soli

Do people really expect it to be anything other than just more GTA? The bar doesn’t seem to be set that high.

lmao that’s cool as hell

What are your thoughts on polyamory?

If they are polyamorous, it’s a no. If they have been polyamorous before but say they’re looking for a monogamous relationship this time, also no. If they use the term “ethical non-monogamy” in a positive way, even if they claim they’re monogamous, straight in the fucking bin.

I have used a check. I’m more likely to be able to get a mortgage and buy a house than to be accepted for a rental again, though I’ll likely die before paying it off. I still keep a fair amount of actual cash at home “just in case”.

Will be interested to hear your guesses.

Imagine a time before instant communications, where you have no idea how life has treated the recipient since you last saw them and it might take months for your letter to arrive. It is a sincere hope that they are well and that tradgedy has not befallen them.

It would be neurotic and unreasonable if your last update on their life was only days or even hours before, but in the days of letters hope is really all you had. It’s just honest.

To be fair, I’m certain that someone has written it with that as the intended meaning. It seems like the kind of passive aggressive thing some mannered British aristocrat would do.

It has it’s roots in actual letter writing, as in “I hope this letter finds you well”.

I can’t remember the last time I got a spam email honestly. I changed my address like 5+ years ago and it just stopped and never resumed. It’s not the email provider filtering them either, the only thing it catches are legitimate but automated messages.

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Starship Troopers is Heinlein not Dick, and it’s fascist nonsense. Verhoeven was right to throw the book in the bin after two chapters and the movie rules.

Never felt it in the first place, weekends always used to be stressful as a kid and it took a long time for them not to turn me into an anxious mess.

From the way you’ve described your mental health problems, I’ve had similar friends who have found stable, loving relationships. So there’s hope, though I know that can be the most infuriating thing to hear.

I literally never have. Same prepaid thing for like 15-20 years. The terms have changed a fair bit over the years but I still only dump the bare minimum for long/no-expiry from the same provider. Averaged out it’s only a few dollars a month.

It has some data now but I still just Wi-Fi hop in the rare situations I need internet.

$200,000 for a 1 Bed 1 Bath with an hour and a half commute to the city. It’s a unit, so probably has a bunch of other fees attached for upkeep but they aren’t listed. Area is far away from necessary services, highly car dependent and notoriously crime ridden. The unit is run down and requires renovations.

Double that for a 2 Bed 1 Bath in a similar area.

I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I’d follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I’m a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I’ve enjoyed the other Telltale games I’ve played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.

Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It’s far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn’t have any visual bugs, I didn’t have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.

But here’s where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn’t look better though. It’s just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.

There’s only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show’s aesthetic, but they don’t convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.

But visuals are not why we are here. It’s the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don’t get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.

The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.

More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that’ll push you past a threshold where you can’t return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don’t find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you’ll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.

The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina’s actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren’t any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.

It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn’t help but notice how much worse The Expanse’s were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling “drones” with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it’s credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).

The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it’s the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.

Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it’s suitability for this format but it’s just so creatively bankrupt.

One, that’s the kind of thin you get from it being cheap and way past the point you’re supposed to throw it out. Perfection.

Can an object be on both sides of the portal at once? Like if I ran a cable from the inside to the outside. I’m trying to work out how to handle water and sewage, because like everyone else I’ve concluded this is obviously a living space.

Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) is my favourite pirate game. No, it’s nothing like what you think a licensed tie in game from 2003 would be like.

It’s a real oddity. This was made by a Russian studio and originally meant to be a sequel to their previous age of sail game, Sea Dogs. In Russia it was still marketed as a sequel, without the Pirates of the Carribean branding. It has basically nothing to do with the movies in reality. I have no idea how or why this ended up being a tie in.

I don’t really have a short hand for describing the genre. It most reminds me of space sims - where you control a vessel which you can replace, has an economy/trade system, management mechanics, factional reputation systems and an open world. It’s not a simplified as Freelancer, but not a spreadsheet game like the X series.

The sailing is great, a happy medium between completely arcade stuff where you just point your ship where you want to go and sims. Wind and weather play an important role without being tedious or overwhelming.

You also control a character for ship environments, like boarding, and exploring towns and islands (with swashbuckling combat, of course). It’s pretty bare bones but the variety is appreciated. There are lite-RPG dialogue/story mechanics and quests, though I do not want to give the impression this narrative heavy game. It’s an RPG style that used to be relatively common but not so much anymore.

But the real highlight is the New Horizons mod which greatly overhauls the game. It’s been developed for almost 20 years. I don’t recommend playing the vanilla game - I enjoyed it at the time, but it’s just an inferior experience to the mod.

Best yet, it’s free. The game is abandonware.

I’m unironically disappointed. I’d take any new direction at the moment, I’ve already been pushed past the point where it wouldn’t make a meaningful difference to me if it got worse. Even a change with a low chance of getting better is worth it over a guarantee of remaining shit.

I’ve never done it in my own home, but I had a coworker I’d text with even though his desk was an arms length away from mine. Mostly because it could be hard to tell when either of us was on or about to make a call.