majestic

Everspace got an expansion/DLC. Guess I'll sink more hours into the game to keep my 100% completion rate. Plus there's a new ship to play around with... one that allows component modification four times rather than three. Mmmm, welcome my new 3k range Beam Laser M, meet some dead Outlaws...

Terranigma was the epitome of (action) JRPGs on the SNES. It certainly is better than Secret of Mana in pretty much every aspect, but it never got an official North American release... in terms of atmosphere and storytelling I'd rate Illusion of Gaia/Time also a bit higher than Secret of Mana, but that might be just me. Well it should also be mentioned that the various translations and releases vary a bit and the adaptational botching is apparently pretty strong in SoM. It has a special place in my gaming history as a sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure (aka Mystic Quest) which is pretty much one of my favorite games ever.

This thread went far too long without some Moonspell:

Wheee!

No, but they have to partake in the public plan - costs vary between nations and are usually shared by the employee and the employer. It's not all medical costs but also other types of insurance (e.g. workplace accidents or unemployment), paid sickleave, vacations and last but not least pensions. How much that is depends on the nations and vocations - some high risk jobs come with larger insurance costs (but usually at the employer's end, what with us being commies and all). There are companies offering additional benefits. The place I work at offers a tax free additional pension plan where a certain amount of money is deducted each month from my income before taxes, free use of the nearby tennis courts and uhm some hokum voodoo stuff like shiatsu massages.

For adults, yes, at least at a first glance. For children, no idea to be honest, but most likely not the full rate. Public insurance automatically covers one's children and a non-working spouse as well. You'd also remain covered while receiving unemployment pay or our needs-based minimum benefit. Minimum benefit is vailable for every citizen, them dirty foreigners as long as they have lived here for at least five years and refugees who were actually granted asylum. The actual costs for the minimum benefits are just a tiny speck of the budget (in the area of roughly 1%). To put things into perspective the money that went into the bank bailout during the financial crisis (uhm, too big to fail and all that) could have financed the minimum benefit system for 30 years. Eh, sorry for the tanget here.

's where I bought NWN from, the collector's edition with the cloth map. Boy what a fine disappointment that ended up being, at least until the expansions came out and some really good user created content was available. The shop's been kaputt for a while now though.

Obviously that would change depending on where you are but for me a supplementary private insurance would be ~120€ per month and would feature quality of life improvements more than better treatments. E.g. in my case if I had private insurance they would pay for contacts while the public insurance would only pay for the most basic of glasses or I would get a single room at any hospital, or free transportation to my clinic of choice (public insurance assigns you the first free slot within a reasonable distance to your residence, obviously - contrary to popular opinion even state run insurance companies ARE insurance companies and they're just as greedy as the real deal). The more bells and whistles you want to add the more expensive it gets - a full dental plan is another 100€ on top, for instance - public insurance gets you free dental replacements and all standard treatments but not titanium bolted porcelain implants.

He isn't- he's just right wing- but the electoral system means that his most likely coalition would involve the Freedom Party who would almost certainly demand a complete stop to muslim immigration. Only other alternative would be a grand left/ right coalition. Technically there's the possibility of a socialist/freedom party coalition. Wouldn't that be fun, a government that's both nationalist and socialist* in Austria of all places. What could possibly go wrong? *Just run with the joke. And for the Jonah Goldberg crew, well... consider yourselves the joke here.

While I can't speak for Sweden this is definitely not true for a variety of other EU countries (and probably not true for Sweden either, considering Azdeus' stories in the other threads). There are some EU countries with waiting time issues and there's an OECD report on the issue that we've linked the last time this topic came up. I'm a bit too tired to go looking for it but months is generally an overstatement unless you're looking at something like gastric sleeve surgery which has several pre-surgery physical and psychological checkups and a few weeks pre-surgery diet attatched to it. What obviously can and does happen is certain specialists having extremely busy schedules, especially if they're known to be particularily good doctors. It takes me a few weeks, sometimes even two or three months to get a ceckup appointment with my ophthalmologist of choice. Not because our public insurance system is inefficient or awful but because her schedule's that busy - and I'm happy to wait. It's just a checkup after all. *shrug*

Trek is on Netflix Not in the US. For that you need CBS All Access or whatever the name is. Which is pretty awesome because then you can watch Discovery and... a whole lot of NCIS. And the only thing fans of NCIS have in common with Trek is the age.

Critics love it and reviews on Netflix are raving as well (mostly). I gave up on it being Star Trek after the pilot episode but even without that it's just so hopelessly and relentlessly stupid. And I mean in the "It's the last episode of Stargate Atlantis and we need to get the station back to Earth so let's pull a wormhole drive out of Zelenka's butt" sort of dumb. The writers can't come up with a way to make super genius Michael Burnham lookt smart on the screen so everyone else around her just acts like a class of special needs children, except they get to play with the hottest Starfleet tech available. Which while being set 10 years before TOS is leaps and bounds ahead of the 24th century Borg travel tech. *sigh*

Oh and let's not forget Dream Evil who performed a feat of metal that I thought impossible: Oneupping Manowar in terms of pure cheese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_WMHg8c_4I Sorry Manowar, they win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH9FyLsfDzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaJEyKYSlo8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RVf01en-YA Rich Evans is a god among sheep.

It does spoil one thing all right: The movie should be called "The First Order Strikes Back" and be done pretending it's anything else. Except Ben Solo not being able to yell "I am your father!" at Rey unless he started screwing around really early.

Well I found stealth in Satellite Reign to only work in the beginning - and that's only because you can barely do anything else after having just started out.:

Oh boy. I... honestly, I don't know. I tend to give TV shows a season to find their footing and start coming up with good episodes but this isn't really going anywhere. They can't even get the manic pixie dream girl/cloud cuckoolander character to be adorkable instead of just irritating. At least Michael behaved like a Starfleet character for a minute or two this episode.

I second the Lucas Arts adventure motion - anything after and including Monkey Island is both fun and funny and most importantly made with Lucas Art's adventure philosophy of not being able to break the game or die by your actions. ScummVM runs under MacOS and a host of other platforms, all you need are the original game files. The remastered version of Monkey Island is available at the Mac Store, so that should be a nice starting point, assuming having ghost pirates in the game isn't an issue. It's also rather mild on the riddles and while some of them are a bit weird they're not outright ludicrous like the monkey wrench one in MI 2 or most of the riddles in Myst or Riven.

The name is just one of Bryan Fuller's shticks, he does that in his TV shows. She shows no signs of being gender fluid so the name might not just be pandering to the hysterics on Twatter. I read a review that suggested Michael Burnham to be a symbol for the harrassment of women of color in general. Like Tilly or whatever her name is wanting to call her Mickey, changing her name. Apparently that's something that happens to women of color in the US. I honestly don't know if that really is a thing. People getting a nickname or a short version of their name at work is very common though, so whatevs. Almost no one ever calls me my full given name, but I'm a white male so who gives a ****. However linking the peer scorn and her being ostracized by the crew of the Discovery to harrasment of women at the workplace is a "bit" of a stretch. She's a convicted criminal - worse, a traitor and mutineer, and according to this week's epsiode the first one ever in Starfleet. I venture most women aren't. As far as stand-ins or mirrors for our society go that's pretty terrible. Nobody trusts Michael not because of her Vulcan background but because to be honest mutineers generally can't be trusted. *shrug* If anything the treatment of Michael Burnham in the show just highlights Discovery's failure as Star Trek. Especially because she's not to blame for starting a war, her actions could have prevented one (most likely, at any rate). In any other Trek show she'd defend herself at a trial and not play the hard ass, get demoted and reassigned, or she would serve some sort of commutable sentence without the shady dealings of Captain Malfoy and his fungal spore version of Sammael the Hellhound. The suggestion to deal with the Klingons in a way they would culturally respect even came from Sarek, for crying out loud. He's only one of the most respected diplomats in Trek history. Nah. I'm not one of the hardcore Trekkers who hated everything that wasn't TOS and TNG. I loved DS9 and Sisko often did things that weren't "Trek" but at the end of the day it was still good sci-fi. Discovery so far is just interpersonal drama against a spaceship background with a war on that was probably meant as a reflection of the problems of our times - mostly religious terrorism and remaining "Klingon", i.e. the current "culture war". I think that's the most depressing part for me. The potential is there and one can see where the original creative team might have wanted to go, before the whole thing got a soap opera redo.

I just had a weird dream. Flew from Paris to Casablanca and then to Sochi... by hanging onto a jellyfish and thinking that it's one bad way to fly, constantly having to take care not to get tangled up and burned, what with the jellyfish and all. The trip ended in Russia because we dipped in cold water and the jellyfish shrunk - I figured it wouldn't be able to carry my weight now. While flying I saw myself on a world map that looked like a game of Civ 4. I often have bizarre dreams, but it's rather rare that I remember the insane details this vividly.