majestic

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.

The combat log breaks everything down, telling you what sort of equipment, feats, skills, buffs or whatever else is affecting the rolls. It's very detailed, just annoying to access. Looking through the combat log really helps when trying to figure out why encounters are going south and what you can (if at all) do about it. The presentation could be better though. One thing it doesn't show are perception check rolls you do in the wild to spot secrets. So the information is already there. Making easier to see would be appreciated. It's not a sign of decline to bundle all available and useful information into a readily accessible overview.

Stop reminding me of Mega Man, I'm trying to go a month without increasing my backlog...

So you guys always complain about the NPCs in this game being useless but Harrim just broke my game. He's the ultimate tank now, I'm just not sure how it happened. Best guess I have is that he should have (permanently) died while under the effects of level drain but didn't - and now he has 112 (yeah, in words, one hundred twelve) damage reduction with no exceptions.

Probably beats shipping parcels. They're paid 50 cent or less per delivered package and people complain about poor service. I wonder if that's connected somehow.

Mass Effect 3 has an ending that made almost no one happy. Does that count? It even works as a straight answer - the player does have the choice to let everyone die in this cycle after all.

Heh. That hotfix... I now have two Amiris available. It's the same NPC so it doesn't matter who I take with me but the game doesn't recognize that she's in my party when dealing with areas where she has quests. I went to the Hodag lair for her companion quest and she's standing there waiting. I can talk to her while she's in my party then I can party manage her in and out as much as I'd like, the quest trigger's broken. Oh and yeah, taking both of them doesn't work, the copy of her disappears immediately and doesn't respond to clicks. She can still be beaten by the Hodag tho. Hum...

I have heavily thought about restarting as well. I made my main an Arcane Trickster which is annoyingly enough exactly what Octavia is also set up for and there's no pure arcane caster NPC. Linzi is nice and all but she's a Bard and the Eldritch Scion's not really made for being your main artillery and buffer/debuffer. Lagging that one spell level behind needed to fulfill the Arcane Trickster requirement hurts a bit and outside of buying a sorcerer there's no real solution. I'm tempted to restart as Sorc. I also don't feel replacing Linzi with a custom made sorcerer would be much of a solution. Linzi's fine as a bard and a nice support caster. Ideally I'd remove the rogue/wizard from the party but hey, that's my PC. Woops. On the other hand now that I've found the Devourer of Metal Ekundayo is literally one-shotting enemies so what the hell... Anyway, is it just me or are the prestige classes a bit underwhelming?

Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor has to be up there with the worst casting choices ever made.

Wanna bet Shadow Warrior 2 ends up being the game we'll get? It's the only one I already have and I usually get lucky with these things.

I still remember when Ye (lol) posted this screenshot of an open Pirate Bay tab where he grabbed some music mixing software after complaining how much piracy hurts his album sales. Seems like legit president material post '16.

I didn't like that encounter to be honest. It relies purely on the stealth gimmick, it is however a great demonstration as to why the game seems way too difficult at times while more experienced players have barely any issue. The way it's set up makes it almost impossible to react to it (those rats must have some serious stealth skills) but once you know they're there and there's loads of fire damage involved it becomes a matter of prebuffing Energy Restistance and casting Glitterdust or some other AoE to reveal them. Sure they still hit hard but you're not eating 50+ damage in a single opening round of sneak attacks. Something I noticed is that the tooltip that says the teamwork feats are powerful isn't lying. It might just be confirmation bias but giving my frontliners 3 points of perception to unlock Back to Back seems to have really paid off, especially since the game's definition of "flanking" is "two enemies beat on the same character regardless of position".

Aw come on, they have an open relationship anyway. Who wouldn't be up for a threesome with a chaotic evil Half-Orc and his ladyfriend?

The second month of Chapter 2 had a lot of problems happening and my advisors were already busy (not even projects or opportunities) when on Arodus 31st the game decided to spawn two new problems with the deadline being Rova 1st. Well now that I know it can happen I can deal with it. It was just a bit annoying.

I don't like that problems can come up at the last day of the month, leaving you with one day to address them. You can accidentially spend the time resting and fail and have your barony stats messed up. Sure I can work around that. Don't rest on the last day of the month and make sure you don't take time skip projects that push you over to the next month. It's just not really good form when you can't control how long your rest is going to be. You spent 16 hours hunting, enjoy your new crappy barony stats.

The thread itself has proven your point already. If we're being honest, it's gotten pretty bland now, since the drama died down. Then again, perhaps it was the drama that was entertaining souls and not the news after all? Or maybe, just maybe there aren't any interesting gaming news right now. I mean it's kinda proving the point with barely anyone replying to your trailer marathon. I have to admit I almost fell for the Wing Commander trolling a page back.

The Spam Adventures continue! Today I got a fun little mail saying that if I don't pay 600$ to a certain Bitcoin wallet they'll release a video of me watching porn. Then followed a long, convoluted explanation about how they managed to do that and that I now have 48 hours to comply. They also know that I read the mail because they included a tracking image. The sender was faked to be my own mail address and they actually managed to find an old password of mine that I used to sign up somewhere (damned if I know where though). They claimed that this was my mail password (it isn't) and that's how they managed to send me the mail using my own address as sender. The video of me watching porn was captured with my webcam. This was probably intended for laptop users where that at least would be possible. I don't have a webcam. I had one back in '98 that had a resolution of 352x288 and captured video with 12 frames per second. Good old times. Oh and the mail of course didn't include any tracking images, and even if it did my mail client is set to not automatically download external resources for exactly that reason... Regardless, it was as good a reason as any to go over my accounts and enable two factor authentification where possible and change passwords.

Especially when it comes to Raptors.

Enemy tooltips like in Pillars of Eternity would be nice where you just hover over them and see what resistances and armor class they have. It's stuff you can find out from the combat log anyway but it would go a long way to help realize what's going on. Also WTB a sell vendor trash button. The inventory filters are nice but why's the vendor trash lumped together with crafting materials? That's sort of... annoying.

Checked my spam mail folder and found a Twitter confirmation mail. Figured it would be the usual spam but no, actually someone or some bot registered a Twitter account with my secondary mail adress (it's the one I use to sign up for less... say, trustworthy, sites). The account wasn't confirmed meaning nobody else or at least not the guys who registerted the account had access to my mails. I deactivated the account, changed my mail password and checked https://haveibeenpwned.com/. That probably wasn't necessary but hey, better safe than sorry.

Magus seems to be a really bad base class if you want to add Prestige levels - or mutli class in general.

It's the first season since the first one that I didn't binge watch. It's defintely good but failed to capture me like the three seasons before. I couldn't say why, it's not any one thing.

I'm being extremely stressed out by the time limit of the first act. I know it's generous and probably more than enough but it's there, and that suffices. I still have 77 days left but that doesn't seem so much considering I managed to finish one side quest so far and... my party seriously needs more level ups.