Raptorpat

It's true!

the other night I seriously considered busting out the air popper to make myself popcorn but my conscientious-to-everyone-else-sleeping side won out in the end

happy birthday yackie!

happy birthdya nameraaka!

The enemy placement thing is a good point. Even Purah was like "don't go to XXXX, there's a lot of monster activity there" (and I was like >.> 'now you tell me'). At this point I've done my first (Rito) regional quest, the kid wants to send me back to the depths (I think the last mission before Robbie goes to the lab), Impa wants me to visit the chasm, and the stable/newspaper quests are now all available. I definitely liked the dungeon experience and boss way more than the divine beefs, it just all felt way more Zelda-y with a classic-feeling Zelda MacGuffin etc. But what I really appreciate so far is that they took the same exact world and (a) removed calamity-related stuff, replacing it with upheaval stuff, and (b) changed the sequencing in which you interact with the regions. In BOTW, the hardest areas were Central Hyrule and like the mountains. In TOTK, you literally start the game in Central Hyrule outside the castle and explore on from there, and are encouraged to go to the mountains early. Practically, the upheaval debris makes climbing around the formerly endgame areas easier by giving you ledges etc., and psychologically it 100% changes my perspective on those locations and makes them actually feel like real locations irrespective of the game challenges that were/are present. The places I spent the least time in, be it because it was tedious as shit dealing with nannerpods or because I got to them after I started burning out on the BOTW exploration gameplay loop, are places I'm spending excessive time in now. And just finding locations of interest from a different orientation/perspective, like simply happening across a stable from the north instead of the south, does make it feel fresh in my mind's eye yet still recognize its the same place. Like in the same way everything feels a little bit older - people want to rebuild and grow because it's a real place. I have no idea if there's any payoff or not but seeing new foundations in the ruined castle town at the very beginning of the game got me giddy. I burnt out on BOTW and didn't finish it off for five years. I think in part because, though the world itself was clearly a massive labor or love, it felt a mile wide but only an inch deep. I burnt out on the gameplay loop because nearly every named location you could discover was copy/paste ruins and every item you could discover was disposable/replaceable or korok seeds. After a while of binging through ti, the world just didn't really feel "lived-in" to me anymore and the calamity narrative felt like a retroactive justification for having not populated it. The number of enemy types felt disproportionally limited for the scale of the game and the combat got harder by just turning up the damage sponging. So to contrast, one of my go-to examples was that all the wells in BOTW were just copy/paste assets and they didn't even delete the ground inside the well to make it seem authentic. And those same wells are probably a perfect example of how they improved on the "inch deep" part. I don't know where the story goes, but I feel like they could build at least another major game out of this same map without it getting stale. Sub out the upheaval stuff the way they subbed out the calamity stuff, and replace it with whatever the new thing is while continuing to make it all feel that much more organic and lived-in.

if he got serious and called you a liar in a not fun way, then yes

idk, anyone that summary applies to I'm referring to the most recent voting thread I just caught up on, but but there were a couple of times before where the vibes just went real sour

Can y'all find the line between good-fun and too-serious? I think everyone loves the energy both teams have been putting into their challenges and it's entertaining when both sides are ribbing each other in good nature and are having fun with it, but I don't want this game to sanction genuine drama. Like don't go for the jugular, but also don't be a big baby when someone tosses a fart bomb on your lap because fart bombs are part of the performance.

*looks out window* MOM THE EYE IS WATCHING ME POOP AGAIN

my dad said one of my aunts thought the words to the song were "shit on rye, shit on rye, shit on rye - cocaine"

Do you fall into the camp that the Senate-negotiated bill that passed wasn't good enough?

I think the game does a good job of trying to guide you through the early stuff before encouraging you to eff off on your own. I didn't want to make the mistake I made the first go around in BOTW where I off-ramped too early from the opening quests (and then got the camera/upgrades after doing like half the game), but I still feel like I sidetracked too soon because I wracked up higher-end gear facing black-tier monsters and then go back to the main questline to like meet Impa to learn about the glyphs and it felt like I was back in tutorial land with one-hit-to-kill red-tier guys again and my pad isn't fully online yet. It's a balance trying to not blast through the story first without totally overshooting the natural progression.

I didn't make the hat before the time ran out! D: I actually hadn't played tues-thurs and that's the longest lapse in playing I've ever had I think. Just something about the holiday schedule fried that part of my brain.

some of the very most important ASMB lore

i haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate starting to do the dishes, i guess once I'm actually doing them its fine but conceptually i haaaaaaaaaaaaate it i also haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate the litter boxes but i'm the only one who does them

Where is the meat lobby on this? I'd figure they'd try to shut this down faster than the dairy lobby is fighting against alternative milks.

yeah it's pretty much trench warfare at this point

could you be a little more specific? it just kind of seems like he's checked off your "opposes post-WWII western hegemony" box and nothing else matters

On top of the shaping and probing, they're advancing into the first trenchlines in the south and retaking parts of the Bakhmut area while forcing Russia to choose where to prioritize defense. They obviously haven't committed their main forces yet but to say the prep is failing just because the big map isn't changing colors yet is a bit presumptuous.

But that's not even true relying solely on Russian sources.

What about his domestic record on civil rights, or human rights, or political rights, or press rights, or on public/private corruption?

I wasn't quoting ISW for that ratio, I was sharing them for the state of the battlefield.

What about domestically? Or does that not matter? ISW is a hawkish American non-profit, but the credibility of their reporting in this instance is based on their citing all of the available sources from both sides of the conflict when they compile their daily reports/maps.

By what metrics?

whaaat It took Russia/Wagner like nine months of like 7-1 casualties to take the city because it was an internal/politically important victory once they were pot-committed. Ukraine's military objective was to delay them for as long as possible while exacting as many casualties as possible. And as soon as they finished capturing the city and Wagner pulled out, Ukraine started pushing right back into Bakhmut with fresh forces while Russia is overextended and they has to pull from elsewhere to lock it in. https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1675314595983163392