Reading

Core difficulty keeps having surprise bad guys

Today I beat the Darkness in the Midnight Fane in Wrath of the Righteous. ... I think it was Playful but there are a bunch of repeat Darkness so I do not remember.

First time I tried it was TPK and I realised I was going to need all the potion and wand and scroll based help I could get. Then I realised I had three scrolls of Mass Heal. After that it only took a bit of summoned spiders, some massive damage to the wolf sidekick (fixable with Raise Dead and some restoration), and two scrolls.

That fight has been so much harder so many times.

Online guides are dumb, the ones I found completely ignore the damage you get from healing spells. Pillar of Life makes a grand trap for dumb heals by negative fights, you just set them out and trigger the fight and run through them. Mass Heal is complete wipe out for undead. So that's two of the Core achievements sorted.

It didn't go bing today so I am hoping it will when I load it next.
... so much to redo if it did not bing.

It still didn't give me my achievements for killing Chained Darkness on core in the DLC, and that was really difficult.

It did give me a very nice belt of physical perfection in a glowy rift thingy, as a reward for doing Inevitable Excess on Core.
... I should have made a note of which name did that. Shall only need it again on a different play through but still.

Also today food arrived and I have remembered that putting some salad in my sandwiches makes them A+ good. My microwave is being replaced on Tuesday so I shall have several more meals to demonstrate this to myself.

This is not a wildly exciting life but it suffices for now.

Entry tags:

btvs

(no subject)

I am rereading a fic set in late season BtVS
and they just got started being told 'from beneath you it devours'
and this time around my brain has decided
it's not that deep?
well, obviously,
the Sunnydale sinkhole was just that deep,
but it's not that deep/obscure/symbolic.

Something was yelling at the whole town that it was about to be swallowed.

Then the town mostly evacuated, except people who wanted to fight the being swallowed, which... I mean, it wasn't swallowed into a hell dimension as far as we know? So that fighting maybe helped? Or the fighting triggered it. But in a year when the other outcomes were worse.

But due to the past/reruns/fiction not being something you can have a conversation with I cannot tell the characters that.

Also the show really tried to make it seem like supernatural evil
rather than a giant cave collapsing
so it's probably not intended to be simples.

But like, from beneath them it devoured.

(no subject)

Played Wrath of the Righteous for an unreasonable number of hours again.
Reality and me don't have to get along if i never go there.

I got two achievements on Core, though one was unplanned. But I did the 'kill the optional very tough boss monster on core' achievement for the Ivory Sanctum.

It might be that I have and played all the DLC so I'm comfortable for levels at the moment, but the difficulty went weird there. Like I know almost all my characters were useless because I forgot to pack for Swarms when I knew very well Swarms were about to happen, but I somehow managed just fine anyway. We are currently tough enough that mistakes make clattery noises on the way past is all. It's a bit unsatisfying.

I did however realise I shoud be less grump about the Knight Commander being the least optimised. I actually thought for entire numbers of seconds and realised that every Knight Commander I play is different, differing class etc, so of course the team that is there every time ends up easier to make work than a first draft of a KC.

... the only bit of my character that is working right is Dispels. I'm starting to think I should just unload everything that is not dispel. The idea of debuffing the enemy seems fine, the practice is not working.

But I got the achievement on Core and I am ready to hit the end of act dungeon next.

After I actually sleep. The non sleep lasted almost around the clock this time. :eyeroll:

Entry tags:

medical foo

(no subject)

I hate. Hate. Hate. Medical terminology. So much sometimes.

if you have named a sleep disorder something that requires five out of six searchable sources of information to have something on the order of "Despite the name, the condition is harmless" as the SECOND LINE OF THE ARTICLE, then maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should consider renaming the disorder to something a LITTLE less disquieting than Exploding Head Syndrome!

(It's a parasomnia, a type of sleep disorder involving abnormal movements, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, or dreams. Sleepwalking, talking in your sleep, night terrors, etc. are all parasomnias. Exploding head syndrome just happens to have the worst possible name, because the diagnostic cases involved people waking out of a sound sleep from an auditory hallucination of a SUDDEN AND HORRIFYINGLY LOUD NOISE. From what I've read about the condition it's at least several hundred years old- the oldest recognizable description of it is in a 1691 biography of Rene Descartes, with the definition of the disorder dating to the 1870s and the official naming of the condition being done by a neurologist in 1989. No damage, pain, or other serious issues involved, just an incredibly distressing name.)

(... oh, yeah, long story short, I woke up ten minutes before my alarm went off because my brain decided I REALLY needed to hear the sound of somebody hammering on the doorbell as loudly as physically possible. I've had other cases of my brain doing this to me before, with all kinds of different, singular loud noises. It's been months since the last EHS incident, though.)

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Doctor Who audios

Today I listened to
https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-seventh-doctor-new-adventures-volume-01-1882
7, Roz Forrester, and Chris Cwej
The other audios with those companions are listed as novel adaptations so I guess this set picked some good stories to adapt.
Clever and emotional stories, I rated this set 5/5 despite having no prior attachment to these companions.

I also liked
https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-classic-doctors-new-monsters-4-broken-memories-2648
Broken Memories
4 different Doctors, 4, 6, 8, 7. 4 travels with Sarah Jane and 6 with Mel.
I gave these stories 4.5/5 though I'm not sure, could be 5 or 4 if I think about them a different way up.
The thing is the set ends all the stories in a sort of ( Read more... )

I think in a different mood I would rate these a lot lower but I was fine with the degree of open ended they were today.

Good sets, left me wanting a slightly different set of stories.

Entry tags:

games

(no subject)

Playing Wrath of the Righteous and my characters have levelled up to the point where the main problem is standing still for two minutes before a fight while we cast all the buffs.
Also remembering all the buffs. That is a non trivial problem now. There are... so many.

I am having a weirdly unsatisfying time playing even though I am beating most fights and even the tough ones only take two or three goes, on Core. I think it's because I am aware I am not doing it right. I haven't thought of a better way but I know this one is actually rather rubbish. So I am winning, but it is not elegant glorious solutions to demon problems, it's just the thing where I can stack buffs until the enemy are rolling for twenties just to have a chance to hit, we've got armour and damage reduction, their elemental damage can't get through, everyone is protected from poison AND disease, and death ward is taking care of level drain and negative energy on the whole, so when they actually do hit at all with anything? There's barely any damage. Teensy tiny damage of smallness. So I can do really badly, Woljif tends to be rolling for twenties himself because I cannot build that guy so he can hit for toffee, I've had to turn off half the clever feats because they might up the damage but the to hit is too bad, and yet still, I can just ignore the being hit, so I win.

It's like I'd rather play like Batman but at the moment I'm just a set of somewhat mobile walls and that's somehow working.

Still, progress is being made, and new things happen a bit because I am playing Angel this time, so that's neat.

(no subject)

I have been rereading the Mage the Ascension (2000) rule book I have
because I remembered some about the paradigms and wanted to see what all else was in there
and now I am remembering why I have not done that recently.

What is with World of Darkness as a paradigm? Like, everything is bad, everyone is a jerk, and it's all going to end horribly. Let's play!
( Read more... )

I will grant that in Pathfinder the main reason you want to bring magic is to stop other people's magic, the second reason is to heal after other people's magic, and the third reason is artillery, with a dash of librarian divination stuff on top, but that all seems pretty clear from the get go.

Not massively interesting, but clear.

The base idea of ideas competing to build a better world, with no commonality in how they define better, does appeal
but what does it look like
and how do players even get along long enough to find out?

Since I have got fed up and put the book down before finishing the rules I likely will once again not find out.

But I like the idea of having competing approaches to the whole 'what is magic' baseline, the how does it work and the Why of it.

Pathfinder character classes do magic differently from each other but the way magic works and how it relates to the Great Beyond and what it can do to the world (undeath and mana wastes and worldwound) is all built in.

You've got competing deities but the atheists are apparently the only ones arguing about what Is a deity and how you Should approach them. Everyone else is seemingly on the one hour of spells go in magic comes out train.

But then you get Wrath of the Righteous and the more you poke that the more lore comes out about how one even becomes a Demon Lord, capable of sharing spells with followers. Including that they didn't necessarily ask for or want the followers. Which is more interesting.

And the Windsong prophecies on the paizo website have a lot of different takes on Divinity.

... I have one book of Mage and one bookcase of Pathfinder, I am going to have found more corners of Pathfinder...

I guess Mage asks about What Is Magic For but then tells you over and over it's not going to matter anyway. And that trying to figure it out is going to make people all messed up in myriad ways.
And I felt that slams the door on the interesting bits they just raised.

But asking about paths to power and what it does to people to walk them is interesting.

This is why I keep the book and then don't finish reading it...

Community spaces, alcohol included

Today I was looking up pubs on the property websites
as you do
because I was thinking about story characters venues
and also
I've read a bunch of stories where people retire to run a pub
it's practically What Adventurers Do
and yet
pubs are closing so much so fast everywhere
these places that have been there doing what they do for hundreds of years
are just
gone.
( Read more... )

Now I've typed that all up I am getting the deja vu of I probably typed this before.

It's just very weird when your local is closed for sale.

Like you have to think about how much is just... gone gone.

... but gone gone includes a lot of the nice little shops there used to be, like for very colorful jumpers, or scarves, or sparkly things that are not technically jewelery.
And I saw a newspaper article about how Argos has been a bad buy and it's going to be hard to sell, and the physical shops are mostly gone anyway. If our high street Argos closes that's a huge great chunk of Empty on a main corner, and that keeps happening to Everything.

But you can't just switch to online shopping without assuming so many more risks yourself, because the listings tell lies or are from shops that close by the time you want your money back, and at least in the high street you'd get more signifiers of that.

... I am not enamored of the linear nature of time of late.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

So, got COVID last week. Thought it was just bad cold symptoms, then I realized I was feeling my shirt against my skin the way I only do if I have a fever. Since I was supposed to go for an abdominal ultrasound (possible gallstones) last Friday I got a COVID and flu at-home test and spent fifteen minutes in the bathroom.

Fever never went above 100.6 for me, thankfully. Did not lose what little sense of smell I had to begin with. I no longer have to isolate but I am now back to my all-too-familiar state of 'sinuses full of snot, post nasal drip, HORK HORK HORK coughing'. I'm taking a store-brand severe cold and sinus pill every four hours for that and drinking so much tea I feel like the goddamn harbor. Could be worse so I am not going to bitch beyond that. I'm definitely grateful my boss's first statement to me when I logged in on Monday, after dealing with a tech support issue, was 'how're you doing? Plan on working from home this week'. I wasn't looking forward to mornings of trying to assess whether I was fit to haul my ass to the ferry terminal or not.

having said this I am trying to remember where I go to edit the quote at the top of my journal page because yesterday I found out about a species of water beetle in Japan that has been documented as surviving being eaten by frogs, but only so long as the beetle is able to keep moving. The scientists tested it by applying wax that immobilized two legs to several beetle. None of them made it out in any recognizable form, whereas the others managed to get through. Longest time documented was several hours, others made it through in 115 minutes, but one beetle managed to speedrun the frog in six, which... has to have been quite the experience for the amphibian.

Mostly I just like the sound of 'keep moving. there is light at the end of the frog'.

ETA: found the customization page.

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Zappy bit of metal drives the plot

Today I woke up from a dream
where the brain chip Spike had in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was retasked by US law
to enforce modern slavery
as punishment for a crime
where the crime was notionally theft
and the theft was inability to pay a bill or pay back a loan.

Also they had, like, prepackaged debt that could be bought and sold and traded around,
so they didn't have to prove it was originally your debt,
they just had to get your thumbprint on you 'accepting' responsibility for the debt now,
kind of like when companies pursue debt from dead people
and their heirs might not know any better.

But even within that very loose definition of debt
the standards of evidence were insanely low
like debt recovery people in the here now who don't even prove you have the same name or address
just pursue someone with vaguely the same initials
or a similar postcode
and leave it up to the 'debtor' to prove they never were that person.

Put it all together with a chip in your brain though
and it applied aversive stimulus
whenever you failed to demonstrate remorse
ie
said things like
I didn't do it
it wasn't me.

... now I'm awake I only find the whole thing implausible
because the cyberpunk future costs money
and just trashing someone's credit rating and waiting
is practically free
so why brain bomb them
when they'll sign up the old fashioned way
and queue up for zero hour gig economy work
instead of becoming legally property
and an owners responsibility.

Just seems too spendy.

However
thinking about murderbot
the answer becomes
some people have too much power
to leave it unplugged.

So it's brain bombs for the ones with the weapons
or the lawyers who enforce where to point them.