Raptorpat

I finally just caught the first two episodes of the season. It is great to be back, the only reason I have for being able to put off watching for a week and a half is that I forgot how good the show is.

I hate that modern tax prep is the result of millions of dollars' worth of lobbying on behalf of tax prep firms to prevent the simplification of tax filing so that the firms have a raison d'etre. I also hate that TurboTax let me go through the whole tax prep process, and then at the very end of the process before filing for my only $60-$70 combined returns it tells me I need to upgrade to the $55 deluxe version to actually file because I had an $8 foreign income tax credit that popped up. Rather than just alert me as soon as the foreign credit was imported in.

I hatched a bulbasaur, ghastly, and a tyrogue from 2ks just now

Speaking of which, as if on cue...

"oh God *cough* it is so strong it's palpable"

... yeah

You mean like when right as you sit down to eat dinner and the cat takes a spicy dump?

I think they said there were only five worlds Which, to be fair, this was a crowd funded game afterall

I only saw one review (I think ign) and when it praised the game it was because of the retro vibe, feel, and sound. I think they gave it poor marks for camera control and inconsistent level design (some levels were great but there weren't enough in total to bury a dud).

How sweet was the sound?

Good thing it's not my birthday or this would be really tragic

The internet said it so it must be true. you old fogey with your tapioca pudding and your daily infusions of the blood of the youthful and your sponge baths

So did they completely kill the rate revives are given at? I went from like 40 revives to all my good ones are dead and there's nothing I can do.

It's like they saw this thread on our private message board and knew

Guess that explains the metal coat I got today.

I think it handled returning to the zones pretty well, given how linear they were. They gave you new sections to explore or twisted the environment into something new. I think the late return to the Eldon volcano area, where you lose all your items and weapons and you have to sneak and rebuild your inventory under the cover of night, was pretty clever. The sky hub was absolutely devoid of anything interesting though. It was like windwaker's ocean but more extreme.

The thing about it though was that, for whatever reason, it didn't even dawn to me that I was playing a tutorial until I got the glider, saw the cutscenes, and realized the Great Plateau, and what little was on it, was just a tiny, empty fraction of the world. It was like something straight out of Plato's allegory of the cave.

When I played the first few hours on the Great Plateau "tutorial" area, my two main thoughts were "wow this is really expansive, it'd take me weeks to explore this whole thing" and "I am starting to notice a distinct lack of characters, I have a bad feeling I'm in an expansive world with no characters to ground it to again." And then I obtained the paraglider and the real game started - I realized the Great Plateau was the tiniest sector on the map and there were no NPCs because it was abandoned, as the first thing I ran into on the ground were treasure hunters.

It took me until the very end of the game to figure out that slow, methodical sword swings were the best way to go, as I was still used to wagglemotion from the TP port. It was a very different Zelda game, one of the most linear and with the least sense of a unified overworld. Seems to me that they totally overcompensated in the other direction with ALBW (testing nonlinear play) and ultimately BotW (open world RPG).

The trailers have definitely given me the nostalgia. I think they cancelled the Wii u port in favor of a switch version, so I don't think I'm going to get to play it any time soon.

Waking up on days off is the worst, except for the first day back to work after actually sleeping in and then not falling asleep at night.

I've played cosmic encounter with friends and I infamously lost twice in instances where everyone in the game won but me. I really love the board game Diplomacy. I've wanted to try to start an online game here, but haven't had the free time or motivation to initiate a game and teach people how to play.

That poet guy was a tool amirite

Of all the notifications the game sends you from time to time, it should notify you when the coin timer resets and when a pokemon gets knocked out of a gym. Worrying about gym stuff is so far out of my routine that I forget, obviously.

I just realized I forgot to collect my 10 coins yesterday D: