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Wrath of the Righteous is ambitious as hell, with great characters and presentation, and I just love seeing that level up icon†. I had a lot of fun with my game-breaking angel, then stomping around as a cutscene-breaking giant dragon. I can’t fault Owlcat for any single thing, but I didn’t totally enjoy myself for one reason:

It’s too long.

I would love to replay it with a different Mythic Path, but that’s too much without taking a long break, and I can’t imagine going back in a post-BG3 world. 9

Through the Ashes, much like Varnhold’s Lot††, was pretty fun. I definitely enjoy the smaller scope and feeling more precious about characters and equipment, like I did in the early levels. I’d probably miss the Mythic Paths if they made a third adventure, but the simpler stakes are more interesting to me.

†: The Owlcat games don’t have a memorable sound effect (if there is one). That seems like it would be a fun place to put a VO line.

††: It occurs to me that I never wrote about Kingmaker, which I enjoyed, but also felt like a bit of a slog at times. Core loop felt a bit tighter. 9

#Pathfinder #Wrath of the Righteous #video games #pathfinder wotr

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Been thinking a lot about these videos from Deficient Master. I guess it takes exaggerated editing and someone shouting at me that I’m “doing it wrong” to get out of the rut of watching inane videos about ranking status conditions.

Not sure if it was this video, or the perspective that Pathfinder 2e gave me, but definite shift in mindset this year.

#ixdnd #Youtube

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Played a few sessions of Pathfinder 2e and it’s still all so exciting to me. I hope it’s not just the novelty and the flaws are just less readily apparent. Some early thoughts:

Rounds are fast. Positioning is important. Weapons are interesting. No bullshit spells.

It’s a fluke that I’ve stumbled on one of the better designed classes — the Rogue. Tons of skills and feats to build around, though I’m probably fooling myself into thinking that I can do everything. I’d definitely play the class again, which is a good sign.

Thief is clearly the best racket, though. I’m playing a Ruffian, but that was before I realised that medium armor isn’t necessarily an improvement, and most useful weapons are agile anyway.

By comparison, a (bow-based) Ranger looks pretty boring, and spellcasters seem quite weak at these early levels.

Athletics and Medicine seem too generally applicable, but besides those, skill choices seem niche. Healing between combat with Medicine seems like an unwritten rule which I wish was more explicit (and didn’t feel like a feat tax). I can see all of my low-level characters looking similar.

I wish archetypes offered a little more – progression is a little slow and only the multiclass dedications seem like complete packages. We’re playing with Free Archetype. I’m ambivalent, but anything giving more feats should make character building interesting.

The game is great on Foundry, but it seems like it wouldn’t work so well at a table where not everyone knows the rules.

Random gripes (when the system is so granular, it’s easy to criticise):

I would definitely streamline ‘deadly’ and ‘fatal’ and a host of other things. Armor Class is a ‘special difficulty class’, immunity to bleed isn’t found in the stat blocks, creatures with immunity to critical hits still take critical effects.

Head Stomp and The Harder They Fall, two similarly situational feats, occupy the same slot. Gang Up, already an oppressively strong choice, gets even better in the remaster. Plant Evidence, which might be used once in a campaign (with middling odds of success), really ought to be a skill feat.

The remaster is annoying. I’m pretty turned off buying any of the material and just using online resources.

#ixdnd #Pathfinder 2e #Pathfinder #pf2e

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Happy Mach 9

I enjoyed rewatching Top Gun: Maverick, but it makes me a little sad. The original was an important comfort movie for me – I’d always watch it with a huge smile on my face, and it’s unfortunate that Maverick’s competence makes the original more difficult to watch.

As amazing as Maverick is, the fun gives way to sophistication, and I don’t think it works as well on repeat viewings without the suspense of not knowing how it unfolds. It’ll take a long time for this movie to become corny to me, but until then, I’ll keep watching that P-51 fly into the sunset.

#Top Gun #Top Gun Maverick #films

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I’m not sure if Nobody was meant to be an absurdist movie, but I couldn’t take it seriously at all. There’s a shot which I can’t get out of my head, where RZA is surprised by a guy with a pipe after smiling to the camera, so Saul† throws him one of his dual pistols in slow motion, which is used to shoot a different guy (with a wrench this time — notably, at this point it’s escalated to everyone else having automatic rifles).

I also half-watched The Equalizer films recently, and can’t help but see the similarities. In both, the ‘civilian’ lives seem so far removed from their vigilante personas that they detract from the believability of the action (which also lack stakes and almost have me rooting for the bad guys). While Denzel’s use of pointless booby traps isn’t as egregious as Nobody’s, it also suffers from a similar thing of poor action blocking and seriously incompetent bad guys.

Watching John Wick’s imitators puts in perspective just how definitive it was. Maybe I should watch some pre-Matrix action to remind myself just how sophisticated our standards for action have become.

†: This ‘joke’ is a bit cheap, but I really did find it difficult not to see/hear Saul Goodman. I genuinely wasn’t sure if the main character would ‘wake up’ from his power fantasy with a hard cut at times.

(I quite liked John Wick: Chapter 4 – probably a bit too long, but more memorable than 2 and 3; none of them as well-rounded as the first.)

#Nobody #The Equalizer #John Wick #movies #RZA #action movies #Nobody 2021

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Rewatched the first two seasons of Castlevania trying to figure out why it worked for me and Nocturne didn’t. It’s probably a collection of things, but overall there’s something off about the storytelling.

I think it’s really down to the Castlevania Season 1 doing an excellent job of establishing the characters and giving Dracula a compelling motivation and plan. Dracula barely interacts with the heroes, and yet we spend an equal amount of time with both sides in the second season. Comparatively, a ton of events happen to a bunch of characters in Nocturne, but none of it really landed for me.

It doesn’t help that the characters aren’t as endearing and the fight sequences are pretty weak. (With the exception of the pretty hardcore origin story.)

#Castlevania #Castlevania: Nocturne #tv

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Love this on the psychology (physiology?) of Doritos.

Also, I wish we had Flamin’ Hot here. Chilli Heatwave is weak.

#doritos #link #reference #junk food

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I’ve been spending more time painting lately, but I really, really feel The Gap. The vastness of the internet has always made one’s progress feel insignificant, but the sheer volume and quality of AI makes the world seem even more indifferent. It’s kind of laughable when I visit an old haunt like DeviantART.

I’m a little more capable of handing that sort of insecurity these days, but I don’t think I’d ever have picked up a pen as a kid… and I don’t even know if that’s necessarily a bad thing (i.e. with how fast things are going, maybe having taste is more important than being able to do the work for 95% of people).

I know generative AIs have been around for a while, but it’s this 404 piece about porn models that made me think about it more recently and try out mage.space. I don’t even know if it’s ethical to tag this post under Akihiko Yoshida or link to the artist. But I do think this animation looks really cool.

I think a lot about that time a kid in our GCSE Art exam tried to pass off some piece of work they found on the internet as their own.

#ai art #Akihiko Yoshida

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The Apple event was pretty boring. I thought the Mother Nature skit was kind of cute, but I appear to be alone in that.

I’m in the market for a new phone since iPhone X doesn’t get the latest updates. It’s definitely more of a push factor than a pull factor – a fast screen is probably the only feature I care about, but that’s massively outweighed by how aesthetically unbalanced the Pro cameras are. (And how they’re generally not good value for money, of course.)

The iPhone SE is an attractive price. I manage with a home button on iPad, but it does feel dated. So iPhone 13 it is.

#iPhone #purchases

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Pretty interactive from Berliner Morgenpost. A lot of people living in those lethal heat zones.

#climate crisis #climate change #interactive

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Enjoyed watching this Harstem PvZ cast today – perhaps mostly for the digs at faction choices (“This is the level of Zerg scouting that we’re dealing with […] my man hasn’t spotted a transition that takes five minutes to complete”). It’s kind of sad to see Protoss in such a bad state† – I miss bullying marines with a three stalker rush and having units which are actually powerful.

That could be some self-selection where I don’t see those stomp-y games getting casted, but I just watch what the algorithm recommends to me.

† Obviously herO’s not doing everything right, but it just feels like they just have weaker units and mechanics than the other races.

#Starcraft 2 #video games

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How to Blow Up a Pipeline was okay. I didn’t find it particularly interesting aside from the fact that it’s an adaptation (and that the message of the book presumably is). Certainly could’ve done with more of the diner conversation / aftermath.

I’m still pretty doomer on everything – permafrost thaw seems irreversible and I don’t know how we’d be able to fix anything in time†.

I wonder what it is about Just Stop Oil that’s so easily hatable. It feels like they’re targeting the wrong people – that their goal is so far removed from their protests that it comes across as kind of pathetic††. Not that I know what they should be doing instead. Maybe I would feel more sympathetic to destructive protest.

† Besides my ‘Fate of the World’ solution which means half the world dies of famine to keep global warming under 3 degrees. (Though it seems like cloud seeding shows promise, backed by data from a ban on sulphur pollution causing temperatures to actually rise.)

†† But that’s cooking oil 🤣

#films #How to Blow Up a Pipeline #climate crisis #Fate of the World #Just Stop Oil

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Chemist, Berserker!, Freelancer, Dancer (Meteor Run)

Aha! Here’s the chaos that I was looking for. It didn’t make a difference in this run, but I don’t think I’ll do a ‘strict’ Meteor run again if it means playing so much of the game as a Freelancer. Not that it's a weak or uninteresting class, but it meant that I was carving through most of World 1-2 with four Death Sickles, and breaking the occasional rod. Skipped doing the tomes, so it was fairly quick.

Chemist is a new class for me. I only used !Drink, Succubus Kiss, X-Potion and Resurrection until Neo Exdeath, when I realised just how powerful !Mix is – I thought the !Drink buffs were self-only, but being able to double anyone’s HP (and other insane buffs) is crazy. But the recipes are obtuse enough that I don’t think it's really my thing.

#four job fiesta #video games #Final Fantasy 5

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Blue Mage, Time Mage, Geomancer, Bard (Typhoon Run)

Not a huge fan of this party. Individually, they’re all classes I’m okay with, but it just doesn’t work that well together. It has weak Attack and is squishy for mobs, but also Blue Mage is exceedingly powerful with L5 Doom. This meant I was under-levelled and it felt like !Blue was the only way to beat most of the bosses. I managed to catch up in levels towards the end, farming with Bard’s Requiem in the all-undead Great Sea Trench (Neo Exdeath at Level 36).

I took around 15 hours for the main game, though I wiped while farming Reflect Rings (that I didn’t even end up using). Time Mage only came in for the post-game with egregious use of Quick (Poison Rod for Omega, and a dozen Shinryu attempts with a defensive Blue Mage + !Time). Geomancer and Bard continue to be less useless than expected – I think this is the first time I've relied on boosted !Gaia.

I hear a modern class-based RPG came out recently.

#four job fiesta #video games #Final Fantasy 5

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Discussion Summary: Blade Runner 2049

Just kind of boring. A small spark of inspiration with the twist, but that's about all.

I normally set aside contrivances, but I seemed to care more during this one. How can Luv kill cops on two separate occasions in a police station with no repercussions, but also why doesn't Jared Leto have an army of super replicants to escort Decker if he's the key to everything?

I don't think it has 'good worldbuilding' - nothing stands out as a particularly futuristic "2019". I think the food court scene is the only place that seems properly realised. Even then, I guess we have enough replicants to solicit across the street from cops instead of colonising planets, etc. etc.

(It's only on rewatching this scene that I noticed that the replicant leader shows up here. It's kind of important, but I don't think I'm totally to blame for putting it aside, since she doesn't show up for another 80 minutes! In fact, it's making me realise that Jared Leto only shows up twice and probably needs a scene at the end.)

#films #Blade Runner 2049 #discussion summary

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Been playing around with Twine and thinking how cool it is to use colour to differentiate the speech of different characters and how much more readable it is. It could make for dramatic reveals because you can tell whose voice it is without extra prose.

Then I realised that good authors just write better paced dialogue. Ignoring the impracticality, I think it’d be cool if they did this with books. (Or at least picture books.)

#Twine #writing

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Spent the weekend re-listening to Serial, which released almost 10 years ago. Its wonderful storytelling and the sinister piano still makes my skin tingle. Captivating, but not as magically so, as I found it the first time around.

I don’t have too much to say on the case itself, since this essay answers all of my questions.

I also watched the first episode of the HBO piece. That mostly just left me wistful for an American teen experience that I didn’t actually have. Which takes us full circle, because this whole thing was brought on by a Guardian article about revisiting old teenage journals.

Speaking of which, I’m increasingly curious how moments I’ve experienced first-hand might get portrayed in media re-tellings, i.e. the Hollywood shorthand for things which aren’t really that dramatic. I think it’s watching too many of those tech company miniseries: WeCrashed 8, Super Pumped 6, The Playlist 5, and The Dropout 5?.

#tv #serial podcast #nostalgia