majestic

Mr Bates vs The Post Office A four part drama series based on the British Post Office / Horizon Scandal, with the delightful Toby Jones in the lead role of Alan Bates. Normally I do not really watch these types of dramatic re-enactions of real life cases or situations, but this one's well worth the watch. Arnim Zola would feel right at home at the British Post Office. In case you're unaware, here's a fun little summary by the BBC. Nothing like losing your livelihood and going to prison over accounting software problems both the Post Office and its creator Fujitsu were aware of as early as 1999. Horizon had a whole host of errors and technical problems, including (but not limited to) duplicating transactions, repeating transactions during software freezes, an inability to synchronize with the servers in case of disconnects and a way for Fujitsu administrators to remotely change ledger balances without leaving an audit trail. The people involved are lucky that they're British, I guess. Elsewhere they might have gotten "DENY, DEPOSE, DEFEND"ed already. *The British Post Office has the right to conduct criminal investigations and to prosecute.

You also boot into your operating system of choice within five seconds of pressing the power button on your computer (unless your system spends a lot of time POSTing). PCIE 4.0 NVME SSDs are noticably better than PCIE 3.0 ones, while PCIE 5.0 ones have pretty steep cooling requirements and offer no real improvement over 4.0 ones in everyday use due to having similar performance for random reads and writes.

I have to admit that I like Diablo IV's seasons precisely because they have well defined "endings" - there's always a given set of tasks to do, and once you've done them all, you can of course still keep playing to push the boundaries of the endgame content, but for me it's sufficient to have done all the tasks and have gotten all the rewards possible. I have no idea what Path of Exile 2 is going to do for its endgame, but if it is similar to the first game there is going to be a goal to work towards in every season. Plus probably loads of procedurally generated endgame content that really never stops. I tend to not be interested in those unless they offer a sufficiently fun competitive element or they're part of a list of a checklist to tick off. But I can see why. I had a phase where I tried every roguelike I came across and spent a lot of time with them (like the hundreds of hours I have invested in FTL and Dead Cells) and I really burned out on the gameplay elements that are common to them all. ARPGs don't bother me in the same way though, as its just the maps that are generated procedurally in many of them (Grim Dawn didn't even do that). Yeah, I don't see how there's going to be much of an appeal to go through the content every time a new season starts. The gameplay seems deliberately slower even when it is working and the servers aren't dropping your inputs (in addition to button presses not doing anything, in this case they clearly worked because I could see the cooldown on my skill, but it never got cast), and even some of the regular enemies need to be properly prioritized and anything that's more than a regular monster has attack patterns to dodge. While I think soulslike is being applied to way too much nowadays, in this case it's quite correct. It does have a slower gameplay pace, very deliberate casting of skills that lock you into their casting animation and you need to properly read boss attacks and dodge accordingly. It's certainly an interesting choice, and not a game to boot up to faceroll through monster hordes to blow off steam after an annoying day at work.

Path of Exile 2. 3.2 hours so far. Currently not liking it very much. Bugs, unfinished content (well, it is Early Access) and server performance problems aside - which, quite frankly, I expected there to be anyway - the game's biggest failing, at least on a caster character, is that it just does not play well, like it being weird that non-projectile area of effect spells still obey line of sight targetting and end up where an imagined (but still infinitely fast) projectile would land if cast from your character. I'm not talking about casting something behind a wall, but through elements that would realistically block projectiles but definitely not line of sight. There's also seemingly no input buffering/queuing for abilities. I don't recall this being a problem in the first game, but here it is. Using a skill with a casting time basically locks the game out of accepting any other inputs until said cast time is over, leading to gameplay that isn't fluid and decidedly unfun, and God help if you if you pick up a weapon with a basic skill that has a casting time and don't bother binding it somewhere else than your usual left click, you know, like the core element of these games? Click on enemies until they explode. Well, it's easy to just put some other ability in your left click that doesn't have any casting time where you can just spam to your hearts content and press another ability in between to summon great lightning orbs, firewalls or exploding ice mines, but still, what if you don't have any other spammable ability at the moment? I'm not talking about having the ability to interrupt or cancel animations, but I would really appreciate it if I could chain cast skills with some buffering leeway. Especially when playing online where desyncing and server lag and poor connections can and will happen. While it looks like there's no buffering (I'm still hoping I have a weird input problem or bug or just so much server lag that it just appears to be not very fun to play), the game seems to conserve parts of your characters momentum while using abilities that have no casting time, leading your character to moonwalk at half speed backwards or forwards while spamming fire bolts or little lightning sparks. 's not the worst thing in the world, but pretty weird (and perhaps related to desyncing between client and server). Otherwise the game looks pretty neat, it trimmed down some of the more annoying elements of the first game and it's still pretty complex (arguably overly so, just like the first Path of Exile). I can't say much about the storyline yet, but so far it is not any better or worse than the first game's. Which is fine, the art of telling an interesting and decently written story in games that are mostly about gameplay has been lost since the early 2000s. It's been 24.5 years since Diablo II, and so far the only other ARPG that didn't come from Blizzard that played well enough in my opinion was Grim Dawn. I don't get it. Even Diablo IV isn't as fluid and fun to play as Diablo II was, but it's still leaps and bounds ahead of the competition when only looking at the pure gameplay perspective (sadly, the content and pace of new content for Diablo IV is... nowhere near as good). Grinding Gear Games, hire the Blizzard gameplay team. Or at least the guys from Crate that made Grim Dawn.

PoE II Early Access soon, I guess.

After finishing the D4 season and playing Veilguard I went back to playing Dark Souls 3. I am now done with the game. I am also done with the series, which is fine with me. These games well overstayed their welcome, at least when unlocking all the achievements. The summary page tells me I have played the game for less time than Dark Souls 2, which is only because Dark Souls 2 takes ages to finish. Dark Souls 3 is relatively short by comparison. The grinding for the achievements though, oh, is just so much worse. If you thought farming in Dark Souls 2 was bad, well, think again. Proofs of a Concord Kept will haunt me in my dreams for weeks to come. Having to grab all the "new" rings from NG+ and NG+2 also meant that one couldn't just rush through to the end. Which is doubly unfortunate since +3 upgrades of the rings that I did end up using were all found in the DLC areas, so going through NG+(+) was nothing but a useless chore to finish up finding rings and grabbing spells that I didn't get the first time around. Well, and the Proper Bow emote, for which one needs to fail a certain NPC's questline rather early in the game. I'm pretty sure one of the FromSoftware cultists has a long-winded explanation of how and why this is fantastic game design, but it's just not. Since being fashionable is also one of the cult's favorite past times, I took a screenshot of my character's final appearance. This is a first. Meet pretty Meta McMetaface: McMetaface wears Morne's helm, Havel's armor, Catarina Gauntlets and Harald Legion Leggins, combined with the Sharp Infused Sellsword Winblades and the Grass Crest shield. Not sure how so much of the community arrived at the conclusion that armor is usless in Souls games. Perhaps a holdover from the first Dark Souls where iframes and rolling worked a lot differently, but even there it is not useless. If it were Havel Tanking the Four Kings would not be a thing. Anyway, the physical damage reduction on this combination is nothing to sneer at. The setup is complemented by Havel's Ring +3, Cloranthy Ring +3 and Ring of Favor +3, with one wildcard ring for whatever resistance is best for the area or boss. I don't recall needing more than three tries for any of the bosses except Champion's Gravetender (yeah, dunno, that's just like me having problems with an "easy" boss, just like in my first Dark Souls run where I died more often to the Gaping Dragon than all other bosses combined), and that was limited to DLC ones and Nameless King (Friede, Twiddledee and Twiddledum and Darkeater Midir). The game obviously plays a lot better than Dark Souls 2. The areas look great, and I enjoyed that it is more linear. I also never found myself yelling at the screen because of ridiculous hitboxes, so that is an area that was either improved a lot, or I just got used to it. It also shares traits with the other games in the series that I have harped on for long enough now - it once again features a gripping narrative and very satisfying endings and the same "story" for the third time in a row, although the game now has the third option for an ending that Aldia was probably looking for. Half of the game felt like gratuitous fanservice, and I still like the slower and more methodical combat of Dark Souls better than this one's, but that is probably also liberally seasoned by hindsight and having played newer soulslikes. Playing Dark Souls 3 after Lies of P and Sekiro makes it look like a red-headed stepchild in between with no identity of its own, which is unfair, as one of those games isn't even a FromSoftware title and the other is much newer than Dark Souls 3, and has a much different combat focus.

"The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy." -- Drago Museveni

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?