Hello, this is my personal opinion/ post mortem on the Vancouver housing protest on August 14th

A) Population: looks like 46-50 people showed up. More people need to show up.

B) Location: Near city hall. We had lots of cars pass by , but very little foot traffic that we could talk with and convert over. Needs more foot traffic.

C) Messaging materials: Lots of signs, lots of different messages (I liked build UP, not out), but none of the messages gave a point of contact, or a mailing list to join, or a website. This needs to be more visible so people can see how to join us.

D) Literature and handouts: We needed more of this to hand out to others. Someone did print out some leaflets, but we needed to hand more of them out. I counted 7-10 handed out to cars with open windows and 3-4 handed out to foot traffic

E) Media relations: most people found this protest through social media. We did have a CTV camera man show up. I am not sure if more media came.

F) Pre-game: It would have helped to have had a set of recommendations for thing for proole to have brought, like a leaflet people could have printed several copies of to defray costs.

G) Onboarding: Needed a coordinator on site to collect contact info for people that want to be on the mailing lists, or get info for people that want to volunteer more.

H) Identify allies: find groups that work in what we are trying to accomplish and link with them

This is getting started, feel free to comment or criticize this posting.

Rat Race was arguably one of the top five funniest comedies from the early 2000s and it would be really nice to see everyone together again. Of course if some of the vast amount of people in the first film couldn’t be there, you could have newer faces fill the spots.

Just imagine: Jon Lovits with his grandkids.

Rowan Atkinson as some sort of wealthy Ted Talk guy who wrote a successful book about Narcolepsy.

Idk. I’m just having fun picturing these scenarios. What do you all think?

Edit: My original line of thinking for this would be instead of everyone fighting for money, they’re all fighting for their lives. A dark twist where the maze is filled with traps and only one can survive.

Edit 2: HOLY SHIT THIS GOT ON r/all! Thank you to everyone who gave me awards and upvoted. We gotta get this film made!

Longtime snarker, just had a reddit username refresh!

Anyway, I'd love to have some port-mortem discussions about various bloggers/influencers who actually did quit. What were their strengths? Where did they go wrong? How did they transition to their new career?

Halloween Season 2021. Lord love a dayglo rubber ducky, Lockwood, where do I even start?

I’m going to do my best to be gentle, but I'm not gonna lie here. Compared to the last two years of Avakin Life Halloweens I’ve experienced, this year’s Halloween ranked somewhere between extremely disappointing and a natural disaster.

Here, in my personal opinion, are the things that went wrong, and also some of the things that I think had more potential to be successes if only they had been introduced differently. My opinions might vary in some ways from others’ opinions on this forum, but I think you can already tell from all the feedback that has been posted here in the past few weeks that this year's event was not generally perceived as a resounding success.

My personal favorite release this Halloween (and possibly this entire year) was the Broomstick Animation Set. As a Harry Potter/Wizarding World fan, I have been longing for something of this sort for years, so I was ecstatic to see that item launched this year. This was the biggest highlight of my Halloween 2021, so because God only knows we need a bit of positivity right now, I’ll lead off this post-mortem with that. Kudos for accepting that suggestion (which, as I recall, was suggested here on our subreddit multiple times) and running with that ball.

BUT...as desired as that item was, there were two things about that launch which prevented it from being universally celebrated. 1) It was released as a bundle rather than in the regular Shop. I have mixed feelings about highly-desirable, much-requested items being released in bundles. The upside is, at least bundled items are not in a coin pack, which not all players are able to purchase because not all players are able to spend real world money in the app. So in theory, bundles are available for more players to be able to purchase. HOWEVER, 2) these items were bundled in with other items which most players already owned, and there was no way at all to purchase just the animation set and broom separately. Added to this, the bundle price was extremely expensive, which added insult to injury for the players who were forced to pay the full purchase price in order to gain only the two new items in it. Had the bundle been made available at a more reasonable price, and if it had only contained the new set and broom, I think the feedback on that item would have been a lot more positive. But by packaging it with “luxe” pricing while stuffing it in a bundle

Hi all, I recently ran a session where I wanted to use horde like mechanics similar to games such as Vermintide and Left For Dead. The session went really well and was quite interesting so I through I would do a post mortem encase anyone is maybe interested. I will link (at the end) to all the resources I created that helped me run the session.

Story Overview :

The game was building up to the party tracking down a vampire who had kidnaped there employers daughter. After chasing him across the southern part of the world map they had caught up to him in the town that they later found out the vampire had taken over six months previous. They had started there journey with a wizard friend who was feeding them quest info but on there travels to the vampires town they picked up two additional support NPC's, a pair of witch hunters (Using a customized veteran stat block)

Expectations :

The players in the previous build up session to arriving at the town planed on riding into town, heading for the vampires creepy castle (que bats, lightening and cliché's ) and going for the stake in the heart.

What I as the DM wanted to get out of this part of the campaign was to create a combination of sessions that were filled with a real sense of stakes, true terror, overwhelming numbers of undead and a sense that the players were truly the underdogs. I personally find session where the players think outside of the box, actively plan and try see the impact of there actions are the most rewarding.

The Party comp All lvl 5:

Artificer / Artillerist

Rouge / Swashbuckler

Paladin / Oath devotion

Paladin / Oath vengeance

Party Support NPC's :

Wizzard - Old Quest Giver

Witch hunter - Melee background admin jobs

Witch hunter - Ranged background admin jobs

Initial Perceived Problems (DM perspective):

1. I was worried that the two paladins vs a lot of very weak undead would just use their Devine powers to make them all flee, removing all danger, suspense and terror. Also enabling the players to just waltz up to the castle with no real leadup of a sense of accomplishment (A paladin pay to win if you like). But I was equally worried that if I just turned around and said "Uhhh these are special zombies, so they are immune or Devine stuffs" that I would be taking away a core part of what make there character special and cheapening there experience.

2. Endless waves of zombies and skeletons would be a bogged down combat and make it repetitive borin

Hey All,

My mother recently passed away from cancer. Before she died, we signed a lady bird deed issuing me the house after her death. We did this for the sole purpose of returning the house to the mortgage company, as she has only owned the house for ~8 or so months, and there is not much equity. The mortgage payments are also substantial, $2000 per month. No one in my family can afford it, including my mother's live-in partner. We are in the not-so-great state of Florida.

My mother's boyfriend (we'll call him B from now on) is not on the mortgage. He gave my mother $20,000 as a down payment on the house, with the understanding that she would pay the mortgage for until she met that $20,000 mark.

I live out of state, so my intent was originally to follow my mother's wishes -- to let the house return to the bank. However, B said that we should sell the house and attempt to regain some of the money back for him. I agreed that I would pursue it. Upon discussing with realtors, the fee (5%) and the liability (stipulated in the contract -- if the house is foreclosed while under contract with the realtors, I would need to pay 14.5% in commission) led me to decide against selling the house.

B is furious. He believes that I am screwing him out of $20,000 by not selling the house for him. I wish my mother had signed the ladybird deed over to him, but she didn't. The house is in my possession, and the mortgage has a "Due on Transfer" clause. "If any part of the property or any interest in the property is sold or transferred without Lender's prior written consent, Lender may require immediate payment in full of all sums secured by this Security Instrument. However, this option shall not be exercised by the lender if such exercise is prohibited by Applicable Law."

As far as I see it, I have two options:

1. Sign a quit-deed over to B. Would one of us have to pay the remainder of the mortgage in this instance?
2. Foreclose on the house and wait to see if I get sued.

TLDR - Deceased mother's partner not on mortgage, threatens to sue me if I foreclose. Would love to quit-deed the property to him, but am concerned that I would have to pay Due on Transfer clause monies. Feel pressured to sell the house but do not want to take on liability or responsibility given out of state nature. Live in another state, property is in FL.

Yo, this is a direct followup to my earlier pre-mortem musings which I encourage you to read first:

Mostly-solo first-time indie marketing pre-mortem - 10k wishlists, a few days from release

Once again, let us skip the whole "haha thanks for asking" mating ritual: Pawnbarian is a chess-inspired puzzle roguelike, its Steam page is here

What follows is mostly just raw numbers for all your raw number crunching needs, nothing about the actually interesting parts of gamedev.

In a nutshell:

• "94% of the 178 user reviews for this game are positive."

• 8400+ copies sold (copies actually paid for minus copies returned)

• $45000+ in my bank account, or soon will be (this is after Steam cut and all the client side taxes/fees they handle)

• ~$30000+ net (after revenue share and taxes. other than labor & revshare, production costs were negligible)

• ~20 months of full time work on the game including the post release period (pretty lazy full time work, but still)

• ~$1500+ net per month

Where I live this translates to an ok salary (~15% above average), but certainly nothing special for a decent programmer, even in game development. However, all in all I consider these numbers an enormous success:

• got experience

• my next game won't be by an anonymous rando

• get to keep being an indie dev and live a decent life

• the money will keep growing, possibly by a lot - long tail, sales, ports

• helped my musician & sound guy Aleksander Zabłocki earn his fair share for the awesome work he did, which is as close as I can get to "entrepreneurial job creation" without feeling incredibly weird about it

• last but not least, I created something which I unashamedly consider to be pretty unique, well made, and straight up fun, and there are literally thousands of people who agree

Wishlist & sales dynamics:

• chart: last 3 months of units sold (per day)

• chart: last 3 months of wishlists (cumulative)

• had 10k wishlists a few days before launch (read my first post for the """marketing""" process)

• 4 days in Popular Upcoming before launch, +5k wishlists

• 4 days in New & Trending and bit longer in the Discovery Queue after launch, again +5k wishlists

• sold 4400+ copies in

[I checked with the mods if this was allowed before posting about it]

My book is mega dead, so let’s do a post-mortem because that shit is rad and also useful to people who want to publish books.

Hey guys! As you guys might remember, I'm the fencing dude who wrote a book a short while ago, and you guys were incredibly kind and motivational about it when I posted about it. I said it before, but you guys literally inspired me to write the book so I absolutely dedicate the book to this community—you guys were on the acknowledgements page for a reason. You guys were always encouraging me about my fencing shitposts, so I wrote a novel that is basically my fencing shitposts made into a fantasy novel: Duellist’s Road: No Shortcuts. And I’m always going to be really happy that I did it.

So, yeah—book launch has come and gone, book is deader than whatever joke of the week we beat into the ground, and I want to talk about why the book is so dead.

A lot of people asked me to talk about how the publishing process went, and since we have so many aspiring writers here, I figured it would be nice to share some insight into it, because some of this info doesn’t really show up publicly. You can sort of find out about it if you ask other authors around, but when you’re starting out it’s hard to really know other authors—which I fortunately do know now! But yeah this is the kind of info I'd really like to make sure the community is aware of for any books you release in the future.

So.

Uh.

Yeah let’s talk about how I fuck up and how Amazon is...a little on the difficult side to work with, so that you guys who are planning on writing novels don’t commit the same mistakes I’ve made.

Fuckup #1: For the love of god don’t publish in December

So, December sounds on paper like a good time to release a book right? A lot of people have time off, Christmas gifts—holidays are a rad time to release right? Well, no. Conventional wisdom advises people not to publish in December because people only buy books of known authors as gifts and so on.

“Well,” you might wonder, “even if you don’t get a bonus from Christmas, December is still a month like any other right? Not only that, KENP (royalty rates for books enrolled in the KU program) rates tend to be higher in Decemb

Heads up for those still looking to participate in the event that it expires on Monday (ie tomorrow). So if you’re looking at finishing your tree or are attempting to get to the 1% on Secret Santa.

Looking back on the initial concept I can certainly understand where the idea was coming from. The idea of a Secret Santa event has definite good intentions but I feel that the decision to add an element of competition to it undermines the whole point. Making a Super V crate the reward for the top 1% excludes everyone who has no intention in forking over thousands in doubloons to get the chance of getting a Super V crate (in most cases you’d probably be better off just buying the T5 premium you actually want). At least with the summer Treasure Hunt event you knew how much you needed to spend in order to get the crate. With this event, you could splash the cash and still miss out because you didn’t spend as much as other people. Also worth mentioning how poor the RNG is for receiving crates; I got my first (and only) crate yesterday.

As for the Christmas Tree event, whilst it does use the “entry fee” of credits/GXP/doubloons (like Treasure Hunt). You are at least guaranteed to receive the specified reward because you’re not competing with other players. You don’t have to keep checking leaderboards and defending your position. However, when compared to last year’s Advent Calendar, the rewards feel like a lot of work is needed for very little. The potato flag is nice and all but is it really worth 20m credits or tens/hundreds of thousands of GXP? Okhotnik required you to complete a simple enough challenge everyday for 24 days. This year, 84 games + ~20m credits gets you a flag and a 10.5% chance of a premium.

To sum up: Great idea, bad execution.

TLDR: For the most part, this is how events Should be.

Pros:

Calendars and Milestones that provide items of value to all levels of players.

The ability to grind to the end, with value added for continuing to grind even after that.

Snowflake currency being awarded for spending Campaign Energy and Iso energy - meaning if you purchased extra energy either through offers or coring you got double value.

The Option (not necessity) to buy snowflakes if you don't want to/don't have the time to grind

I didn't Have to refresh the store, there was usually something worth buying with snowflakes every refresh. But if I was looking for something specific I could.

Making the costume easy to obtain by playing the game, and letting us know up front that we had to spend money to get it, and making the thing we had to buy both worth it even if we didn't care about the costume, and making it cheap relative to how things are usually priced in game.

Cons:

Magik limited to 3 star unlock. While I want more shards from her, not having her in the store was a great idea. Let the focus be on getting useful gear vs having to choose character shards. Maybe in the future just have higher milestones for people who grind extra hard to get more shards. They don't even have to include any gear. Since 75k was the cap at 150 shards, maybe have the final milestone at 100k for the final 30 shards to take her to 4*. Doable but hard to grind.

Having to pay for the costume. Extremely minor gripe I admit considering the value of the orb. But several of my alliancemates missed out on the costume because they didn't realize they had to buy the ornament or did realize it and didn't check the offers and by then it was too late. Maybe something in the inbox when the ornament goes for sale so people get an extra look?

Verdict: A-. Almost perfect. Putting the amount of rewards we receive in our hands was huge. A little shortchanged on Magik is all.

I’ve been watching this case in Cook County for about seven years and there’s never been any progress:

https://www.namus.gov/UnidentifiedPersons/Case#/10805?nav

It’s so sad to me. I assume she must have been homeless at the time of her death and I assume the police assume the same thing, but it seems odd to me that she’s still unidentified given the dentals.

For one, they call her “Asian,” but Chicago isn’t really known for a large female Asian homeless population, and based on the picture I couldn’t say for sure she’s not Hispanic or Indigenous, and apparently she was found in or near Little Village which is a Mexican neighborhood.

Also she apparently had a lot of dental work at some point. Not terribly cosmetic dental work, and yet in gold. I assume her teeth would be recognized by someone who knew her with gold caps visible in the front. Maybe the work itself was done back in another country and she was an immigrant at some point, though if so that must have been when she was younger and less frail; I don’t imagine a 98 pound woman in her 60s crossing the desert recently.

Also dying in an alley. No sign of foul play mentioned on NAMUS and I don’t remember ever seeing a cause of death, but was she sick or starving and just no one saw her deteriorating or offered her any help? The body was found in May so I’m not thinking she froze to death. Normally people recognize the homeless people who stay in their area for a long time, yet no one recognized her? Was she constantly moving such that she never became familiar?

And they don’t seem to care. The Cook County missing persons page has a few more details that weren’t put on NAMUS such as confirming gold capped teeth or the fact that she was found at or near 3837 W. 23rd Street.

Yet when I search that address it doesn’t seem to correspond to any actual building or property. Google maps identifies a location, and it’s the same location as on the maps they uploaded to NAMUS, so I have no reason to doubt it (but if you look at the nearby house numbers on 23rd street they are off by 1000…) It appears she wasn’t really in the alley behind 23rd so much as under the bridge/overpass at the corner with Hamlin.

Very strange and sad, but it’s a case that crosses my mind a lot.

Sorry for the double post, last one is no longer valid and this one is more complete.

Playtime: So full playthrough was 37 hours which is quite long. In real time, I was playing it around a month. Well worth the money. It seems as though they don't make games like this anymore. I did most of the side quests I could find, including all of the hacker and Gary photo side quests (with the Plus Patch installed). The serial killer quest, pretty much everything.

The bad: The more annoying sides of VTMB started to show over and over again:

-Taxi rides: whenever you move from area to the other, the left click for selection gets interpreted from time to time as a click to arm your weapon, causing an immediate criminal violation upon arrival

-glitch involving shooting when loading a game: You load and you start endlessly firing with your active weapon

-autosaves: absolute garbage. You can be several spaces ahead and the game does not autosave at crucial moments for you

-DOORS!!!!!: Why are doors among the worst enemies in this game? Why do they automatically close, making it impossible to retreat during a firefight? Why do stop opening when you get too close? Why are they blocked by the most innocuous of objects, by enemies, making them impossible to open sometimes?

-weird mechanics: Why does the game unequip my weapon when I go into a boss fight, or after certain sequences?

This game has plenty of bugs that you all know about. The weirdest one was having random yellow rocks spawn in my apartment. I unloaded my gun thinking that something was wrong...

What I loved:

-The writing is top notch. The dialogue, the twists among many of the characters.

-The atmosphere. The Hotel level I will remember for ever, but the overall creepy atmosphere just gets underneath your skin.

-I cannot comment on how different playthroughs are, but what I've heard is that there are many more ways to do things that you will not see in one playthrough.

-The story >!the large amount of ambiguity and mystery surrounding the sarcophagus still leaves me guessing!<

-Side quests: though I wish there were more, they were all fun and straightforward, as well as rewarding, whether through experience points or money. I also liked that you had enough money throughout the game, but never too little. I still decided to max out my credit card for my last playthrough. I have a bad habit of saving things until the very end of the came, meaning I still had elde

Hello people of r/idlegamemaker. You might know me as the guy who made Get A Glass Of Milk Because You Have To and more importantly Pancake Maker. The reason why I'm making this post, is because tomorrow (January 10th, 2022) is the 2nd anniversary of that game. It's been 2 years since I released the 1st version of that game. So since I didn't do anything for the 1st anniversary (I was worn out from IGM during that time), I think now would be good time do something for this game.

A Post Mortem. Probably the first for an IGM game.

Where It Starts

It was the Fall 2019. School was near it's end of the 1st half, after a summer's and 2 months worth of trying to throw concepts for IGM games at wall to see what would stick. I've barely actually released anything I have thought of during this period. In fact, only one game actually did get a release (Before being taken down by me). Concepts I have thought of during this time were a Pokémon like game (Obviously I didn't do this), an RPG about traveling around areas to fight enemies (Failed Story wise), a game about ice cream being able to be fused and evolved (Actually released titled A[n] Ice Cream Clicker but taken down), a guide about IGM (Actually released, just not finished), and a mining game with RPG elements (This and the pervious idea were after Pancake Maker's development started). A game about pancakes was also thought of, so of course I considered it.

This was before the non-idle games (Forez's Dream / Milk Game) started being a concept on IGM that had some notable games. Almost everything on IGM at the time were Idle Games, which is cool and all, but I wanted to do something a little more unique. After my months of experience working on games that never went anywhere, it's about time I try to make something that I could stick with. That's how it started.

Pancakes!

During the development of the project, I had timeslot during my day in which I would develop. Usually from 15:00 to 18:00 every weekday, and some more time on weekends if I felt like it (I don't remember the details for the weekends). The system of where you would make the pancakes took a bit of time to make, with a lot of coping and changing numbers. While I knew there would be bugs with what I was doing, I continued on with some testing to make sure things work (This will be important later).

The cooking system was made in order of the process. The cooking part was somewhat easy since it's just a few values with if statements.

I love this fucking song so much man it deserves some more respect at least. Edge of the earth is a grainy sense of hope that I absolutely adore and post mortem boredom is honestly one of the saddest Cudi songs I have heard. I understand why people wouldn’t like it , it’s annoying and a bit goofy but I honestly just see it as a tormented man walking along the street just trying to get by. Something about that just clicks something in me. Also that intro and interlude between tracks is awesome ngl.

Marked spoiler for length.

This is the "what went wrong" post that I teased relentlessly. Now that the dust has finally settled and the Hi-Evolution trilogy has officially concluded, I want to dig into what the hell happened with this and what we should expect from Eureka 7 going forward, if anything at all. Why did this reboot fail?

While I think there are a lot of technical and writing flaws that held these movies down, I want to narrow them down to the broader strokes as well as home in on some aspects I don't see many people talking about, which I will explain in depth.

Before I start, a disclaimer: While I do try to back up my points with as much research as I could, I did have to make some speculations about things like production troubles and creative differences within the team. This is because anime studios (and the animation industry in general) are very secretive about their practices as well as the details of their various productions. You would be hard pressed to find things like budget figures and financial returns for various shows. It usually only takes a whistleblower for details to come out, and given how Japanese culture is regarding work ethic, we likely will never get the full story about this unless someone steps forward. That being said, I tried to make educated guesses whenever possible.

For those who want the TLDR: If there was any chance to take the franchise in a positive direction after AO, Eureka 7 Hi-Evolution wasted it. Misleading advertising, uneven art direction, questionable writing choices, refusing to build off what made the original stand out, and in some cases just spitting right in the fans’ faces led Hi-Evo to feel less like a reboot more like a cynical, directionless cashgrab to the keep the franchise relevant. The result is a confusing trilogy of films made by a studio and a director that have either lost sight of what made Eureka 7 so beloved and what its fans expect or just no longer care about the property and are intent on writing it out of existence.

If you still want to read, strap in. We have a lot to talk about.

DECEPTIVE MARKETING AND POOR ADVERTISING

To start, I think it's worth talking about how the movies were marketed at the beginning compared to at the end. To put it bluntly, Bones and Hi-Evo's production seriously screwed up their press. Talking to people about your product, be it anime, a movie, a TV show, or a video game is extremely important especially today. We live in what I

Good evening. This Q&A is for people to ask me any questions they might have about the election system, their own races, or anything else related to the election.

Now, onto general announcements:

• The state election cutoff is currently slated for February 25th. If you believe this needs pushed back farther, I'm happy to have that discussion, just let me know.
• Partisan lean will be out tomorrow, and it will be in effect with the bill cap and recruitment mod changes that were in effect this election. If you have any questions on any of that, please let me know.
• The December results document can be found here.
• Seldom is the new Events Board chair and is looking to bring some life back into the Board. If you'd like to be on it or have any ideas for events, let either of us know.
• If you'd like to be an election grader let me know on Discord.

I feel I've come to terms a lot more with the breakup now. I've been able to look at it more objectively, and it also gave me insight into previous breakups where I've generally been the dumper..

(Note I've always practiced no contact from that perspective, and as an adult I've also been straight up with people why I ended things out of emotional respect where possible)

This wasn't a long relationship as bf/gf (less than 6 months), but we'd become super close, almost best friends before this over 2 years, so it was an extension of a long growing affection from both sides.

In a nutshell this is what happened from my pov:

1. We fell in love

2. Everything seemed perfect

3. She said at one point down the line she was having issues with the relationship, felt it was too much pressure

4. We agreed to keep it a bit more chilled, but didn't really talk this through properly, and it was left unresolved. We should have had a break at this stage I think, but we were both super busy with work and things just sort of carried on..

5. Still probably feeling pressured I think she kind of demoted the relationship status to something like dating or casual in her head to stop feeling stressed (she intimated this in the previous chat but I missed the cue). This then meant that the loving feelings were quietened at some level

6. I think she then slowly began evaluating the relationship with this less meaningful criteria. It should be noted here that on the surface she always seemed happy and we were still having amazing intimate sex. I wasn't getting any negative feedback at any time (or I was so in love I was blind to it)

7. But silent judgement had started and without the bigger feelings, the small annoyances became the dominant voice for her*

8. Towards the end she basically ghosted and breadcrumbed me. She became unavailable but gave me loving (mixed) messages to bide her time while she made her decision

9. She then ended it

By the end I think the relationship had changed so much in her head that the care and love were already absent, so splitting up wasn't emotional for her at this stage.

I was still in stage 2 though so the shock was immense.

I'm a very secure person but this really threw me at the time.

She really wasn't clear articulating why she felt different which added to the confusion.

My whole emotional register was turned upside down and I lost the plot for a few weeks. I wasn't badgering her but I did the w

This is a long post, mostly for my own documentation and reflection. Please ignore if you are not interested in hearing of someone's first time playthrough and thoughts on a 22 year old game.

I finally did it after all these years and completed it. The game is excellent, the writing is excellent and in a sense there hasn't been a game close to this one before Disco Elysium came around a few years ago.

A bit about myself: First of all, I actually started playing 3 years ago but stopped near what I thought was the ending >!(just before you enter Ravel's maze)!<, clocking in around 20 hours at that point. I started a new playthrough a couple of weeks ago to finally finish it. Full playthrough from beginning to end was 37 hours but I admit that I still remembered a lot of my previous playthrough.

My favourite game of all time is Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn which I have played at least twice, both back in the day 20 years ago when it was released. In my mind no game will ever beat it. I finished IWD 1 and 2 as well, NWN 1 and most of 2, Dragon Age 1 and 2. I love the forgotten realms setting and am happy to be here for one of them.

The bad points first:

-The system is old. That's what you sign up for game and engine from 22 years ago. I was playing the enhanced edition but even that does not contain some of the tweaks and QOL improvements from the later D&D rules featured in BG2, Throne of Bhaal and the masterpiece: Icewind Dale 2, the swan song game of the Infinity Engine.

-The presentation is old: Very little of the dialogue is voiced. You need to love reading, preferably love reading fantasy novels to get the most out of this game. Indeed, it would be a shame if you didn't as the writing by Black Isle is unparalleled. But this game shows its age for sure.

-I wish that there had been >!an epilogue screen describing what happened to your companions after they left the NO. Black Isle obviously learned from this and handled it properly in Throne of Bhaal, before Bioware then in turn messed it up again for Mass Effect.!< It would have added that additional bit of closure to someone who invests 30 to 50 hours in their game.

-Difficulty: I found the game too easy. I was shocked how easy the final boss was and overprepared for it (I am guessing playing previous games of Bioware's Infinity Engine have scarred me, >!particularly several battles with Jon Irenicus)!<.

-No great Romances: Sorry but in my opinion they droppe

England - My mother passed away a few months ago and it’s come to light she had a secret credit card debt of around £7k no one knew about that was accrued due to helping a sibling who is a total freeloader. She passed away with very little personal money and savings were used to cover the funeral. Freeloading sibling has nothing and is claiming ignorance. The only real asset being the house owned outright with my father. He is now being chased by the credit card company for money he doesn’t have. Is there any help available to him or is it just next of kin must pay somehow? Many thanks for any advice.

#40 DeFiChain Twitter Spaces: Atomic Swap Post Mortem & further steps

In this Twitter Spaces, we discuss exactly how the Atomic Swap early beta feature was exploited, the extent of the exploit, and why you really shouldn’t be worried. We also present various solutions that could restore the small occurred damage, which are up for discussion in the next Twitter Spaces in 2-3 days.

Spotify

Apple

The 2021 Big 12 preseason rankings are a fascinating place, a brief moment of anticipation captured in internet history, an ethereal plane akin to purgatory. Here, away from the cold realities of the actual events of 2021, Oklahoma has easily won their 7th consecutive big 12 title behind the heisman-winning quarterback play of Spencer Rattler. Here, Texas is back- they have recaptured the 10-win season of days old and, while falling just short of the conference championship, promise to transition the SEC as true heavyweights guided by the tactical genius of Steve Sarkisian, a man who did not lose to Kansas at home in football.

Here, lowly Baylor has finished 8th overall, tearing scraps from Texas Tech and Kansas. Oklahoma State has notched a couple exciting wins but ultimately fallen to the middle of the pack. TCU made a surprise challenge for the conference title behind the expert leadership of Gary Patterson, whose decades-long commitment to and success with the program are the foundation of its strength. Iowa State continued its promising upward trend and finished 3rd overall. Kansas State and West Virginia are, undeniably, football programs.

Here, in the Big 12 Predictions Realm, all is as it should be. But, alas, it is a fragile and temporary dwelling place. We simply cannot live in the past forever, unless we have financially supported the Texas football program. For the rest of us, we must awaken to the truth of the 2021 season, the waking nightmare that saw Broyles finalist Jeff Grimes lift the Big 12 championship following a classic Big 12 defensive slugfest. It is this dark world we now inhabit- a world where the Big 12's CFP representative is an AAC team, a world where Mike Gundy has no mullet, a world where, thanks to a rube goldberg series of conference realignment moves, we all are suddenly rooting for Bob Bowlsby to succeed. Here, in the Dr. Pepper Reality Sphere**^(©)********,** nothing is as it should be. It simply is as it is. And cry as we might against the unfeeling void, it cares not. It simply stares, passive and unfocused, apathetic to our pain. And as we gaze upon that indifferent visage we glimpse, if only for a moment, the stoic countenance of Dave Aranda. Then, all is dark.

********

Preseason 2021 predictions from last fall from some of the bigger media outlets for your perusal, with brief summary:

[The Big 12](https://big12sports.com/news/2021/7/7/sooners-picked-first-in-football-preseason-poll-f

In game development, sometimes we run something called a “post-mortem” (which literally means “after death” in latin) to talk about how something went after it’s done and we’re looking back on it. What went well, what could have gone better, and what should we do differently next time? This could be run for anything from launching a game to launching a feature to transitioning to using a new tool internally. There’s no scope too big or too small to take a minute to look back at how we did as a team, and how we can ensure we’re always improving and doing better the next time around.

Post-mortems are internal-only, since it’s pretty rare to not have proprietary or confidential info be a part of this process, but once in a while it’s worth giving players like you a peek behind the curtain to see how the magic is made. Or, in the case of Season 3 League Play rewards, how the magic went wrong, and how we went about fixing it. So here’s a post-mortem of sorts explaining what happened, what was needed to fix it, and why we expect this to run smoother in the future, written by Kevin, one of the Producers on Knockout City.

The Problem

To start off, the problem we faced: Season 3 League Play rewards were not handed out correctly for most brawlers that played in League Play during Season 3. This problem started on December 7th with the start of Season 4, with the fix rolled out this past Tuesday, December 14th.

Whenever you play on a server, the server asks what the current season number is as part of the logic that saves the player’s highest ranking to that player’s data. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t get that season number, but if it doesn’t (for any reason), it bails on updating the player data with their highest ranking. The main issue here was that the server failed to get that season number, so it didn’t update the ranking.

But it gets more complicated! That bug was introduced in 3.1. Anybody who played in 3.0 had their highest ranking set correctly; it just stopped getting updated from 3.1 on. So some players did receive rewards, but they were the rewards for the ranking as it was set before 3.1 was released.

What was the bug? Well, you might know that to make Knockout City, we invented Vscript, our own scripting language, to make possible the high demands of a physics-based game played over the internet with players at various pings and network conditions. That language makes the game possible. However, writing your own scripting language m

Quick write up for everyone who missed one of the all-nighter-session that will go down in DeFiChain History!

Background: When trying to bid for an action with pretty much 0 collateral (but not 0), the 5% auction fee would result in less than 1 satoshi, causing the Chain to stall. Community- and Team-members in all time zones rallied together, to figure out what was why causing the issue. At this point it was about midnight in Singapore Time. At first it was hoped that no blockchain upgrade was necessary and the auction could simply be forced to accept a higher fee than 1 sat, but the fee amount was based on the vault amount, not based on what was someone willing to return. So, at around 3am, the core devs decided that an emergency upgrade was needed to fix the issue by always paying at last 1 sat in 5% auction fee. Figuring out such an issue would have probably not been spotted even during extensive testing, as we are not really sure how vaults ended up with such little loan amounts in the first place (we are talking about just a few sats worth of loans!). So, at around 6am this upgrade was ready and was distributed to the masternodes. A few minutes later, block 1430640 was found and from that point on the blockchain was flying again.

The genius part that makes me not only proud of this group, but moreover shows how we can ralley together when there is a serious issue, was actually all the collaboration and interaction between everyone. Yes, we lost a whole night of sleep. Yes, some community members acted like complete morons. Yes, it is never good, when such an issue causes all masternodes not to find a new block. BUT, it shows how resilient we are. Any real fight starts after you’ve thrown and received a punch, and how you  react to this. Considering how fast everyone delivered, with how much ownership and relentlessness, how resourceful everyone approached the issue, how much thought was put in to make sure vaults would not get liquidated when the chain started to run, how supportive everyone was to each other and how strong we all came out of this, I want to say thank you from and to everyone. Maybe it is the triple dose of pain killers speaking to get rid of my headache, but I wouldn’t want to miss these moments. It is what we will share as part of the successes. It is what unites us. It is what we will be proud to share, when someone asks us about a task we had to deliver on a tight timeline.

So, what do you need to do

So full playthrough was 35 hours which is quite long. Well worth the money.

The more annoying sides of VTMB started to show over and over again:

-Taxi rides: whenever you move from area to the other, the left click for selection gets interpreted from time to time as a click to arm your weapon, causing an immediate criminal violation upon arrival

-glitch involving shooting when loading a game: You load and you start endlessly firing with your active weapon

-autosaves: absolute garbage. You can be several spaces ahead and the game does not autosave at crucial moments for you

So....

I did most of the side quests I could find, including all of the hacker and Gary photo side quests (with the Plus Patch installed)

-Werewolf in forest and around observatory: Great design, especially for back then. A real blood pumping experience

-the moment of choice comes while riding in the taxi, I went with going back to Lacroix to explain the situation.

-final showdown>! at the chinatown temple with Ming-Jao, annoying battle as its close quarters, but bloodpacks can make it really easy along with a flamethrower. Had I known she was the final boss, I think I would have been more generous!<

Erm... I got an odd ending (Prince): >!The Sarcophagus was opened, but not age-old demon to fight, no elder Vampire, instead just dynamite that blows up Lacroix and the PC... What an anti-climax that came from nowhere! The Anarchs look on from the distance, laughing at the carnage.!<

WTF.

Well, I still enjoyed the game, but have this feeling that I made the wrong choice and got the bad ending. Is it worth going back to the taxi driver part and choosing another side? >!Anarchs or Independent, or is there yet another one?!<

How different (without spoiling the endings) does the final part play out based on your choices?

Previous posts

https://www.reddit.com/r/vtmb/comments/qj0196/playing_vtmb_for_the_first_time_no_spoilers_some/

https://www.reddit.com/r/vtmb/comments/qz6ra5/playing_vtmb_for_first_time_kings_way_house/