majestic

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.

Only if you don't git gud at some point.

For f*cks sake, the ONE time I type up a semi-long reply and don't CTRL + A; CTRL + C it just to make sure you go and lock the old thread in between, and that post is gone, sacrificed to the forum gods. Such irony, the post talked about me making things harder on myself by accident, in both Sekiro and Dark Souls.

I should probably look up the character names next time I talk about a film I've watched like 15+ years ago. Indeed, that's Jankis and not Jenkins. Oh my. Leeeeeeeeroy!

For what its worth, Memento is one of the few films where the conclusion - or, well, the beginning in this special case - came as an actual surprise without feeling contrived or simply impossible to figure out by having no prior setup and thus coming out of the blue.

Rogue cable? My first (and only) reaction was: wireless 'ergonomic' multi button mouse? No thanks. I can relate, the display port cable is the only rogue cable on my desk too. Those things really are too short. That is a relatively new development as I cleaned out my desk with the new computer and threw out the old Dolby Digital speaker setup, that instantly removed 13 cables and a gigantic power adapter that never fit anywhere, plus I never truly had the space for proper speaker placement anyway. Still plenty of cable chaos under the desk, but who gives a damn about that. Anyway, I'm using this mouse: And I actually bought a couple just in case, because they're out of stock almost everywhere, and buying stuff on eBay, dunno... going to have to try the Logitech M110 eventually to see if that works for me too, but they're a bit longer than the LS1. Ah, to not be so limited with preferences would be nice. Alas.

Is it just my anime-broken imagination, or was Queen Beryl really close to a wardrobe malfunction in this shot? Edit: Usagi's brother is spying on her while she's studying, then goes back to mom and they're both surprised Usagi is hard at work. Shingo mentions that people can go crazy from pushing themselves to hard, and her mother goes to check up on her. She enters the room and sees Usagi in a... Unicorn costume (she wants to go to a Minako hosted costume contest) making weird sounds in front of the mirror. There's something charming about these totally obvious setups. They should not be hilarious, but somehow they just are. PIKA? Well, she's more like KUPII! KUPII!

Violet gets to a dark place, but I the ending of the series was rather uplifting in my opinion. Then the movie goes and takes a dump on it. Edit: Wow, Rei not only looks like a psychotic killer in the live action series, she's also channeling her inner Kreia something fierce. She refuses to help Usagi with her school work and chides Makoto for wanting to help her out, giving her the ol' Kreia speech about cheapening the struggle. That's going to be interesting. In the TV adaptation, Minako is already a successful idol, so who knows. I think I read somewhere that TV show Minako has terminal cancer or something, which makes little sense, but hey, one step at a time...