majestic

I played Raft with my nephew, and we've just finished the final story island. The game is probably more survival focused when not playing it on the Easy difficulty setting*, because that takes out the punishment of dying, i.e. no inventory is lost upon respawning in the game world. Hunger and thirst are staved off longer, making the exploration of the islands less ardous. Overall, this is an okay survival game, even though the raft design becomes far out there relatively quickly once you start smelting ore in your smelter made of unbaked bricks put on plastic and wood foundations and fired by driftwood. Making fire is never a problem with driftwood pulled directly from the sea and once the smelter is active, a bit of plastic, some scrap and copper ingot will produce circuit boards. I guess whoever the player character is, they're brilliant engineers that would make MacGyver envious. There are story islands that one locates by setting up a triangulation system on your raft and building a radar out of trash and metal ore (which one gathers with a plastic hook, initially). It's just a perfunctory way to progress, although I appreciate having an ultimate goal. The game itself is fun enough in co-op, the aftermath of finishing it wasn't. My nephew was supremely unhappy to find out that there's nothing new to discover now. So, next week, we'll be trying a Team 17 multiplayer mini-golf game. God help me. Maybe I can get him to play Worms with me. *Thank god for the easy setting, really. I don't like open world survival games, like, at all.

True, but I was talking about actually having Wenduag in the group after the prologue. I wonder how many players don't even realize she is a romanceable option because when choosing between Lann and Wenduag, Lann wins elven out of ten times, particularily in case the game begins with her betraying you, which is... probably true for most players too.

I don't think either of the two took the silly little cat companion along. No one in their right mind does, I guess.

The current list of kanji taught in school in Japan contains 2136 characters. That is considered baseline literacy by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and the characters that official government texts are limited to. Newspapers and other modern texts have more than that - Chinese language tests expect you to know at least 2500 characters (and 5000 words, and for what that is worth, that number is around 10000 words* and the 2136 kanji for Japanese) for the higher levels, but the same caveat exist. Certain words and grammatical elements are written in hiragana in Japanese writing, the Chinese grammatical elements are still Chinese characters, not a simplified syllabary. You're right about the diminishing returns though - knowing the most common characters in either language will give you the abiilty to read a lot of texts and look up the rest in a dictionary. Still a far cry away from being literate in the strictest sense. Japanese also has furigana to help with the reading of less common characters. Being able to comfortably read texts really does require more characters for Chinese than Japanese. Academic and literary circles are an entirely different beast - especially in Japanese, where they come with their own set of rules, much like business Japanese has its own set of words and ways to express oneself that is fairly different from regular (but still polite) Japanese in everyday conversation. *Japanese has an excessively large vocabulary. There's a whole slew of forms for the copula, for instance, a simple verb particle with predicative function for sentences that would otherwise lack a predicate. Da, de aru, desu, de arimasu, de gozaimasu and de irasshaimasu are all the same thing, to be used in different contexts.

Ember: Crazycakes will start 'hitting' on you in some fashion really soon, don't worry.

That's fine, I do the same with AMD. Company can go to hell for all I care (best not, of course, because Intel and nVidia without competition would be way worse), and I'm certainly never going to buy any product of theirs.

The only reason why it doesn't appear to be like that for the on'yomi of the kanji is because you lack a frame of reference. The 'Chinese' readings sound nothing like Chinese - not now after 1500 years of language drift, but also very much not when they first appeared. It's easy to see the similarities when looking at transcriptions into our alphabet, but that's pretty much all there is to it (see the names for the Chinese characters as an easy example, that's hanzi, hanja and kanji). The Japanese sounds for ha, hi, fu, he and ho and their voiced/semi voiced companions (ba, bi, bu, be, bo and pa, pi, pu, pe, po) are used to approximate an awful lot of common Indo-European (or more specifically Indo-German) sounds (b, f, h, p, v, w), and the very common sounds for l and r fuse into one, and that's before factoring in the lack of si, ti and tu sounds (shi, chi and tsu respectively) and the fact that the only single consonant in Japanese is 'n' which leads to the many seemingly unnecessary vowels in them (like in テーブル - tēburu- table). It's probably easier to draw blood from a stone than to make sense of Japanese loan words based on their original language, so it is probably best to think of loan words as Japanese words that you simply write in katakana. コーヒー ('kōhī' - coffee) is a good example because neither the 'c' nor the 'f' sound of English exist in Japanese, and the o of the ko part is simply elongated because it's nigh impossible to do say っひ (ッヒ). Technically ふ is transcribed as 'fu' in Romaji, but that is also just an approximation. It certainly isn't an Indo-German 'fu' sound.

They're both in the 2200+ hours of study for fluency group, but those were made with English natives in mind. For literacy, you'd need to know twice as many characters for Chinese, but in Chinese each character has one way of reading it (there are a few exceptions) while in Japanese almost all of them have multiple readings, with some extreme examples having 10 or more. 生 is one of these, that can be read as shō, sei, san, ha, i, u, uma, o, ki, nama, na or mu depending on the context*. That's because when the character means life, birth, raw and green, and it was slapped onto every Japanese word that has something to do with that. Nama for raw, umu for giving birth, umareru** for being born, and so on, and so forth, and the first three readings come from the way the character was pronounced in Chinese. The written language doesn't even follow any rules when to use which reading for compound words. The general rule is that the kanji readings of them are either all the Chinese phonetic reading (on'yomi) or all of them using the Japanese reading (kun'yomi, meaning the Japanese term that the character represents) - but even for that there are exceptions, and there are words where both readings can be used. So, yeah. Basically, for reading Chinese you need more characters, for Japanese you need to be aware of the context much more, and some of that context is deeply cultural. 私 for instance can be read as watashi or watakushi, both meaning I, the latter being more formal. Which one is the right one? Well, is the context a formal enough one? Good luck and have fun with that. Turkish and Japanese are both agglutinative, yes. So are Finnish and Hungarian, and a couple of African languages. Most Japanese loan words are incomprehensible to native speakers of the language where it was borrowed from. That's because Japanese has an awful dearth of sounds, so all loan words are approximations of their original sound. It is also the reason why there are so many homophones in Japanese***. There's only so much you can do with five vowels and ten consonants (plus their voiced and half-voiced varieties). Take the word violin for instance, that becomes バイオリン (baiorin) in Japanese. *Not included are the readings for names, which are sometimes entirely different. There's so many ways to write names and parents often pick the kanji for the names because they like how they look, so how someone's name is written is almost impossible to say without that person showing you how it is written, but our languages have the same problems, there's plenty of ways names can be spelled, and you can't know without the person in question spelling it out for you. Unless you're in a movie or TV show, where that always works, instantly, without spelling it out. **umareru is simply the passive form of umu, but in this case 生 is read as uma, because the word can be written 生れる (れる being hiragana for reru, the passive verb ending) in addition to 生まれる (まれる = mareru). **Also the reason why Japanese writing is most likely impossible to reform without changing much of the language. While in the spoken language, pitch accent and context are readily available to help distinguish between, say, hashi the bridge and hashi the chopsticks, in writing that only works because the characters used represent concepts, not the reading of the words. Using an alphabet or a syllabary to write Japanese makes it unreadable.

I don't know, the conclusion the Gamers Nexus video arrives at seems fairly sensible. Between EVGA having to sell cards at a loss in the current environment, nVidia making it deliberately worse in preparation for the 40 series launch (in the Q2 earnings call Jensen Huang pretty much said as much), having nVidia dictate price floors and ceilings and undercutting the market by selling their own Founders Edition cards it sure sounds like that's enough for Andrew Han to decide that he's too old for that sh*t and dealing with nVidia is no longer worth it.

Hangul is a 'featural' alphabet (make of that distinction what you will, at the end of the day, it is an alphabet more than anything else), and that makes it a good deal easier to learn. Still, many Korean texts contain hanja, so you're not off the hook entirely, but even then it is less problematic to learn than Japanese. Little wonder, Japanese has one of the most complex writing systems still in use. if you randomly pick any writing system on the planet, chances are very good it'll be 'easier' than Japanese.

Joke aside, they're not even in the same language family. It's just the sort of thing that happens when a writing system was adopted from another language and is based on glyphs representing concepts rather than pronunciation, although the Japanese Kana came from exactly such a use, where the Chinese characters were used based purely on their pronunciation to write Japanese words and then reduced in complexity because Japanese words were both complicated to write and even more complicated to read. With many characters having similar or the same pronunciations*, writers often picked the characters for their perceived aesthetic value, making Japanese texts a nightmare to read. So would any linguist, I imagine. *Courtesy of the very limited amount of sounds in Japanese, leading to an awful lot of homophones and distinction of the words based on pitch accent and context.

Yeah, you guys might want to check the description of the Soulshear glaive.

Didn't think to check archaic Japanese, but you're right. 之 once served the same function as の today. Obviously still does in Chinese though, hence the post. Kana are simplified kanji, so any given kana was derived from a kanji once. Point in case, 之 is the basis for the modern kana for 'shi': し and シ.

Noir episode 11: Moonlit Tea Party. Curisously, the title is written in Chinese, rather than Japanese. 月下之茶宴 instead of 月下の茶宴. Why? No idea, but "no idea" is the general theme of the episode. Our heroines are contacted by a mysterious man, get ambushed afterwards and then Chloe invites herself to Kirika's and Mireille's home and they all drink tea in the moonlight while having a bit of smalltalk. The episode ends with Chloe asking Kirika if she can keep a fork. Heh. I can post all the spoilers I want and it's not going to spoil anything, because most of the storytelling is visual and not in the dialogue. Mireille constantly plays the audience standin in a fun way, by demanding to know what the hell is happening while Kirika is content to just play along. Understandable, she lacks the meta knowledge that there'll be 15 more episodes and hopefully things will make at least some sense at the end.

"Balance? There has never been balance! If anything, we shall remove all balance." -- Ulyaoth, "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem", lord and master of Owlcat.

House of the Dragon, episode 4. Not going to post much, things proceed at pace in all the ways they're supposed to, more or less. The show tried its hand at using sex scenes to convey something more than, well, nudity and talking exposition afterwards. It worked as intended, but it wasn't really good. Episode was fine. Everything about the series is fine enough for as long as it doesn't try to be epic than Game of Thrones. However, I'd say Game of Thrones had the better characters and better dialogue overall, and a better cast. House of the Dragon has nobody like Peter Dinklage, Jack Gleeson, Mark Addy, Lena Heady, Conleth Hill,... well, you get the idea.

It's there to fill your spell levels and make Hellfire Ray (once you get it) go super-brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr with rods adding more metamagic to it. There's one thing you need to be aware of, the game makes metamagic'ed spells a full action for spontaneous casters. So if for whatever reason you need your move action for something else, like a Cackle, you can't cast a Bolstered spell. You can, however, use a Bolster rod. Owlcat gonna Owlcat. Would also recommend taking a couple levels of Loremaster to get Improved Critial: Ray and Creeping Doom from the Druid spell list if you have no other characters that can cast it. Ascendant Element: Fire and (Greater) Elemental Focus: Fire as well as (Greater) Spell Focus: Evocation are pretty much a no brainer, I guess. Might as well go all out. If you don't mind going all out on the cheese and click a bit (or install a mod that makes it easier), you can pick Protective Luck as one of your Major Hexes. It lasts only a short time, but you can extend that with Cackle. Cast it on a character, Cackle twice, cast it on the next character, Cackle twice, wash, rinse and repeat until you have a couple of hours of duration on your entire party. Just keep hitting that Cackle button and make sure everyone's in range. That, of course, also works with Fortune, improving your hit chances a good deal.

Chloe (the character voiced by Sailor Mercury) finally showed up in episode ten. She looks like she escaped from a different anime and invaded Noir: Rolled my eight ball, it told me: Cannot predict now. So, not really sure what to make of it yet. I'm tentatively leaning towards not liking her character design.

Maybe, but I'd argue that Miyu's strengths are a little closer together than that of Noir. The distance between the almost romance-novelesque parts of Noir and the action feels a bit bigger than that between Miyu's slice of life part and Miyu's dark vampire mystery, at least outside of the end where Miyu flies completely off the rails, but I expect something similar to happen in Noir too. Wouldn't it be perfectly weird for Mireille and Kirika to be an actual angel and demon* sent to... do whatever on Earth? One's fair, the other dark, and all that? I guess I let googling for an image of the scene color my impression while posting, no such implication was meant when I began typing the post. You also ended up liking the third Sakura OP. *Or any other religious or divine representation. Judgement, death, or something similar.

Makes a pretty convincing Bob Ross though. The original, however, would put more "big ol' trees" in the pictures.

It does - but probably not for anyone who has not seen Noir. It certainly is a strange beast, a blend of things that usually do not blend together all that much. Bee Train was founded to allow artists to create anime free from regular studio constraints, and if Noir is anything to go by, they succeeded. It certainly is an attempt at making the action scenes be more than just cool action. I'm not sure why it is all bloodless, it would add some more gravity to scenes that are meant to be more artistic than awesome, even though some of the kills certainly are meant to be both. Also, indeed, some of the scenes are just ludicrous, like Mireille being able to mow down the entire army squad. Funny how I'd probably be complaining about the series instead of liking it if a few of the elements were just a bit different. Case in point, this episode's beach scene. Mireille's beach outfit is probably even more suggestive than most in anime, but it's perfectly in character for her, and the juxtaposition with Kirika next to her just made it different enough. Plus, it made me laugh. Not sure if that was intentional, but probably. It's just too ridiculous to not be meant to be funny at least at some level. I fear the critics weren't wrong this time around, the pacing of the show certainly is glacial - borderline problematic even, perhaps. The next episode moves forward a bit (very little in terms of the plotline, but for the characters). Well, that's easy, they are Noir. Mireille is particularily mum about using names when talking to Kirika, which is probably just a fake identity anyway. Took me a while to remember their names too. It also doesn't help that Mireille is just called Meruru in the few instances Kirika uses her name. Learning more about the characters is apprently intertwined with their connection to whatever the storyline is going to be, so that's probably still going to be a couple of episodes. It sure is a strange one. I have even less of an idea who the intended audience for Noir was than I had for The Vision of Escaflowne. The latter was the result of a shoujo-retooling of a shounen mech series, but this one was probably fully intentional.

I was uncertain, but now I am in! This is going to be just great then! Yay!

Tom Bombadil has always been around, as per the information from Lord of the Rings, he certainly did not fall out of the sky in the Second Age. In the lore outside of the book trilogy and The Hobbit, Sauron forged the One Ring in 1600 SA, as the last of the (Great) Rings of Power. The characters introduced in the last episode are from a time around 3100 to 3200 SA, with the age of some of then suggesting that we're somewhere around 3228 SA, give or a take a year or two. So yeah, since this is all fan fiction condensing 1600 years of history into one TV show storyline, what's there to ruin?

Welcome to the game proper, it's only going to get worse from now on. Depending on your party setup and skill levels, you might be looking at reloading a certain book event prior to the final part of the quest too. Like, a couple of times.