kanisatha

I just completed playing the SoD expansion for BG1ee for the very first time. It was weaksausce and rather lame, especially when in comparison with ToB as the equivalent expansion to BG2. The NPCs were all forgettable, and the multiple times Charname gets screwed over by people who are supposedly his friends/supporters got tiresome real quick. And the huge castle battle was a giant pain in the ass with no fun redeeming value. Beamdog truly sucks. I'm so very glad their Ps:T successor game got canned.

Whereas adding a mere three mods to my current BG2ee playthrough was too much of a chore and a pain for me.

Looks like the very definition of overkill 😜

Nice! I recorded from BBC America an ABBA docu-concert some months ago. Maybe it's the same one. I also recorded from a PBS broadcast a couple of days ago Fleetwood Mac's "The Dance" reunion concert from 1997.

This in Foreign Affairs today: Ukraine on the Offensive: How Kyiv’s Attack on Russia—and Successful Defense of Its Northern Flank—Has Changed the War

I like this game, including how it looks. The graphics look very nice to me, way more attractive than BG3's graphics. And I especially like that the Rook shown in this trailer could easily pass for a South Asian man. About time I had that choice of look for my PC in an RPG!

Very interesting. This is exactly the conclusion I myself had recently come to about the reason for BG3's popularity. And it also perfectly captures why I am soooooooo NOT a fan, because it is *exactly* these things in/about a videogame that would aggravate me and/or be something I would consider a complete waste of my time.

It is indeed prestige, plus "influence." It is about Russia reestablishing itself as one of the great powers of the world, given that many (especially politicians here in the US) have questioned or challenged Russia's great power status.

Yup. One of the many forgotten conflicts around the world (because only the Palestinians matter).

Zelenskyy's call with Trump: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/19/trump-zelenskyy-ukraine-call-00169905

Moody Blues is one of my favs too, and I especially have a soft spot for them because it was to 'In Your Wildest Dreams' that I got to dance with an American girl for the first time, at a college party a couple of weeks after I arrived in the US. 😀

Fascinating! The Famous Five books were the first books I started reading for myself, as opposed to having my father or grandfather read them to me. Prolly when I was four or five years old. 😃

Yup, exactly the same for me. I was high school class of '86 and college class of '89, so the '80s was the decade when I was young and into music. Got exposed to a lot of '70s and '60s music as well because I always had the radio on while doing my homework or building my model airplanes which was my afternoons after school. I literally don't know any music after about 2000. Edit: Gotta' love that '80s hairdo on Stevie.

Also because the Soviet Union actually had something to lose. Furthermore, believe it or not, the resentment that some out there in the world feel towards the West is FAR more intense than any silly ideology. It is personal. The Russians feel this the strongest, and are building an axis with those others who also feel it very strongly, specifically Iran and North Korea (the Chinese also feel it, but not as strongly, hence their reluctance to go all in with the Russians and to only use the Russians for their own ends). The only goal in life for these 'resenters' is to bring the hated West's standard of living down to their level. And increasingly, they are even open to the idea that using nukes to achieve this goal is "reasonable," especially because they are becomming convinved the West (both Western leaders and publics) don't have the guts to pull the trigger on nuclear retaliation.

Oh, hey, I'm totally with you on this. I was making my point based on my prefessional judgment as an international security scholar. But at a personal level, I'm completely with you (though destruction by alien species invasion would be more fun, and I'd get to witness first contact in my lifetime which would be very cool). I too am extremely disillusioned by the human species. It's why my retirement dream is to buy a large horse ranch in northern Wyoming so I can sit on my porch with a cooler of beer and a faithful dog, and have a front row seat to twilight's last gleaming. Should be a great show.

I think people far too often forget or overlook the nuclear dimension in these discussions, simply closing their minds to the possibility of nuclear weapons use because it is just too terrifying for their minds to contemplate and thereby assuming that surely no one would actually use them. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news to those people, but I very strongly believe the actual use of nukes will be part of a global war in the coming years.

But this has been known for a long while, that sleeping is how we get rid of the gunk that builds-up in our brain/neurons while awake.

But do you have to login to the Origin app/have an account? Or is it just something that automatically pops up and runs in the background?

Yup. I'm gonna' (re)buy them all so I can have then in my Steam library and not have to care about the Origin app anymore.

I'm a huge, huge, huge Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks fan. Was a fan of their music even when I was a kid back in Asia in the '70s. I think I even posted something here when Christine McVie died. Sometimes, with songs like Go Your Own Way, Say You Love Me, Second Hand News, Seven Wonders, etc., I put them on repeat on my old CD player and just listen again and again. Takes me back to when my life was simple and carefree.

Fair enough. As far as combat goes, though, per what's in that Gameinformer article, seems like they have done a good job of evolving real-time action combat into something that's fun. If you don't like RT action combat, then sure, you're not going to be a fan. It's no different than for me with my utter dislike of TB combat. As far as I am concerned, the worst RT action combat system is way better than the best TB combat system.

All true enough, but from a policy stand-point you can't do much about the past, especially the distant past. So my point is about the future, and re-establishing the original principle underlying the concept of sovereignty, which was reciprocity: your sovereignty is recognized and accepted by others only if you recognize and accept others' sovereignty.

We'll see about DA4 (the trailer being a trailer and not necessarily representative of how the game will be), but I disagree about BG3 and DA4 being the same in cinematics. There is no RPG out there, including upcoming games, that even comes close to BG3's extent of cinematics. Larian themselve have boasted about the extent of cinematics in their game, claiming a whopping 175+ hours of cinematics that they recorded for their game (and that was before all the post-release updates and patches). And therein lies the real issue, because I'm not opposed to some cinematics in a AAA RPG. It's that BG3 has gone so far into cinematics that for me effectively the game is far too much like watching a movie than playing a game.

I would really love to see the US government publicly take the position that henceforth the United States' policy on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries will be exactly the same as their policy towards Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Putin couldn't get the Ukrainians to surrender on the battlefield so he's demanding they surrender at the negotiations table? What an ass. LOL