majestic

I got some reading done during my vacation. Y'know, sitting on a balcony with my Kindle in hand, watching the bay and enjoying the breeze is something I could really get used to. Finished the first two Harry Potter novels (which I got as my monthly Amazon Prime e-book for August and September) and grabbed a few things from Prime Reading, like The Forever War and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Them Potter books were more entertaining than I imagined. I'm curious to see how much different the later films were because the first two were pretty faithful to the source material, and I heard that changed with the third one. Not curious enough to buy the books early though. Heh.

You should have played Everquest. People sold buffs. Granted, the game had some ridiculous buffs with no level scaling, so you could get your fresh alt an endgame gear's worth of stats for a couple of hours right away and you often had to play classes with severe experience penalties (hybrid tax in EQ was awesome, 20% less experience) for them, so that might explain that.

Sorry to hear that guys, terrible news and a terrible accident. I'll be off for two weeks, going on vacation. Looking forward to some good ol' downtime at the sea.

I love their music videos. In The Zone from Episode 2 is a work of genius.

Sure is, WoW Classic can be accessed by subscribers. You still need a key to sign up though. I don't know if you only get classic when you bought Battle for Azeroth, otherwise the base game and Legion will most likely suffice (and you can't buy anything less anyway).

Tol Barad was what really got me. Several times.

Oh boy, so that line "a thousand generations live in you!" is meant literally, and Rey's really a clone with the experience of generations of Jedi loaded into her at creation. Kind of like a human holocron. >.<

Dynamic respawn times based on zone load is relatively new, yes. Eh, and by that I mean it was introduced to immense effect back in Cataclysm where Athene (ab)used it to get the world first level 85 character by simply grinding a patch of quickly respawning mobs that some out of group friends killed, i.e. he tapped everything, they nuked it, the enemies respawned instantly.

Funny thing, if someone told me a few years ago that Miley Cyrus would be the reason for me to reevaluate my opinion of Nine Inch Nails post Broken (yeah I'm that guy who didn't like The Downward Spiral with some very few exceptions like Heresy and Hurt, sue me ) I would have laughed at them. I guess stranger things have happened, but anyway, I'm beginning to realize that The Fragile is much, much better than I ever thought it was. Or to be more accurate: ever wanted to give it credit for during my youthfully rebellious but somewhat ignorant "It's mainstream now so it sucks" phase. Still can't stand Closer from The Downward Spiral. That apparently had nothing to do with it being a club hit. Heh.

Woha, it's like Manowar and Dream Evil had a superhero love child. Awesome. 😄

I'm pretty sure they find it... puzzling enough. *snicker*

All that talk about growing vegetables made me remember a fun little tidbit that happened to my partents last year. They're renting a patch of land near my grandmother's former home, roughly 20,000 square feet wedged between the street and a small river. Anyhow, last year mom planted some corn which was growing fine until they went on vacation. When they came back her uncle called and said that all of it was gone. You know, usually when people steal corn they only take a few ears. This time, well, everything was gone - neatly cut off right above the ground. All the corn. Vanished - quite literally over night. Some days later he called and said he found the missing corn while fishing. In... yeah, right. A beaver dam. Cheeky little bastards.

Got around to finishing Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6. All in all maybe the weakest season since the first, but still pretty entertaining all in all, but it sure was weird... even for a show set in the MCU (or not, any more, what with Endgame and all).

Small cucumbers are by far and large the most popular choice for salt brining here. Everything else gets pickled in (spiced) vinegar. Most of our home grown vegetables are used fresh. Mom makes jam from whatever berries or fruits are currently available: apricots, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, sometimes gooseberries and most of all red and white currant. Red currant jam in particular makes for a wonderful ingredient in sweets. It retains a slightly sour flavour and works to create a fine balance. Great, now I'm hungry.

Salt brine and hot peppers sounds like something that doesn't mesh very well. Have you tried making pepper infused honey? That's easy to do and gives great results - works best with honeydew honey. There's two ways you can go about this, either simmer the peppers in honey for a bit and then strain through a sieve or just chop up the peppers and pour the honey over them. The latter can't be stored for extended periods of time and should be consumed within a few months. Adding water to the honey makes it perishable, however you still get the actual peppers with a bit of honey instead of just honey that's hot and sweet, and you don't feel dirty afterwards, I mean... boiling honey should be a criminal offense.

Eh, honestly, we're talking about a comic adapation that has assassins killing targets because of errors in the fabric of the Loom of Fate(tm) who can curve bullets. With that as frame of reference Acid Burn picking up Professor X like that makes perfect sense.

Watched the final season of Orange Is The New Black. There are times I wish my mind would compel me to keep watching shows that clearly spent their creativity and quality after the first (or second) season. I'm not entirely sure what this last season was supposed to be. An attempt to outdo A Song Of Ice And Fire in terms of terrible things happened to people without understanding the difference between a meaningful and a pointless character death*? Trying to cram in all the social commentary the show lost in the past four seasons? Making Piper even more insufferable than she already was? I'm glad it is over. *

Once you unlock the Ancient Weapon and Leech glyphs (best combo ever, really) you won't have to worry about not being able to kill anything. Top that off with the Splitter glyph and load up those ARC 9000s for some fireworks. There are two downsides to the setup, first it locks you into playing one particular way and two it makes the game easy, and I mean "win almost every hard mode run" easy. Especially if you combine it with a Time Extender and a Teleport. The only dangerous situations come from bumbling into some environmental danger (accidtentially hitting a gray goo or eating some solar discharge) and them pesky little Swarm fighters.

Hey that's something I backed, so be worried. It'll turn Epic exclusive before long.

Venetica on GOG. It's only three bucks at the moment. One of the games in my "lost decade" going from 2004 to... well, not quite 2014 (more like 2015), but otherwise it wouldn't be a lost decade. 2004 is when I started playing Everquest 2, then World of Warcraft, then an easily overheating computer paired with a new job meant I wasn't playing much. Once my computer was fixed I got back into World of Warcraft which kept me glued to the screen until SWTOR came out, and that infatuation ended in guild drama in 2015. Sure I played some of the big releases like the Mass Effect series, Dragon Age and Resident Evil (mostly 4, 0 and the Game Cube re-releases) but I've missed a lot. No, wait, I played the second Call of Duty and the first Gears of War at work, because back then my work actually involved maintaining and testing XBox Demo units. Heh. Ah, good times.

No home delivery service around?

Bloodlust was added in 2.0.1.

Soulstones aren't out of combat resurrections, but yes, Blizz patched out the only job PVE Shamans had in classic pretty quickly. I know, I know, it's 1.12 and Shamans are actually decent at healing and buffing their group at that point, assuming they manage to not run out of mana.

Well that's possible. Forgot that the in-fight resurrection limit wasn't always around.