I am not surprised that Yennefer selling out the Lodge got scrapped. That sounds like a plot thread that deserves way more room to breathe than being crammed into the ending sequence.

I am just about to start the DLC, but I think the quality of the major bosses in the base game is pretty good. I would actually say that my main complaint is that they aren’t balanced around using all the new bullshit, so it ends up being more fun to fight them without it. Like, I’d love to mess around with spirit summons, but most of the bosses have terrible decision making when there’s more than one target available, so you just get a bunch of free hits. For my replay I just used a bastard sword and restricted myself to “fair” Ashes of War that feel like normal parts of a weapon moveset, like Stamp (Sweep) and Impaling Thrust, and only used a shield on fights where I couldn’t figure out how to do the fight without one, like Radahn, and it was a lot of fun! I also tried out perfumes for the first time and I think they might have to be relegated to the “overpowered” section in future playthroughs: Uplifting Aromatic in particular giving on-demand Opaline Bubbletear effect is extremely powerful and let me win some fights that I wasn’t actually proficient in. (Also it’s not especially fun to farm snow trolls for Arteria Leaf once you run out.)

My secondary complaint is that a lot of minor bosses, especially in the overworld, have a lot of terrain jank and camera issues, like Lansseax going down the nearby cliff and then having weird geometry issues with the tiny raised section down there, or the tree spirit “miniboss” in the rotten pond in the Haligtree that is encircled by raised roots that make the proper part of the boss arena too small, and which it regularly clips through during its animations, making it even harder to see what it’s doing than usual.

Looking forward to it! The Bloodstained games are some of the best Castlevania-likes I’ve played.

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?

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.

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?

The $250/month plan supposedly includes unlimited traffic. If there’s actually a limit where you’re supposed to switch to a more expensive plan with no standardized price, maybe CF should say what the limit is?

Wait, is this my “nightmare sound”? When I have nightmares (fairly rarely, but I’ve gone through times when they were more common) there’s a sound that goes with them, and builds in intensity as the fear comes to a crescendo. It’s like a high-pitched whine that starts as a hum (like tinnitus) and slowly grows to ear-splitting intensity, except it’s more like head-splitting because it feels like the origin is in the center of my head. And I say “feels” intentionally because it’s not just a sound, it feels like my consciousness is vibrating apart.

Often the actual content of my nightmares is mostly abstract (like worrying about why the room is dark, or feeling followed but not knowing by what) and the terror is completely disproportionate to the events, but directly proportional to the intensity of the sound.

Uh, for me it’s firmly inside the dream though, I wouldn’t classify it as a hallucination. When I was taking antidepressants I used to have hallucinations wake me up—like waking up because I heard my mom talking, when she was in a different state—but that felt different. That was like hearing someone in the room with you and having it pull you out of whatever dream you were having. The “nightmare sound” is inside the nightmare, it isn’t what wakes me up.

So, uh, are we doing World War 3 now? Just asking because I need to know if I should be canceling my summer plans and investing in canned food.

A measuring cup is a specific size, about 237mL. There’s a whole system of US measurements, actually:

3 teaspoons in a tablespoon

2 tablespoons in an ounce

8 ounces in a cup

2 cups in a pint

2 pints in a quart

4 quarts in a gallon

Not all cups are measuring cups; if you are having a cup of coffee that doesn’t mean your cup is exactly 8oz. You just infer from context that if someone is talking about ingredients then you should measure them with a measuring cup. (Very commonly you also see cups with graduated markings, which are US Imperial on one side and metric on the other, that go up to 2 cups/500mL.)

Honestly I feel like characters die all the time, to the point that I mostly roll my eyes at it. Yeah yeah, “stakes,” “emotional impact,” whatever, now they can’t be in any more stories, which is bad if I liked them, and also means they don’t have a chance to become more interesting if I didn’t.

It’s hard to know if I underrate it when I wasn’t able to finish it (or, honestly, make it even halfway through). I liked what I played, but I’m clumsy and slow. In Dark Souls this is usually forgivable as long as you learn to choose the right option; in Sekiro you must execute and I never got good enough.

Is the joke with apophenia that there’s no connection between the illustration and the definition? Or am I missing something?

It’s quite good. If you’re looking specifically for aliens, you’ll enjoy the second trilogy (Brightness Reef, Heaven’s Reach, Infinity’s Shore) which is set on a planet where members of various species are attempting to live together outside the structure of galactic society.

I like Sundiver even though it isn’t very much like the rest of the series. I’d say check it out, and if it doesn’t grab you just move on to Startide Rising. Skipping straight to Brightness Reef will also work.

I think the tentacles might be growing out of her back. And the “handbag” is definitely a grimoire (or at least a book)! It has bookmarks in it.

Before I expanded the post to see the tagline, I was like “Wow, I didn’t know those Anglicans were so zealous.” ^^;;

How did you learn they were tourists? Is there a better article?

I haven’t read the book in 20 years, maybe there weren’t any on Arrakis. But people for sure used them; this Dune wiki says:

However, shields for ships and planetary installations could and often did have extremely low penetration velocities, as artificial life support technologies could be utilized while the shield was active.

So shielded installations must have existed.

It also says that Duncan Idaho sometimes used the threat of the laser-shield interaction to intimidate his enemies; I don’t remember that, it must have been in a book I didn’t get to.

We can’t have lasgun/shield interactions causing atomic explosions whenever a player decides to attack a shielded base

Cowardice!

(This was a silly idea in the books too, IMO. No one would shield their base with a technology that lets any suicidal fanatic with a lasgun destroy the whole area single-handedly.)

Reddit still full of crybabies, news at 11.