Pastelbat @pastelbat@awoo.space

Oh wow EDF5's difficulty is completely different in MP lobby vs SP campaign

I'd been told enemy health scaled with # of players, but I'm not sure that's true so much as MP vs SP.

But yeah, I'd been trying to tackle Hard missions solo in an MP lobby, assuming it just stacks difficulty according to difficulty level + player count. Then got disillusioned and went down to Normal, and still got nommed..

Now playing the same levels on SP-Hard and it's wow, kinda a cakewalk by comparison

Max Gladstone & Ada Palmer are my two main "Any excuse to loudly fan at people til they read their stuff" authors atm

Though Anne Leckie is certainly up there too, she's fab

Yay, dead-tree copies of Jacques the Fatalist and This Is How You Lose The Time War arrived today

Mainly curious about Jacques the Fatalist because of Ada Palmer talking about the weird narrator stuff it does and complete disregard for narrative/novel-format conventions generally.

grabbed This Is How You Lose The Time War cuz I will read everything Max Gladstone puts out there and it seems like a cool concept

I just realised something

You absolutely wouldn't find the Hounds of Tindalos hanging around run-down Universities in New England

Now, all the Universities built in the Brutalist era?

They be all over that

Brutalist university campuses would be eldritch anglepuppy heaven

'body horror', also known as 'scream at own ass'

*searches for collapsible box, collapsible crate, collapsible container*
*gives up*
...
Ah. Of course.

"I saw in a hall an arrow pointing the way and I thought that this inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inescapable and fatal projectile that pierced the flesh of men and of lions and clouded the sun at Thermopolae and gave Harald Sigurdarson six feet of English earth forever.

Some days later someone showed me a photograph of a Magyar horseman. A coiled lasso circled the breast of his mount. I learned that the lasso, which once whipped through the air and brought down the bulls of the prairie, was now nothing more than a haughty trapping of Sunday harness.

In the west cemetery I saw a runic cross, chiseled in red marble. The arms curved as they widened out, and a circle encompassed them. That limited, circumscribed cross represented the other one, the free-armed cross, which in its turn represents the gallows where a god suffered, the “vile machine” railed at by Lucian of Samosata.

Cross, lasso, and arrow–former tools of man, debased or exalted now to the status of symbols. Why should I marvel at them, when there is not a single thing on earth that oblivion does not erase or memory change, and when no one knows into what images he himself will be transmuted by the future."

The true power of seamstressing is when you realise you can make any obnoxiously patterned bedsheets or curtains into pants

My wish to play Go more and my aversion to playing 1v1 games with randos are dueling in my head

Playing with K is good but he's very early on the learning curve, and there's only so much 'getting kicked around the board' he's up for (which is understandable)

Thankfully AI is good enough that my tablet will handily beat me for the forseeable future

I should do that more

EDF5 is good

I've only played a handful of missions but "EDF 4.1, but moreso" is my general impression, which is a good impression

Also balancing out levelling and weapon drops across the classes is a really good move

https://store.steampowered.com/app/226840/Age_of_Wonders_III

Age of Wonders III is free (to keep) on Steam atm!

I highly recommend AoW3; It's a good blend of 4X empire-biffing and Heroes of Might and Magic style wandering-heroes/tactical battle shenanigans, and probably our favourite 4X to date.

It's wonderful seeing so many people getting into Evangelion / It's heartbreaking seeing so many people have Wrong Opinions about Evangelion

I'm so used to drawing furries that I can do human bodies pretty well but human faces are "Fffffrick how do I do this again"

Does anyone know of a good e-ink (or otherwise non-backlit) ebook reader that's either open or easily jailbroken?

Like, a Kindle without all the digital bondage those come with

(..Or "How old a Kindle should I look for and how hard would it be to hack open", alternatively)

Lightweight is also a big plus, as my wrists/arms aren't great for holding stuff up for long periods

Gosh the animation of Mob Psycho 100 is so good

It has a real good loose, fluid style of motion