Okay the image is messy but the snake coiling around the scales is actually a sick concept.

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?

They say you will likely spend 30-50 hours “leveling” in the desert, but… leveling how, exactly? Grinding the local wildlife into a thin red paste for dozens of hours doesn’t seem to be in theme with Dune. More like Runescape, where you also level all sorts of noncombat skills, maybe?

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.

That’s fair. I imagine if you are playing every day for a long period of time, the game would get stale if it never changed.

How do you even keep returning players? I used to enjoy checking out League every once in a while, but it seemed like it wasn’t possible to keep up with all the changes that way. Every time I went back to it, I felt like I was learning how champions and items worked from scratch, because they kept changing. Eventually after every champ I liked to play had been reworked (some of them more than once) I just gave up.

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

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.

This is a pretty common style of humor among older people IRL, I feel like? The problem isn’t that he isn’t thinking of them as people, the problem is that since they can’t see him laugh at their reaction they never get let in on the joke, which is an important part of the difference between joking and trolling.

What exactly are people upset about? Other discussions on this topic appear to mostly involve people who already know what’s wrong. Something about new player experience and bots?