Castle Magus

I don't know if it's a Windows 10 thing or a my-specific-computer thing or what, but I've noticed that ever since I installed Windows 10 however many months ago that was, every program (or app or whatever the hell you call them these days) I open, the first time I open them after a boot, they invariably take something in the vicinity of three to five times to fully start, be it a game or a word processor or Internet browser or whatever. This is not something that occurred back when I was still running Windows 7, at least as far as I recall now. It's gotten to the point now to where I just automatically close a thing down as soon as it gets to the main menu (if it's a game) the first time I launch it, because A) I know that on all subsequent launches, it will start normally until I boot the computer again, and B) I'm actually not sure if this long-load-on-first-launch thing affects only the initial loading or if it will run more slowly the whole time on the first run. Checking Google for an attempt at more info on this issue has led to zilch for me so far.

My Time at Portia seems very similar to Stardew Valley but with 3D models instead of 2D sprites, more focused on building/crafting than on farming, and with voice acting. Also, so far at least, I haven't felt nearly as overwhelmed playing MTaP as I did the several times I've tried to get into SV.

Also, My Time at Portia is the third game I've played recently that lets you pick up and store animal poop in your inventory (an "honor" shared with No Man's Sky and The Sims 4).

Oh, right, I'd forgotten why I quit playing The Sims Medieval all those years ago and never bothered trying it again, until now. It's a bug-ridden roach motel of a game. I was hoping that maybe the "Special Edition" on Origin would have had some of the issues maybe, you know, fixed, but no dice. Obviously, EA doesn't roll like that, dawg. And unlike the mainline Sims games, there are hardly any fanmade bugfix mods, either, and none for the game-breaking issues I was having.

Rather than ranting at length about the perpetually ongoing asshattery of Dumbshit Jackass Trump that prompted the above embedded political ad which has President Dumpass all in an infantile tizzy, I will instead just copy/paste the words of Wil Wheaton, taken from his post on Facebook in which he does all the ranting for me:

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Shitler and his enablers are threatening to have the FCC *revoke the license* of any broadcaster who airs this ad.

Be a real shame if literally everyone in America saw what they're trying so hard to deny ever happened, and recognized this undeniable truth: America's intelligence and public health officials told Trump all of this would happen, and Trump ignored them. Then he straight up lied about the risks facing America and the world, and then he lied about lying.

Trump knew, he just didn't care, because this is a fundamental truth about Republicans like Trump: They don't care about people and their quality of life. They _only_ care about accumulating money and power for themselves and their allies. They _do not_ want government to work to protect and care for the basic human rights of anyone, including their own voters. It's unsurprising that, with these fuckers in charge, we find ourselves leading the world in COVID-19 cases.

Trump and his cultists are lying about his callousness, dismissal of experts, and refusal to take the most deadly and serious pandemic in over 100 years seriously.

For those of us who remember "Bin Ladin determined to strike in the US", this feels a lot like history repeating itself. We need to do our best to make sure they don't get away with claiming, like Bush and his administration claimed, that "nobody could have seen this coming."

Experts kept begging Trump and the grifters in his administration to pay attention and prepare, and they couldn't be bothered. That's the truth. The truth is that Trump didn't care about you, he didn't care about your family. He DOESN'T care about anyone but himself, his wealth and his power.

Do not let them get away with misleading the public now, and in the future, about how utterly and completely they failed to prepare America for this crisis.

#FuckTrump

What a goddamned moron. Every day that this man remains the President of the United States is a sad day for the country and the world.

Also, on a related topic, it is amazing how ridiculously not photogenic the man is.

(Via rabbitucker via Facebook.)

(Mostly copy/pasted from FB, but with some additions [beyond just the hypertext] that weren't in the original FB post.)

(Also, "RPG games" is kind of fingernails-on-chalkboard to me, but... meh.)

Not going to do a whole huge-mini-review of each game on the list this time, but of these, the ones that I've played (none yet to completion except for Diablo, which is only mentioned), are: Nox, Grim Dawn, Transistor, Depths of Peril (I own Din's Curse, but not yet Din's Legacy, and have played neither, and hadn't heard of Zombasite at all prior to this article), Victor Vran (didn't like it much), Titan Quest, and Sacred Gold. So... most of them, really.

The reason I won't be writing a huge-mini-review for each of them is because... well, there's really not a whole lot of difference between them. They could have also included Divine Divinity (completed as a mage) or Path of Exile (not on GOG likely due to it being online-only, which is probably why they didn't mention it) or Torchlight (completed as a vanquisher) or Dungeon Siege (really don't know why this one isn't on GOG, but that's probably why they didn't mention it), among many others. And, again, still, there's really not all that much difference between any of them. You're looking down at an unchanging angle at your hero (maybe some of the later games give you a bit more camera control), you're fighting hundreds of monsters and, later, stronger variations of the same palette-swapped monsters, you typically either choose a class at the start from the standard warrior/mage/rogue types (or whatever offbeat name a particular game decides to rename them to) or you start as a blank slate and build your character (mostly) toward one of these as you go along, you find tons of leveled, multi-color-labelled, sometimes unique equipment and other loot, and you usually have a hub location to which you return to sell or store that loot. And... that basically sums up those games, in a nutshell. Any differences are usually cosmetic, such as storylines or graphics or music, and don't really affect the gameplay itself.

I'm not trying to rag on these games, because of the ones I've played I've usually liked a lot (except for Victor Vran, which I really didn't get into much, the one time I tried it, and that may just have been due more to my mood at the time than the game itself). I even liked the free-to-play Path of Exile... at least for the 80-something minutes I tried to play it singleplayer, before I got randomly disconnected from the always-online server (even for singleplayer), which booted me out of the game, and then I never touched it again.

I guess if I had to pick favorites, I'd go with Diablo/Diablo II (never touched and likely will never touch Diablo III, due to it also being always-online, and not free-to-play... also Diablo II is on neither GOG nor Steam, for whatever asinine reasons), Torchlight/Torchlight II (though I've yet to finish the second one), and Grim Dawn (made it almost to the end, but then just... stopped playing it, for whatever reasons... likely because right when I was almost finished, they announced an upcoming DLC or whatever, and I decided to wait for that, then never bought it, then never went back to the original game).

Of the games in this list, I've only played Stardew Valley, Craft the World, and Banished, so I'll talk a bit about those.

( Lots of text )

So, yeah. Those are my mini(-ish) reviews for those three games.

And if I were making a list like this myself, I'd have probably added Slime Rancher and maybe Gnomoria, as well. (I won't go into writing big reviews for those, but they're pretty good, too.)

I wonder how many posts with the title "Another Seth Abramson thread" I'll have made by the time this whole Donald Jackass Trump shitshow is all over.

So yeah, the first time I read that hit piece on Slate a couple years ago was pretty much the last time I trusted Slate for anything.

Mr. Abramson links to the Slate hit piece himself at the end of his thread there. I'm not going to sully my FacebookDreamwidth page by posting the link here.

Real thread starts around here, by the way.

And yeah, it is ridiculous that all of these heinous, criminal motherfuckers aren't already in prison and haven't already been in prison for at least half a decade by this point, rather than acting as the legal team for a criminal buddy who is badly masquerading as a President of the United States of America.

(EDIT)

"So, Ben Matthis-Lilley, how do I feel about pegging John Dowd *exactly* correctly more than *two years* before his perfidy became evident to the public at large? I feel fantastic about it. Proud as hell. And I hope your breed of birdcage-liner 'journalism' dies—and soon."

I love it when Seth gets especially catty. It's almost never not fully deserved.

Really, this is only one of many, many times that Seth Abramson has been proven exactly right on something he was saying anywhere from six months to a year or two more before the mainstream media got more than a whiff of it. (And collecting and collating what "whiffs" there have been up to now has been Mr. Abramson's bread and butter for the past three-plus years now, which is why he has been and continues to be so knowledgeable on the subject of all of Trump's inane horseshit.)

And he even apologizes for spelling the asshole's name wrong.

(/EDIT)

This, right here, is a huge part of the reason I completely abandoned the toxic cesspit that is Twitter.[1] This never happened to me personally, but I saw it happen enough times, to famous, semi-famous, and non-famous people alike, that it just plain disgusted me, and I wanted nothing more to do with it.

"we argued for hours"

And that was Mr. Abramson's big mistake.

Of course, you can't and shouldn't just let these fuckers get away with constantly libeling you, but if you try to confront them about it, they win. If you don't try to confront them about it, they still win. I don't know what is the solution to this conundrum.

Lawsuits, I guess? But those take time and money, and if you (especially if "you" are a semi-famous person like Seth Abramson with as big a following of haters and trolls as you have actual normal, human, non-shitstain followers) sued everyone that libeled you on Twitter, you'd be doing nothing else but that for literally the entire rest of your life, and you still wouldn't handle even a tiny fraction of them (and that's assuming you actually won all your cases, which is not a certainty).

[1] - Aside from getting back into reading Seth Abramson threads, of course, though those are usually just direct links from the ThreadReader site, and I rarely venture beyond that anymore, these days.

Bitch McConnell has been in politics for far longer than Trump has. McConnell is much better at being a slimy shitheel than Trump is. (Trump is too brash and out-in-the-open with his shitheel tendencies, which, in many ways, makes him less dangerous and less of an overall threat than McConnell is.) McConnell is, for all intents and purposes, the only real reason Trump is still in office now. Trump has only ever been nothing more than a useful tool to McConnell. I've had no use for McConnell ever since he said his "number one priority is making sure president Obama’s a one-term president." He's just been proving himself to be a bigger and bigger asshat ever since.