majestic

I joined a random party and attempted the frist wing of the Dark Citadel (the only actual group content in the otherwise always online Diablo 4) on Torment IV difficulty. At first it went much better than expected as we basically flew through the wing without a hitch, and then we hit a brick wall, and I left the party, which is something I normally not do, but this time was special. Looks like my gear is just not good enough and I made space for someone who is not a burden. Yikes. You'd think you're ready for everything the game throws at you when you can push pits past level 100, but apparently not. The final boss of the first wing gives players a debuff that eventually turns into a void zone that damages the player at least once, the idea is that you carry that someplace where it is not in the way (we also had someone in the group who dropped that void zone in the damndest of areas, right on top of objectives you need to click to remove the boss' invincibility, but that is something else entirely). That one-shot me, while it only moderately harmed the others. In other words, I need some gear with +maximum life greater affixes. On the bright side, Duriel dropped me a nice 3GA Banished Lord's Talisman, so I will be switching to the Overpower variant of the Quill Volley Meta build as soon as I get a decent chest drop.

Ever since we got a cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner, it has been my go-to tool for moving most arthropods invading my living space. It easily moves them from wherever they are into the vacuum cleaner, where they end up a somewhat literal whirlwind of gore, which suits me just fine. I do make an exception for spiders that creep up on me in the shower or hide inside the drain. Those I crush with my bare hands, screaming bloody murder like a viking berserker charging into battle. I blame a rather early childhood experience on that, waking up in the middle of the night with the devil's pet spider crawling across my bed. It was probably not as large as it is in my memory, but that is of no consequence, and you're dead all the same, creepy eight-legged freaks.

The Substance (2024) The film is a rather unsubtle look at Hollywood's treatment of aging women, and a more subtle (though not by much, mind you) metaphor for self-loathing and self-harm, expressed as various disorders ranging from binge eating to substance abuse. I would call it the highlight of 2024 so far, but that would be looking at it from a very limited perspective, as the only other film that came out in 2024 that I have watched is Deadpool & Wolverine, and that is not much of a film, but merely two (somewhat entertaining) hours of fanservice, which is not a very high bar to beat. Well, have you ever watched Perfect Blue and wondered how the film would be if Rumi and Mima were actually the same person, and stuck in the grind of the US entertainment industry rather than Japan's? Then wonder no more, and whatch this film. Fair warning, instead of mind games and rape you will be treated to body horror. The actual body horror in the film is not as bad as it is in many other body horror films, but the sound effects are certainly disgusting. In a way that makes it worse. The film is garish sensory overload, both visually and audially, and certainly knows how to amp up one's misophonia. Whether it is shrimp being eaten or the very frequent sound effect that accompanies a needle being inserted into a body (funny how that works, since that makes no noticable sound in real life), it just frequently makes one's skin crawl (or have involuntary muscle spasms, in my case). On visual side there is the set design, the costumes and clothing, the camera work, the extended and extreme use of close ups, the juxtaposition of old age and youth and most importantly the framing that keeps one on edge, never being truly comfortable while watching. There are segments of this film that pander to the male gaze to the point they become softcore erotica, but the scenes purposefully lack any of the appeal. Instead, all you can do, is feel sorry for the protagonist of the film, Elizabeth and Sue, and her way of continually denigrating and debasing herself for fame, glory and acceptance. Will she respect the balance, or will her self-destructive tendencies and self-loathing give rise to the monster within? Watch it and find out. Gets a recommendation for @PK htiw klaw eriF. Very likely to be way too uncomfortable to watch for @Bartimaeus.

Yes and no. You can watch the first hour and then just skip to the moment Not!Ripley drops the cargo container with the alien into space. You'll miss out on the character deaths and the reason how an alien got there in the first place, but that is better than to sit through what actually happens in the film. Fair warning: you still have to deal with Deepfake!Ash. Disney pulled off another Fake!Cushing, just with Bilbo Baggins this time. Spoilers:

Alien: Romulus. Oh boy. Half of the film is enjoyable, the other half is just garbage, and the less is said about everything that happens once they find Z-01 the better.

Oh noes.

There's a pretty wide range between viable and meta builds, yes, but with the entire endgame of Diablo IV consisting of timed challenges with waves upon waves of enemies, killing them efficiently is the difference between playing an okay ARPG and having a miserable time. At least, well, for me it is. I'm not playing to have fun, but to quickly get through whatever gauntled Blizzard has cooked up so I can get back to playing other games.

There's really no point in playing anything but Spiritborn and Necromancer right now. Well, maybe Sorcerer if you like very specific playstyles.

I am done with the season journey in Diablo IV. There are some tasks open (salvaging 100 ancestral items is more of a grind than I thought it would be) for the feat of strength, but otherwise, yeah, well, that was underwhelming in every way. Except maybe that completely busted Evade Eagle build of the new class. My thumb hurts from hitting spacebar over and over again.

If a ship of apprentices all become journeymen, is it still an apprenticeship? Asking for Theseus.

Professor Tomoe was looking for the three talismans to turn Hotaru into MISTRESS 9 in order to bring PHARAO 90 into our dimension. It is no wonder you guys cannot remember any of that, this is the closest the anime ever got to actually implementing most of the hare-brained plot of the manga, where the difference is mostly in that it is Sailor Saturn who destroys PHARAO 90 by bringing about the apocalypse in PHARAO 90's dimension, while in the anime it's just Sailor Moon who goes to PHARAO 90 and beats him (?) up off-screen just to drive home how ridiculous it all really is. Things the anime chose to drop in favor of not sucking is Haruka kissing a flabbergasted Usagi without consent and Hotaru's butt-plug shaped crystal thing, and a number of other little things like Setsuna's orbital ion cannon. Black Lady wanted her father, and you know, the manga implies she got him in every way she wanted. At the very least she got his tongue in her mouth. In front of Usagi. Because that's just really good and wholesome entertainment and all. It's funny how the two filler arcs in Sailor Moon ended up being some of the best storytelling it had. The Doom Tree plot was simple but genuinely heartfelt, and the reuse of Nehelennia in Stars was actually fairly decent, if a bit weird at times since it references things that never happened in the anime (like Minako being the leader of the team). After reading half the manga and watching Crystal, I have realized one thing: the writers did the best job they could with the anime, and all of its flaws are remnants of being an adaptation of something so bad that I have no idea why it was so successful. Except Super S. That had to be on purpose. I'm pretty sure Ikuhara made the season as a giant middle finger to Toei. The next time I'm rewatching the 90ies anime I'll probably appreciate the story episodes much more than I used to. In the same way I no longer hate Janeway's stupid writing in Voyager after subjecting myself to nuTrek. It is still bad, yes, and she's still a basket case and should be in psychiatric care for bipolar disorder and not running a starship, but it could be worse. Oh so much worse.

Guys, with all that talk of the apocalypse and all, do you guys remember the entire reason we're active in this thread? We watched the only universally beloved anime in the thread (well, except for the season with the pedophile alicorn) and we're all still here, so... uh. I don't think @PK htiw klaw eriF's dislike of the end of season five makes such a difference. Kinda... dunno. I mean, I'm all for ending the world, but, you know. It ain't gonna happen because it ain't happened already?

Time to check if the jeweler area in Kurast Bazaar still crashes after a couple of seconds standing in there. Got stuck there yesterday because it kept crashing the moment it loaded the game, until I got far enough away to get out of the crash zone. Man, you know, back in the day, Blizzard made games where half the mechanics wouldn't work or don't do whatever they were supposed to (one of the funniest was the Earthliving Weapon glyph in Wrath of the Lich King, which read it increases Earthliving Weapon's procc chance by 5%, which it did - raised it from 20% to 21%, a proper 5% increase ), but at least the game ran well. Nowadays half the mechanics and half the game don't work... edit: Well, no crash in Kurast yet. Looks like they fixed it. Good job, now, can I have my quest reward back that dropped on the ground moments before the game crashed on me the last time I was there?

That is certainly one way to read it, if you want to troll. I should probably have skipped the part about it probably being the least played content. The actual dungeon is fine, it was just impossible to complete with random mouth breathers, which sadly is the usual way to play 5-man content in the game. The entire game is designed for each part of its content to be completed multiple times anyway, what with it being an MMORPG, so giving the inevitable repeats a breath of fresh air is good. The point still stands though, the achievement system was a nice addon with an incentive to do things differently. I have done some of that myself, like playing a full tactics modded Baldur's Gate 2 solo on insane run*. My inability to liberally use limited resources in games makes many of the games I play technically challenge runs right from the start (I had 99 human effigies in Dark Souls 2 halfway through the game and only then started to use them because they would have otherwise gone to waste). Well, actually, yeah, I get it. It's similar to the problem I had with Baldur's Gate 3's timed quests where I immediately looked up time sensitive quest lists before even reaching the druid grove, just to make sure I don't miss any content. I probably despise that sort of game design in the same way you dislike achievements, but the point is that I can still see how and why they're included, and that they can make for good game design. They're just not for me, and I will always hate them. *Lie by omission, I have only done that because it was a challenge on the forums. Without external impetus, I am so not doing any challenge runs outside of my OCD when it comes to limited resources in games. More like the opposite, I will go out of my way to break the game in every way possible. I did not like using the rapier, but it had several advantages that were too good to pass up. Next to the ridiculous damage output it also was good to use for the NPC and PVP invasions (since Dark Souls 2 requires external shenanigans to put into offline mode, I often did not bother doing it) because it could stunlock enemies until your stamina runs out. The Dark Souls 2 PVP meta seems to revolve around doing the silly rapier dance. You whip out your ice rapier, buff it with your buff of choice depending on your character build and then try to connect just once to stunlock them until you are out of stamina. Rinse and repeat until one side is dead. Arguably the best weapon in the game, and one you can Fast-Havel with due to its low weight. Not so keen on the poise damage though. Great weapon to use on bosses though. I tend to, what was it that Tolkien used to describe his dislike for allegory, cordially dislike PVP in games were anything but skill influences outcomes too much, and in the case of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 game, their backstab vector placement and net code are just way too janky to make for fun combat. That is before factoring in that one might just play a build that is not too good in PVP and since there are not a whole lot of players left playing the games these days you might get invaded by the same player over and over again without having a real chance to fight back against their meta build, and you end up with one very unfun experience. Maybe Dark Souls 3's PVP is better, but somehow I doubt it, and I am not going to find out. It is just not fun for me, and the same was or is true for PVP in plenty of hot key based MMORPGs with global cooldowns and incredibly gear dependent PVP. Really enjoyed the arcade space shooter component of SWTOR though. I might have played a couple thousand matches. I don't get it, Solaire is clearly undead, and if he was Gwyn's firstborn and human, he would have been dead at least twenty times over. Frampt implies that it has been at least a thousand years since Gwyn linked the first flame, and his disavowal of his first born must have happened before that. If you help him fail his quest for the sun he loses faith ("Was it all a lie?" - why yes Solaire, that is the nature of religion, it is always a lie), which is why he can be summoned against Gwyn, whom he worshipped, and you need 25 faith to join the Warriors of Sunlight without jolly cooperation, so he's part of a rather faithful group, yes? I'd argue it is also the reason why he can (almost) solo Gwyn even on NG+. 's laughable, out of all the things in the game, the one with a rather clear intent by the designers is the one the fandom argues over being something completely else? Yeah, I understand that, it is the same for me. See, for instance, when you read A Game of Thrones, it becomes pretty clear that the mystery of who Jon's actual parents are was intentionally put in the novel. The novel also contains enough clues to answer it conclusively, or at least I thought so. The fandom did not agree, and they argued back and forth, at least until the TV show proved that the original theories were correct. The mimic with the occult club in the secret room in Anor Londo? That's an occult club. In a mimic. A mimic that most likely just hides amongst other treasure to eat whoever tries to open it. That's what mimics do. Eh. I repeat myself. Yeah, maybe. That's what I once called a younger gamer a "stupid uninformed neophyte" over, on a different forum, after saying they loved Halo so much because it was the first multiplayer shooter*, so clearly we have found something where I am the irrational hater more so than you are. Yay? *Historically obviously wrong on every account, but it was arguably the first instance of a very popular shooter that you could play online over a console at a time when the availability of fast and reliable internet connections skyrocketed, and very likely a gaming generation's first foray into multiplayer shooters. So, in a sense, well, I guess it is understandable. If one squints enough and accepts that in the same way that I can "accept" that people like time sensitive quests because immersion, or like looking for NPC because they have schedules and it is a full moon in the second month now, and they are on their yearly pilgrimage because immersion or people who think Bethesda makes good games because... ok no idea why, but clearly, they exist.

Huh, Diablo IV needed stability improvements? You don't say. In the past few days the game servers have crashed several times for me, especially while loading into new zones (i.e. getting endless loading screens without timeouts). Well, maybe that got better, it is pretty tiresome to lose your seething opal buffs because the servers keep dropping games.

AMD: Here's Zen (notquite)5%! Intel: Hold my beer! Granted, if even half of the claimed power savings are correct that'll be interesting, but unless Intel can't into 1st party benchmarks, the incentive to upgrade to Arrow Lake just went away. Unless the 265K is proportionally better in comparison than the 285K, which I am not really interested in anyway, the only upside would be going back to air cooling's much better idle noise. Not gonna lie, that pump is annoying as f.... when it is quiet in the room.

I have a hunch that we are fairly safe, because if either @majestic or @Bartimaeus would enjoy Dandadan then the end times are upon us anyway. Besides, I am not sure if we wouldn't need IC for that, being one of the originals.

High definition textures, something Cyberpunk 2077 or more recently, Black Myth: Wukong, for all their visual glory, do not really have.

Well, to be fair, a full installation* of Diablo IV is like 150GB, so it's more like a quarter reinstall. *A third of that is the optional Diablo IV high res texture pack.

Huh, what, how and why does Bruce suddenly have a problem with young people born into corporate slavery dying when trying to escape from their lot? It is their lot for a reason, and they should all properly slave away for because shareholders expect proper returns on their investment.

Quest designer: "How long should the Spiritborn class quest be in Diablo IV?" Design Lead: "Yes." For crying out loud, seriously, stop wasting my time game. What the hell.

I edited the post to make it a little clearer, I sometimes forget that I am no longer as active in these discussions as I used to be. No, I am not serious, The Tangerine in Chief is a serious challenge to my humanist and pacifist outlook, to the point where my first reaction to the assassination attempt at his rally was not "damn, did we reach the next level of escalation?" but rather "why'd he miss?"...