majestic

And here I was thinking you'd be more into Natasha Volkova, what with your usual preference for - admittedly Asian - wrestlers. Ivana Miličević is the high point of the videos though. From a purely, uhm, male gazey point of view obviously. The cast of RA3 was amazing. Kind of makes me miss the time when games were made with FMVs full of great actors. Understandable though given the amount of money games cost to make these days even without hiring actors and building sets. I didn't dislike C&C 4 because it killed the franchise as much as I hated the storyline and the attempt to revive the RTS genre by combining it with MOBA style combat. But what else could you expect to happen from a game that was originally intended to be an Asian market online only strategy game that had a campaign tacked on later after that never panned out?

That was Half Life Sistah, and yeah, Gost Love Score. Although I think she also cried on a few other ones. As much as I like Floor and while I think she's killing all the stuff written after Tarja's departure, the only thing making me weep about Nightwish these days is Anette or Floor trying to sing songs written for Tarja. Annette never could and that was probably unfair to her (by the band, I mean) and Floor easily could but doesn't want to sing in her operatic style all that much, I guess? Not sure. Someone cut together different live videos of Nightwish a few years back. Mostly Wacken 2013 and End of an Era, but there's also one from the From Wishes to Eternity tour: Although this is by far and large the worst of the bunch in terms of quality (From Wishes to Eternity was ages ago) it showcases what I mean pretty well. There's no arguing that Floor is much more flexible than Tarja, and I always thought that trying to push her into a more poppy voice starting with Century Child was a mistake - although I'm not entirely sure whose idea that was, maybe she wasn't pushed as much as she demanded it to be done - but honestly, Tarja owns the old songs, and Floor just doesn't. And that new live album from Buenos Aires suffers from it. A lot. So, how long until the Floor fanboy brigade crucifies me?

Best part of an otherwise disappointing sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEERq5tLiOY Huh, YouTube doesn't want the video to be embedded? Guess you gotta click then. Meh. Way to steal my thunder there. Bah.

Not that long ago when that Nightwish video was released on YouTube there were a number of channels that made reaction videos to it. They were... everywhere the moment you watched the video. I watche a few of them. It was hilarious. One of them even went (paraphrasing here) "This is a great critique of how with smartphones we've become tools of our technology, not the other way around. Huh. And I say this on social media? Well... like my video and hit that subscribe button!" Right. Had a good laugh or two. The song itself is okayish. The video is great though.

It's not that bad. It's... worse.

I like to gripe about balance in Cataclysm because that was the only point in my entire MMORPG gaming carreer where I got benched in spite of being the best healer in the guild because my main's class was so fundamentally broken that it was pointless to bring any of the three possible specs to the raid. Sure, I could have done what everyone else did, switch mains, but I didn't want to. So I quit. I get too attached to my characters to be all professional and simply switch them. Interestingly enough Cata was also the high point of my raiding in WoW. I raided with a bunch of casuals in WotLK and we couldn't get Ulduar clear and it took weeks (and the 30% buff) to down the Lich King in the end. In Cataclysm, after switching guilds, we were the first guild on the server to have the achievement drake for the launch raids, although that was mostly also because nobody else bothered to do Ascendant Council on heroic before overgearing it. That was one bitch of a fight. Much of Cata was like that though. Probably in response to all the vocal people who said WotLK was too easy (and I'd bet that these guys never saw Mimiron, let alone his hard mode). So Blizzard came up with encounters like Ragnaros and Sinestra. Eh, and Spine of Deathwing. Geez. Not to mention the hilarity with the dungeon finder groups before the first wave of nerfs.

WoTLK was pretty much the best WoW expansion. Class balance (except for the Death Knight at launch) was not as terrible as it was earlier or as bad as it went on to be in later expansions and the game systems were streamlined just enough to have a nice balance between complexity and accessibility. They also removed most of the ridiculousness of the raid roster requirements of Classic and TBC without killing the differences between classes, an issue that seemed to seep into the game with the bring the player not the class approach, something that worked so well in Cataclysm that raid guilds dumped Shamans completely and guilds class stacked worse than ever before. The biggest offender probably being the world first Nefarian kill in Black Wing Descent - half of the raid being made up by druids (and that's literally, Paragon had 12 druids on the kill). That the expansion's got a reputation of being easy is also down to the launch and funnily enough to realizing how easy Classic was when you wouldn't spend most of the game time fighting the game (that includes the logistics of raids being made up of 40 people) instead of the bosses. Blizzard thought they'd give fans Naxx back after it was relevant content only for such a small amount of time and tarnished the reputation of the expansion forever. Oh, on that note, even if you have to fight the game* AND the bosses the raids are demonstrably only a... shadow of veteran memories. BWL classic was clear 42 minutes after it went live. It made for a fun Cataclysm launch though. The same people who wanted a more difficult end game got what they wanted and then didn't stop complaining about it. Heh. *Well with certain differences, what with the game going live with the patch state of 1.12 - MC in particular was a lot easier in Classic because by 1.12 Blizzard fixed some of the more ridiculous talent trees and class problems. But that's minutiae, by far and large. There, I said my piece. Call me a Wrath Baby if you like. I don't give a rat's arse to be honest.

Well that Picard episode was... Oh, I don't know. It felt like Our Man Bashir, except they were actually serious. But hey, why not. In the past when someone famous from the Federation had to disguise themselves they at least got some elaborate makeup on and pretended to have plastic surgery. But since Patrick Stewart is too old for this sh...tuff he just gets an eye patch and hams it up a little. Not that it was a bad watch, mind you. Entertaining. If it weren't Trek. I sound like a broken record at this point. Edit: Also, GG to RLM for calling out Agnes.

I've said it before, Bett Call Saul is probably the best show that I don't enjoy watching. It's terrific in every aspect from writing and direction to the performances. I just find it utterly unengaging. I simply don't care about the characters or what's happening to them, which sets this widely apart from Breaking Bad. Last time we had this discussion I postulated it coming down to prequelitis. Everything that comes up in the show has a forgone conclusion*. We know that Gus manages to build his underground lab, that Kim Wexler isn't going to have a lasting relationship with James (the only mildly interesting thing is whether he gets her killed or she simply leaves for good). The entire spiel with James' brother about the disbarment was pointless as well. *See that mayhaps be an actual weak point of the writing there. If you can't find anything in your prequel to create tension or drama then perhaps the prequel isn't necessary at all. On the other hand, everyone else that I know who watches Bett Call Saul loves the show. It's possible that the flaw lies with me.

Well that's wrong, Volo is Kanadian, ask him.

As long as you pretend C&C IV doens't exist you should be good.

The forest village is in Act II. It seems I also spoke too soon about the Wolcen servers. Worked fine yesterday, have been down for maintenance the entire day. Either that or my game is broken and won't let me connect and just gives me terrible information. edit: Wait, are you actually talking about Pillars of Eternity after talking about Path of Exile a page back? Confusing acronyms.

It's a biographic film meant to entertain, not a documentary, did you expect it to render a verdict on the life and wiles of Rudy Ray Moore? If so you might have approached viewing it from the wrong angle.

Seconded. Assuming they don't turn anyone into a literal angel or bring back James Darren I'm all for them doing some Star Trek again. Huh, for a moment I wondered who you meant there, but yeah, then I remembered. The AI. Heh.

Sounds an awful lot like bagpipes.

The whole show is built upon a premise that is so ridiculous that you'll just have to go along with it. It's depressingly similar to the beginning of The Force Awakens in that skips some odd 15 to 25 years of galactic history and simply presents us with a future of a setting that makes no sense (some minor spoilers ahead, but all I'm talking about now was part of the trailers anyway). The, for me, strange and interesting thing about the last two episodes was that I didn't hate them like I did the second one. It's just that... very much like with Discovery, this is actually hurt by being set in the Star Trek universe. Any other setting a former Admiral setting out with an elven warrior raised by an order of elven assassin nuns on a quest to investigate Seb-Cheneb, the Destroyer, who for some reason is part of a prophecy of a galactic extinction level threat whom a former cybernetic drone "knows from tomorrow" might be interesting. Instead I facepalmed all the time. The worst part is that this episode had a seed of a much better way to get into a similar situation by having the Federation actually pull off the evactuation and then simply have the Romulan Nazi guys (what were they called, Romulan Rebirth movement?) take advantage of a possibly disillusioned Romulan people who could believably cope much worse with the relocation and Federation values than anticipated. This could, in turn, also lead to a believable feeling of resentment throughout the Federation. But nah, instead we have an attack on Mars and perhaps an android that might reawaken the beasts (that so TOTALLY doesn't mean the inactive Borg drones, right? RIGHT?) and bring destruction to everyone. In a post Voyager setting where Janeway brought perfectly working Anti-Borg tech from the future with her.

The servers seem to be working as of now. Stable ping, no lags. I don't usually play online when it is optional, but the game doesn't seem to cloud sync characters so online it is for me. It's just very, very different from four years ago. Back when I first tried it (backed it as "Umbra" on Kickstarter) it was an open world action RPG and the story - what little there was - was something else entirely. I wonder what Anita might say to those female characters. Especially since one can apply empty skins to your armor, leaving you in a strapless bra, black panties and dominatrix style high heels with leather wraps.

NJO was pretty divisive. As far as the novels go (of which there are 19) there are better and worse ones, the writing can be a little uneven, but that's to be expected with a dozen authors contributing to the series. I'd say the absolute low point is Dark Journey which is about Jaina Solo, the Dark Side of the force, royalty, a terrible romance plot and pretty dresses. And no, I'm not making that up. Exaggerating? Sure, for effect, as it were. But not much. The hubub came from certain creative decisions, like the deaths of major characters, a somewhat significant expansion or change to the way the force works, which didn't sit too well with some fans (but I'd venture without NJO we'd never have gotten Kreia). It was an entertaining read. It drags here and there, but overall for it's length and volume it was fine. The scope was perhaps a bit too, say, ambitious. The follow-up books were really something else though. Dark Nest was... bad, Legacy of the Force made no sense for a long while, the standalone books had time-travelling Sith and a weird history of the Millennium Falcon and by the end of Fate of the Jedi Luke and his son duke it out with a literal dark side Cthulu creature causing an apocalypse on Coruscant. Still, everything, even the terrible ideas, even the force Cthulu is better than the travesty Disney put out. Heh.

Time to vent. We've spent the past nine months at work upgrading our ERP system and our customizations to the next major release. For compliance and quality assurance reasons (or whatever the reasons behind certifications are, screw that crap, seriously) - had to migrate to newer server operating systems and the old version wasn't officially supported running on the newer OS version. I'm not generally a violent person, but the people responsible for this major release need to be put out of their misery for their own benefit and those of everyone else's life they might ruin by working on some other project. And by put out of their misery I mean locked up at Guantanamo and waterboarded every day until they hang themselves with rope made by their own hairs. Here are some of the fun things that happened. I'm not entirely sure anyone that isn't Malcador is going to appreciate the sheer insanity, so feel free to skip ahead, I'll just leave them in a spoiler tag:

No, don't feed the spell casting hedgehogs!

Master of Orion 3 after patches was a decent 4X game. Turn based combat is boring and for complete boons who can't hack it. Baldur's Gate had good combat. Even before mods.

Huh, well, I'll take that Kickstarter as a slightly cheaper pre-order this time. No need to back super-special-wowzer editions any more. Heh.

Time for more food porn! Or possibly some mild irritation. Pasulj/Grah is a great base to use leftovers and fairly easy to make: And... well, roasted blood sausage with potatoes and sauerkraut: