I don’t think that has never not been a thing… Read memoirs/letters from earlier times and you’ll see plenty of it too. The big shift was probably admitting the children don’t yearn for the mines, but we seem to be heading back that way (eta: in the USA anyway I won’t paint other countries with our fuckery lol).

Some of the details in these are kind of interesting. I assume the pitcher and plate/bowl it’s on were for washing up in the morning. Just fun to see the items put in the backgrounds that were normal for the time and not so much now.

Some of it was DDOS but a lot of it was just server overload which sucked horrifically. DDoS was its own thing because I did have trouble logging in during those times.

ETA: also not to sound like a churl the update about a month in did fix a lot of the lag. Until then it was just really bad and I was routinely running into people in df roulette also suffering from it which just made things even harder. But I will say SE did work on it and put a fix out that resolved most of it within a month. I feel like part of the challenge may have just been I was on the “overflow” datacenter for NA and SE underestimated how much “overflow” we would be seeing. Cause about the majority of people I was paired with in df roulette during this time were travelers which isn’t the norm on Dynamis ime.

Can’t say how it was for Endwalker, but I did experience a lot more server lag on Dynamis than I did before the launch. Getting in wasn’t the problem so much as being in instances and just having minute long multiple lag spikes to the point I was often going from lag to lag. Had this even in duty support. My understanding is this was “better” because I could even log in at all, but it did absolutely suck trying to learn new mechanics where I was in MSQ and learn how to play around entire dungeons being slide shows of lag at the same time.

ETA: I got up to Amaurot about the day after pre-order drop happened and then worked up through Seat of Sacrifice over the heaviest weeks was absolutely miserable with the lag to figure out what was going on. I also do MiNE ex/savage and had a few I’d been progging I just had to bow out from because when we got to new phases I was having so much lag they weren’t showing for me and the majority of the time I’d be either killed by something I never got an update to see or last person standing because I was lagging so much I didn’t ping into the damage.

If they’re trying to do an animated spin off of the live action Barbie movie they have grossly missed the point. People who saw the Barbie movie aren’t going to watch an animated movie to see if Ken is finally “kenough”. Honestly not sure why they wouldn’t stick to the animated movie prescription of promoting their latest line either. It’s a toy they can sell and frankly not all of those movies are even terrible. They’re not going to win Oscars, but the animated Barbie movies wouldn’t have to up their game much to be in the running for animation awards as they’re generally pretty meta making them fun for all ages. They had an animated online series (dreamhouse) that was well-acclaimed before the live action movie and actually seemed to inform how some of the live action movie was done.

Really sounds like sitting on a gold mine and then trying to steal the workers’ bathroom because suddenly it got the “right” interest via controversy.

Sometimes they just make up whole new stories (Bleach) or say fuck it and go their own way (Fullmetal Alchemist). I feel like the more accepted recent approach though is having a mini-series of an arc which has normal pacing (actually even often accelerated pacing cause they only get 12 episodes) and then just putting the show on hold.

And then you have when the anime affects the manga and the manga starts stretching the story out for “content” (feel like this happened with My Hero Academia and Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun). If it was a novel that’s being published on a pay by chapter platform you’re just completely fucked because they (generally) follow the Mark Twain model of pay per word so once a story gets popular that shit absolutely gets milked into the ground. If you’re lucky they waited to do the anime until the comic adaption was half done at which point the novel will hopefully be done…

So from the article the Lae’zel ending only happenings if you

Super spoiler don’t think there’s a spoiler text accepted across all instances yet

Accept becoming a mind flayer and some events thereafter and then follow through with Vlaak’ith telling you to kill yourself. This “rare no one’s taken” glitch ending seems to be if you listen to Vlaak’ith, but don’t turn mind flayer you can still take the kill yourself ending if you check the mind flayer box …despite not being mind flayer. Which could only happen through a glitch. So it’s just a you could take this path if you’d checked X box but you didn’t so can’t “ending”. I’m not sure what this article is trying to say honestly as it’s literally just “if you make X choice you could get Y ending, but if you glitch the game to believe you made X choice you could get Y ending” article.

If you read the article, this isn’t a rarest ending like the headline says. There is an ending playing as Lae’zel most players don’t take because it’s a bad ending that obviously ends the story. The ending being talked about is a hacked ending that was maybe an idea at one point to get to the above ending via an alternative path, but wasn’t ultimately implemented. I wouldn’t even call this an ending frankly. It’s more “there’s some game files that can lead to each other if X or Y is marked, but actually can’t because Z being marked cuts that path off”. More of a glitch than anything.

Just feathers pinned to it. Was common to have overly decorated hats if you could afford it in ways we wouldn’t consider fashionable today (Mrs. True’s hat looks like a modern flower cake also lol). This tradition is not dead, for some modern examples check out the royal ascot races, kind of a fun/funny tradition.

Gith became resistant to the mind control over the millenia. This is why in 5e the race has psychic resistance. The duergar were also slaves of the mind flayers and this is why they have psionic fortitude. There’s some other races that have been altered due to being enslaved (derro, kuo-toa, quaggoth), usually resulting in some form of psionics and madness.

Part of what makes mind flayers interesting because their society touched and left scars on a lot of other races. Gith are just the loudest about it in part because they live in the Astral Sea where time doesn’t age them so, outside of dying during raids, many of the gith who rebelled can easily still be around leading to the rebellion being fresh in the gith’s minds (as opposed to the duergar for example who live on the material plane in normal time and have had empires rise and fall and numerous generations since the enslavement).

Personally don’t really find the snack sized Cthulhu aspect that interesting. What really interests me about them is the lore about them once being a great empire of douchebags who were overthrown by those they oppressed (gith) who then took their place politically and now hunt them down. Says a lot BG3 focused on this lore over the Cthulhu monster aspect. Just some good lore building which could have (and I’m sure has) gone to any other races.

If I’m into the story, yes. Feel like this kind of question doesn’t understand that a lot of stories only have going for them resolving one or two questions. Once you know the answer the rest of the story is so average it’s hard to care to finish. For example I read a lot of otome isekai (tl;dr romance novels where the heroine was sucked into a novel/game). Once you know the twist it’s just a subpar story.

That said if a story is kind of shitty and I’m considering dropping it, but I read a spoiler the twist is actually really good and puts the crappy parts in an interesting context I’ll keep reading. So case by case, reader by reader basis. I have stories I only finished because I read a spoiler, but I have just as many I never finished because I read a spoiler.

It’s not the kraft variety.

Yulo was also offered lifetime supplies of free buffets, baked mac and cheese, and chicken inasal, a grilled chicken dish, by various chain restaurants.

I know Stinky Dragon edits stuff out to keep the run time down. I assume for live streams the DMs just use the “it’s dead when it narratively fits/needs to happen to stop bad rolls from dragging this out an hour” rule and players know to focus more instead of spending 30min on cock jokes after finding a cock fight that then devolves into a heist plan to free all animals in the village and make them the masters of their own fates lol.

“After approaching the coelacanth to encourage it to move between two cameras positioned on a custom-made stand, the team turned on the lights. “At this depth, some think that there is no light,” says Ballesta. “There is [very] nice light. It’s tiny, it’s soft, but there is still light. So, it’s important to not use too much artificial light. It’s like driving in a car at night. If you put your lights on full, you see just in front of the car, and all the rest is dark. If you switch off your lights – and there is a little bit of moon – suddenly you see everything: the road, the mountains, the forest. It’s the same when you’re deep.””

For anyone else wondering.

Listening to He Who Fights With Monsters rn and enjoying it. Started out slow, but once the ensemble characters get introduced it picks up.

I enjoyed Trash of the Count’s Family (licensed in English as Lout of Count’s Family by Seven Seas) until it got too repititve and drawn out for me (which tbf was smtg like 600 chapters in) though that one’s lighter on the game interface aspect (ie you’re not getting stats and ability blocks). The found family focus is nice.

So I’m a Spider, So What? is really heavy on the game interface, but the weirdness of the premise (what it says on the tin here) and the quirkiness of the protag with a sort of deuteragonist who handles the more serious side of the story until it all comes together was good.

There’s also an whole “girls’ genre” focused on visual novel games that’s pretty popular (haven’t read/watched it, but My Next Life As A Villainess I think is the most popular). Heads up though these ones are usually around having to build relationship and romance meters if you’re just looking to stick to power leveling “boys’ genre” stuff (which no shade both are fun!). Villains Are Destined to Die is a pretty good one I’ve read for the genre, but severely depressing (there’s a bigger story, but most of it is about “I’m stuck in a game world that forces me to deal with an abusive family and it’s making me suicidal”). Probably more happy girls’ genre ones, but I can’t think of any that have an official English translation/are default English off the top of my head haha.

If you wanna dive into the genre I think most important decision is what amount of gamifying you want to read about it cause it extends from “character woke up in/is playing a game and it’s rarely if ever mentioned this is a game world again” to “every other page you have massive game statblocks dumped on you and are supposed to remember entire stat systems, skill trees, etc”.

This is the one I bought. It works pretty well and has controls for each half so I can just heat one side if I want to address aches on that side or both if I’m trying to warm up quick. Haven’t run it through the wash yet so I’m not sure how it holds up there. Otherwise for pets (since I have a cat) their claws don’t get stuck on it, but they may cause threads to get pulled out (I haven’t had this happen a lot, but I figure if you have big dogs or something you’ll see a lot more threads pulled out; I have a miniature pincher sized cat so small dogs I assume wouldn’t cause too much wear and tear). It heats up pretty fast too, I think it only takes about ~2-3 minutes and once it’s heated up you don’t feel the lumps from the wires inside.

King size heating blanket. Wrap myself up like a burrito after work and I’m in heaven. Just wish I’d done it sooner, my last place didn’t keep heat in well, but I felt like spending $100~ on a blanket was crazy and was stacking multiple cheap ones to not freeze in my own home.

Iirc everything’s loaded as one map so you don’t have long loading times going from lot to lot. So if your sim goes on a date downtown you don’t have to then load downtown to continue playing and then reload the sim house when they go home.

Idk about hit, but decent success maybe? Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers wouldn’t be bad with a re-release that fixes the controls (gameplay is mainly a series of mini-games which the timing is off for making attempting completing them a rage inducing task) and the travel map areas redone to have actual purpose instead of “here’s a zany spot with cyclical weather where you can throw stuff around to play with our gravity code”. The story was pretty good/interesting imo as a Final Fantasy version of Cowboy Bebop.