majestic

Well, actually EU law just regulates how much overtime you're allowed to do, not how you're compensated for it. I don't get paid for overtime. I do get a lump sum bonus payment for all overtime rendered (monthly) and am allowed to use overtime as equal comp time. There are also some exceptions in my work contract. I do get paid overtime for weekends and holidays assuming the overtime is necessary, e.g. crunchtime to meet deadlinesThis, however, exceptions put in place the company as incentives, not mandatory by law.

I decided to have a bit of fun with the kingdom management (as far as that's possible) by putting advisors in charge that aren't exactly aligned with my kingdom's, uhm, alignment. So while that's Neutral Good I've Tsanna as High Priest, Jaethal and Minister and Bartolomew as Grand Diplomat. It's hilarious, Jaethal's first idea was to torture everyone that might have been involved in a possible conspiracy.

The time limits on the main quests are more of an annoyance than a real problem. The fact that kingdom projects take an eternity is though. Due to the way it is set up you can barely get two 14 days stat or region upgrades done per month and you have to split your main quest downtime on kingdom management as well as companion and artisan quests. Which means in reality you'll be doing one upgrade project per month, at best. And you can do these only at the beginning of the month, because if you cross months while doing the upgrading you will automatically fail all events that come up in that 14 days timespan. Because no matter WHEN they spawn, they fail on the first of the next month. And the game does enjoy throwing you a curveball on the last day. These 14 day projects are actually by far and large govern your advisors ability to handle events. So if you don't do them enough you'll end up with unwinnable events. That's not even touching the projects where you send your advisors away for 90 days. That means three months without that advisor, heaven forbid if problems come up that can only be solved by someone who's away. The more advisors you can use the less problematic this gets because for most issues you later have at least 2 advisors to go but it's an issue in the beginning of the game. The final issue is the speed at which you travel the world map. It's slow. Really slow. And it slows down in woods and even worse in the mountains, or if you carry too much loot around. Granted, that last one you have a handle on yourself. The others make sense. But with an extra day or three to spare in between upgrade projects it puts a damper on the game when your companion quest is four days back and forth. At top speed. Sigh. That said my Bokken is alive and well. Old bugger gave me some new potions the moment I loaded my game. Not bad for an old geezer who died twice so far.

That bothered me a bit in the beginning but I eventually stopped caring by the time he quit the ticket booth. It helps when he's doing something else than sitting, staring and cashing in parking tickets. Edit: Oh! Oh! Spoiler warning for Better Call Saul, Mike eventually does business with Jimmy and the Mexican drug cartel. What a shocker.

I wonder if that retroactively fixes poor Bokken. He died for me. And even if he still lives, will he finish his project? Hrm.

Finished the fourth season of Better Call Saul. it doesn't happen all too often that a spin-off of a well written, well directed and excellently produced show as Breaking Bad was ends up being well directed, well written and excellently produced. But here's the crux - as much as I enjoy seeing Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks on the screen, just as much do I not give a rat's ass for the show itself. It gives me answers to questions I've never asked myself while watching Breaking Bad and it has the added prequel problem that it is primarly about characters that either have full plot armor or are entirely original, which is all of a problem on its own. That would be all right if the show wasn't trying get me invested in storylines that almost all have forgone conclusions. It's like having seen the knockout round of a sports tournament and then watching the group stage afterwards. It's made even worse by the show having these flashbacks to points further in the past and the flash forwards to after Breaking Bad - both of which are much more interesting than the near-past shenanigans of Gustavo, Mike, Jimmy and Hector. Well, rant over. It's not the show's fault, but I really only like prequels if they manage to add something interesting to questions left by the original, and those are kind of rare. Cube Zero is a decent example. The conclusion has the same issue - why bother explaining how Rodney McKay ended up in the cube (and he's not even played by the David Hewlett in Cube Zero, boo!) but the rest of the film is interesting enough.

Yeah we had that theory at some point over in the gaming forum.

Considering that everything the game saves is stored inside the savegames as JSON files and it's really easy editing them I'm very tempted to... toy around with the kingdom management. Mostly by setting running event timers to 1 day. It's not it helps with the actual game... much. It still leaves these annoying do diddle squat for 14 days parts. Meh.

60 to 90 days long projects are also really awesome. Sending your treasurer or high priest away for three months is like staring down Dirty Harry's gun while he says WELL DO YA, PUNK? Except the game's gun has unlimited ammo.

I'm pretty sure those are supposed to be thunderstorms, not just rain. Be glad they didn't include the wind's ability to knock your characters prone.

Well, it took Deadfire several months to start looking like a game you'd want to play. Pathfinder Kingmaker is a different league of broken than anything Obsidian ever released. It's still a fun game and I do enjoy the combat (and by extension the ruleset, obviously) much more than that of Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire. And I didn't even like 3.5E that much. And the best thing is, they can't change the game rules to accommodate the whiners - and they're not willing to change the encounters. Outside of Gromnir's poor experience with this Feyspeaker Harrim there's no chance you'll wake up to a patch that rendered your character obsolete. Or half as fun as before.

Came across an endless gold reward dialogue while looking for one of the Defaced Sisters. It also gives a tiny bit of repeatable experience but not nearly enough to be exploitable considering the amounts of experience one needs to level up at that point. Unless you're really, really bored or really want that level up and somehow think it's better than simply editing your savegame.

I can appreciate the production values of the episodes so far. One of my first thoughts when the Predator showed up in the first episode was "Woha, I wonder when we get a bottle episode, looks like they've blown the budget on the first episode :p". Just not digging the style too much. Adequate is pretty much it. The only Chibnall episode I really enjoyed so far was Power of the Three, but that can be pretty much chalked up to novelty.

Every time I've seen forumite's pictures (and Missy had a lot of them in the days of yore to gawk at) I was sorely disappointed that they don't look like their avatars.

I watched the second episode of season 11 of Nu Who. Let's just say I don't like the new look of the show. It's unecessary... edgy, for want of a better term. Even the inside of the new TARDIS is darkish. Jodie Whittaker does a decent job so far but all that jubilant motormouthing ends up being suffused in all the doom and gloom of the design and lighting. It's like they took the anguish of Eccleston's survivor's guilt ridden Doctor and made it manifest visually. The companions so far, save for the replacement Wilbur who is at least trying, are about as interesting as Martha was.

That's ancient, but as awesome as ever.

So who do you think it is? Just throw it in spoiler tags, I'm most likely going to read about it more than play anyway.

Finished the second season of the ReBoot reboot. In a revelation that shocked nobody in the history of ever the Sourcerer turns out ot be... Looks like during season 2 the showrunners figured out they were making dreck and just went with it. The cyberspace nonsene is so thick that the scriptwriters can't possibly wanted to be taken seriously. In one of the episodes the Department of Internet Security white hat hacker guy even said that the random bad guys showing up in the episode operate on the edges of the Deep Web where "data's hard to track". Now that the shock of what this really is has abated I had loads of fun with this. For all the wrong reasons. It's easily in the so bad its good territory.

Hollywood voice talent (including one comeback from Wing Commander) was one of the stretch goals. So, yeah, they might not make the game better but they were necessary, in a way.

The Kilrathi look weird.

If you can't stop yourself from watching sucking stuff, then it must be the good kind ;) Not really. Watching STD is a mix of masochism and the strange need to see what abject crap they come up with next.

Watched the first episode of the new Doctor Who season, which turned out to be all around sort of... okay. I'm really hoping that Jodie Whittaker will come into her own somewhere along the ride. I'm positively tired of the showrunners and actors trying to emulate Matt Smith (who in turn just jacked David Tennant's portrayal up to eleven, haha, eleventh Doctor, get it? God). The first half of the episode started with the usual post-regeneration shenanigans and of course a new sonic screwdriver that this time around looks like someone plated metal sheets on a ****. Then we get really creative. Haha, I wish. Right, so we're off to a really original start of a season that by the showrunners' own words won't include any iconic Doctor Who enemies or a story arc. I sure hope that means we'll at least be getting something else than rehashed 80ies b-movie plots. I don't really have an opinion on the new companions yet. Still, I find it somewhat hilarious that when Matt Smith became doctor and Amy his companion people complained about the actors and the show becoming Hollyoaks, and now DW is full of Hollyoaks actors... and nobody complains because it's overshadowed by the sex change. Can't say this episode left me excited for more but I'll still continue to watch. Oh yeah, and the production values seem to be way up. I wonder if there will be a bottle episode to make up for it.

The main quests have soft time limits. If you don't do them fast enough they will destroy your kingdom by spamming events until you can't handle them any more. Not to mention that they actively change the longer you need - and not for the better. In other words, do you questing, exploring and kingdom building in the lulls between.