"I had a [noun] [verb]" is a perfectly fine colloquialism for "a [noun] [verbed] (in a way that affected me)." It's very common in the parts of the US I've lived in, at least.
Steam should really just let you set games not to update without having to futz around with Offline Mode. Refusing updates for specific games is currently possible-but-very-annoying: you need to set "Only update this game when I launch it" and then ALWAYS switch Steam into Offline Mode before launching; if you ever accidentally launch it while online, it will update and Steam won't let you roll back.
One of the conditions for being a tax exempt religious organization is staying out of politics. If they denounce a particular politician or party they could lose their status.
Maybe there's a shell company that Clark Kent makes payments to, and then Superman bills it for nonexistent super-services so that he can have some spending money while in costume.
My car has been on standard time for years now, so it's currently correct.
The last time I was handing out candy at my old neighborhood, kids would ring the doorbell but then they'd just stand there and stare at me until I handed them candy. You're supposed to say "trick or treat"!
Now I live in an apartment, so I don't get trick-or-treaters. (I have candy just in case, but nobody ever knocks.) My roommate went to hang out with his sister and hand out candy at her place, and apparently their neighborhood has decreed that trick-or-treating ends at 7 sharp now so that nobody is out after dark? I don't get it. I thought staying out late (and, for teens, potentially unsupervised) was part of the fun!
Apparently the Narcan is "in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon." How often does this happen? I can find one instance of Russia using aerosolized fentanyl against Chechen separatists during a hostage situation in 2002.
This doesn't strike me as an especially efficient way to increase security.
Wow knowing the asset reuse was by design makes me feel way less charitable towards DA2. (I don't know if I'd go as far as the other commenter and say it's "a bad game," but I didn't like it.)
Initial reviews seem remarkably positive given what we saw in the first gameplay reveal a few months ago. My impression at the time was that about half the voice actors sounded like they hadn't been given enough context about the scenario and some of the cutscenes had questionable direction, which were bad signs for a curated ten minute slice. I still think it's ultimately not for me—I don't really want action combat in my Dragon Age—but I'm glad people are enjoying it.
My college workflow was to copy the prompt and then "paste without formatting" in Word and leave that copy of the prompt at the top while I worked, I would absolutely have fallen for this. :P
So fuck Alex Jones, but I really don't think it's a good idea to force people to sell their accounts so that other people can impersonate them. It's just inviting social engineering attacks.
- Do what thou wilt
- This shall be the whole of the Law
- This space intentionally left blank
https://youtu.be/4nyHPIcbn88 (nsfw lyrics)
Was that this studio, or their other studio that's been running since 2017? This one, "Team Blue," was supposed to be working on some unannounced AAA game.
I think you're right, it must have been the sequel!
Is this the one where I kept trying to go visit my mom (as part of my belligerent insistence on looking for stuff to do in the open world after every mission), but the game wouldn't let me go into any building that wasn't the next story mission, and then later the main character got chewed out by his mom for never visiting her? I did find that annoying.
Digital. The average lifespan of physical crap I'm failing to keep track of is way shorter than the expected support lifespan for PSN/NSO. I would love to be one of those people with beautiful displays of lovingly-collected merch, but I've accepted that I'm incapable of that level of organization. Digital keeps everything organized for me.
Did Trump even say it was a hoax? I remember him asking if you could cure it with bleach, and taking credit for the vaccine. He for sure was annoyed at how long it lasted and wanted to end mitigations early, but I thought it was mostly other grifters who took the "it doesn't exist" line.
How good of a friend are we talking? I care about my roommate's new nephew. I know his sister, and we've played D&D with his brother-in-law. The baby is, like, a relevant part of being friends with them. Similarly, if he went on vacation I'd want to hear about how it went, especially if anything interesting happened.
On the other hand some of my coworkers at my last job liked to talk about this kind of stuff, and I didn't really care, but it was nice to have something to talk about while I was setting up a new printer for them, or whatever.
It doesn't bother me so much when a character in a show has to take a turn with the idiot ball, but when a video game wants me to hold the idiot ball it really makes me want to stop playing. Recently I was checking out Fallen Leaf and the very first level ends with a character politely but firmly indicating that I can't go further in this random cave I'm exploring, because there's something dangerous stored there... while standing under a stalactite that the game clearly wants you to drop on them. No, god damn it, I am not going to commit murder just to unleash the ancient evil that I would clearly spend the rest of the game stopping. I can just quit here and not be a murderer and the world can stay safe.
I did not even humor it by hitting the stalactite to see what happens, I just pressed alt-F4 and went to play something else.
Tell me about what you're doing in OSRS!
I just started playing OSRS recently and have been just drifting around from one activity to the next, as I find stuff that catches my fancy. Currently I'm about 20 games into Fishing Trawler and haven't seen a piece of the angler set yet; I ended up liquidating some of my food and crafting materials on the GE to buy more rope. I notice a lot of people prefer to play the lower deck even though swamp paste is so expensive; what's the appeal?
Previously I spent a while in Camdozaal because I liked that it was a pretty self-contained grinding area; I stayed long enough to unlock all the buffs, and get the barronite mace and the Imcando Hammer. I like the concept of the Vault but it seems like the actual loot is worthless compared to how much time you spend mining to pay for vault runs. The best drops are adamant armor that you could buy on the exchange.
What's everybody else working on? Grinding skills, making money, minigames, bosses? Having fun?
The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel — Jenny Nicholson
Yes, this is a 4 hour long review of a hotel that's already closed.
There is one uncleared level remaining in Super Mario Maker, with 18 days to go before the servers shut down
UPDATE: Ahoyoo has confirmed that Trimming the Herbs was uploaded with TAS tools, meaning that The Last Dance was the final legitimate level all along! Congrats to kazeihinn on the Last First Clear! The journey continues in Super Mario Maker 2...
ORIGINAL POST:
Team 0% is attempting to clear every level in Super Mario Maker before the servers shut down on April 8. (New level uploads have been disabled since 2021, so there is no danger of new levels appearing at the last minute.) As of a few days ago, only a single level remains: Trimming the Herbs, uploaded in 2017 by Ahoyoo. (See also Ahoyoo's original upload video.)
The level is short but extremely precise, requiring Mario to use Bob-ombs to precisely remove Piranha Plants and collect coins while navigating a tight space filled with spikes. There have been over 200,000 attempts so far! If you have a Wii U and feel like you might be a Mario master, this is your opportunity to pick up the final First Clear in Super Mario Maker history.
Getting a tattoo is one of the most permanent decisions you can make; it stays with you until you die. But one Ohio company is changing that: preserving tattoos as tributes to last beyond death.
Recurring blue screens with various error codes, Win11
The system:
MSI Raider GE67 HX 12UHS
Intel Core i9-12900HX
nVidia GeForce RTX 3080Ti (laptop)
32GiB RAM
Win11 Pro 64-bit
The problem:
Once in a while (usually 2-3 times per day), the system crashes, usually resulting in a blue screen with one of various error codes. Codes I've seen include:
HYPERVISOR_ERROR
CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT
VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Sometimes the system hangs but the blue screen never comes, and I have to power it off manually. When this happens, the fans go to full speed and yet the laptop quickly becomes incredibly hot if I don't power it off as soon as possible, suggesting that the CPU or GPU is maxing out for some reason.
Checking with Event Viewer shows nothing out of the ordinary in the lead up to the crash.
Things I've ruled out:
I initially thought it only happened while plugged in, and bought a new power supply. That didn't seem to affect the frequency of the issue, and I also have now seen it happen while on battery. I also initially thought it was more frequent while playing games that use the dedicated graphics card, but I'm not sure that's actually true; I have seen it happen even while just watching Youtube. At one point I felt that it happened more when I moved the laptop or plugged in USB devices, but I think that may be magical thinking; I have never been able to make it happen on purpose by doing those things. It does seem to be true that after it happens, if I let the laptop restart automatically, it often happens again in a short time, but shutting down and then turning it back on gives more time before the next incident.
Solutions I've tried:
I tried updating the BIOS and the Intel firmware to the latest available on MSI's website, but that doesn't seem to have helped. I also updated my nVidia drivers.
A possibly related issue:
A week or so before this happened for the first time, I updated the BIOS to fix a different issue. What happened then was: I was playing a game on battery unintentionally, and didn't notice until that "low battery - switching to Super Battery" warning appeared and began throttling system performance. I plugged the laptop in, but performance didn't improve. I restarted and performance was terrible across all applications, even Firefox. I checked Resource Manager and noticed that the CPU was being throttled down to around 0.16GHz. Event Viewer was showing warnings about this that said the processor was being limited by system firmware.
I tried using various Windows and MSI power management settings to resolve the issue, which persisted across restarts, fully charging the battery, etc. In the end, I solved it by updating the BIOS (to a version that is now one version back from the most current one).
It was a while, maybe a week, after running the update that the crash happened for the first time.
Current theory:
Is it possible I screwed up the BIOS update somehow? I noticed that it instructs you to return clock speeds to stock before doing the update. I don't think I've manually adjusted them, but MSI's "MSI Center" software seems to offer automatic adjustment. It was set to "Balanced" when I did the most recent update, but it may have been set to "Auto" when I did the first one, which I guess could be a problem if the CPU was automatically overclocked.
Communique from a group of anarcha-feminists in Mexico City after they were violently attacked, and their space ransacked and destroyed. Yesterday, those of us who maintain an organizing space in Building T of the CCH Vallejo (UNAM College of Science and Humanities - Campus Vallejo), had orga...
Security in this game is kind of funny
I'm crouched in an empty room, stealing everything. My stealth meter randomly changes to Detected so I stop for a while and wait for it to go back to Hidden. I steal the next item and get a notification that a bounty has been added. I'm still Hidden.
I finish looting and stand up. Suddenly: "You're under arrest!" A cop charges into the room and starts giving me a spiel. I unload my fully automatic Grendel into their chest at point blank range. Somehow this attracts less attention than quietly picking up comestibles did; no reinforcements arrive, and I remain free to wander around.
I come back to this room about five minutes later for an unrelated conversation. Everyone politely ignores the dead body.
I know this is all, like, just Bethesda game things, but for some reason this time it seems funnier than usual.
Also, minor companion spoilers:
spoiler
If all the companions get as mad as Andreja did every time petty theft escalates to murder, my ship is going to get real empty real fast.
An inconsistency I found in a certain dungeon
Spoilers for the Wyrmway
In the room where you must demonstrate insight by striking down a representation of one of three writers, Amaps is represented as a tiefling:
!Image of Amaps being a tiefling
However, the book he wrote clearly indicates that he was a halfling:
!Image of book description that says Paul Amaps was a halfling
This is halfling erasure!
Spoiler question about a certain Act 3 rescue
spoiler
I broke into Wyrm's Rock and assaulted Gortash at his coronation, where Wyll's dad, Lord Ravenguard, was present. I won the fight by falling back to the parapets (by the ballista) and forcing all the enemies to walk through Hunger of Hadar and Wall of Fire to get to me; they really hate pathing through Hunger of Hadar, so most of them waited politely in the main room while I killed the rest a couple at a time.
I knocked out Ravenguard and then shoved him to a safe place so that he wouldn't get hit by any AOEs. However, now that we're done, the post-fight cutscenes are over, etc., he's still just KO'd. Wyll doesn't have anything to say about him, and the quest journal entry about rescuing him is still on the step where it says that he's being held at Wyrm's Rock. Well, yes, I know, I found him.
So what do I do with him now? He's infected, it doesn't seem like I should wander off without him. I tried going to camp and there's still no quest update or word from Wyll. I tried healing him in case we need to talk to him, but I learned that KO'd characters don't get up when healed.
Update: If I long rest, the journal updates to say he is dead and his body disappears. It also implies the existence of a next quest step at camp, but Wyll says nothing about it. Also all my companions had the wrong dialog after a certain camp event, as though I had not yet killed Gortash who is very dead. Curiouser and curiouser. I think it's definitely true that they didn't plan for you to try to use the nonlethal toggle this way.
Modding XCOM2:WOTC: Anyone know of a mod like Extended Information that is compatible with EU Aim Rolls and Complicated Red Fog?
For context, Extended Information is a mod that shows hit chance popups for every shot, like the older Perfect Information, which (when it works) helps you develop a better sense of how much risk you're really incurring from enemy shots.
I've got a long and complicated mod list which is mostly (but not entirely) cribbed from ChristopherOdd's last Youtube playthrough, and I've noticed that the percentages EI displays, especially for enemy shots, are wrong. The most obvious evidence is that they frequently miss shots that EI displayed as 100%, but it will also show absurd numbers like 89% chance to hit by a basic trooper against a target in full cover while the shooter is wounded, and they'll usually also miss.
I think the problem is with shots that are modified by certain other mods, and I currently suspect EU Aim Rolls (which separates hit, crit, and dodge into separate rolls, as well as offering some specific tweaks) and Complicated Red Fog (which applies penalties to aim and other stats based on missing health).
There is a link in the Steam workshop page to a Discord server where supposedly the mod developer posted an experimental, updated version that solved some of this (at least with regard to EU Aim Rolls), but that link is now defunct (either the server no longer exists or it's private). Does anyone happen to have that version and be willing to share it, or know of another, more compatible mod?
Edit: For now I have disabled EI and I'm using EU Aim Rolls' built-in stat reporting. It isn't as nice, because it's just plain text on the right side of the screen instead of a color-coded popup over the shooter, and it doesn't have some of the extra info on the HUD that EI provides, but it does appear to be right, which is a good start!
Do y'all pretend not to notice when the DM fudges something to keep your character alive?
Sometimes I can tell when my current DM fudges a roll to miss an attack or reduce damage. He has a tell in the specific way he pauses and breathes before announcing the roll, then tries to hurry to the next turn, which only seems to happen when someone is in a life-or-death scenario, but "luckily" survives.
Should I let him know he has a tell? Will it be less fun (or more stressful) for him if he knows I know?