majestic

No, it wasn't. It was the last regular classic patch. The preperation patches always begin with the version numbers of their expansions. For all their faults, Daybreak does a really interesting thing with Everquest 2 that allows players to progress through game expansions on an accelerated pace. They call that time-locked server. When a new one opens it is base EQ2 and every 16 weeks the next expansion is applied to it. You can watch the game unfold as it did, with some differences. There are no game update patches, the expansions are released and in the middle of the cycle they apply all the smaller patches that happened after an expansion came out. Every time I think about rejoining but there's a steep time requirement to playing Everquest 2 in its classic state that I just can't fulfill any more. I do miss it though, my time in EQ2 was some of the best time I spent playing MMOs.

With today being annoyingly hot I went out and had a cold one:

Poor Robert Picard.

Is STO canon? I tried to play it but... uh, didn't even finish the tutorial. Can't get into it.

Would have been fun starting with the original skill trees though. Ah, to hear paladins winging about their only role being a blessing of kings buff bot auto-attacking bosses for proccs wearing a combination of leather and cloth because plate didn't come with healer stats. 😆 It'll take a while to clear the raids though, even with the trivial mechanics. You'd still need to craft cloaks to kill Nefarian, go through the Onyxia attunement and several lockouts to get the materials, clear Scholomance to craft flasks and all that. Not to mention getting resist gear for AQ40 and the Four Horseman in Naxx needing four well geared tanks to get through reliably.

To be honest I don't like the concept very much. The ideas are sound in terms of sci-fi and examining the human condition by providing refugees that nobody wants to take in, but it just doesn't fit into the universe. Especially not since it makes no sense for the Vulcans to refuse to take in Romulans after all the overtures towards peace and/or reunification in TNG and the alliance in DS9. Or resettling them anywhere in the Federation. Or resettling them someplace outside the Federation. The proposed Data/Picard conflict also seems somewhat contrived. Ugh. I'm deliberately ignoring the fact that what is (almost) a Type III civilisation on the Kardashev scale would be able to figure out that they need to evacuate their home long, long before their sun goes supernova. It's not like that happens in a week or two, and... uhm, the evacuation would have to be long before it goes boom, changes in the star happening and all that. But hey, it's a concept based on a Jar Jar Abrams idea.

Ah, a trip down memory lane. There are a few. The first game that I can remember playing: Pitfall, and I was like three or four years old at the time. The first NES game I ever played, and still one of the best games ever made: Mega Man 2 (I think I mentioned this before, I never had a NES, only a Sega Master System 2, the one that came with Alexx Kid in Miracle World pre-installed). The first time I sat in stunned silence in front of my PC: Tengoku de omachishi te imasu! The ending of Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy was a major bummer. I still wish I hadn't stumbled upon the solution to the figure eight and palms riddle. Finishing Loom(tm) with barely any grasp of English. Still feels like an accomplishment. Not so much by me, but by Lucas Arts. It takes some doing to create a graphic adventure where you can figure out what to do without understanding any of the dialogue. The way one learns the necessary spells is masterfully done. Managing a 100% completion run of Gargoyle's Quest on the Game Boy all by my own. Playing Eye of the Beholder 2 on the PC, again without having any idea what the words mean. That one was a lot tougher to figure out than Loom(tm). Well... and playing Ocarina of Time and Planescape: Torment, my absolute highlights in terms of atmosphere and immersion, for different reasons.

The insurance people called today, they'll finally be assessing the damage next week, and Amazon finally seems to have quietly cancelled the second charge on my credit card. Still leaves me with a bit o of a bitter taste in my mouth because they essentially converted 50 real bucks into an Amazon gift card without me wanting that but at the end of the day... I guess it doesn't matter that much.

The roommate, presumably. Account sharing is techincally against Netflix' terms of use but as a lot of people can probably tell you they're not doing anything against it (at least for now) when you violate that by sharing your account and costs with friends and family not living in the same household*. I also suspect that they full well know that people use the premium plan and the four simultaneous streams in such a manner. It's pretty much content mafia modus operandi to assume one download is a lost sale and therefore every shared account a lost subscription but that doesn't work that way, at all, and I'm pretty certain Netflix knows that, much like HBO knows that GoT benefitted a lot from being the most pirated show on the planet. *This doesn't mean these illegal sites where you can rent obviously hacked streaming services logins for a pittance. Use those at your own peril.

Thanks for confirming that you indeed are SonicMage117. Not sure about movies but animation on TV sure has taken a turn for the worse in the past 20 years. What we watched when we were 6: What my nephew's watching when he's visiting: Evolution for the supreme win. Pffff.

When you use them they show up, stick around the throne room for a bit and eventually bug out. Or at least that's what happened when I played. It could work much better now. The item was still in my inventory - or rather, in the box, after using it. Not sure if everything worked as intended, game having had a rough launch and all.

'Tis true. But confusing 3E with 3.5E is... less problematic than confusing AD&D 2E with 3E D&D. 3.5E was just a revised version of the 3E rules where they baked a bunch of corrections and addenda into the core rules to, well, grab a bit of extra cash from the player base.

Oh, I wish too. Then systems like PoE's wouldn't bother me so much. Oh, wait, did you mean that the other way around?

i just watched that Picard trailer three times and then replayed the scene with the Japanese Vulcan with what appears to be a cheap looking katana on his back several times just to make sure my eyes didn't deceive me. Granted it's only a wooden handle so it might just be a bent stick but the imagery alone is ridiculous.

That's just CGI, really. Space isn't real. 😆

Does that mean Armstrong went off Kubrick's script or what? I mean moon landings were fake, lmao.

And 150 hours of loading screens. 🤣

I bought my Switch for Breath of the Wild. I'm playing a lot of games on it - but so far Breath of the Wild stands the test of time as the only Zelda game that I have that I didn't finish. At least I'm having fun with the Switch. When I bought an XBox for Halo I was disappointed both in the console and the game. Anyway, I'm playing Etherborn right now. Too early to judge, for now it's interesting enough. Not sure just how far that concept can go or how long the game's going to be.

Zensurla is replacing Jean-Claude "Backpain" Juncker, not Donald Tusk. Charles Michel is going to be the next president of the European Council, and president of the European Parliament is David Sassoli. I said my piece about her earlier, she's a terrible choice in my opinion, given her track record in the German government.

Not sure how the patches and DLCs changed the games but Orions were pretty much the go-to heavy mech when the game came out. Pack the Vs with missiles and the Ks with AC10/AC20 and you're pretty much set until you need to switch to assault mechs. Focus missiles on one enemy until it topples over and precision one-shot with an AC20. Rinse and repeat with assault mechs as they become available. If it can't serve as either missile boat or ballistic finisher then toss* it. As far as pilot skills go in the campaign I ended up with everyone having Bulwark, Sensor Lock and Master Tactician. Breaching Shot suffers too much from PPCs being from the arse in the game, Ace Pilot looks good on paper but in reality pales compared to being able to weather the missile storm a little while longer and moving earlier in the turn, potentially disabling or even destroying an enemy mech before they can move. *One possible exception being a melee focused build with a lot of support weapons but those got the nerf-hammer pretty bad in the first patch IIRC.

I really want to see a satanic Ewok cult worshipping Palpatine. That sounds awesome. Heh.

So... after having to deal with the incompetent Amazon help desk who so far refuse to cancel the 100 bucks they charged me with that don't belong to them my boiler goes and dies after 35 years of faithful service. Ah, the joy of taking cold showers. Past two weeks in a nutshell: Had a leaky pipe in my apartment that luckily didn't damage anything except for the downstairs neighbor's wall. Still have to live with a hole in the floor right next to my toilet that the owner of the building won't fix until the insurance company assessed the damage. Which they assured me was going to be "really soon" like ten days ago. Had Amazon charge me with twice the amount they should have - or none, in fact, when they should just have cancelled the gift card that I never wanted, had my warm water supply die on me and I got a letter from the church with a friendly reminder that I missed paying my taxes tithe.

Holy hell now my credit card's been charged for what appears to be two times the price of a single Xbone controller.

Absolutely. Mike won't be able to help himself and force Rich into making Re:Views of it. 😄