majestic

I guess that'll ever be the Enigma.

I idly browsed through Violet Evergarden: Recollections, a creation no one asked for and certainly no one needed. It is a condensed recap-film for the first season, and at 95 minutes of runtime, clocks in at less than a third of the original series it is based on. A series which, while perhaps a bit slow at some points, did not contain any scenes that could be reasonably cut or trimmed down without hurting character development, storylines and themes. An OVA was made after the series that bridges the gap between the fourth and the fifth episode so neatly that, if it was part of the series timeline, would never feel out of place - except for running a couple of minutes longer than the series episodes - just proves that if anything, more could be added without any detriment to series, not taken away. It cuts out Erica's outburst in the second episode - actually, it just drops almost the entire second episode, including Violet's ill-fated letter for the woman who wanted to play hard to get, which means Erica's screen time is drastically reduced - @Bartimaeus could potentially give it a chance, if it weren't for the fact that most of the missing runtime comes from the episodes between the second and the seventh episode that establish Violet as a woman doing her best to help others with her job and finding her place in the world, before she's thrown into crisis. It basically removes what made the series special, and for what? Existing fans are not going to like this, and which new fans would it bring? What is the point? The series spends more time establishing Violet and her interactions than the recap has overall runtime before setting events for her emotional downward spiral in motion. It works so well precisely because of that, and some of the scenes also no longer work because the reactions of the others make no sense because the events and contrasts necessary to understand them are not shown. What a waste of everyone's time.

I sure hope it's going to have Aqua in the OST.

Tried to pick up my parcel from an UPS Access Station™. Now, as it turns out, the station where my parcel was dropped off isn't an UPS Access Station™, but one that serves many parcel services, which generally would be fine, but invalidates UPS' information that I need to bring my tracking number and my ID. Basically, press "UPS" on screen, then scan collection code. What collection code? The display tries to be helpful, telling me I received the collection code via e-mail or text message. Except, of course, I did not. Sigh.

Probably, but there's something wrong with the cookie or the board software's check for it, because some of the posters affected definitely had the social media cookies accepted before the posting broke. Private windows force cookie acceptance every time, but you're right, of course. Rejecting and accepting the cookies through the cookie setup on the bottom of the page should fix the problem too.

Open an InPrivate window in Edge, accept all cookies (or just the social media one) and then post from there. Downside: you need to log in and accept the cookies every time you open the window. Upside: should fix the issues, for the time being, and allows for social media tracking...

Games without defined ending parameters / victory conditions are death.

Not this time around, but it's based on the same folk song as some parts of How Much Is The Fish, but it is much more likely that this was picked up by Azdeus linking the English version of this song (by the same group) a page or two back. Unless, of course, you listened to How Much Is The Fish on repeat. In that case... hah. I knew you like Scooter and just pretend not to.

If that is the actual 'secret' everyone is talking about, that was clear right after the intro. Currently watched 26 of 60 minutes of the first episode, by the way. Best guess at this point:

I liked the original Scooby-Doo cartoon, although the reason is perhaps a little strange: Daphne's German dub voice actress was just music to my ears. The cartoon itself is fine, I guess.

This is the most hilarious bug I've run into in a while. It sure is a top contender for one of he best, but at least I managed to reproduce it now thank to @Azdeus's testing. Steps to reproduce: Be from Commie-EU-Yurop so the cookie settings pop up. Switch to Incognito/In Private/Private browsing to make sure you have a clean slate. Go to https://forums.obsidian.net Reject the social media cookie (you can reject all others if you want, but this is the one that is causing the issue). Log in Try to post with quotes and multiple lines. ??? Profit (or facepalm if you're the poor sod who has to fix this )! So, while I am not 100% certain that this is caused directly by rejecting the social media cookie - or rather, not accepting it - it is an easy way to reproduce the issues of our posters. It also neatly explains why it is only posters fom the EU that seem to be affected. There was an issue with the social media cookie settings not sticking in the past too, as @Gorgon and @HoonDing can attest to, for which there als are posts in this thread and a solution was sought. There is one really, really, REALLY fun thing you can and should do. Once you got the steps down to reproduce it, reject all the cookies, open up Chrome's dev console by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + I, and try to post from Chrome. You will find this will actually cause posting to behave normally, until a page refresh (going to some other page, or pressing F5). After a page refresh, it will keep eating lines and quotes until you close the development console again. Either way, the moment the scripts seem to realize that the dev console is open (or thinks it is, when you actually close it), it switches to a debug mode where the problem does not happen. If you keep the console open and refresh, the posts get mangled again, but other than some minor warnings about deprecated jQuery functions and content policy header settings there is no error to be seen. Fix for the posters affected is to accept the cookies. Perhaps clear out the browser cache for the forum. At least until it is fixed. Or alternatively, use Chrome and press CTRL + SHIFT + I every time you load a page, but that's certainly really annoying. Edit: tagging in @SChin Edit 2: Same behaviour in Edge, not much of a surprise, same basis as Chrome. Does not seem to work in Firefox from @Azdeus's testing. Can't check now, perhaps later.

My copy of Corel Draw 4 had 45 disks... that was a 'fun' installation.

What a misnomer that was for the 3.5" disks anyway. They weren't floppy at all. Heh, our computer came with some version of DOS on 5.25" floppies. I also got 5.0 on 5,25" floppies, and Red Baron 2. My mother was not really happy that we had a war game, and my limited knowledge of history made it all the more frustrating, because no matter how well I played and how many medals I was awarded, I just could not get the Central Powers to win the damned war.

Those things are as old as I am. I started kind of early with having a PC, but not that early. Basically with the TVGA card, more or less - was one of the first upgrades, along with adding a 387SX to our 386SX based system. We once switched cases which was quite an undertaking at the time, or at least it seemed like that to me. With no mainboard manual, we had to draw up diagrams and tag the cables with numbers - not like the mainboards at the time were built to make sure users don't accidentially plug the cables where they're not supposed to go, never mind all the jumper settings and whatnot. Upgrades were also kind of strange and sometimes did not do what I expected them to do. We once added another 4 MB RAM to the system because I could not get Strike Commander to run, but imagine my confusion when more memory did not fix the issue of not having enough conventional memory free for Strike Commander. The great irony of the time, adding really expensive memory modules did not help (how could they, with that being based on a hardware limitation that little 9-year-old me was not aware of), but replacing the old mouse with a newer one fixed that. Why? Because the silly mouse driver that came with the newer mice took a third of the memory of the old one. Like from 17 KB down to 6. That was enough to push memory usage down to meet SC's insane 595 KB requirement. Then came the great waiting, because on my old system, the game needed like 15 minutes to start, and almost as long to prepare takeoff for the first mission. It did not run all that great and was all but unplayable. You know, generally, when old timers say that they had to walk backwards up a mountain each day to get to school they're just being ridiculous, but in some cases that isn't far from the truth. Had that one for a long while. Later upgraded to a system with a P-120, which was quite a leap in performance. Also pretty necessary because Windows 95 did not run with the ancient 386SX CPUs.

Hardware memory lane, one of my favorite places to be! So, this was the first graphics adapter I ever had, a Video Seven VEGA EGA from a longer while back: Changed eventually to a Trident TVGA9000B from '92: And technically, I suppose this counts as the first GPU of mine, an S3 ViRGE: I no longer have the Riva 128 I upgraded to, I started upgrading my cards fairly regularily and gave my old ones to friends and family. I had a Riva TNT too, the original GeForce 256, a GeForce 2 and 3, one of the 7 series (a 7950 GT, I think), a 560 TI, a GTX 970 and currently the RTX 3060. I'm pretty sure I'm missing cards in between there (most likely something between the 7950 GT and the 560 TI, and something between the GeForce 3 and the 7950 GT). Quite noticably I moved from getting the flagship cards in the early GeForce series to more budget oriented ones. Although, technically, for the GeForce 256, there was no such thing as a 'budget' oriented version, only one that had laughable SDR memory on it, which I think never made it here. That was 23 years ago already, feels like yesterday. Bizzare.

Nope, playing Quake is.

*rummages around his brain* Uh, we played a couple of things over network way back when. Command & Conquer, Duke3D, Quake, Worms and GTA were the most popular ones by far and large.

Any particular reason you guys are taking a SonicYellow117 post seriously?

Linked In suggested a job to me. Part of the description: Sure. Let me apply. I'm sure there's nothing fishy and long term unhealthy about 'competitive' coding and four hour deadlines for your assignments every day. Sounds like perma-crunch.

What exactly is the connection between dArtagnan and Scooter? Azdeus posts their tracks here direclty sometimes. One just rather recently even. However, good to know. Have fun with the suggestions coming from this one:

Cyberpunk is very lighthearted. Unless you maybe end up caring for the characters for some reason, in that case you'll probably not laugh as much as I did.

I can remember two standout moments. The first one, we just killed the campaign before it properly started. The setting was some backwater village with our party having grown up there. We had a cleric, a rogue, a ranger and a barbarian who rolled so bad he ended up having an intelligence of five, and basically all he ever said was expressing his current physical and emotional state in short sentences. Me hungry. Me tired. Get breakfast? Anyway, the village comes under attack, and the cleric and I (the rogue) just take off and start plundering the village chief's home while the others try to hold off the invaders. While the defense was basically successful, with half of our party getting locked up, well, our DM decided to change the campaign. The second attempt saw us heading out to find and bring back a missing scout (I was playing a fighter for this one, starting level was 4 - 3E, by the way). So we head out, find out the scout was apparently killed by some dangerous wildlife, cleaned his corpse out, read the report he was carrying and then hauled his dead, naked butt back to the village chief, because he said bring back the scout, right? We were like "Yeah, we found your scout, here, he's heavy and a bit smelly, now where's our reward?" but the chief was none too happy. Anyway, the report had some side note about orcs gathering in the mountains and a strange group of humans doing some excavation at dwarven ruins and an outpost somewhere in the desert. It also contained a sketch of some dwarven runes. Our village also had a minor dwarven enclave at a mine nearby. The idea was pretty clear, take the drawing, head to the mine, talk to the dwarves, get to the ruins, find out what's going on. We skipped the part about asking the dwarves, did not figure out a way to enter the ruins (well, obviously), then simply left for the desert and found the outpost, an imposing tower with an underground complex. Heading over, two guards came out telling us that we're not supposed to be here, but we just killed one, and captured the other. Going up, we eventually ended up being discovered, barricaded ourselves on a balcony (with the prisoner), then took positions at each side of the door. Using the door as a choke point, the guards, even though they were plentiful and level 10 NPCs, just died one by one, the ranger kept tripping them with his chain, and we just killed them. Eventually the DM just put guards with bows below the balcony that started pelting us with arrows. We threw the prisoner down the balcony for some more space, but they just kept coming and wore us down. Still, after killing almost 40 level 10 guards (that was a nice challenge rating), we were thrown in prison. We promptly escaped because knock worked on the cell doors, we overpowered the guards, dressed as guards, then looked around. Found a cantina, started a bar brawl, then snuck around while everything was in chaos and ran across the commander of the place. With a series of really, really lucky rolls the ranger just kept him tripped until we managed to defeat him. He was like level 20, and was supposed to be one of the final encounters of the campaign. Turns out he had an artifact level ring and the compound was originally built by some mysterious (maybe dwarven, but who knows, never figured that out) kingdom that used the giant ants in the desert to build an underground city beneath the sands. Pretty impressive. Anyway, the ring could be used to give commands to the ants (or, well, the queens) and we agreed that it would be a decent idea to just send them all to the mountains to wipe out the gathering orcs before they can become a problem. DM decided that our orders were not clear enough, so the ants just destroyed everythin on their way... and the orcs. There, campaign 'won'. In, like, two sessions.

Hey, I don't begrudge you guys liking rancid, mouldy milk, just leave me out of it.