Welp, time to learn the real version of the fight!

Edit: Got him!

The experience is very similar, overall. The most noticeable difference is that the textures for overlays like blood spatter are very low res on PS5 in performance mode. Not sure what quality mode looks like, I tend to leave everything on performance out of habit.

I started a new character (mostly because I no longer have a working PC, so I had to switch to playing on my roommate's PS5) and am about 40 hours in now. I know I should be trying to actually advance, but I can't stop myself from puttering around the open world.

I did, for once, decide to restrain myself and only level my main stats (Strength, Vigor, Endurance) instead of branching out into a little bit of everything to hit stat requirements for spells and weapons just to try them out. Either I suddenly got a lot better than I remembered being, or leveling sensibly makes the game like 10x easier.

One problem I'm anticipating for the DLC: I've already settled into an aesthetic I like, with lightly-armored sellword vibes (bastard sword, Vulgar Militia armor, bandit boots, bandit machettes). So there is a good chance that I pick up all the new DLC items, go "oh that's neat, but not for this character" and then never give them a decent shot. :P

Edit: Holy shit Starscourge Radahn is, like, a real boss? The first time I played I killed him on my second try and I didn't really understand what all the fuss was about. I spent the entire rest of the game making fun of him by pointing out enemies that are "literally stronger than Radahn." But, uh, now he's kicking my teeth in and it turns out I didn't learn the fight at all. Did his hitboxes used to be bugged or something? I seem to recall that I previously killed him just by hugging his feet and mashing R1 while all his attacks missed me, but that is not currently happening, LMAO.

Damn. I knew this would happen eventually, I guess. I've been avoiding mentioning them by name on public sites for years in hopes of keeping the heat off.

Amnesia reminds me: another problem with horror games is that "game" elements are at odds with "horror" elements. I played the demo for Amnesia and the atmosphere broke as soon as I picked up a chair, because the next thing I thought was "If I can pick up chairs, can I stack them?" and there was nothing to stop me from lugging it to the next chair, which looked very silly and distracted from the feeling the game was trying to impart... and the answer turned out to be yes, you can stack chairs.

You know you start that level having apparently fallen through a hole from an upper floor? I wanted to know what was up there, so I went around and gathered all the chairs in the level to make a big rickety chair stack I could sort of awkwardly jump up. I guess they knew someone would do that, because there was a cheeky message scrawled on the wall up there. But it's completely impossible to be scared by a game after you've spent twenty minutes faffing around with physics objects.

If I weren't lazy I'd make a "I'm literally the guy in the photo" meme about this.

Based on the linked article, I think they're implying that the rise of a free press in what was then a region of the Ottoman Empire was linked to an increasing sense of Palestinian identity and/or nationalism, and resistance to the growing Zionist movement.

Joke's on me I guess; I'm also dogshit at things I want to do!

You can include me as ryven. Happy to help! ^^ And thanks for making the game!

I went Humans, then Elves, then Dwarves.

At the human kingdom, I had to assault the keep, and I chose to have my dwarves undermine the walls. This resulted in the loss of some dwarves. I don't remember if this was reflected in the counts. Then I fought a battle against the human army in the field, and was asked which of my forces suffered the greatest losses. I chose greenskins, and the count dropped from 9 units of greenskins to 6.

At the elven kingdom... I've played several times now, but I think on that occasion the elf queen surrendered to me without a battle, and then I forced her to declare her loyalty publicly and give me some of her army, which she accepted.

Then this was my status going into the dwarf fight, and I lost.

I've played through a couple times, haven't won yet but I'm having fun!

On my last attempt, at the end, my troop size just before the final battle was (a lot) less than my number of troops:

Is that a bug?

I worked for an environmentalist canvassing org in Texas for about a month but I didn't stay long enough to find out their stance on unions. I'm not cut out to spend all day getting yelled at by people threatening to call the cops on me for knocking on their door. Also I just kind of got a weird vibe from them overall.

Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm annoyed that they've made it arbitrarily difficult to make back up saves (probably for pawn economy reasons, I guess) because there are many things I need to experiment with, and experimentation is difficult when I can only do some things once, and other things require waiting for monsters to respawn or what have you.

I could just look up the answers, but that doesn't sound like fun.

The TEA is right about one thing: calling early 21st century machine learning systems "AI" is letting the marketers win. The scoring system is not an "intelligence" in the sense most people would understand the term to mean.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

If you had to fix your OS struggles in order to 3d print a part to finish the chicken door project before you could tidy the office, you'd be yak shaving. It's important that the task you're working on is, somehow, eventually, contributing to finishing the original task. At the point that you decided not to tidy, you ceased to be yak shaving.

Not sure at a glance which lines are apologia; the obvious ones are intended to be sarcasm. Lehrer certainly doesn't actually think it's good that the U.S. developed the bomb, or that it loves peace. The whole song is about how the initial U.S. development of the bomb has led the world down the path to destruction.

Does... does he think that reusing the existing steel means just propping it back up and doing spot repairs? Those parts are all damaged, that metal can be recycled and reforged but that's a whole reclamation project in and of itself. There's no way it's safe to reuse those trusses.

I don't know much about image generators, but it's not surprising to me at all that ChatGPT can't fulfill the request to respond with nothing. Your prompt gets converted into tokens, tokens get processed by the model, it outputs a resulting set of tokens, and those get converted into text. Expecting the token-outputting-machine not to output any tokens is going to lead to disappointment.

You can restart the game by manually deleting your save file, and you'll get placeable portcrystals later even if you don't buy the cash shop one. The only things you can't get without the cash shop are the slightly-lighter camping set, the sound pack that replaces some sounds and music with DD1 sounds, and the heartfelt pendant, which is supposedly for gifting to NPCs but I haven't figured out why I would want to do that.

And honestly, "DD1 again" is still a pretty good game. Also I think the balance changes in the early game (most notably goblins and wolves not being super sweaty encounters for level 1 characters) makes early exploration a lot more chill.