majestic

I figured out that Baby Jesus doesn't bring us presents quite early and immediately told my brother because I wanted to make him miserable. He flat out refused to believe me. I guess that means I learned really early in life that you can't convince conspiracy nuts of the truth. Our Christmas routine helped a lot in figuring it out. We were always visiting our grandparents on Christmas, and when we came home my father would go and check if the presents arrived while we waited with mom at the door. Curious, yes? Because all the presents everywhere else were already there when we arrived. Just ours were always late and my father always needed a couple of minutes. From there on it was easy to guess that he didn't just look if the presents were already under the tree but that he was, in fact, putting them there, because there was no time to put them under the tree before we went to visit our grandparents. Guess that's one thing that is made easier by you heathens getting the presents on the 25th from a Finnish fat guy in a red suit. Plenty of time to put them under the tree while the kids are in bed instead of up and about.

Not everything in 2020 was bad. A local behemoth of an investigation and trial finally came to a very satisfying conclusion (assuming for a moment that the verdict holds, which it pretty much will). 11 years worth of investigation and a three year trial. That might look really inefficient but the defendant's council fought tooth and nail to delay wherever they could (here I would postulate that they always expected the verdict to be guilty and they dragged out the trial at every potential turn to be able to appeal to the ECHR later). Getting the necessary documents from the banks in Liechtenstein alone took three years. https://www.politico.eu/article/karl-heinz-grasser-austria-finance-minister-corruption/ Have fun in jail, pretty boy. I'm sure you're going to be really popular there. Take care to not drop the soap too much. The article's slightly wrong though, he didn't pocket the 9.6 million alone, that was for him and his accomplices, all of which were sentenced to 6 or 7 years). Anyway, what I do find funny is that his lawyer immediately stated that they're going to appeal the verdict. In Austrian law the verdict of a trial by jury is not appealable, only the sentence. Of course the outcome of the trial can potentially be nullified if grave procedural errors were to be discovered, significant new evidence brought forth or the judge and jury to be deemed not having weighed evidence with the necessary care, all of which would lead to a re-trail. Given how immensely high profile this case was here procedural errors are unlikely to show up, and if there were any significant new evidence it would have been entered by now. However, anything's possible (just unlikely). The appeal might even backfire. The jury saw the long duration of the trial as extenuating circumstances and reduced the maximum penalty from fifteen to ten years (of which he has gotten eight). The supreme court might just as well inrease the sentence if they decide to apply the full range of penalty as per the legal framework. Also not very likely, but one can hope, yes?

Can't wait to not play it and complain about it five years down the line. Like with TheWitcher 3.

Isn't that what Bioware did with the cupcakes? Donate them to charity. Granted there's better food than cupcakes for that, but still...

Someone's in love with their doctor. Or the other way around. ❤️ Well this day's getting worse all the time. One of the dogs of my sister-in-law also died. Looks like 2020 is gearing up to be really annoying on a personal level on its way out. FU 2020. FU. On a more bright side I've decided on a Christmas present for my wife:

Oh, great. This morning I learned that my best friend's cat died yesterday evening and I noticed that my toilet was full of peeled off plaster. Looks like the neighbor's drain pipe is leaky. Well, time to call the landlord before anything more serious happens and I get a load of literal crap dumped in my flat. What a monday...

Indeed, speedy recovery GD. Still trying to determine if I should take up the invitation for a free COVID-19 test next Saturday. On the one hand, it would be nice to know. On the other hand the actual chance that I'm sick is very close to zero and going outside just increases it. I'm pretty good as self-isolation. I mean, going outside to the testing facility will put me into contact with at least ten times more people than I've actually interacted with in the past month (and that is counting the optician I went to to order new glasses). On the other hand that would mean seeing the sun again after so long... hmm.

The "haha stormtroopers" parts of The Mandalorian continue to be bad, and the prospect of getting another episode with Bill Burr doesn't exactly make me happy. That prison break episode was easily last season's worst.

Hahahahaha. Star Dreck Discovery time! This time we deal with some of Booker's family issues, his home planet and Prissy McMoustache Osyraa who does her best to be all threatening and grrrrrrrrrrr and brrrrrrrrrr and terrifying. So boss lady is seen executing her incompetent nephew in the most hilarious moustache twirling manner possible (she feeds him to her pet) then she comes up with a plan to get her hands on Booker by withholding pest repellent from Booker's home planet. Apparently the Emerald Chain is the only source of VANDAL in the galaxy. Anyway, Discovery jumps Book and Burnham to <insert planet name I don't want to look up here, something like Keijwisjousn> (neither of which ever even think for a moment that this could be a trap laid by Osyraa, which anyone with half a brain could see coming) and stays around to be a neutral Federation observer, hoping to make McMoustache be a little more open to diplomatic solutions. You know, show the flag and all that. Of course she shows up in heavy cruiser and is suitably unimpressed with Discovery. Hilarity ensures and McMoustache begins bombing the planet where the impact of the bombardement randomly does nothing even if it's right behind you or causes a shockwave that causes everyone to fly from their feet whenever it is convenient to do so, i.e. everyone tumbles and falls the moment Michael and Book are surrounded by the baddies. Saru is itching to intercede but has clear orders to not engage the Emerald Chain because the Federtion really can't deal with a direct conflict at the time. Luckily First Officer Ensign Tilly comes up with the perfect plan: Have a pilot of Discovery go rogue and attack the cruiser with Book's ship to give Michael more time to do something or other down on the planet (they conveniently lost track of them due to the planetary defense fields and don't even know what - if anything - she's up to, but they need to give her more time to do whatever it is). Detmer goes to fly Booker's ship against a heavy cruiser. The Andorian who lost his both his "antenna" knows a weak spot, so he joins her. Yes it was hilarious when Michael said millennia to a single millennium but this isn't funny any more. It's either antennas, or less pedestrian, antennae. In fact I'd say that antennas is out for Star Trek as antennae is the accepted plural form referring to feelers. Well anyway, in a scene that may as well be reused footage from Poe's attack on the dreadnought in The Last Jedi, we get a flashback to Star Trek: Insurrection where Riker flew the Enterprise with a joystick. Detmer goes manual control and takes out the cruisers weapon system and causes some hull damage. The cruiser hails Discovery and Saru offers her assistance because, hey, her ship is damaged. Green Osyraa McMoustache states in no uncertain terms that the Federation just declared war on the Emerald Chain. How shocking, she saw right through Tilly's ploy there. How... unexpected. Instead of trying to salvage the situation by intercepting the Emerald Chain flagship (which is now completely hapless) they just let her fly way. Then Burnham comes up with a way to save the planet they've been fighting over in a minute and a half, Booker and his estranged brother (but not really biological brother) hold hands and sing Kumbaya to make strange blue flying locsts from leftover Avatar CGI shots go back to Pandora where they came from. Oh, and yeah, there's this minor C-ish sideplot where Culbert is trying to figure out what is wrong with Georgiou, and Adira tells Stamets that she wants to be called they. They (well Stamets and Adira) also analyse the SB-19 data to find out that the Burn originated from a weird nebula that is singing the same melody that played on the Seed Vault ship - the same melody Adira is playing on her, errr, sorry, their cello. There's also a coded message coming from the nebula that is apparently from a Federation starship. Okay. Stamets works Adira so hard she falls asleep on the job, then Culbert and Stamets have a little discussion about Adira while she's sleeping in front of them (but of course she's awake). The two of them have some dialogue that is choke full of pronouns. The writers apparently tried very, very hard to come up with as much theys and thems as possible in four lines of dialogue and it really shows. It's wooden, forced and terribly acted. Stamets and Culbert look as if they're close to resounding laughter with how bad the dialogue is, smirking like idiots and putting an emphasis on every they and them they say to a point where it sounds utterly unnatural. No, not unnatural in the way orthodox fundamentalists think LGBTQ people are but unnatural as in severly breaking the conversational flow. If the intention was to show how picking pronouns for yourself makes talking harder then congratulations Discovery writing crew, you have succeeded. If the intention was to get more understanding for trans people then... please stop. If you can't direct the actors you have that are playing a gay couple to not make a mockery of it just leave it alone. Sheesh.

I liked exploring Elven ruins in DA:I and figuring out what happened. It's what I liked most about the Dragon Age games, exploring Thedas. I don't care for the combat of any of the three installments. They're all various degrees of serviceable, sometimes okay, sometimes annoying, and in the case of Inquisition occasionally hilarious like when you one-shot a dragon, but were, for me, never the reason to play them.

That I don't know, but Casey Hudson vocally defended it as the artists' intended vision for the ending, so he can at least join in being frozen from the neck down in Cocytus.

Fails junior high science, should be ample qualification to become a writer on Star Trek Discovery.

I'm pretty sure once the people who came up with the Starchild in Mass Effect 3 shed this mortal coil they'll be replacing Judas Iscariot, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Iunius Brutus as the people Lucifer gnaws on in the ninth circle of Hell.

There's this really nice video that can tell you why DA2 wasn't as bad as it was made out to be: And yeah, I, *cough* borrowed *cough* the save simulation joke from MRBTongue.

My insurance covered, let me check, 17.54 €. To be fair, with a basic (acrylic) glass package and a regular no-name frame they would be pretty much free, but also super uncomfortable, heavy and ugly. I'm blind enough to need super high refractive lenses and a small frame if I don't want to wear ashtray-style glasses on my nose. It certainly doesn't help that large 70ies style frames seem to be all the rage these days, it's apparently cool to look like a creepy stalker or pervert. You know, like Rich Evans:

I'm surprised that DA2 gets so much hate here. With how contratian this board usually is I'd expect people defending it a bit more. It was fairly okay for an interactive cave simulator.

Had my yearly checkup at my ophthalmologist. Eyes got a bit worse, and I figured it's been a while since I got new glasses, so why not. So my wife and I go shopping, and she's like: "Hey, is this going to be expensive?" and I go "Nah, not really", so she immediately starts picking out frames and we finally find one she likes (that I can live with). A couple of measurements and a bill from the shop later she looks at me and says: "Wait, you said this isn't going to be expensive!" and I'm like... "Yeah that was before you picked the Emporio Armani frame and the diamond glass package, dear."

As ridiculous as that may sound, season one has the longest run of decent episodes of the series. Overall it was still terrible, but it's the clearly the season with the best value so far. Season two makes Battlestar Galactica's final half of season three and season four look positively glorious and the current one is... uhm... yeah. It's occasionally okay. Somewhere between the first and second, but incredibly uneven.

Danes always sound funny. Like people speaking Dutch. 's not a jab at people or anything. Just as someone who understands both German and English the two languages have something inherently funny to them. Also Danes speaking German generally have adorkable accents. ❤️ <insert jokes about German sounding aggressive here>

It's so painfully obvious when you watch this tripe back to back with DS9. DS9 has its fair share of problems and episodes where you can facepalm to your hearts content, people acting out of character every now and then, not to mention ludicrous episodes like Move Along Home or Let He Who Is Without Sin... (which ranks very highly amongst the worst pieces of TV ever, not just 'Trek) and a whole host of plot holes and people forgiving each other really quickly (Garak mostly, or that episode where O'Brien goes directly against Bashir's orders and lets suffering Jem'Hadar die) but the interactions between the characters are so great that it barely matters. Now imagine doing an episode like Hard Time with someone from the Discovery crew. You'd sit there at the end and when Michael (because who else could be off to save someone) goes to whatever character is trying to off themselves you'd start yelling DO IT, DO IT, DO IT! at the screen.

So... bear with me. Everything that wasn't made by Lucas was originally considered expanded universe - EU for short. It was a sort of extended canon or pretty much regarded as canon as long as the works and story layout was cleared with contacts at Lucas Arts. Lucas Arts nowadays has the Lucasfilm Story Group for exactly that (so ever since 2012) but always had people to help coordinate with the publishers (most notably of those Del Rey and Bantam, but both are part of Random House anyway). As Zoraptor noted already a good deal of the old EU had continuity problems. Many of which were created by Lucas himself, because while Lucas Arts more or less expected licensed works to be beholden to a coordinated story outline he himself didn't bother with the prequels. That's why Heir to the Empire was written from a perspective that assumed the clones were the aggressors of the Clone Wars, not separatists. When Disney bough the rights to Star Wars, they threw out the entire EU by renaming it to Legends (imagine Legends as the Kevin timeline of Star Wars, or vice versa if you want the new canon to be Kelvin ) and created a new canon that at the time only consisted of the prequels, the original trilogy and the Clone Wars tv show. Everything released from Disney from then on is also canon, i.e. Rebels, the new trilogy, Rogue One and Solo, as well as any novels, comics and whatnot coordinated by the Lucasfilm Story Group. That means there's a good deal of books now that explain - or try to, at least - whatever the hell Jar Jar Abrams was smoking when he came up with the New Republic as a single star system with no military, the First Order instead of the Imperial Remant (or simply the Empire as they continued to call themselves). I'd also call the Starkiller base a silly idea but it's hyperspace laser isn't all that different from the EU's Centerpoint Station that literally was able to make suns go supernova or blast planets and ships with giant laser beams across the known galaxy in an instant. Okay at least Centerpoint Station didn't suck up the mass of an entire star into a planet. Sure a lot of sci-fi writers and, quite frankly, most people have no idea of the dimensions invovled in space and that's mostly okay, but Jar Jar is REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY bad with that. Cue Spock seeing Vulcan sucked up into a pinhead sized black hole. Le sigh. Content creators liberally help themselves and borrow from Legends all the time. Tython now exists in both legends and canon, as does Ilum for instance. In fact... Starkiller base WAS Ilum. The same Ilum from SWTOR. Obviously some form of Darth Bane must be canon too, because the Rule of Two is. So it is more confusing than ever and the stories told are worse than ever before because they need to work with what Kathleen Kennedy, Jar Jar Abrams and Captain Looper came up with. Plus the one thing they keep doing and the thing that bothers me most about the sequel trilogy is changing the way hyperspace jumps work. I hate that with a passion. Gah! TL;DR: Disney threw out the old EU and renamed it to Legends. Canon in Star Wars terms is everything that came out post-Disney (except the 2013 novel Crucible the final EU/Legends entry), Clone Wars, the prequel and the original trilogy. Star Wars: The Old Republic is in a sort of hybrid mode that is techinically Expanded Universe but also canon-y for the sake of Bioware being allowed to write new content for it.

Mando's next destination for instance is also already mentioned in a canon comic book. I don't read these, nor have I read of the any new canon books so far. You don't really need a degree though, just the time and inclincation to see if there's a "Canon" entry for any given thing on Wookieepedia. There are enough Star Wars enthusiats around to keep that pretty up to date and accurate. The movies, Clone Wars and Rebels are considered canon. Was the reset really about making Star Wars lore simpler? I always thought Disney made that just because they otherwise would have to set the new trilogy inside the old EU canon - so with the given timeframe somewhere around the Yuuzhan Vong invasion (or significantly worse, the Dark Nest trilogy), and they'd have to kill Chewie off*, which is worse for toy sales than killing off Han - and with Harrison Ford not giving a rat's butt any longer it would be somewhat difficult to get him to properly act his moping around for a couple of books scenes. All issues aside I can also get why you wouldn't want to make a post-Empire era Star Wars movie in the old EU. Those books at some point really took a dark turn. Lovecraftian Force Horrors incinerating half the surface of Coruscant, Yuuzhan Vong loading refugees into ships to crash into planetary shields to collapse them, the Jedi Order getting desperate enough to send a bunch of teenagers on a suicide mission that killed Han's younger son and even more civil war... * Have to being a somewhat strong term, one could easily retcon Chewie's death. The supremely dark disposition of the franchise near the end there, less so.

I've heard that Bloodborne becomes a good deal easier once you learn how to parry instead of trying to Dark Souls the combat by dodge rolling all the time. I wouldn't know, having never played Bloodborne but people with a DS history had the same issue in Sekiro.