majestic

But flying pigs already exist. Duke Nukem Forever came out. Therefore, pigs can fly. On the other hand, that does not imply that flying pigs have wings. They could levitate via anti-gravity or have jet engine anuses.

In their Star Trek: Into Darkness Half in the Bag Jay speculated that Kurtzman, et al. simply put the cart before the horse by first coming up with scenes they really want to have, then writing them and afterwards playing connect the dots with a disjointed overarching plot that makes no sense. And Into Darkness was a two hour standard action movie. The most baffling thing is that after Trek 2009, Into Darkness and Star Trek Discovery they really thought Kurtzman could do this? Yeah, he got replaced, sure, but which buffoon thought it was a good idea to give him even more Trek to do?

Accusing the financial sector of being greedy and only interested in profit at the detriment of everyone and everything else is also a reputation they worked very hard for, and it is neither entirely undeserved, nor is it going to change for as long as people can get filthy rich by jacking up food and basic needs prices for financial gains. Look at food futures, like 3% of them actually lead to food being bought. Which inversely means 97% of the entire business is only there to make sure you rake in some sweet, sweet money at the expense of starving people. Are you honestly going to pretend that this is for the good of everyone and not simple, pure greed? What's next, accusing Nestle of being a collection of philantropists?

Gromnir's post in the Coronavirus thread reminded me of an old joke. An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying at a hotel. One night there's a fire. The engineer gets up, picks up the nearest fire extinguisher and quells the flames. The physicist does a few quick calculations, then jumps ouf of the window and into the hotel pool. The mathematician wakes up, sees the fire, says "on that's solvable" and goes back to bed.

It also really makes them look like (the) hyprocrites (they are) in a post-Snowden world. Please let us spy on you, not China. Polemic? Perhaps, but as you've so wonderfully stated the US has worked hard for the past 20 years on that dim view of them the world's slowly adapting. See that's the point, for as long as you're on the inside that statement rings true. When you're outside, though, it's the Obama drone program that blows up your wedding. It's US funded terrorism that gets you beheaded, shot, mutilated or blown apart. It's the sudden removal of support that sees all your hard work wiped away by a Turkish invasion. It's NSA spying pervading even the most intimate parts of your life. It's China that's selling you cheap knockoff products. Unless you're in Tibet, Taiwan or Hong Kong you're much more likely to accidentially catch a stray freedom cluster bomb than be spirited away to some gulag by the CCP. We also really don't need to discuss how the US has done more good than harm before BruceVC comes and has an aneurysm, and how even with the likes of Trump, Obama and Bush the US is vastly preferable to the dystopian nightmare that is China. Going back to having a foreign policy that reflects that would be a appreciated though, and also much cheaper, something I know you're agreeing with (for different reasons, perhaps, but it's an agreement nonetheless). I'm also very much in favor of making ourselves as indepdendent of the US and China as possible, even if it takes some doing and costs money, who knows, perhaps Covid-19 will finally give us a push in the right direction. I'm also with you on that we shouldn't kowtow before dictators and wannabes (which at the time includes The Donald(tm)).

The controls really do take some time getting used to, especially if you're coming from Celeste or Hollow Knight, but once I got used to the momentum Ori seems to have when running and jumping they became serviceable. Except for the charge jump system, that remained awkward for the entire run, but that's also the last and least used ability you'll get, so it's a minor one.

We're not really getting a Star Trek Picard Re:View of the final two episodes. It seems like Rich really doesn't want to talk about it. He's baaaaaaaaaaack! Mike must have really hated the ending.

Played and finished Ori and the Blind Forest. Well that was fun, if a bit short.

I haven't seen today's episode yet, but up until last week's I enjoyed this season of Better Call Saul more than the previous ones. It showed that while you can set a show to the backdrop of forgone conclusions there's still a place for drama, tension and good fun. The ongoing hostility between Lalo and Gus is kept to its barest necessary minimum (and in itself utterly boring unless you haven't seen Breaking Bad yet) for the rest of the drug story to work while the Mesa Verde stuff was good fun - just please stop with the Jimmy does something montages. They're getting a bit old. But Jimmy being threatened is boring, and a full episode with him and Mike hiking through the desert? Nah, count me out. Jonathan Bank's age also has beomce a huge crack in my suspension of disbelief.

Well here's something for the thread: Dark Souls doesn't have subtle but awesome storytelling. It's set in an interesting world where mysterious events that you can piece together from observation and lore happened possibly so far in the past that they almost don't matter any more. But an actual plot that the game itself tells? In that regards it is as servicable and perfunctory as Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age: Origins were, perhaps even less so as you need to superimpose your own motivation and drive as a player over your character's.

Ah, yes, that's the one I was thinking of. But I read that is set after the Battle of Terra, not the events before. Looks like I mixed them up a little. I played the WC Saga prologue and thought it was pretty awesome. Gotta give it a go at some point.

Wasn't that a Freespace 2 total conversion mod once? Or was that a completely different fan project attempting to tell the same storyline?

Everspace is an arcade shooter dressed up as space sim and while you can do some very perfunctory trading it's really just there to gather crafting materials to build new equipment and consumables. It's very beautiful and you can explore interesting locations for a while but you have a time limit per sector that manifests itself as a fleet of giant killer warships that follow you wherever you go, wanting nothing more than to blast your behind to a thousand pieces, and you'll be constantly harrassed by ships, missile silos and defense drones. It also has permadeath with unlockable ships and ship upgrades. It's a great game but it's very much the opposite of chill. It's also fairly difficult, even on "easy".

For a more serious reply, Joe's both an author and avid gamer, and unlike most people reviewing games he plays on a god tier level of skill. And sometimes without him realizing it that comes across as strangely disconnected from the reality of most gamers, a trifle arrogant, or both perhaps. Like his Furi review, where he shows the game stats of his first playthrough and goes all "I was pretty bad there, I died 84 times in total" and casually says things like "overall I thought Hollow Knight was too easy". He also really makes the best April Fools jokes on YouTube. Heh.

Moar food! Homemade cookies (my mother's uncle is 80 and bored while having to stay home, so he's baking sweets... all the time): Pork with zucchini. Home made sweet bread And lastly, some zander with parsleyed potatoes:

Finally found the time and inclination to grind out that final skill point in Sekiro. Last two achievements down. So that's that. Onwards to something else. I could go back to wrap up the final achievements of Cuphead. Edit: Well that was the wrong thread, how did we end up discussing played games here?

Joe has a bunch of other videos you can spend hours watching, and he always says if you'd like to play the game at some point it's better to play first, then watch. Except for games where it really doesn't matter, e.g. Factorio.

It is finally here, after five thousand hours of work, 800 of which were spent on playing, reading and watching the Witcher franchise, here's Joseph Anderson's analysis, part 1: And yes, that 4 hour video is part one. Two more videos to follow.

The game gave me the strangest dreams I ever had. Reading all them overwritten descriptions about how weird the world is before going to bed left their mark. For that alone it's probably a 10/10, but that might not work for anyone else.

I loved every second of Castlevania so far. It's a fun romp and well animated, something that's otherwise usually lacking in Western animation. It's no BoJack Horseman but it looks a damn sight better for sure.

I finished Tomb Raider. Groaned a bunch at the end when Lara picks up that second pistol to cutscene blast Mathias off that cliff with it. For a game that short it also really felt too stretched out for its own good. Every setpiece repeats itself ad nauseum. Lara climbs a crumbling tower. Lara runs over a crumbling bridge. Lara runs from explosions. Lara climbs a crumbling tower. Lara runs over a crumbling bridge. Lara runs from explosions. Lara climbs a crumbling tower. Lara runs over a crumbling bridge. Lara runs from explosions. In a game that - with padding - scratches the 20h mark? Just how did it get the raving reviews it did when it came out? The one thing I really liked, and that's Lara learning to cope with her situation and progressing from scared out of her mind to ruthless killer rivalling Steven Segal's bodycount, also got ruined by the end when she starts killing the otherwise undefeatable and scary Oni by the score. Really? Fully equipped commando teams couldn't stand up to them but Lara and her trusty bow can, after a few days of learning wilderness survival and camping?

Insist on getting proper moonshine and drinking it for breakfast for the full Balkan experience.

Finland, actually. Yes, that's another one of those in-jokes. I mean, not that obscure, that signature's been around for a while...

Great times at work. First we had our pay raise cancelled. Wait, sorry, delayed until June as if everything will be back to normal by then. Now we no longer get paid any overtime. We also should not be doing overtime. Which also means my lump sum overtime payment per month is gone, which just about kills 10% of my regular income. But we have more work than ever before. Yes, yes, I realize everyone else has less and less work to do, but that doesn't help us as a small team, and as a special bonus I'm supposed to use up my vacation credits. Next month I'll have 57 days left. That's going to go really well with the current workload, not sure how I'm supposed to drop at least 27 days, ideally more. There's a reason why I have that many days left, and it's certainly not because I'm a workaholic who loves being at the office more than being home doing a whole bunch of nothing. I'll just take six weeks off during an off-season peak due to everyone ordering stuff online because regular shops are closed. Seems a bit like first world problems, almost 8% of all employees here lost their jobs in the past two weeks and a whole truckload of small companies are facing doom, so all in all our situation's not terribad and our management is doing their best to keep everyone employed for the time being. That's great, really, and it affects a whole lot of people in a positive way. Feeling like collateral damage doesn't help though. Le sigh.

I haven't shaved (myself, that is) in years. With all the barber shops closed I'm beginning to look like a Canadian lumberjack.