Interesting, I make sets of 10. When I see 7 and 6, half of the 6 moves over to make 10 + 3. I say “moves over” because it feels like dividing tokens into sets in my head.

Ooh, we should have them put up the Five Commandments of Discordianism (a.k.a. the PENTABARF) too!

I will never understand the giga-rich. They could afford to hire round-the-clock help at rates that both buy expertise and inspire loyalty. Your house staff know where the bodies are buried, maybe literally—there’s no world where it makes sense to pay them less than six figures. Remember, $100,000 is 0.01% of $1,000,000,000, or about 0.003% of their estimated net worth of $37B. They could hire an extra maid at $100,000/year and not even notice the expense.

But they can afford even more than that. Splurge a little. Hire a specialist in early childhood education to tutor your kids. Get a chef who graduated from a renowned culinary school. They could afford to spend millions on salary. Why skimp? What do they think they are saving up for?

That’s not what the article is saying though? It doesn’t say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn’t have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).

Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.

Jesus Christ, they’re like the villains from Captain Planet.

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 sellsword vibes (bastard sword, Vulgar Militia armor, bandit boots, bandit manchettes). 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.

As a Blood Mage sympathizer, I say we let Solas cook!

I think you need to use the same phone number you signed up with, but other than that I don’t know. If you signed up with a burner phone, maybe you could do that.

I don’t know, but mine guesses correctly when I’m a passenger about 90% of the time. Unlike the other commenter, mine doesn’t have a bluetooth connection to my car or a device in my car.

Once in a while I have to tell it I’m not driving.

For each trip it tells you things like how often you touch your phone, what % of the trip you spent using your phone, and how many times you braked hard (which is a proxy for things like tailgating or general inattentiveness, since it can’t see the road). Mostly it seems to be a “don’t use your phone” score. There’s an overall score, and you can see how big your discount is, but the score itself is largely meaningless without the ability to compare to other drivers.

Discount on my insurance.

My driving is being non-secretly scored, I have an app just for that. Currently it just complains that I have power saving mode on all the time, so I don’t know if it’s not working or if it is and I just can’t see the results anymore. (I’m not turning off power saving mode.)

Huh, I didn’t even know this existed until now. And instead of being tempted to watch the show, I’m wondering how wise it is to leave viewers (and potential viewers) wondering if they would rather you have made the other show that you teased in the first place.

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.

I really liked it. Bikes and cars go vroom, guns go bang, flamethrowers go woosh. 10/10. I’m contemplating going again next weekend.

My roommate was bored. Didn’t like the writing, didn’t like Taylor-Joy’s performance. He rated it “not good.” I didn’t really disagree with any of his specific complaints, I just didn’t care about them.

I suspect your mileage really depends on what kind of audience member you are.

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.