snowflakes who were bothered by my previous posts enough to actually report them to the moderator team in spite of being in support of the game and its content. *sigh*

I should really start proofreading these posts. Yikes.

Done with the game. The game has two rather big problems, only one of which is Bioware's fault. Marketing. Well, what's in a name anyway? The first is EA marketing as RPG, while in reality it is Thedas: Fallen Dragon. It is hard to stress this enough. The Veilguard is not an RPG, it is a 3D action adventure that plays mostly like the Jedi series, with a different abilities tacked on to make the combat more flashy than it was in Fallen Order (I have not played Survivor, so I cannot commet on any advancements over Fallen Order). The combat has about the same substance as the one in Fallen Order, but it certainly looks, feels and plays a lot better. The other problem with calling this an RPG is that there are barely any decisions to make, and only two of those have consequences - and there never is an alterantive way to handle quests. Bioware really dropped even the pretense of having morally questionable options for the player to follow through. Even Mass Effect's paragon and renegade system looks inspired in comparison. Which, again, is fine for an action adventure. The ability/skill tree is a bit bigger than the one in Fallen Order too, with more variety and different playstyles. The exploration of Veilguard is also similar, with companion abilities substituted for the upgradeable driod in Fallen Order. The problem is that it still isn't that much fun, or challenging. It only very seldomly goes beyond PRESS X FOR AWESOME, and the exploration element is generally fun with a capital c Caveat, which neatly leads to the second really large problem of the game: pacing. We're on a record pace to... boredom, I guess. Sigh. The pacing is downright dreadful. The game opens with roughly four hours of not very impressive content. The abilities one can use are very limited, the combat thus highly repetitive and the areas are rather constricted hallways designed to funnel you from one main quest to the next. It is only after recruiting the first companion and finishing another part of the main quest that the game itself opens up, at which point your character has a few levels under their belt and has unlocked a few more abilities and passives that transform the combat gameplay from boring to good enough. It is precisely at that time, before the game opens up or starts playing well, where you're introduced to token minority elves, one of which is a companion that joins you. It is a sad testament to the times we're living in that the minority representation in the game (which was almost always a part of Bioware games anyway) had such a terrible reception, but there's no second chances for a first impression, as the saying goes. You're already not having fun at this point in the game, and then you see that Bioware wasted development resources on brown and east-asian looking elves. In an ideal world players would realize that for a project this size, no part of gameplay, quest design or writing (outside of Taash, who we will talk about later) has suffered a lack of resources because someone was tasked to make brown textures for characters, but the polarization is what it is. The game sucks because it is woke - but that just is not the case. The game (almost inarguably) sucks at this point because it is not fun to play, and that is not the fault of Strife the Brown Elf. It then proceeds to go on for too long, especially the exploration and parcouring part of the game. Fallen Order had the same issue - and neither game is very good at telling the player that certain parts of the maps are cut off until quest progress or the abilities of a newly recruited companion opens that part of the map. I probably spent a good five hours of my playtime (roughly 75 hours, which was enough time to experience all of the content) trying my damndest to figure out riddles and/or ways to reach areas and loot that just were inaccessible at that point. The other part that is badly paced are companion interactions. This is arguably the worst part, because at the end of the day, it is still a game (ostensibly) made by Bioware. For the first twenty hours I have played the game, the companions all seemed shallow and flat. Friends that played the game also agreed. The problem here is, again, the pacing of the game, as companion interactions and dialogues are interwoven with side and main quests, and often are contingent on reloading the Lighthouse (your base of operation) map, i.e. you need to go into the game world and come back for a new set of interactions to be loaded once they're ready to be presented. So if, for some reason, you have unlocked three interactions with a companion, you can do one, then you have to go back into the world and come back the Lighthouse for the next. This is such a dumb decision that whoever came up with the idea needs to be fired, because it means you're best off with going back to the Lighthouse whenever you have finished a quest, instead of just questing naturally in the game world. Gating was always there in companion interactions in Bioware games, of course, but they were usually also frontloaded with an enormous amount dialogue to be explored with them right from the start. With a few exceptions (most notably the Antivan Crow companion, who remains boring and flat throughout the game), the companions in The Veilguard aren't (much) less developed than those in other games. They're just not front-loaded in the usual Bioware manner, and that is much to their detriment. To recap, we're now a couple of hours into the game, it does not play well, it is not fun, there's no real sense of exploration, the main quest is on rails going through several limited hallways (of which most are out in the open, to make the contrast even worse), you had an annoying "nervous and talky scientist type" Korean looking elf lady foisted on you for a companion whom you could have exactly one really short conversation with and you have just reached Treviso, a city in an "RPG" that is basically also just a colletion of hallways (which kind of makes sense, as Thedas' version of Venice) where any and all exploration options are seemingly unreachable. To make matters worse everyone talks in a weird Italian style accent that the voice actors were clearly uncomfortable with and no one sounds in any way natural. Sprinkle your own character's somewhat dumb dialogue in this part of the game on top, and you have one recipe for a disaster. Where it doesn't matter at all that all of that gets better the more you play. I mean, who's still playing at this point? By now you're angrily shouting about how bad the game is on social media. Depending on your political and social leanings one might as well blame wokeness and DEI for everything that is bad in this game, ignoring that Bioware games were pretty "woke" all along. Taash And then there's Taash (Taash was born a girl, for the record, for anyone who has no intention of playing the game). Taash is Bioware's attempt at making a non-binary character, and while they had a wonderful setup for them, they never followed up on it. Taash is Qunari, but their mother fled to Rivia when Taash was little. So as Taash grew up, they were neither really Qunari nor Rivaini. There's also conflict with her mother, neatly established during the first companion quest, which is actually pretty good. Her mother complains that Taash dresses and behaves more like a man (for those reading this who are not familiar with the Qunari, they're basically fantasy muslims with a caste system) than a woman, which frustrates Taash. Taash is an accomplished warrior and dragon hunter - job reserved for men under the Qun. Can you already see how this might make for a decent metaphor for not feeling particularily like either male of female? Taash doesn't feel like adhering to the Qun, nor do they feel like being fully Rivaini. Naturally this looks like a decent way to bring a non-binary companion into a fantasy setting without it being immersion-breaking, right? As the player character, you can probably gently guide Taash towards understanding their place in between these two cultures. Right, except then it just stops, and the game and all other characters start using the term "non-binary" as if we were in a contemporary setting, crashing you hard out of any immersion. It eventually culminates in a really weird scene with Taash and her mother where Taash has a "coming out" as "non-binary" ("Hey mom, I'm non-binary!") that is so awkward that it leaves players facepalming hard. This is all handled about as well as Adira was in Star Trek: Discovery. Like, not at all. The setup falls of a cliff so hard it becomes a disservice. It's not just a case of bad representation, it is actively hurting the cause by introducing an element that strains the already tenous enjoyment of the game. What was that saying with the road to hell and good intentions? You know what's the worst part? Taash is a genuinely fun companion with lots of funny interactions. She also has the best apology line in any Bioware game when she's having a minor fight with Emmrich, the necromancer companion. "I'm sorry I called you a skull-f... liker. Skull-liker." Conclusion So, what's the conclusion? I liked The Veilguard, in spite of all the problems. Partially that is because I have an OCD-ish tendency to finish games I have begun playing, so I kept playing, and eventually found myself immersed in the game, started to like the companions and genuinely enjoyed the flashy combat and exploration. It takes a good eight to fifteen hours of playing the game to reach that point, and I don't blame anyone who quits well before that. If, for some reason, you still want to play the game, then make sure to rush through the main quests until you have gathered all your companions. Then you can explore, and make sure to return to the Lighthouse as often as you can, to check for companion interactions. That means those marked on the map as well as where you can see two or more companions standing next to each other. That means you should go there and listen to them talking. The game will be better for it, really. Oh, and I hope you're like me and don't care for exploring city-settings in RPGs. While the game does have two cities, they're not what you'd expect from one in an RPG. I don't mind, but others might.

Honestly can't be assed. Since I quit before the second wave of server merges, I don't even know how many of my characters still have their names. Probably none.

Watching nuTrek brainwashed me into thoroughly enjoying my current Voyager rewatch. Man, I can't even remember why I complained about it so much. Janeway's bipolar disorder, Chakotay being a racist stereotype the writers never knew what to do with, all of that seems so... irrelevant next to them having some depths as characters. I wonder what's next? Maybe I should check out Enterprise. Next to the cardboard stereotype checkboxes of nuTrek even the token black guy from Enterprise might look like an actual character.

It's funny how many things in Sailor Moon are good because the show only had a shoestring budget and was following a monthly manga. The episodes were pretty streamlined and felt tight because their actual runtime was not that long. Every episode has like 10% stock footage, not counting the opening, so there was much less runtime padding needed in dialogues. The understated and dream-like backdrops were fantastic and the fact that they couldn't follow the harebrained storyline lead to something that came together so nicely. Well, when the show was not revolving around pedophile unicorns with wings. Also, isn't it funny how a pedophile unicorn with wings is the worst thing the anime did, while for the manga that was just Tuesday? CCS on the other hand even had a new outfit for Sakura for each episode. I recall reading an interview where CLAMP stated that they wanted her to have more outfits instead of wearing the same costume for every episode, like in older magical girl animes. That extra production time had to come from somewhere. 's complaining on a very high level though. If all anime would be nearly as well written as CCS was I would be doing a lot less complaining.

Had a couple of things left over from the weekend, from some peppers to tomatoes and a bit of pork as well as various forms of dried noodles. Turned everything into a pasta thingy. Guess Italians would cry foul, but it tasted good. The hot peppers failed to give it the kick I expected it to have, but that's a minor detail - one can always add dried hot peppers later.

So... you played Roblox?

NANI?!

Yeah, sure, fat chance of that.

Was Mami's head bitten off?

Factorio looks like one of these games that I wouldn't like playing, and while they're from a different genre, that is also true for games like Magnum Opus or Human Resource Machine. The former which was recommended to me and sits mostly unplayed in my Steam library (although I finished the achievements for the mini-game in Magnum Opus, which locked me out of a refund by way of playing more than two hours), the latter my boss once showed up with on his tablet at work. I don't mind puzzle games, or games that need serious thinking, but I really don't want my games to be my job with a different UI. HRM was probably the worst offender, it's basically a visual coding platform disguised as a game and has you develop quicksort for its final level, or at least it does so if you want to have a good score for the level. Speaking of games that are like jobs, has anyone ever made a 1st level support simulator game?

I know this was not a serious question, but the answer is that, while seppuku was seen as a sort of socially idealized response to losing one's face, in reality it was not practiced nearly as much as popcultural depiction would suggest. Especially not when looking at its usual depiction as a way to evade the disgrace of defeat. You're not going to win any wars if all your samurai (or even just the officers) ritually kill themselves after losing a battle, after all. Oh, and the practice was limited to the aristocracy (i.e. samurai). The OVA also seems to be an adaptation (of a sort) of an Edo period novel, so that would track. Was my first reaction to seeing the image. "That looks an awful lot like Tsukikage Ran."

I generally go with the Alucard aesthetic. So, like, the boy version of @Bartimaeus' goth girl.

So, do you still like shrimp or has Dennis Quaid managed to turn you off?

There was way too much combat in the game even when there were all these massive bugs making it easier and shorter. I dread to think of playing it now, really. I'm good with my first playthrough, read the other ending slides, that'll suffice. For a long time.

So whatcha all posting this Hamas propaganda garbage for? Clearly all the death and destruction would stop if Hamas just surrendered unconditionally, and they'd all be treated super well by the IDF. Unlike the hostages.

Anyone else get this feeling of "oh, don't worry, he just wants to play" right before a dog bites someone's arm off whenever Bruce tells us to not worry about what Trump says? He just wants to play in the White House, after all. That reminds me of a joke. What's got four legs and an arm?