majestic

She is, terms in Germany are 4 years.

Whoa! I guess Merkel's 20 years (at the end of this term) are nothing in comparison. Not to rain on your parade there but Merkel's chancellor since 2005. She might get 16 years at best, assuming Jamaica works out (and that'll be fun with the FDP and the Greens in the same government). Kohl also had 16 years, so that's not even a record for Germany. And I suppose Tage Erlander qualifies as the longest continously serving, democratically elected leader in Europe post-WW2.

So, right, Discovery. Not sure where to put it yet. It was better than what I expected (then again I expected Into Darkness levels of bad) - except for the Klingons. And there I thought Into Darkness' Blingons were terrible. So, a few observations: Trek can be good with wartime stories as we saw in Deep Space 9. Of that there was little in the two episodes so far, but it's too early to tell at any rate. The Klingons suck. Everything about them sucks. Their ships, their clothes, even their way of talking. What the hell? I get why the new Klingons are essentially religious fanatics as enemies for the Federation. The Klingons of old were Soviet stand-ins, now it's holy war. That might actually not be so bad... if this weren't... ...a prequel. Seriously, the Soviets turned into religious fanatics? Anyone remember the TNG episode where some Klingon religious weirdos cloned Khaless and the Empire's reaction to it was initially "burn it with fire" and Worf convinced them to use the clone for political means? God I hate prequels. So fancy hologram communication on pre-Kirk old Starfleet ships? It's a prequel. Let's make up Kelpiens, why not. Enterprise made up crap all the time. Vulcan subspace telepathy... Did I mention that prequels suck? Gromnir has it right, Rihanna is the worst first officer ever (I know it's not Rihanna). Looking forward to see Captain Malfoy in action. Gonna be interesting to see how much that weird me out. In terms of rating I'd put it above Broken Bow but below every other Star Trek pilot so far. *sigh*

Have fun forming a government Germany.

I'm playing Apotheon as well. It really is just a bit too long, with areas that are just a bit too big at times (...the underwater section, good lord). I'd say Artemis was the worst for me. A huge map, one hell of an annoying boss fight and the trophy of the wilds quest. Poseidon comes in as a close second due to the sheer enormity of it all and the time it takes to traverse the ocean. I liked the more focused levels of Ares, Athena and Hades, but that's probably just me and my need to uncover the maps as much as possible.

On the off-chance that I commit some Irish heresy now: Because I'd rather have a Kilkenny?

I think it's telling that D3 has an adventure mode that essentially allows the player to level through grinding alone, and it's even the better option if you want to progress on the ladder. *sigh*

Played (and finished) Apotheon which was interesting if a bit too long for its own good, now dabbling in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe before I'll proceed to Breath of the Wild.

Finally finished Gardens of the Moon. I don't have much time to read at the moment, work's pretty busy and I find myself relaxing in front of the telly at the end of the day, not reading a book where I need to pay attention to the details. In a way it reminded me of Hohlbein's Anubis, 700 pages of extremely slow build up and in the end nothing much happens with any of the stablished plot threads, and then it is suddenly over with the climax dropped in lieu of something happening that was fuzzily alluded to. Ultimately disappointing, but decent enough to make me grab the next book in line and hope for the best (I did like the plot setup and the setting, just not the resolution). I also noticed it's been a long time since I actually read high fantasy with mages and gods that actively interfere in mortal business.

And riddled with project overruns, coming out years after the planned release. The single player campaign was probably really just slapped together and released without much thought or quality control - we were supposed to be able to import our Baldur's Gate characters after all. Oh how that could have gone. Instead we got ToB and the NWN OC. Of course Volo is right when he says NWN was well worth the money for the user made content, one could potentially play for years without getting bored.

Dave Gaider made Ascension on his own after ToB shipped. So yeah, I'd consider it semi-canon.

I may be remembering this wrong, but I think there was a series or a pilot out there in which the Greek Pantheon was transposed into modern day New York making their way among mortals. Aphrodite was played as a drag queen who worked phone sex lines. Well... not a sitcom but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcaHutZQiIA

Not to mention all that work for The Motion Picture of all things.

Yes, Imoen was supposed to die in Spellhold - it's also the reason she has absolutely no party interactions outside of Irenicus' dungeon. There was no time left to fiddle some in. There was another, more practical reason for her survival. Having Imoen die at Spellhold and Yoshimo "leave" the party could potentially render your party without a thief for a large stretch of the game. At least this way if you choose Yoshimo to accompany you to Spellhold the party has the option of getting a thief in return, even if it is just a dual classed one (her stats are good enough for all necessary thievery anyway, unlike Nalia's). Sure no one really needs a thief in any of the Infinity Engine games but they have their uses, and a lot of players complained about the lack of decent thief NPCs in the game, with the only single-class one only available for a while (people for some reason apparently like single class thieves and clerics, whatever for).

Scum and Villainy used to be a very fun raid on nightmare. I don't know if the instance made it through all the upscaling and expansions intact though. It's been well over two years now that I last played SW:TOR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpF0MRGwOQA

SC was upgraded to Lumberyard (Amazon's version of the CryEngine) last year with version 2.6. So yeah... uhm... =)

I haven't even seen a single episode of Dawson's Creek (nor did I know when it originally aired until now). Blame the meme maker for not using period appropriate pieces.

Indeed. One for the real internet oldies.

Nah, that's fine. The amount of times I actually get the number down wrong is close to zero, maybe once in a year. I don't really check the number since it's muscle memory typing on the numbers block, 's just that every now and then my sausage fingers fiddle the wrong key. I was just surprised to get a silly useless error message like that from, well, Steam. Which just goes to illustrate the point made here how Valve is resting a bit too much on their laurels.

Pefectly serious, yes. Yes, obviously. Yes, they do. Have been doing ever since I went online shopping. Which was uhm... '98 or some such. edit: So, I just tried, GOG does so immediately, actually, without even having to submit the form.

So I went and bought a game on Steam. Entered my payment details, tried to finish the transaction, gives me a nondescript error message about the transaction not being updated properly and I should try it again later. Except I had my credit card number down wrong, so no amount of waiting would have helped, nor did the transaction not work due to a faulty update or whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. (Not to mention that Steam's payment details form has the usability and look & feel of a pre 2k Geocities web page)

I also enjoyed MoO 3 but doing so took some serious patience and the willingness to understand mechanics that - while sensible - weren't at all intuitive, or in other words, finding an answer to the question of MoO 3: "Why does the AI keep building troop ships?" was pretty tough. The manual was useless in describing the interactions between the statistics, just like the in-game help. I can also understand why people weren't satisfied with the shift in gameplay from micromanaging a handful of planets to macromanaging an empire of hundreds of planets. It no longer was "Master of Orion" but simply a 4X game set in the Master of Orion universe. Kind of like JJ Abram's Nu-Trek is Star Trek in name only. Nice action movies, just no Trek. But eh, I digress. PoR 2 never killed my operating system, I think I even got a patched version that no longer had the installer from death on the discs. The gameplay on its own was terrible enough. Almost finished it though. It's still on my list of games I want to complete at some point. Just for the sheer inanity of it all. :D

That leaves no viable source of news because every news source in the history of ever at some point lied.

Your honor, I rest my case. No need for even a closing statement here.