majestic

Took some pictures of our family christmas dinners this time around. Yay. Again, made from an iPhone so the quality is so-so. Putting the pictures into spoiler tags to keep the post concise. Cheese plate, cold cuts and homemade cookies: Smoked fish, various pickles, veggies and hard boiled eggs (and some condiments) Fresh bakery and butter: Roasted Bambi and boar: Chop chop: Graaaaaaaaavy: Gravy, part II: With added root veggies: Brussels sprouts: Bread dumplings: Pretzel dumplings: Red cabbage: Croquettes - eh, well, these were store bought (but no less awesome). The reason why most of it is in some sort of Tupperware container is because the food was prepared at three different locations. Christmas logistics for the win.

Condolences Hurlshot... And Happy new year guys.

Mega Man 11. Finished it on Normal, will try Superhero sometime soon. Bounce Man's stage has the potential to become my favorite Mega Man stage.

A friend of mine is a member of Rebel Legion and they rented a screen for a private viewing of The Empire Strikes Back to commemorate Carrie Fisher's death. Seeing it on the silver screen really drives home how much better crafted Empire is than all the newer Star Wars films. It also very much proves a point of Mike Stoklasa that when a film is good enough plot holes don't bother the viewer as much. Between Luke landing on Dagobah and Han reaching Bespin lies a world of timing issues very similar to The Last Jedi's situation of Rey finding Luke and connecting it to the slow chase between the First Order and the Resistance. Yet, while seeing The Empire Strikes Back for what must have been the hundredth time it never once came to mind while it kept bothering me all the time during even the first viewing of The Last Jedi.

Yeah, Merry Christmas to you too guys.

Grabbed the Mega Man Collection and Mega Man 11 for the Switch. Already played and finished the first Mega Man.

Started to read Sexy Losers again after this rainbow kiss discussion. Still cracks me up. Warning, the comic's very much not safe for work.

Public Squadron 42 roadmap with a projected Beta in Q2 2020. Chris Roberts also sold 10% of CIG US & UK for $ 46,000,000. The funds are supposed to go towards marketing and distribution, something he doesn't want to spend the crowdfunded money on.

Alone in the Dark can take a while to finish, especially if you play them all in a row and the trilogy is currently on sale. Assuming you don't mind blocky graphics as muc has SonicMage117 does.

Finished Dark Souls. Did most of it, Dark Sun Gwyndolin is still standing (for some early Titanite Chunk farming). Not sure what to think of it yet. I enjoyed the experience and might even continue in NG+ or replay but I don't really get the hype (yet?).

Don't worry, you can keep the traitor as long as you don't sentence him to death for his treason (or, ahem, if you want the thingy he stole).

Having never played the game before I grabbed the Dark Souls remaster on the Switch and I just killed Ornstein & Smough on my first try, no summons*, Smough first. Considering it's, uhm, legendary difficulty I expected a bit more. In all fairness I read up on their weaknesses and brought fire and fury (eh, bleed) to the fight - here's where you can tell me using Pyromancy is a cheap ass way to play the game, see if I care. Knowing myself I'll probably get stuck for a while on some boss everyone else considers easy. *Well actually I did summon Solaire expecting he will help me get a feel for the battle but he glitched out and got stuck with the Royal Sentinels outside the boss room, I just ran past them. Heh.

I'd still chalk up most of the games failures to interference by EA. Especially the forced engine switch. Adapting a shooter engine to suit an RPG is a tall task, just ask the guys who worked on Torn how much fun adapting LithTech was. Anything that didn't directly have to do with the engine was pretty much Bioware par for the course. Which I do enjoy every now and then, but the actual gameplay, eh... it kept me suitably entertained to finish the game. I suppose that counts for something, right?

It might not be becoming increasingly anti-science but it sure feels like the world is becoming more and more pro-magic. We recently had a nice scandal where city funded hospital paid 95k € for... eh, well, it pains me to write this, for a circle of protection against negative energy to be laid down. Just let that sink in for a bit here. The dude just walked around the building once with his dowsing rod. The hilarity doesn't end, because shortly after this was discovered and made news the Association of Human Energy Practioners* (they're actually part of the Federal Economic Chamber, subsection Personal Services get that) showed up and denounced the energy practitioner that laid down the circle as a fraud, with one of its members actually stating in an interview that he went to the building and immediately noticed that there isn't any protection circle and that they would have only charged 150€ per hour for the same work and their protection circle would actually work. Another gave an interview stating that it saddens him that actions such as this make his entire trade look disreputable. Because obviously it isn't disreputable when you sell dew collected from flowers for 1000€ per liter to go along with a 150€ hour of faith healing. The Federal Economic Chamber even offers quality assurance courses where you can get bronze, silver and gold certificates to show off. They're also purely designed to make money because all you do is an online course and a quiz the end, and each is more expensive than the one before. But I guess that's okay because it's the frauds that have to shell out the cash. *The description of the trade is literally the study and application of the scientifically currently not observable ubiquitous energy field that surrounds and links us all. Does that read like the Force to you? Because it sure does. So I guess we actually have official Jedi healers.

I'm still undecided on what I should think about the show getting a sixth season, let alone a seventh one.

Pulp porn novels, I'd imagine. They're not technically romance in the way e.g. Rosamunde Pilcher books are and while they're fantasies they're not fantasy.

I'm not really interested in shelling out another 20$ for a game I backed at a rather high Kickstarter tier. Usually companies have the good grace to include any future DLCs in such tiers. HBS didn't, and that's fine, but at the risk of sounding petty now that Paradox bought them I'm waiting for a high percentage sale.

As far as the rumors go I'd be fine with Chibnall leaving the showrunning to someone else but I'd like to see Whittaker's Doctor being allowed to grow into her own instead of being a Matt Smith derivative with bewbies. I expected more from the show - The Master's change at least had an impact and Missy was fun to watch playing off the Doctor. It might not have been the best idea to remove Bill Potts from the show along with Capaldi. Not that I liked her that much (although at last season's point, anything is better than Clara "The Wesley" Oswald) but she could have had some interesting interactions with the new Doctor. But now all the companions are new - and I agree, too many! - and the Doctor is new and all the enemies will be new. There's nothing and no one for the Doctor to play off after the change. Why bother, then? Sure it maybe makes for the feminist message of gender not making any difference by having the show continue just as before without even acknowledging the change past the first epsiode but does it make for interesting storytelling? Ah, hell no.

After 20 years I'm almost 100% sure that Volo is actually an online form of folie à plusieurs. Like an inverse Eldar - we're all alts of Eldar but Volo is an alt of us all. Eh... or have you seen Volo anywhere else? He's only around because we expect him to be, wheverer there are more than a few posters that are somehow linked to Black Isle.

Did you miss the commotion about banning Huckleberry Finn from schools because of the n-word a while back?

It's in the ground. The Na'vi aren't.

The best part of the light side Sith Warrior storyline is lecturing Jedi about the light side.

The sequels are bound to become even sillier. What's going to stop Earth from carpet bombing everything? It took the combined forces of the Na'vi and a somewhat literal Deus Ex Machina Luna to fight off an ill prepared attack from a small defensive military force that employed terrible tactics. Unless Earth employs General Hux as supreme commander how's that going to end well for the Na'vi lke, at all?

Someone said fantasy?