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Aran

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Everything posted by Aran

  1. (Hey! Haven't been here in a minute.) I was randomly looking something up on the EE wiki about Erika Redmark, and found some contradictory dates for Skylark Vale. Specifically, the wiki claims that Emperor Stewart closed Skylark School of Magery in the year 762, and that it was then explored and cleaned up in 842 (or 844, in one case). But elsewhere, it claims that Stewart reigned from 672 to 722 IE. That doesn't add up, and I have no idea how we came up with these numbers in the first place. The BoA version has Stewart closing the school "eighty years ago", but says nothing about the current year. (Interestingly, the BoE version apparently said "130 years ago". Maybe this retcon relates to Pythras, who in BoE apparently claims to have been imprisoned for 127 years - contradicting the school being closed for longer than that - but in BoA only says "more than a hundred years".) There are several possibilities - maybe VoDT is set much earlier than 842, possibly before the trilogy? Or maybe Stewart reigned much later than assumed. The EE wiki has always maintained that there were three Hawthornes, with Hawthorne I discovering Avernum, Hawthorne II starting to exile people in 765 and Hawthorne III being the one you assassinate in 817. But I can't remember any in-game source for more than the latter two. (Hilariously, I see we already discussed it on this forum as early as 20 years ago, but this contradiction seemingly never came up.)
  2. Haven't been in here in some time... I guess some time last year I finished the Dresden Files series (March 2018 - Fall 2021). On the heels of that, I started on the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and finished listening to that around April this year. Finally, lately I've started on Brandon Sanderson; I've listened to the Mistborn books and most of the Wax & Wayne books at this point.
  3. I think I made it past a difficulty cliff or something, because now at level 11-12 after clearing the Gnass + Dharmon questlines (currently at Patrick's Tower) the fights are a lot more manageable again. A few points of Hardiness and Gymnastics also seem to have made my fighters much more durable, and giving my mage Minor Heal has done tons too. Compared to previous games it feels like AOE damage has come a lot later, but tbf the first AOE spells (Icy Rain / Searing Spray) are sold in Patrick's Tower so that's on me for not going there first.
  4. I'm playing A6 on Normal difficulty with the pre-built party, and I'm currently around level 8-9 (the Slith levels more slowly as always). Lately I'm finding that almost every other fight feels like a boss battle, and involves several iterations of my priest running away as the sole survivor after wittling down a few enemies. I'm just not sure if I made some bad skill choices, or I'm in an area too early (Fort Saffron currently)... what am I missing? My biggest enemy seems to be stunlocks, where practically every enemy in a fight is able to either stun, slow, charm or terrify my party and I barely get a turn in edgewise. Is there some way to avoid that? My priest doesn't have Unshackle Mind yet, and even if he did, he'd likely be too busy healing every turn to cast it often enough. (I checked and I have food in my inventory, by the way, so it's not the starvation debuff.) I've attached the skill screenshots... https://imgur.com/a/pxEUTBl
  5. I've only recently started heavily using Charm as a tactic, and noticed a behavior that seems broken: When you're fighting a monster that uses Charm, it'll sometimes try to charm monsters that you've already charmed. Rather than canceling out, the second charm will be treated as if it was cast by you - the monster stays on your side and has the status "Charmed (2)". I'd expect that charms would either cancel an existing charm status, or that enemies won't try to use it on already charmed enemies.
  6. Started on Diane Duane's Young Wizards series (So You Want To Be A Wizard, etc.), but got sidetracked after the first book and am now re-reading Rick Cook's Wiz Biz series, which I first found when I was in high school. (Unfortunately, the writing and tropes in the latter haven't aged as well as I remember them.)
  7. Same here, though it must have been around 1999-2001 in my case. I must have already known English, but I still remember struggling with some of the words.
  8. Starting last October, I've been reading Worm, which is a fascinating (and really, really dark) story about people with superpowers. I originally found out about the story in 2017 via a thing that happened on reddit, but never got around to reading. Some of the books that are already on my list for after I'm finished (aside from all the web serials I've been neglecting during Worm) are The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin) and Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman).
  9. Much as I like a big spell catalog, to be honest, I never got enough of a handle on all the debuffs and area denial spells for them to be useful, only using casters as direct damage dealers. Also, I've never ever had an occasion where casting quickfire was a good idea. (Though fun, briefly.) 😛 However, I do hope we get a flexible skill tree (more like the Avernum remakes than Avadon) instead of rigid character archetypes.
  10. I like this perspective more than I expected. It feels nicely retro. Afaik, only two SW games have ever had native Linux ports - Exile 3 and Avadon, both by other developers. They all work quite well in Wine, though (at least the ones made this century*); personally I'm using PlayOnLinux and Steam. I'm fairly confident this one will work as well. (*That feels weird to say.)
  11. I just bought The Age of Em (Robin Hanson) while waiting for a train, because I heard good things about it over the years, though I haven't finished reading the introduction yet. (One of these days I really need to take some time off to finish all the books I started reading. 😛) I also want to make another go at learning French (Duolingo didn't work out so great last time), so I picked a book I'm already familiar with that is available in French on Audible (Harry Potter book 1) as well as an EPUB, and I'm going to try reading along while listening.
  12. Okay then, let's go for something controversial and political. Pineapple Pizza.
  13. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7vyv09/im_jeff_vogel_founder_of_spiderweb_software_since/dtwdvob/ I have slightly mixed feelings - Exile fills me with nostalgia, but it's hard to imagine that kind of UI looking good in a modern game. But if Jeff thinks it can work, I'll probably be pleasantly surprised.
  14. Jeff's Twitter feed is a good source to follow for these news (https://twitter.com/spiderwebsoft). The Jan 31st release date was announced there on the 12th, apparently.
  15. These should clearly be checkboxes and not radio buttons. (But personally, whenever I get to set my own schedule, I end up working from "made it to the meeting just in time" to "the stores are about to close and I need milk". So I gravitate to the former, but I'm not sure if that's actually optimal for me or just indicates depression.)
  16. Aran

    10,000

    The decimal system is overrated, but happy 0x2710th.
  17. I have tried out a recipe for a sort of low-carb protein "bread". (In quotes because it doesn't actually contain flour.) The ingredients per loaf are 50g each of wheat bran, unflavored protein powder (whey probably, though I've used hemp, which also tastes fine), crushed linseed and minced walnut, 2 eggs, and 250g of Quark, baked at ~180°C for 30min. It tastes pretty good and keeps surprisingly well despite the dairy/egg. (It's also very filling, unsurprisingly.)
  18. Pythagoras was famously opposed to beans, and apocryphally let himself get murdered rather than fleeing through a bean field. A Pythagorean diet shuns meat, fish and beans. (I have no idea whether this was supposed to extend to other legumes like lentils, though.) --- I've repeatedly been told that I don't eat very well (basically mostly sugar and cereal, because I'm too lazy to cook) and am at risk of inheriting my dad's type2 or at the very least become overweight in my thirties. Since I am in my thirties now, I've decided I should probably change my habits a bit. One of my favorite easy recipes is an Andalusian tapas consisting of spinach and fried chickpeas. There are several recipes online and I don't really stick to any one of them, but these are some variants: http://simpleveganblog.com/spanish-spinach-with-chickpeas/ http://spanishsabores.com/2014/08/17/espinacas-con-garbanzos-spinach-chickpeas/ (I usually just cook the spinach for a few minutes before transferring it to a pan with olive oil, adding the spices and chickpeas.)
  19. I think somewhere around 5M words of my reading this year has been pony stories. It's not for everyone, but the Austraeoh series is quite enjoyable (though quirky and often deliberately purple-prosed, and it's an ASoIaF-sized beast). Still on my list right now is the recently published Beren and Luthien book, as well as Neal Stephenson's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. On the latter, I'm experimenting with listening to the audiobook while reading - with Stephenson's narrative style, I tend to lose the thread, and maybe this helps. (I mentioned some time in mid-2015 I was reading Yudkowsky's rationality thing, which is coming along really slowly: I'm somewhere around 60% in now. It's not easy to follow and EY does like to go on and on about some stuff, but there are some pretty interesting concepts in there.)
  20. Imban! Wow, it's been a long time, even though everyone here has technically been you.
  21. Maybe the survey could have used a Romans vs Celts question, as well.
  22. Just a few minutes ago I was looking at my old results and thinking that it might be nearly time for a new one. So I pop over here and it's literally at the top of the forum. My results are here, and graphed above. Full diff against last year's results are here. The tl;dr seems to be that I've gotten more active and less depressed, but also less nice. (I will try to take the other one soon, but 420 questions in total is too much for one day. )
  23. You are a: Socialist Pro-Government World-Federalist Bleeding-Heart Progressive Collectivism score: 67%Authoritarianism score: 33%Internationalism score: 83%Tribalism score: -83%Liberalism score: 67%
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