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  As someone who has had at least one modded Bethesda game on my computer since Morrowind, I try to keep an open mind and try the official Nexus Mods client, Vortex, every year or so. I'm currently on day 4 of getting the most endorsed "1-click-install" #Skyrim collection on Nexus to work with a clean install of Vortex. Hilariously, this is, in fact, the best interaction I have ever had with Vortex. Same time next year, everybody! Back to modifying Wabbajack lists to m...

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  Thought I'd finally try watching #Stargate (SG-1) as my next "popcorn" binge between more serious fare. I was alive in the 90s so there's a definite sense of instant nostalgia, tempered by the *very* 90s cultural, gender, and racial dynamics on display. Very much "yeah, that tracks" in both cases. Googled a bit after the dreadful third episode ("Emancipation") and was relieved to see it's widely regarded as one of th...

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  As a longtime #Fallout fan I loved the first season of the Amazon show. Felt pandered to in the good way (they captured the production design and a fair bit of the vibe). Season 2 premiere feels like the Easter Egg / Continuity knobs are turned *way* too high. It's structured like a fan film in a way that I find actively offputting. The "coming this season" sizzle reel made me wince and roll my eyes, and I'm a New Vegas fanboy! Too much of a good thing.

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  There's a case for just watching TV and movies and not learning anything about how the sausage is made, but then you'd lose out on little pleasures like noticing that a recurring actor just got promoted to the end of the opening credits ("And Teryl Rothery as Dr. Frasier" in #Stargate). (When I saw Avengers: Infinity War, the audience actually laughed at the "And Chris Pratt" credit like it was a joke or afterthought instead of a significant p...

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  Belatedly completed what passes for #Halloween season prep around here these days:

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  Have been looking at a bunch of different niche crowd-funded projects in the #TTRPG and #VideoGames spaces lately, and keep seeing the same basic failures across *wildly* different domains: Solo dev tries to kitbash a plane while they're in the air on monthly Patreon subs. The steering is wonky, fuel starts to run low, passengers bail, operator panics, engine conks out, hello uncontrolled descent.

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  D&D would not be my choice of #TTRPG for Traveller (for me the appeal is the classless 2D6 part, not the OTU), but unironically happy if it means folks can play a system where their starting characters' elaborate backstories are actually plausible for once.

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  Buying a stack of gauze, antiseptic and gloves at a convenience store at a quarter to three in the morning while dressed head to toe in black like a sadsack straight to video Tarantino knockoff protagonist.

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  Me, a normal, neurotypical film enjoyer: I like the way the posters for this three-film series have similar composition, typography, and a recurring design element, but the third one is red when it should be magenta, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

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  Being reminded today, as so many in my peer group celebrate a crewed spaceflight, that my formerly hypersensitive sensawunda receptors have atrophied, possibly beyond repair. I simply do not give a shit about anything beyond the blue marble, except insofar as it can benefit the blue marble, which it mostly won't.

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  Figured out I should probably take the night off from work when I realized I was verbalizing my symptoms like Leeloo from The 5th Element. "Fatigue. Faa-teeegue. Faaaaaaateeeeeeguuuuuh." #ChronicIllness #Lupus

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  Grimwild being the Deal of the Day on DTRPG when the creator has rather infamously ghosted the project feels weird IMO. I've purchased digital access to open-licensed #TTRPG PDFs for convenience where the original stakeholders are defunct/deceased (e.g., OpenD6) but this feels like a step too far in the circumstances, given that the Community Edition exists and is actively being worked on: https://groov-games.itch.io/grimwild-community-edition

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  I deleted my Kickstarter account years ago (blockchain bandwagon was last straw). Something like a third of my backed projects never materialized but I never could be too mad about it. (My favorite was the solo-dev rhythm video game that never shipped because God had called on him to abandon it.)

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  Spring allergies plus summer heat equals mood falling and an early winter of my discontent

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  Thought I'd try listening to the venerable (and venerated) History of Rome podcast and…it's kind of terrible? Pop history through an uncritical military/political Great Men of History lens that butchers the Latin like Romans sacking Carthage. Apparently "it gets better" after the fall of the Republic, but I'm not grinding 40+ hours on a podcast like it's a dang JRPG when the underlying approach seems so weak.

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  I am not a person who makes computers do useful things for other people (or even myself, more often than not). I know there are infinite reasons why software (like so many things) seems so much worse on average than How It Used To Be. Still, as a mere User, I sometimes cannot resist nursing my secret belief that mantras like "programmer time is more valuable than [CPU/bandwidth/user time]" and "the code is the documentation" are somehow to blame for (waves va...