majestic

I followed @Bartimaeus glowing recommendation after @Sarex mentioned Delicious in Dungeon and watched the first two episodes. What a fantastic experience, my sides still hurt from all the laughing.

Is it just me or are sessions expiring awfully quickly again?

Today, my mother struggled a bit to get her groceries inside her apartment. My wife said that we should go help her, and I put on a really serious expression and said: "Be careful of charity and kindness, lest you do more harm with open hands then a clenched fist." Then I burst out laughing, but in this instance, Kreia was pretty much right: to take the struggle from her is to weaken her.

Unless there were significant changes in some of the patches, it is almost impossible to reach either the max character level or zealot on anything but dogmatic, and even for dogmatic you really need to take every possible option. The convictions really need some tuning. The Calibrated Heavy Stubber is especially ridiculous when you combine it with the main character's dogmatic IV ability that just makes the target ignore any damage reduction, and you did not even get the full fun out of the Compensator Gloves by having Argenta as Bounty Hunter. Compensator Gloves scale the rate of fire bonus off the character's Ballistic Skill, which goes up with each shot on an Arch-Militant. Worse because of the bugged interaction with Firearm Mastery, which makes every single shot give you one rank of Versatility. Not sure if that was fixed yet. Still mostly used the Heavy Bolter on her because it did not matter and bolters are appropriate for Argenta, and they look and sound better than the stubbers.

Yeah, well, I get 30 seconds of unskippable ads on YouTube because they want me to subscribe. It is understandable. I mean, look at Alphabet only raking in 17 billion net profit per quarter. They're basically bankrupt, so trying to force people to pay for an ad free YouTube is fair.

If YT gives you any trouble with your ad blocker, you can just install Ad SpeedUp. It works without a hitch and has (probably?) the advantage that the creators still get a cut of the ad revenue. Not sure, but I guess the companies running the ads through YouTube might be a tad unhappy about it.

Bruce, really, I have no idea how you got it into your head that I was talking about a chapter of his self-help book. I was referencing an interview he did with the BBC, and said so. At any rate, the self-help book, which I only know the chapter titles of thanks to you posting about them, neatly illustrates the difference between reactionary right wing elements and regressive left wing elements: one side tells you what to do, the other tells you what not to do.

It is a MYSTARY for sure.

I just checked if I even have a single game by an Ubisoft studio, and the answer is no, I do not. I do have a couple of games published by Ubisoft, but even those are old. Like The Settlers and Heroes of Might and Magic old.

Well, you got that wrong, Jordan Peterson is the guy who DESTROYS leftists by telling them crustaceans have a strict hierarchy and then proceeding to unironically talk about post-modern neo-marxism, which most likely sounds highly intellectual to his fanbase, but is completely meaningless. Postmodernism's defining feature is the rejection of metanarratives like Marxism as fundamentally flawed. His fabled debating skills, by far and large, boil down to raising strawmen arguments combined with a factually true statement in an attempt to goad the other party into looking stupid or giving him an opening where he can claim that they are misrepresenting what he said without ever really specifying what it is exactly he said. Which is pretty much what he did in his BBC interview, for instance, where he's argued that "the" Left has this idea that all our societal hierarchies are the result of Western patriarchy, but lobsters also have hierarchies and they predate Western civilization. The strawman here being that "the left" of course never argued against all hierarchies arising from the oppressive patriachy. It is, however, fairly problematic to respond to, you can either argue against a fundamentally correct statement ("lobsters have hierarchies"), which will make you look silly, or you can follow his implication and debate that, to which he can just reply that this is a misinterpretation of what he said. Which is pretty much what happened, as the interviewer's response was asking him whether he believes we should organize our society along the lines of lobsters. No, of course not. Silly interviewer. The reactionary core of his implication still stands, of course, and his fanbase gobbles it up like candy. Like him or not, he certainly knows what he is doing, which is pandering to his audience, not engaging in meaningful, intellectual debates.

One of our colleagues died of a coronary. People used to call him 'roidsmurf (or alternatively cokesmurf) because he was a little on the short side and constantly zipping about, stressed out and fidgety. High levels of stress and substance abuse is an unhealthy combination. Guy was just a bit over 50.

That is probably the weakest point of the game. I kept all the companions around to the very end of the game on my Dogmatic run, but only because this is a video game and keeping companions around makes sense if you want to experience most of the game's content, not because it makes sense for a dogmatic character. Actually, well... (spoiler about Yrliet):

Apparently, there's a Russian meme involving frogs.

Probably buggy. The pirate encounter zones also stuck around on my map forever even though I hunted them down.

That fight is much more fun when you do it in Chapter 2, although I am uncertain if I was supposed to be able to reach it in chapter two. I think it took spending Navigator's Insight to create a warp route to the system. Should have been a hint, I suppose...

No, you have to spend 100 hours in the ship builder, because next to it even vi seems easy to use. And, just so you know in case you have never used vi, well... that takes some doing. Does that answer your question?

Like I said, if you play Factorio, going with the better CPU is a good idea...

Finished the game, checked every possible ending - unless there is another, supar secrat hidden one. Did not get the achievement for visiting all optional locations. It was either bugged or I have missed something. The final battle was a joke. Sure, the boss has 14000 hit points on Daring difficulty, but even that much is just leaves in the wind for Argenta and her insane attack rate at this point. The Calibrated Heavy Stubber combined with the Compensator Gloves on an Arch-Militant is insane. Make sure you sell only the stuff giving the most reputation to each faction. It is <expletive> annoying to do, but the reputation items are something else. Worst part of the game goes to the enchanted forest part of the main quest and, as per usual, the mini-game Owlcat can't help but put in. Void ship combat is at least more fun than Bad HoMM was, but it still was not very entertaining. Halfway through the game I abused the fact that the game is basically just saving json fiiles in a compressed archive and gave myself 999 Navigator's Insight. I am not sure if that made me miss any random battles worth of note, or any random events of note, but damn, travel between systems is hyper-annoying, and it is slooooooooooooooow.

Took a chapter out of @Azdeus' Food Heresy (tm). Pizza with kebab. I guess any Italian boardies (not sure, don't think there are any that frequent this thread) will run to mommy to cry at the sight of this, but it is pretty tasty.

This is one of those "well, duh!" tests. No, really, are you telling me that unless you're hitting the CPU limit in games, it is better value to go with a less powerful CPU and a more powerful GPU than vice versa? Nice to see with the lower settings in Fortnite, where the better gaming CPU results in much higher frame rates due to both GPUs being far away from being GPU-bound*. So, basically, for any non e-sports scenarios, or unless you're playing Factorio exclusively and can notice the difference between 400 and 700fps, a 13600k/7600 will easily be enough. Go with the higher powered GPU if you're on a budget. Guess it's nice to have proof to link to. *Minor caveat, in some cases turning on ray tracing in games can lead to the 7800X3D outperforming the 7600 with the 4070 Ti. But even then it is really minor.

Great, I got the "Marazhai's last quest does not work properly" bug in combination with "game crashes on same map when making an athletics check" bug. Both of which are only resolvable by tinkering with the state and teleporting away. Le sigh. Up until that, there were a lot of quirks, but nothing broke completely. Guess I'll just finish the game without finishing the quest first. Savegame Size also seems to have exploded (such is typical for all the Owlcate games as they really just dump the entire game's state as json files onto the disk, which is fun for editing the save games, but pretty wasteful), and it broke GOG's cloud sync size limit. Good thing I don't need really cloud sync for this game. The game is also really inefficient. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 without my fans spinning up to the point of being audible, but Rogue Trader? Constant audible fan spinning. Not even BG3 does that, and BG3 also is pretty heavy on the CPU. Edit: Complain, and an hour later a patch comes out that seems to have fixed all three issues. Well, good on Owlcat.

Is the buzz gone? Can I complain about the 10 hours I wasted on Starfield yet?

Is the buzz gone? Can I complain about the 10 hours I wasted on Starfield yet?

Look on the bright side, at least none of us come from Wittenoom.

I think I figured out why Argenta hyperscales so much in my game. I gave her Extermination, a talent that is supposed to increase her damage by +1 for every attack she makes. The game seems to count shots, not attacks. Argenta goes BRRRRRRRRRRRR. Might be time to see if that Calibrated Heavy Stubber isn't actually the king of weapons. Sure, the Blessed Bolter Casing is not going to work with it, but still, base rate of fire of 12 is insane. So, probably going with the regular heavy bolter and the stubber as my weapons. Nothing wrong with switching guns for the heroic action single sniper shots.