majestic

It looks like Rings of Power is going to be about the ring forging, the War of Sauron and the Elves, the fall of Numenor and the Last Alliance. At the same time. Guess that makes it possible that mystery man fallen from the sky is actually Gandalf. Oh what a joyous time to be alive. No sense complaining, it is what it is given the amount of material they've licensed. Edit: The episode's incredibly dull. Managed to get throuh less than half of it before having to pause. Will finish it tomorrow. Yuck.

You might want to change your approach to this argument if simply replacing Saudia Arabia with Russia and the Saudi 'king' with Putin leaves you with posts that could come from Russia Today's telegram channel. Just, you know, food for thought because it makes you look like a fascist hypocrite. Oh, wait... sorry, time to whip workers back into their mines.

That's true, and it is a big draw (reduces the inevitable overkill by more easily having something else in range to hit once an enemy dies), but whether reach is worth a feat is up for debate - unless you play something that doesn't require a feat, like Sword Saint. Could make a Trickster Sword Saint with Fauchards and Arcana 3 and then reload until you get something really good on the Bearer of Sorrow, but that is a bit of an edge case and requires meta knowledge and the will to rush Mythic levels in Act IV. It's certainly not wrong to go with Fauchards on melee focused characters.

Not really, Scorching Ray you can cast every turn as long as you have energy. Another thing that makes little sense at a first glance, in the battles, try to spread your damage around. Damaged units deal less damage, and as such, for instance, having three at full power and one dead means you take more damage than facing all four at reduced strength. The exception is of course units that do something really dangerous or are powerful enough to one-shot yours. You can heal up your armies as long as at least one of them survives - and you have a healing ability.

Minor tip, because it is not that intuitive either: Don't dismiss weapons with good secondary effects just because they have a low enhancement bonus. There's a dagger +2 that gives two extra attacks on a full round attack, there's a +2 club that prevents you from becoming flat footed, and a +2 battle axe with a crit range of 18-20. You can buff the enhancement bonus of weapons, and bypassing DR isn't an issue beyond the very early game either, but you cannot teach a generic +5 weapon any new tricks. A dagger with an additional attack is quite painful when playing a character having Sneak Attacks and/or Elemental Barrage, and that axe? That axe removes the requirement to take Exotic Weapon Proficiency: Fauchards if the primary thing you're going for is their increase crit range. Which it usually is. Plus it comes much earlier than the go-to Fauchard, which is available in Act IV, and has a higher critical hit multiplier.

You know these types of calls when someone you know goes "You do something with computers at work, right?" and then has a question about their phone, because that's clearly the same thing. Well, granted, for a time they were pretty similar, but sadly Windows Phone died an ignominious death it did not deserve, and as such, we now have iOS, where the answer to any problem is "call the hotline, because you can't do anything at all to solve your issue on your own" and Android, where the user experience was designed by a group of biopolar schizophrenics with a dash of misanthropy. The caller this time was the wife of the guy who currently lies dying at the hospital, so of course I tell her to come over when she says that her phone is trying to tell her something and she doesn't understand what that is. There were two issues, the first one being a text message from the provider telling her that she's reached the limit of her phone plan and will now be charged for any additional minute she spends calling someone. A pretty steep rate, at that, clocking in at 40c per minute, but that's the price of having an otherwise fairly cheap plan. Stay under the limit and you win, go over, and, well, yeah. It took me like five minutes to explain to her what the phone plan is, what it means to pay for calling someone (oh how I wish I was joking) and that her current balance on the prepaid card is a bit more than sixty Euro, or another 155 minutes. Then I asked her when the 'free' minutes of her plan will refresh, which she of course doesn't know. The other issue was an Android message recommending a reboot because the phone hasn't been turned off for a while. She tells me that they get this message like once a month and that her husband usually presses a button and that's done pretty quickly. Naturally, I reboot the damned thing, ask for her PIN code, and she's like: "What's that?" Ten seconds later after she realized that we just locked her out of the phone, predictably, hilarity of a really bad kind ensues. Panic, yelling, having half a heart attack, screaming, some more panic, realizing that she also of course does not know any of the details necessary to convince the hotline to hand over the unlock code, and then she packs everything and runs off after exclaiming that she has no idea what to do now and that coming here was a mistake. Okay, I get it. She's on edge. Who wouldn't be in such a situation, but... she has a land line and another mobile, so all she really would have needed to do is tell the hospital to call the other number if something happens, and then go to a service point tomorrow to have her phone unlocked. My mother called the service hotline and pretended to be her, explained the situation and managed to convince them to hand over the unlock code for the SIM card - that's fairly easy when you know every little detail, like the address and birth dates and all that. Now she doesn't pick up any of the other phones, so my parents are off looking for her. What an evening. Whoever calls and asks for help next time will get a very firm no. I'm done with this sh...tuff. Done with this stuff.

House of the Dragon, episode three There are two sides to this prequel show. One side is on screen when whatever is happening is mostly character interactions with a splash of soap opera drama added to the mix. This side is happening mostly in front of actual sets, looks good and is quite interesting, in spite of everything being forgone conclusions, helped by mostly delightful acting. Even Rhaenyra was fine in this episode, which opened with a three year time skip. Then there's the other side of the show, when there is a lot of CGI on the screen to make things look grand, but in doing so makes everything just look uncanny. Much to @Hurlshort's delight, there were three CGI animals in this episode (not counting the dragons as animals, for the record), and they all looked bad. There's also Daemon's dragon which just looks awkward and is animated in such a ludicrously bad manner that I cannot but wonder if anyone got paid for how it looks, or worse, if anyone actually wanted it to look this way and it was not just sheer incompetence at work. This other side also has terrible action sequences and warfare on a scale of stupid that it possibly out-stupids the Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones. The final ten minutes of this episode very much ruined all the good will the rest of the episode built up. Needless to say that this battle necessitated a departure from the source material, but that is not even the biggest issue. Time economy and resources dictate that certain events must be changed in an adaptation, however, a little more sense applied to it would be nice. Early Game of Thrones did not have the budget to depict battles, and I think the show was better for it. This one would be too. They definitely had too much money to burn, and it shows. Overall this would have been a great episode, if not for the battle at the end.

Yeah, who could that possibly be? I may have expressed a certain dislike for Lynchian pseudo-intellectual masturbation in film and TV while watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, a series directed by someone who long held a desire to collaborate with David Lynch, and it really shows in the, uhm, show. Edit: This is true for all art forms, not just film. Take something like White on White, for instance.

What he doesn't say is that if you have a Brown-Fur Transmuter Mercenary with Elemental Barrage and you use that character to cast Geniekind on someone else (BFT's special ability - cast personal only transmutations on other characters), it actually uses the BFT's Elemental Barrage. As a bonus, you can get the buff to last for a full day (24 ingame hours) with the right Mythic Abilities and equipment. Feel free to buff your already ridiculous main character* with a BFT's Dragonkind III, Frightful Aspect and 4x Geniekind (although not in this particular order, Geniekinds first) and watch your character go to town with 11 (or so) attacks per round each dealing four different types of elemental damage. BFTs might just be the most broken thing in the game. Don't leave home without them. *Can also do that to your pets for added hilarity, but you're probably going to run out of Arcane Reservoir points before long.

It might not be impossible to do Sadistic Game Design on a full Unfair run, but I'm certainly not going to try. Part of the frustration came from wanting to rush to the end and be done with it. One of them alone wasn't a big issue, but the packs that have two of them were a bit problematic. The biggest problem is the duality of their insane area of effect spells, using Icy Body to stop Cone of Cold is one thing, but when one of them randomly decides to use Firestorm instead that doesn't go so well. This is one of the instances where playing on RTwP is much easier as you can just have Ember delete one from existence while rushing the other before they can act.

Done: Finished the game and did the secret ending. The final few fights were really weird, even for the unbalanced madness that Unfair is. Never touching that difficulty level again. Like ever. Sheesh.

Got an offer from my energy supplier that, quite frankly, was too good to refuse. Sign up for another year for half of the current market rates of all other suppliers, plus 130 days of free energy. Looking at the current price hikes, having a year of basically 'only' a 50% increase in energy prices, well, not going to say no to that. I'm guessing they're banking on the EU getting their sh*t together in the timeframe and being able to sell for more than market rates down the line. I'd call that a very optimistic bet. No thanks, give me the fixed energy prices for a year.

The manga is about a private investigator that just happens to be a cute girl, right? RIGHT?

I'm running a Brown-Fur Transmuter, so I could just cast Icy Body on someone else, no need for scrolls. At this point in the game I usually just blast through enemies in RTwP mode, but one of the rogue packs got lucky like three times in a row, killing various party members and once my main character. It's kind of ridiculous, but that's game RNG for you. Yeah, casting Selective Sirocco solved the issue. Generally things are a little wonky in the game, I guess that's from loading a savegame from April, from before a couple of patches. Nenio has a lot of Weirds thrown at her, and she should be immune - except when she suddenly isn't and instantly dies. Beats me. I just want this stupid puzzle pyramid to be over. I'm almost done now. Sigh.

All this talking made me go back to the Unfair game I parked in Enigma. Two observations: Enigma is still from the arse, and rogue cultists attacking for 300+ damage are too. Concealment, super high armor class, nothing of that matters in case the enemy lands a lucky crit. *rolls eyes*

Yes, it is as 'good' as the thumbnail would suggest.

Rings of Boredom: Going through the motions I expected to hate this, based on the critique linked earlier, but it is arguably worse. It is boring. Pretty, sort of, but boring. Plus, it looks much closer to The Hobbit in style (particularily the characters) than Lord of the Rings, which is a pretty negative in my book. The dwarves look comical, the elves aren't at all glorious, aloof or any of the other things they're supposed to be (even Liv Tyler was a better elf than the cast of elves here), the humans are just simply there and the Hobbits... why are there even Hobbits in this, other than BECAUSE IT IS A LORD OF THE RINGS SHOW. So far this is what this show is, it is showing us quite clearly, and quite loudly and very often(ly ), that is it has something to do with Lord of the Rings. Galadriel: Ninjas Die Twice Well, that one made me facepalm, but it then quickly gave way to the ennui that accompanied the rest of the two episodes. Galadriel is a ninja elf capable of singlehandedly killing a troll where her entire troupe of warriors - presumably at least semi-competent - fail. Following the fight, she faces desertion of a sort. None of them want to keep following her. She's also capable of swimming across half an ocean. Or almost. Certainly is preciously little reason and reasoning in jumping off a ship in the middle of the sea, but this Galadriel is more brawn than brains anyway. The Dwarves: A tradition So, well, with Gimli being a mostly comic relief for Lord of the Rings, there's preciously little option than to make them comic relief here too. For a noble dwarv, Durin sure has no table manners and lacks any diplomatic tact, but at least he's a jolly good fellow, which nobody can... I mean, which the series somehow needed. Still, eh, there's only so much of Durin and Elrond doing a stone breaking contest over a perceived slight I can take. Motions So, eh, yeah. This tries really hard to check off all the boxes. There's a troll, dwarves are loud and silly and have beards (or not), men are racist against elves, elves are racist against men, there's a romance, it's all... very, very Lord of the Rings, with a touch of The Hobbit insofar as that the characters look like they're straight out of The Hobbit, rather than Lord of the Rings. Which is a detriment, I would say. To think that I once complained that Liv Tyler isn't very elven. In closing Well, I'm not going to talk about the casting choices when it comes to casting minorities. There's a black elf, a black dwarf and a black hobbit so far. The characters at least don't feel entirely like token minorities (unlike Gay and Gay Too, the gay couple from Discovery, whose only defining trait is being a gay couple). We could debate about how there are no black elves in Lord of the Rings, because Tolkien's mythology has a light vs. dark / good vs. evil theme that very literally expresses itself in looks, and that a black elf would quite frankly be spoiled by evil, but that's been co-opted by weirdo white supremacists and whatnot, so nope, not interested. Other than that, it's fairly meh. Nothing much of interest happens, except something falling from the sky, in a rather literal manner. Oh, and yes, the first two episodes are full of Star Trek: Picard season 2 flowery talk, except it is much more fitting for elves to speak that way than for Q and Picard. Could have been worse, I guess. Still, not sure why this is a thing, other than Jeff Bezos wanting his own Game of Thrones. Turn it on if you feel like watching two hours of mostly nothing set in Middle Earth. It'll be 50 hours at some point anyway.

Dazzling Display is a prerequisite of Shatter Defenses. As long as you take that, it'll not be a wasted feat even in the light of Frightful Aspect. edit: @InsaneCommander if you give Ember the Red Salamander ring, she will have two different spell levels of Hellfire Ray, which you can separately bolster. If you do that and then later pick Favorite Metamagic: Bolster, you can add some more of them to her spell levels. Because even if all newly created Bolstered spells are now one level lower than before, the old ones stay in the book. She can cast LOTS of these things. At insane damage.

Speaking of Mami having her head bitten off - screw spoiler tags, entire thread watched Madoka anyway or doesn't want to - that was so clearly telegraphed it just wasn't surprising*. I have no idea how anyone could watch any appreciable amount of TV in general, not just anime, and not notice the ten thousand death flags raised prior to her death. Okay, maybe that's just one of these 'me' things, but one of them is figuring twists out in advance. There's only two types of twists, the one I see coming, and the ones that are so obscure they don't make much sense, or come completely out of the blue without prior hints. Every now and then there's a twist that is obscure but I still sort of predict it on an off-chance that the writers want to troll the audience with it. A certain vampire anime was like that. Heh. Okay, one part of that statement was a lie. There's a third type of twist that is telegraphed just right so that it all makes sense in hindsight but the reveal is still a surprise. To date, that happened once, and that was a certain wedding in A Storm of Swords. Upon re-reading the double meaning of many of the character interactions become quite clear. *The level of violence probably was. It's not every day heads are bitten off in 魔法少女 animes. The intro music is painful to listen to. Pretty much my reaction, of course I was intrigued by the mystery probably more than you were. The show keeps being like that for a bit yet. It could be a tad sappier, of course. Still waiting for the character voiced by Sailor Mercury to show up. Anyway, the series is so far fairly well crafted, things make sense - as much as they can in an anime about two hyper-competent girl assassins with broken or repressed memories - and even without any splatter gore it's pretty violent. How'd you like the second episode opening? Show sure doesn't hold back with the killing part, it's just not really explicit about it, and pretty bloodless unless it really needs to be (i.e. characters follow a blood trail). That's just for people who get shot in the face. edit:

Since I didn't do a full post, here goes nothing: The second episode was fine, actually. Matt Smith seemed more like Daemon and less than The Doctor, but I still don't care for Rhaenyra's direction, which still seems to have been "try to look like Emilia Clarke" for no particular reason. The character interactions were much better too, and the series did not try to one-up Game of Thrones in violence or nudity. The one thing I consistently dislike is the video game background feeling almost all of the scenes have. The soft-focused CGI backgrounds that are clearly distinct from whatever is in front of the greenscreens don't really work for me, but anyone else's milage may vary (much like with certain CGI animals in a film recently released). A little less grandeur, a little more real props and sets, and this would have looked much better. Looking forward to the time skip, hopefully Emma D'Arcy will make Rhaenyra her own. Also, hopefully, Rhaenyra will depicted as somewhat faithful to her historical accounts, because that would get a bunch of Dany fanboy's knickers in a bunch. No big surprise here, it'll be on the 'air' on Friday, September 2nd.

With Amazon's track record and after The Wheel of Time, do you even have to ask? The trailers sure looked terrible, and I half broke my brain trying to figure out when whatever was depicted is happening in the timeline, only to then notice that it never did, it's just fan fiction because spending a billion dollars on a TV show apparently doesn't buy one the right to all of Tolkien's world building. Baffling, really. I, of course, will be watching the series, but I'm sure confirmation bias will strike again and it will be as terrible as I expect it to be, even if it for some reason ends up being decent (like that second episode of House of the Dragon, that was fine, really). edit: Ninja'ed by @Hurlshot or @Hurlshort or whatever is going on with his user names, on account of verbosity. Sigh.

So far there are elements that are really good and some that I don't care for. It's not making me want to keep watching all the time like The Vision of Escaflowne did, but to be fair to anime series in general (or any series, that is), that only happens once in a blue moon. There's preciously little realism in the two girls being able to basically annihilate however many enemies are placed in front of them, but that's not any different from any action film.

A bit more Noir, the pacing of the storyline is really a bit glacial, but I have a feeling that's for the best. It keeps hinting at being some sort of secret society/prophecy thing with a splash of religious fervor, not my most favorite mystery combination. The next two episodes are a two parter though, I guess that'll move some things forward.