Ooh, we should have them put up the Five Commandments of Discordianism (a.k.a. the PENTABARF) too!
THE PENTABARF
The PENTABARF was discovered by the hermit Apostle Zarathud in the Fifth Year of The Caterpillar. He found them carved in gilded stone, while building a sun deck for his cave, but their import was lost for they were written in a mysterious cypher. However, after 10 weeks & 11 hours of intensive scrutiny he discerned that the message could be read by standing on his head and viewing it upside down.
KNOW YE THIS O MAN OF FAITH!
I - There is no Goddess but Goddess and She is Your Goddess. There is no Erisian Movement but The Erisian Movement and it is The Erisian Movement. And every Golden Apple Corps is the beloved home of a Golden Worm.
II - A Discordian Shall Always use the Official Discordian Document Numbering System.
III - A Discordian is Required during his early Illumination to Go Off Alone & Partake Joyously of a Hot Dog on a Friday; this Devotive Ceremony to Remonstrate against the popular Paganisms of the Day: of Catholic Christendom (no meat on Friday), of Judaism (no meat of Pork), of Hindic Peoples (no meat of Beef), of Buddhists (no meat of animal), and of Discordians (no Hot Dog Buns).
IV - A Discordian shall Partake of No Hot Dog Buns, for Such was the Solace of Our Goddess when She was Confronted with The Original Snub.
V - A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
IT IS SO WRITTEN! SO BE IT. HAIL DISCORDIA! PROSECUTORS WILL BE TRANSGRESSICUTED.
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.
The mentor/parent figure has to die for the protag to prove that they're self-actualized or whatever. Sometimes I can point out who's going to bite it as soon as the first few scenes of the book/movie/game and it makes me want to stop reading/watching/playing, and then if I keep going anyway I regret it when it turns out I was right.
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.
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 think you need to use the same phone number you signed up with, but other than that I don't know. If you signed up with a burner phone, maybe you could do that.
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.
Yes, this is a 4 hour long review of a hotel that's already closed.
UPDATE: Ahoyoo has confirmed that Trimming the Herbs was uploaded with TAS tools, meaning that The Last Dance was the final legitimate level all along! Congrats to kazeihinn on the Last First Clear! The journey continues in Super Mario Maker 2...
ORIGINAL POST:
Team 0% is attempting to clear every level in Super Mario Maker before the servers shut down on April 8. (New level uploads have been disabled since 2021, so there is no danger of new levels appearing at the last minute.) As of a few days ago, only a single level remains: Trimming the Herbs, uploaded in 2017 by Ahoyoo. (See also Ahoyoo's original upload video.)
The level is short but extremely precise, requiring Mario to use Bob-ombs to precisely remove Piranha Plants and collect coins while navigating a tight space filled with spikes. There have been over 200,000 attempts so far! If you have a Wii U and feel like you might be a Mario master, this is your opportunity to pick up the final First Clear in Super Mario Maker history.
Getting a tattoo is one of the most permanent decisions you can make; it stays with you until you die. But one Ohio company is changing that: preserving tattoos as tributes to last beyond death.
The system:
MSI Raider GE67 HX 12UHS
Intel Core i9-12900HX
nVidia GeForce RTX 3080Ti (laptop)
32GiB RAM
Win11 Pro 64-bit
The problem:
Once in a while (usually 2-3 times per day), the system crashes, usually resulting in a blue screen with one of various error codes. Codes I've seen include:
HYPERVISOR_ERROR
CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT
VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Sometimes the system hangs but the blue screen never comes, and I have to power it off manually. When this happens, the fans go to full speed and yet the laptop quickly becomes incredibly hot if I don't power it off as soon as possible, suggesting that the CPU or GPU is maxing out for some reason.
Checking with Event Viewer shows nothing out of the ordinary in the lead up to the crash.
Things I've ruled out:
I initially thought it only happened while plugged in, and bought a new power supply. That didn't seem to affect the frequency of the issue, and I also have now seen it happen while on battery. I also initially thought it was more frequent while playing games that use the dedicated graphics card, but I'm not sure that's actually true; I have seen it happen even while just watching Youtube. At one point I felt that it happened more when I moved the laptop or plugged in USB devices, but I think that may be magical thinking; I have never been able to make it happen on purpose by doing those things. It does seem to be true that after it happens, if I let the laptop restart automatically, it often happens again in a short time, but shutting down and then turning it back on gives more time before the next incident.
Solutions I've tried:
I tried updating the BIOS and the Intel firmware to the latest available on MSI's website, but that doesn't seem to have helped. I also updated my nVidia drivers.
A possibly related issue:
A week or so before this happened for the first time, I updated the BIOS to fix a different issue. What happened then was: I was playing a game on battery unintentionally, and didn't notice until that "low battery - switching to Super Battery" warning appeared and began throttling system performance. I plugged the laptop in, but performance didn't improve. I restarted and performance was terrible across all applications, even Firefox. I checked Resource Manager and noticed that the CPU was being throttled down to around 0.16GHz. Event Viewer was showing warnings about this that said the processor was being limited by system firmware.
I tried using various Windows and MSI power management settings to resolve the issue, which persisted across restarts, fully charging the battery, etc. In the end, I solved it by updating the BIOS (to a version that is now one version back from the most current one).
It was a while, maybe a week, after running the update that the crash happened for the first time.
Current theory:
Is it possible I screwed up the BIOS update somehow? I noticed that it instructs you to return clock speeds to stock before doing the update. I don't think I've manually adjusted them, but MSI's "MSI Center" software seems to offer automatic adjustment. It was set to "Balanced" when I did the most recent update, but it may have been set to "Auto" when I did the first one, which I guess could be a problem if the CPU was automatically overclocked.
I'm crouched in an empty room, stealing everything. My stealth meter randomly changes to Detected so I stop for a while and wait for it to go back to Hidden. I steal the next item and get a notification that a bounty has been added. I'm still Hidden.
I finish looting and stand up. Suddenly: "You're under arrest!" A cop charges into the room and starts giving me a spiel. I unload my fully automatic Grendel into their chest at point blank range. Somehow this attracts less attention than quietly picking up comestibles did; no reinforcements arrive, and I remain free to wander around.
I come back to this room about five minutes later for an unrelated conversation. Everyone politely ignores the dead body.
I know this is all, like, just Bethesda game things, but for some reason this time it seems funnier than usual.
Also, minor companion spoilers:
spoiler
If all the companions get as mad as Andreja did every time petty theft escalates to murder, my ship is going to get real empty real fast.
Spoilers for the Wyrmway
In the room where you must demonstrate insight by striking down a representation of one of three writers, Amaps is represented as a tiefling:
!Image of Amaps being a tiefling
However, the book he wrote clearly indicates that he was a halfling:
!Image of book description that says Paul Amaps was a halfling
This is halfling erasure!
spoiler
I broke into Wyrm's Rock and assaulted Gortash at his coronation, where Wyll's dad, Lord Ravenguard, was present. I won the fight by falling back to the parapets (by the ballista) and forcing all the enemies to walk through Hunger of Hadar and Wall of Fire to get to me; they really hate pathing through Hunger of Hadar, so most of them waited politely in the main room while I killed the rest a couple at a time.
I knocked out Ravenguard and then shoved him to a safe place so that he wouldn't get hit by any AOEs. However, now that we're done, the post-fight cutscenes are over, etc., he's still just KO'd. Wyll doesn't have anything to say about him, and the quest journal entry about rescuing him is still on the step where it says that he's being held at Wyrm's Rock. Well, yes, I know, I found him.
So what do I do with him now? He's infected, it doesn't seem like I should wander off without him. I tried going to camp and there's still no quest update or word from Wyll. I tried healing him in case we need to talk to him, but I learned that KO'd characters don't get up when healed.
Update: If I long rest, the journal updates to say he is dead and his body disappears. It also implies the existence of a next quest step at camp, but Wyll says nothing about it. Also all my companions had the wrong dialog after a certain camp event, as though I had not yet killed Gortash who is very dead. Curiouser and curiouser. I think it's definitely true that they didn't plan for you to try to use the nonlethal toggle this way.
For context, Extended Information is a mod that shows hit chance popups for every shot, like the older Perfect Information, which (when it works) helps you develop a better sense of how much risk you're really incurring from enemy shots.
I've got a long and complicated mod list which is mostly (but not entirely) cribbed from ChristopherOdd's last Youtube playthrough, and I've noticed that the percentages EI displays, especially for enemy shots, are wrong. The most obvious evidence is that they frequently miss shots that EI displayed as 100%, but it will also show absurd numbers like 89% chance to hit by a basic trooper against a target in full cover while the shooter is wounded, and they'll usually also miss.
I think the problem is with shots that are modified by certain other mods, and I currently suspect EU Aim Rolls (which separates hit, crit, and dodge into separate rolls, as well as offering some specific tweaks) and Complicated Red Fog (which applies penalties to aim and other stats based on missing health).
There is a link in the Steam workshop page to a Discord server where supposedly the mod developer posted an experimental, updated version that solved some of this (at least with regard to EU Aim Rolls), but that link is now defunct (either the server no longer exists or it's private). Does anyone happen to have that version and be willing to share it, or know of another, more compatible mod?
Edit: For now I have disabled EI and I'm using EU Aim Rolls' built-in stat reporting. It isn't as nice, because it's just plain text on the right side of the screen instead of a color-coded popup over the shooter, and it doesn't have some of the extra info on the HUD that EI provides, but it does appear to be right, which is a good start!
Sometimes I can tell when my current DM fudges a roll to miss an attack or reduce damage. He has a tell in the specific way he pauses and breathes before announcing the roll, then tries to hurry to the next turn, which only seems to happen when someone is in a life-or-death scenario, but "luckily" survives.
Should I let him know he has a tell? Will it be less fun (or more stressful) for him if he knows I know?
