majestic

I'd point and laugh but we're way ahead of you as we already had two (technically three) governments where the Nazi Freedom party was a major part of. Luckily, they imploded twice, but they did enough lasting harm in the process, and the courts are still busy with cases that go as far back as the early 00s - but they always seem to bounce back, and their current chairman is a highly dangerous demagogue who helmed the protests against any COVID related action taken by the government, shills ivermectin as suppressed (because cheap!) treatment against COVID and refused any innoculation because they're untested and dangerous. Not that I buy that he really believes that. He's just telling the riled up masses what they want to hear. Depending on the polling institute, they're currently set to become the strongest, or second strongest party in a general election. Three years after the video of their former leader wanting to sell half the nation to the Russians came out. You bet that none of those dolts voting for them would post comments any better than the ones we can't see. There's times I wish there really would be a world-spanning conspiracy to forcibly sterilize half the planet. Humanity is a blight on this world. People's Republic of Vietnam?

Minor local issue and musings: a 'concerned' parent complained to the Viennese school council because the school his son attends segregates classes based on religion. There's one class with catholics and orthodox christians, and one class with all other relgious minorities and those who are non-denominational. I myself am Lutheran, which here is a religious minority (behind muslims and orthodox christians), and indeed, I too, have experienced segregation: I was always in classes that had all other Luterhans if there were any, as well as other religious minorities. I fully understand that we cannot be allowed to fill the catholics' heads with heretical nonsense, that always seemed fair. Imagine, our priests are allowed to marry, if something were to happen to the catholic celibacy... Well, all joking aside, as I am Luterhan in name only, the real reason for the segretation is not that the schools are racist, but it is simply a matter of expedience, and one where the fault lies largely with the untoward influence the catholic church still holds over politics, particularily over our conservative party (who formerly called themselves 'christian-social' party before switching their moniker to 'people's' party). Since every school has to educate its students about the invisible sky fairies they believe in, or at least nominally should believe in, and most students are catholics, schools generally have a dedicated teacher at hand to tell them about the catholic invisible sky fairy. Teachers of the muslims, orthodox and lutheran invisible sky fairy however, have to teach at several schools, and it is much easier to find free time slots when the minorities are all in the same class, because otherwise one runs into an issue that I also experienced, namely that we'd start a day at school later, because the first class was about the catholic sky fairy, and our sky fairy classes were after everyone else went home, or worse, sometime in the afternoon. So, it was coming home from school, doing homework, and going back to school to learn about our special sky fairy. Except... they're apparently all the same invisible sky fairy anyway, making this even sillier than I ever imagined it to be when I was a lot younger. Clearly, there's one ideal solution to this issue: remove religion from the curriculum and replace it with ethics, and change the curriculum to include knowledge about a broad range of religions, rather than just one. Alas, such left-wing commie heresy will never happen. The complaints would be endless, from catholics, muslims and orthodox christians alike. So, sky fairy segreation it shall be, forevermore.

Well, yes. Or rather, no, because this is how the end of the article looks like: Tried it with Firefox and Edge, both with and without ad-blockers. Malcador doesn't have an EU-cookie policy issue that is potentially the cause for this.

I don't see any comments on the article. Is the comment section hidden from us dirty foreigners, or am I finally going completely blind?

Yeah, our stupid morons are trying to score political brownie points at the expense of everyone else. Bunch of incompetent assclowns we're stuck with until 2024. *sigh*

The mods and the loader are probably perfectly fine, but we're talking about my parents PC, and if anything goes wrong, it'll be me who has to solve the issues. I guess I could give him a VM to play around with. It also doesn't help that the mods are all hosted on these super stupid download sites that have ten "download" buttons on the page, of which elven link to ads of suspect repute and the button "continue" hides the actual download link. Looks like CurseForge has Minecraft support in its standalone version. The one that comes without the Overwolf framework. Well, it's not paranoia when they're really out to get ya, right? I guess that could work.

Today's fun discussion: "I want to install Minecraft mods." *checks* "Nope." "Why not?" "Because." Because... yeah, beause they all apparently require a Java based mod loader. Thanks, but, you know. No thanks. Quick check tells me there were 'only' 29 vulnerabilities discovered in the Java runtime environment. In 2022. And that is without figuring out a way to prevent my nephew from loading up MINECRAFT_HAXXOR_BITCOIN_MINER.JAR. Yep. Like I said. Nope.

Having a time travelling daughter?

PGSM can't have funny moments like turning Usagi into a giant tennis ball, and they know that, instead they work with their limited budget to come up with silliness. Whether it is Usagi cosplaying as unicorn, her mother wrestling her down so Ami can get a coffee she doesn't even want or, as it just now happened, Usagi imagining several different Tuxedo Masks, one looking sillier than the other. In terms of storyline it is playing it rather loose with the manga, but still keeps major plot points. Thankfully, the girls are much less into MURDERDEATHKILL'ing everyone. On the other hand, that could mean the series picks up on that alternate semi-canon idea that everyone was in love with everyone that Crystal ran with. I'm of half a mind to go and spoil myself just to be prepared if that happens. That was, bar none, the best scene in Crystal to illustrate everything that is wrong with the anime. Beryl's four henchmen are staring down the Sailor Guardians while Usagi thinks Mamoru is dead and tries to run a sword through her stomach (Usagi being Usagi, she can't even do that properly). Minako (I think, I repressed some of the memories of that series) is all like 'REMEMBER YOUR PAST GUYS, WE YOU!' and they're all like 'well, we'll be damned, them gurls are right, we them', and then out of Nowhere, Off-Screen Beryl is like 'you useless twits, DIE ' and that was the end of the four generals, just like that. Edit: Ami is pretending to be Rei in order to check if a weird older guy who is excessively polite and refers to her as 'Master Rei' has the Silver Crystal. Since Ami was absent from the last episodes, it makes sense to give her a larger role for a change, but it does not make sense for her to not use her transformation mobile to actually change into Rei. I mean... she so clearly isn't Rei that the guy can't possibly think she is. Edit2: An entire police detachment is guarding the appraisal. Naturally, as the show has zero budget to do anything with, it looks like the super cheap glass bauble it is.

Blizzard learned nothing from the fiasco that was The Oculus, and decided to make it even worse? As Karl Marx once said: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. More and more I get the feeling he was right.

Should probably go get that checked out to make sure there's no myocarditis.

Shingles vaccination costs 250€ here. Per shot. Two needed, of course. It is a constant source of debate as it is one of the few recommended vaccination not covered by the regular health insurance, in spite of a full rollout being cheaper than the side effects of having to treat affected people in the hospital. Most others are free*, with some exceptions accounting for age here and there, the HPV vaccine is free for people under the age of 18, while flu shots are reduced for the elderly, and some exceptions when it comes to the more exotic vaccinations - like any shots you need to get before going on vacation. No sense in everyone chipping in for someone's brothel visit in Thailand. *Usual caveat, 'free' as in 18% of everyone's paycheck is going towards social insurance. That's healthcare, pension plans and unemployment insurance (and some other things).

Looks like I got lucky with my Cyberpunk 2077 experience. I bought it in spite of all the chaos because I figured I would enjoy the setting and then had to put off playing because my old rig could not hack it (who would have thought, with that 2nd generation i5, a hard disk and a 970 GTX ). Played it with my new upgrades and it worked well and looked good. At first I was only midly entertained by the ray tracing component, but eventually moving through the center of night city in the rain was an experience that was - while still not worth the price of admission, probably - pretty nice. It also helped that I watched zero trailers and did not follow the development of the game. Oh, and I loathed Witcher 3, so CP2077 not being a 'sci-fi Witcher 3' is most likely the reason I enjoyed playing it. Night City is decently sized without feeling overwhelming, that there's not much to do in spite of it being 'open world' is a godsend too. Screw open world games.

Whee, thanks a bunch guys, Amazon just put them back in stock. Three week delivery time, but if everything really works as advertised it'll be a great replacement for my ailing XBOX Elite (A button is dying) and my old Nintendo Pro controller (nephew played with it, much to its detriment). At 80€ it is a little pricier than I would like, but hey, 'tis the season, right? Besides, definitely still cheaper than replacing both controllers.

Lots of 'fun' end of year stuff: paying next year's road tax, automobile association membership fee, Amazon Prime yearly membership, Nintendo Online yearly membership, buying christmas presents, looking at last month's taxes and semi-fainting in the process. No, wait, that last one is a monthly occasion.

It makes the Horizon Husk rush really fun to deal with. Bonus points if you do not have any strong fire area of effect skills to deal with all that armor. My experience with Mass Effect shares something in common with my Dark Souls and Sekiro experiences. Not entirely realizing how the game is supposed to be played and making it harder than it would be otherwise, and this is partiall at least the post that the forum ate when @Gorth locked the other thread. In Dark Souls 1, I began playing as Pyromancer, because consesus was that playing a caster makes the game easy - or easier - and for a first time around the block that seemed reasonable. A quick peek at how stats work before playing led me to pyromancy over regular magic. That was a good choice, all in all, because I did not realize until I was done with the game that you could just buy multiple copies of the same spell to extend casting. Why would I buy a spell I already have? I basically had a 45 DEX glass cannon with a dexterity scaling weapon and the durability of a wet 'forced' into a hybrid casting/melee playstyle. This led to the hilarious situation of bosses giving me trouble that other players consider a pushover: I spent like an hour trying to defeat the Gaping Dragon. On the bright side, none of the other bosses gave me any pause afterwards*. Ornstein & Smough died on my first attempt. Kalameet and Artorias took a couple of tries, Manus like two. Sekiro on the other hand I initially just ran around until I stumbled upon Lady Butterfly. Fightingher with no upgrades took me a while, but beyond that? I saw a lot of posts and people complaining about the final boss being too difficult. I don't get it. I spent three hours fighting Lady Butterfly and a whole lot of time figuring out how to do the Mikiri-Counter because dodging straight into an attack went against three decades of conditioning, but like ten minutes fighting Kensei Ashina Isshin. Lady Butterfly is the single hardest boss in this game, period. Now what does that have to do with Mass Effect? Oh, right. I think my experience finishing the three games on Insanity would have been less stressful if I had realized that the player was supposed to just import a character they already finished the game with. *A bit of a lie. The jump to The Bed of Chaos killed me more often than I would care to admit, but that's not really a boss, is it? I mean, it is the hardest part of the fight, but still...

Nothing, because:

Does the controller come with a cable, or do I need to use a bluetooth dongle for use on computers? Not that it makes much of a difference, it is out of stock in every store that would ship to my address, but it would still be nice to know. I'm not doing wireless only.

I don't know, only 'true' Aeons can do the special Aeon ending. I guess you could fix that with a mod or two.

Well, who am I to argue with the season? For @Gorth in particular:

Crank up the difficulty a little, and enjoy the Husks with a massive armor boost.

Achievements, and before anyone asks, yes, I am fairly serious about that. No way I would have finished my Unfair run without them.

Huh, I laughed at @Make a contract with KP's joke. David Lynch is famous for just saying no every time someone asks him to elaborate on the meaning of one of his films. Dune aside, but Dune was directed by Alan Smithee. It is also an answer of a sort, more than it would initially seem. What made Pillars of Eternity so unremarkable, or perhaps boring, for me, is not any one thing, it is a combination of many little things. As far as the writing goes, that is a little more difficult to quantify as I have yet to figure out what I really consider 'interesting' or 'good' beyond a few examples I can point to (one of them would be Neon Genesis Evangelion, which manages to be geniuinely interesting sci-fi, a deconstructionist examination of an 80ies sci-fi staple and a deep examination of depression, need for validation, pressure and loneliness - the director of the series expressed his own personal experiences through the characters, and it shows). I can point to a larger number of things that generally qualify as being well written but do nothing for me: Icewind Dale, Pillars of Eternity, and The Great Gatsby, which already caused groaning in the book thread, but I have to bring it up again, because it has the exact same issue. Reading it was unengaging. It took me longer to go through it's 200-something pages than reading a doorstopper novel generally considered to not be worthwhile by literature experts. Now, the Fitzgerald novel at least I can point to and say that neither the time period nor the social circles it is about are of any interest to me, so that could explain my experience, but ruminations on the existence of souls and the nature of gods, an ancient, lost civilisation and a conspiracy to hide it all? Count me in. There were a handful of interesting moments in Pillars of Eternity. The parts of the main story in Defiance Bay and particularily the visit to the Sanatorium stand out, and when Thaos showed up to conclude the second act, at this point I thought the game would finally rise to its promise, at least in terms of storytelling - and it went back to being what it was before almost immediately. The combat gameplay is a factor as well, as was my experience with the first few patches. I may have mentioned it before, but my first - and only - character that I played Pillars of Eternity with was a Cipher with a blunderbuss. The first couple of patches made my game experience worse in the name of 'balance' - because rogues arguably sucked when the game launched, my Cipher's ability to bypass the unfun combat were tuned down, instead of rogues being made stronger. Why? The only reasonable answer I have is that the designers of the game actually believed their combat to be fun, and for it to be fun, it needed a serious trimming down in options to bypass it more quickly. The idea is preposterous to me, because combat in Pillars is a slog. It feels unresponsive even though it gives much better feedback than other real time with pause isometric games, and the pacing feels off. The graze mechanic, put into the game to give the players a minor success instead of dice rolled miss streaks, like they were all too common in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale at the lower levels, made the combat feel even worse than better, and again, that is by far and large, based on a feeling. The entire time I played Pillars, I thought the game would play better as a turn based game. Now, if someone actually enjoys the combat of the game, and I am certain there are people who do, then it becomes a much better experience. There are a handful of other game elements that came from the success of the Kickstarter campaign. The stronghold mechanics feel like they were tacked on later, and Twin Elms is a break in pace at a point where the game shold move towards its conclusion. Both came from stretch goals. A number of other Kickstarters with runaway success had the same issue.

Darktide looks like a fun game with a big downside. Online co-op with randoms? Yeah, I tried that in Mass Effect and Anthem. Hard, hard... VERY HARD pass.