majestic

Yesterday I had a motorcycle accident in Cyberpunk 2077 that left me flying through the air for almost a minute, with a crash so hard it killed me instantly (well, duh). I immediately texted a friend of mine saying that CP reminded me of Stunts (aka 4D Sports Driving). Then we talked a bit about the good old times. Today I fell through the world exiting a car after it rolled over. Hilarious. If you care about driving mechanics and physics and you bought Cyberpunk 2077 then you're in luck, I have this bridge here I want to sell you. Slightly used.

I'm two episodes into Chibi-Usa showing up during Sailor Moon R. I'm not sure if it's me getting older or having seen the show already, but I don't hate her nearly as much as I did during the original run. On the other hand it's been only two episodes. Plenty of episodes with her left. Anyway, there's a reason I picked Sailor Moon R 15 (Episode 61, overall) to post now. It's the one where Mamoru breaks up with Usagi to prevent her death in the future (or his vision of it, anyway). It... yeah. As ridiculous as that might sound given the subject matter and the abject silliness of much the anime, even knowing how it will all turn out - which, realistically, you'd know even on a first time viewing unless you're so dense you'd sink in lead - I found myself feeling terrible for her in that scene where she enters the phone booth, sits down and cries. The setup and execution of this scene is simply flawless. Down to the incredibly in character and somewhat weird - I mean weird here when looking at it from the outside, it's really perfectly in character for Usagi - thing she says to herself in the phone booth: "Sorry mom, I can't bring him home any more" - referring to an earlier scene where her parents met him where her mother asked her to bring Mamoru home when Dad's away so they can talk. See Discovery writing team, emotional scenes work much better when you care about the characters. Even if they're usually silly and do ridiculous things like dressing up in sailor outfits to fight evil in the name of love and justice. Heh. Ah, anyway, a heartfelt thank you to @Bartimaeus for making me watch the anime again. I'm planning on watching Sailor Moon Crystal afterwards, I wonder if that will be like watching Full Metal Alchemist and later Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood.

They're always funny of course. Even consultants laugh at them, I bet. A sheep farmer is tending his flock when a city slicker rolls up in his BMW, hops out and asks, "Hey, if I tell you exactly how many sheep you have, can I take one?" The farmer nods, so the city slicker opens his laptop, calls up some satellite photos, runs some algorithms, and announces, "You have 1,432 sheep." Impressed, the farmer says, "You're right. Go ahead and take one." So the city slicker loads one of the animals into the backseat of the car. "Now," says the farmer, "I'll bet all my sheep against your car that I can tell you what you do for a living." A gaming sort, the city slicker says, "Sure." "You're a consultant," says the farmer. "Wow!" says the consultant. "How'd you know?" "Well," says the farmer, "you come from nowhere even though I never asked you to. You drive a flash car, and wear a smart suit. You told me something I already knew. And you don't know anything about my business. Now give me back my dog."

Consultants are like eunuchs. They "know" how...

I think Night City is getting to me. Silly broad just bumped into me and yelled "Are you blind?", so I pulled out my gun and blew her head clean off. Liking this a good deal more than The Witcher 3. Feels like the same game though. Cars even handle like Roach.

That's making me sad. I mean I have no real intention of ever coming back - not to SWToR nor to any other MMO - but I really enjoyed my time playing it. The operations and even some of the flash points were among the best MMO content I've had the pleasure of being able to experience. If only a tiny fraction have cleared them in Nightmare Mode then nothing much has changed from the past. Not entire unexpected though, the player base probably hasn't grown too much, if at all, and the raiding scene was somewhat anemic even before SoR. Probably no way to pick up NiM operations now even if I wanted to. I remember we had a total of eight Conquerers of the Dread Fortress on the server (cross faction, even), and no Deposers (aaaand that's the reason the guild went kaboom). Had a good team going for a bit, lacked some DPS though. Had a good healing companion too. Really good. He had some family issues and couldn't play shortly before the reaslease of Dread Palace. Also a reason why we failed. Replacement was good, but... yeah. When he left after the guild drama I stuck around testing other healers for a bit, then left too. Massively increased project load at work helped with that decision too. I remember greenlighting a sorc heal for the main raid. Almost flunked him out after the first test run, but he did all right on the second (said I don't think he's a keeper but we should do a second run just in case). After I left, they raided together for a while, then the sorc left for Drop It Like It's Hoth. Not sure if DILIH is still a thing, but they were back then. Being the only guild to kill pre-nerf Dread Guards, as far as I know. Keeps popping up as a funny topic when talking with some of the guys I'm still in contact with from time to time, but it should showcase just how good of a healing partner the other guy was. The thing I miss most though was shooting people out of space in GSF. Feel like I've posted that before. Probably did. Twice. Or maybe more.

You tell me, enjoy working a second job? Heh.

Terrible advice, don't. It will suck out your soul until you're nothing but an empty husk full of hate and rage, and if you go beyond that you'll end up getting sick to the stomach when thinking about playing with other people. Or you might win the lottery and actually end up in the one raiding group on the planet where everything is happy-go-lucky, fun and joy and the people have the skill to raid. You just see a unicorn, the sasquatch, a yeti or perhaps discover the cure to old age and every disease. 's all equally likely I guess.

WL3's setting is great, the quests are rather entertaining, the overall storyline is somewhat, uhm, yeah, forgettable, and the only "unexpected" thing that happens in the end feels contrived and afterwards the game doesn't even pretend to acknowledge it. Did Bioware release any new operations or is it just the same they had for years now?

I thought items decayed after a certain amount of time has passed unless they are in a container related to quests. Anyway, lower the difficulty and don't worry. If you ever play the game again you'll steamroll over her anyway. In the EE it's bringing a sorcerer along, playing on Insane and reducing party size a bit. I mean... it's the EE's solution to everything. Nuke it, DoT it, help the whelp groups. Game just wasn't designed for her catching fireballs with her face. The best you could do in the original I think were Skull Traps, and that was a random scroll and you needed a caster high enough in level. 's not something you know on your first rodeo. Always thought that "Insane" difficulty on IWD was hilarious, making the game easier after the first cave with the Orcs instead of harder. Even without adding classes the game was never designed for.

For once and just because it's Christmas I didn't immediately watch Discovery and I missed the most stupid on the season? Man... well got something to look forward to tomorrow then.

For what it's worth, I won. I mean, survived until the very end. Not a single Last Christmas this year. But that's fairly easy when you're stuck at home and only going outside when you can't help it.

Minor thing that I just thought about regarding the timeline of The Mandalorian. Or rather, the age differences of the actors. Assuming she was a teenager during Clone Wars, and that's really a stretch (she clearly not much younger than her sister, and her sister was the accepted Duchess of Mandalore at the time) she should still be roughly five to ten years older than Boba Fett. Boba was born what, ~32 BBY? Well, "born" - cloned as it were. So that makes him ~41 during The Mandalorian. Bo-Katan has no real canon birthday (yet?) but if she was 18 during Clone Wars she's in her late 40ies, maybe early 50ies during the show. And that's a big if. So... in-universe Bo-Katan who looks barely any older than 30 (Kattee Sackhoff is 40) is 10+ years older than Din, who is 5 or 6 years older than Katee Sackhoff in real life, and roughly the same age as Boba Fett who essentially looks the 60 years Temuerra Morrison has right now. Uhm... yeah.

The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie? The same procedure as every year, James! Well, not quite. Since we're going into another lockdown on December, 26th we will skip our traditional final family meal. Well, not skip. We'll deliver the food to everyone and then enjoy it at home, no visiting. New Year's party will fall flat probably, but not sure yet. You're allowed to have a single guest, but said guest is technically not allowed to violate the curfew for a mere visit.

Fixed that for you. It's so sad that HBO ran out of money and could never finish the series. Who knows, maybe Martin will actually finish the books at some point. Maybe in 20 years or so, assuming he lives that long.

Played the hell out of Enter the Gungeon and Dead Cells, a combined 600 hours of entertainment for less than 2 bucks. Not sure I did much else. Nothing worth mentioning at least. I did get off my arse and finished the last Sekiro achievement during the first lockdown or so. Completed the game last year but getting all skills remained open. Had no real desire to grind out the last three points I needed. Humm. Anything else? Oh, yes, Wasteland 3. Which was pretty good, except it was an inXile release and would have been better if I played a month or two later, but sometimes I can't help meself. Bunch of games I began but didn't complete yet: Star Renegades, Cyberpunk 2077, Outer Worlds, The Witcher 3. Played a bit of the Everspace 2 backer build. Performance was crappy at the time so I stopped. 's about it, I guess. I'm not sure what I played this year because my memory is really fuzzy. Between the major release at work, the heavy crunch before and afterwards, customers going mad, amount of work exploding, the lockdowns and home office everything is a single blurry timeframe with no clear beginning or end. Could be I played Dead Cells last year. Wouldn't know about it. *shrug*

Have fun, these days you don't have to wait half the game time for the game to load. Fun to see that inXile learned nothing from their Bard's Tale IV debacle. Even Obs here managed to cut down on loading times in Pillars 2, and the ones of Pillars weren't so bad when compared to WL3 or BT4... or Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

Yes, off-handed and without checking I agree. Season 2 seems to have a smaller average runtime, and it was for the better. This season was pretty good, the first one was really uneven with the occasional dip into dreck territory. The only episode I didn't like was the one Robert Rodriguez directed. That was almost painful to watch. Please don't let Tarantino do an episode next season.

Sadly I lack the intelligence to properly appreciate Rick and Morty.

Doesn't run that bad. Loading times are all right, framerate could be better but that is with the default settings which are all at high or ultra. Well no, I reduced crowd sizes. Might have to drop things once I get the world opened up, but one thing after the other. So far so fine. Spent half an hour hacking the same fan over and over again to gain some skill levels. How is this better than putting points somewhere at level up again? Oh, right. It isn't.

This isn't as funny in a laugh out loud way as Valhalleluja or And Then I Noticed That She Was A Gargoyle but it's the most spot on (power/true) metal parody of them so far. Fire in the sky!

Cthulu runs a telecom business:

Okay, you convinced me. Downloading the game at the moment.

No it doesn't, I'm hoping someone will convince me to not do that. 60€ I could also invest into a decent steak or two.