Argonath Diver

I'm pretty excited. Did you try the Runemaster yet? Holy crap it's seriously some of the most fun moment-to-moment ARPG gameplay I've ever experienced. Just a total blast being able to cast dozens of spells depending on the combo. I didn't take him to endgame, as I think I'm just gonna wait to 1.0 before putting more hours in. I also liked their re-vamp of act 1 - the rest of the game could use a bit of a fleshing out as well and I hope that's part of their plan. Obviously the Monolith endgame system needs lots of help, and hopefully they can implement lots and *lots* of endgame stuff to do in general. The crafting system is so fun, and I really hope I can fully kit out a Runemaster come release.

Adolis Garcia was a bat-only, 1-skill AAAA guy when the Cardinals had like 8 outfield prospects in the mix. I absolutely thought he was expendable, as did the FO, as did every fan I remember on message boards etc back then. The Rangers gave up on him too, but he stuck around and now he's an absolute legend. I'm happy for him. Arozarena was similar - he had better stats in MiLB but was also deemed expendable by just about all of us. It's silly when I hear other Cards fans bitch about our lost prospects in the post-season. The Braves shoulda held onto their hometown kid Wainwright. 29 other teams should have drafted Pujols. The Phils should have been better to Rolen. Same for the Rockies and Arenado. Teams whiff on future winning players constantly in every sport. I hope Adolis hits three homers every game.

I lived 9 wonderful years in that incredible city. I'm also back home these days, meaning a suburban town that happens to be directly under the flight approach path of Scott Air Force Base. Eventually you get used to colossal planes flying overhead, completely halting all outdoor conversation until it passes. It's wild, people at a BBQ just kind of stop interacting completely, everyone looks up at this metal hulk flying impossibly slowly only a few hundred feet overhead. Then it's passed out of eyesight and the roaring ceases, we all just kind of look back at each other and act like nothing at all happened. Crazy to imagine what I see out here, only over Manhattan.

In the most 1990s Hugh Grant voice one could muster, "Egad..."

Your passion for the series is certain. However you may have come across this forum, you'll see that a ton of posters here are voracious readers, many of whom actively promote unheralded authors they enjoy in threads like the "What are you reading" and "Great deals" you'll see on this first page. Bumping a singular thread with little response comes off as a bit abrasive. I'd certainly recommend lurking in this amazing forum as I do, and as you find gems like the one you enjoy, sharing that in threads specifically suited for finding new authors. Cheers and glad you've enjoyed the series.

You have that right, sure, but you're not going to get much empathy here for it. What a ridiculous complaint. Good for you for owning it, at least.

What a thrilling first set of wild card series. Whoof. Congrats to the Twins, though! With the pathetic year for the Cardinals, I've hitched my wagon to Tywin's Twins. Mostly because I will never forgive the Astros and their fanbase for their blatant "Fuck you all, we cheated get over it" attitude. Go Twins

I foolishly watched a bunch of their livestream about season 2. Hooray, now you appear inside the dungeon if you port there! The main dev said this was a "huge" change. My god. What an abysmal game. I refuse to call that company Blizzard. It's just Activision using the name. Meanwhile I'm still absolutely blasting in Project Diablo 2 - just had my first SoJ of the new season. It's like they took everything I ever wanted from D2, added it all, then also keep adding more and more QOL and content. With 60fps and 1080p graphics (of course not as crisp as D2R's, but it's just D2 and idgaf) it looks just fine. My only gripe is that the terrific online community (2.5k players online right now) are all ridiculously far behind my slow-gaming self and nothing I find will have value only 10 days into the season, so it's basically an SSF experience for me. I got an old college buddy of mine hooked this week and his last message to me was "My wife hates you." I haven't seen that guy in 20 years but I've made an enemy of a nice Kansas lady.

He goofs off every media day. Last year he had absurd dreads. His interview about how this last week made him emo was hilarious, and a nice bounce-back after his weirdly angry comments about tampering when Portland got a massively better deal than what the Heat could offer.

I'm sure there's a relevant quote from the scripture about this.

Indeed. The series is full of some truly horrific scenes, to be sure. I'm rather claustrophobic, and Erikson's tribute to Moria (the escape from Y'Ghatan) was incredibly hard for me to read - but also one of my favorite moments in the entire series when they literally see the light. There's tons and tons of body horror - as I said, the kids exploding with gut-worms was the nail in the coffin for me. But boy howdy, that 40 page or whatever chapter was thoroughly unnecessary. Not to mention Ran's favorite character the Bro of all Bros just shrugging off his culture of rape with a non-apology. Terry Goodkind's obsession with Kahlan (is that her name? Man it's been a decade or more) being near-raped in every single book was quite troublesome, but I find Erikson's unabashed and repeated descriptions of terrible violence to women on par or worse. Perhaps because, as I mentioned, he also writes my absolute favorite scenes of any author. I still have the superb Tor Re-read bookmarked, and my last attempt at a full revisit had me going back and forth between the novels and the chapter descriptions. I think it's the only way I'll ever be able to navigate past the ~2000 pages of stuff I simply never want to re-read, to enjoy the ~4000 pages of content I love.

This series is certainly the most polarizing content for me personally of anything I've read. At its best, it has my favorite characters ever, my favorite incredible scenes ever, and a delightful amount of world-building and mystery that I love. At its worst, it's absurdly confusing and vague, with entire cultures and plotlines I have actual difficulty reading (Midnight Tides, blech, I just loathe everything about the Edur and Letherii), and some of the singular most disturbing scenes of anything I've ever read. Namely, *the* rape chapter (unfortunate that Hetan's horrors needs to be specified over the many other ones. Fuck Karsa Orlong). I can't imagine trying to read through that ever again, nor can I imagine how it would affect the many, many readers who've been subject to real-life abuse. I've also never finished the series, as it's Dust of Dreams and Badalle and the rotting kids that finally made me give up. Erikson's prose has a singular ability to instill empathy for a soon-to-be-killed character throughout the series, and get me cheering when beloved characters triumph or force me to find a tissue to pat down a tear-soaked beard. Then I'll hit giant swaths of content that I want to completely skip over. I honestly don't think I'll ever get through The Crippled God, nor do I enjoy Esselmont's different style enough to invest in his portion of the world.

Any skilled Go players here? I learned the basics back in college, enough to build a nice board in my dad's woodshop, but it's been twenty years. Logain's board had some spots that looked like proper eyes but the rest looked like random stones. Not that it necessarily had to be an actual game of Go, but that woulda been pretty cool. And it's been so long that perhaps it was indeed a realistically laid out board. Love that it's there, regardless.

You know what other leader thought they could get away with a life of blatant, public crime? Cersei. Imagine Trump being herded down 5th avenue, the very avenue he told the country he could commit murder on and not be punished. No bronzing makeup, hair shaved and white, pelted by tomatoes and lettuce heads. No rocks or damaging objects of course - surely Manhattan is more civilized than King's Landing. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Referencing Groundhog Day was pretty great. Oh man, just about every paragraph is dripping with contempt.

I'm not nearly as beholden to the novels as most here, and I'm shocked after that crappy first season that I'm suddenly waiting for Thursdays for this show. What a great time it's been, right? This second season is a sea change from the very dull first one. Anyway, loving it all, and I would like to mention a specific scene. Moiraine finally approaches her nephew Barthanes and compliments his sandwiches. She says "I think you'll make a wonderful King, Barthanes, a king to make our house proud." So, she can't lie, right, and surely at this point she doesn't know, well, who he ends up being. It jumped out to me, though, that she has to know he's an incompetent idiot, but she says that openly to him, so she truly believes he'll be a king to make the Damodred house proud? Anyway no worries and I'm not too worried but her compliments to this moron stuck out like a sore thumb to me.

How about the deep world-building of the Leisure Suit Larry series? I definitely had a 5.25" floppy disc of, I think the second one - that unfortunately for my 8-ish year old self wouldn't properly install on my mom's Kaypro PC.

I generally disliked but didn't loathe season 1. I've no interest in rewatching it ever and while watching the season 2 refresher, I'd honestly forgotten where most of the characters were after the season ender. That said, I'm having much more fun in the second season. It's a good point that simple questions like "okay where is this scene, compared to the last?" are hard for me to answer and I've read the books (at least the first five-ish) a bunch of times. The GoT puzzle-box map intro was great to reinforce where the heck people were. They certainly got a lot of very good looking actors for everyone. Just about every new character introduced in season 2 has been dreamy, although I'm happy enough that no one had any dreadfully poorly acted scenes.

Sisu felt like one of the Grindhouse movies to me. Absurd and silly and very 70s. Closer to Kung Fury or Death Proof than Keanu and Odinkirk beating up criminals. I enjoyed it as a late night romp that I'll never bother with again. The dialogue sounded like it was written by a high school kid. It was a really dumb movie but I don't think it wanted to be much more.

I really enjoyed Last Epoch on its previous major content patch and got pretty far into the endgame - which is loads more fun than D4 but far behind POE or even Grim Dawn to be honest. But it's getting there, and the combat is loads of fun. Specifically, this very moment. Because a week ago they released another big content patch, releasing a sorcerer mastery called the Runemaster. I figured I'd try it out, as lots of good feedback already was floating around. Well, let me say that it might be the most fun moment-to-moment gameplay of any ARPG class I can remember in years. Basically, you cast a Fire, Ice, or Lightning spell, and then any combination of those is released through the Runemaster's signature skill. But the order and combination completely changes whatever spell is cast. So if I shoot three cool fireballs in a row, I cast Runic Invocation and a colossal fireball obliterates the screen. or if I only cast two fireballs, a fire mortar shoots out a bunch of quick shots. Or Lightning-Fire-Fire and a "Hydrahedron" is summoned and spits out its own fireballs. It's ridiculously fun. Quite overtuned at the moment, but that's just making all the more entertaining. Anyway I won't be going hard on the game as I'm waiting for a proper 1.0 release to really flesh out endgame, but if any of you had bought a key prior, I highly recommend trying this guy out even if it's only til level 50 or something.

I for one enjoyed reading every Bakker thread on this forum even more than the books (in which I eventually fell to the inevitable slog). The height of this Literature forum was when those incredibly high-level philosophical conversation threads were neck-and-neck as popular as the brilliance of the Tairy threads. Also, back then we did have stronger Summon Author rolls. Edit: I should add that at approximately the same period, the Rothfuss threads were also generally a delight, with a nice mix of theory-crafting the puzzles (remember when someone figured out the poem!) and light-hearted mockery of some of the, well, fairy-featuring bits. That was also when we all still thought Pat was, you know, not a fraud as well.

It was pretty hilarious really. We're all in a Discord server for a Valheim server and he forgot it shows your current status (ie Playing Starfield). So boss saw him on late Friday, i saw him on like 4am, he was still gaming in the morning (when he texted saying he was sick). Boss typed "Bro you know your Discords been on since you logged onto Starfield last night" and the kid issued a terrified and heartfelt apology. Everyone's just laughing about it today. Re: the UI, ya I tried again sober today and it's still just a terrible UX for me. Same reason i havent deatroyed a Bethesda game since Morrowind. Game is gorgeous maxed out on my 6800xt but it'll wait on Steam til a major UI mod is released, as you pointed to that SkyUI mod.

I tried it out tonight and quit not a half hour in. I'm a PC gamer through and through, and Bethesda's increasingly console-oriented UIs have thrown me off through the Fallout and ES series. Even equipping the very first item in the game was a total mess from a UX perspective as a keyboard/mouse gamer. Ugh. I wish I were able to play modern games with a controller, but my thumbs are completely useless compared to my mouse control. Navigating menus with the E and R buttons and such is ridiculous for a 9-figure-budget game. Eff off, Bethesda. Anyway the game is absolutely gorgeous on Ultra settings and I'll adapt to the console UI using keyboard/mouse after a few hours once I get a day off. I had a coworker at our bar call in 'sick' tonight and get caught by the rest of us when he left his Discord on - he'd played it 13 hours straight and even my boss was mad but impressed.

Very excited that Steam is letting me download this colossal Starfield installation. It came free with my recent video card upgrade, and I'll certainly try it to push this 6800xt hard. Good lord, 87gb?! Also, I'm 37 gigs in already - good lord our network speeds these days are bananas.

So The Advertising and Netflix's relentless algorithm convinced me to try out the Gal Gadot spy thing that I've already forgotten the name of despite just trying to watch. Oh, that's it, Heart of Stone. 25 years ago, my summer job as a teen was at a kick-ass Blockbuster Video (as an aside, we all loved it there and had a blast). This film reminded me of some random-ass VHS in the Action section with some random 90s female action star awkwardly holding a pistol as the cover slip. I made it about 45 minutes in before realizing a mix of complete apathy and utter contempt was not making for a fun time watching a movie. I'm glad this is the last month using this service for likely a long time. Thoroughly unimpressed with their unique content business model, and their backlog of fun old movies runneth dry.