I burned a Blu-ray a few years back just to supplement some of our encrypted Google Drive backups with copies that would be more accessible in case of my demise, or physically grabbable in case of disaster. I know they won’t last forever, but if Drive shut down on the same day my local copies failed at least I have an option.

Otherwise, I haven’t used physical media in years. I got the 4K LOTR set when it came out and tried to use it, but it ended up being easier to just pirate the rips like anything else.

So traditional it’s like a Norman Rockwell painting.

I’m definitely using my parasite powers, I’ll have to look for the counterspell there, I’m sorta low on worms at the moment though.

Only works if you’re in melee range already and they cast which I haven’t seen a lot of. Advantage against concentration could be good but I have plenty of ways to break that. Counterspell stops the spell from occuring at all from across the room.

Haha, well the Berserker is rolling with the Returning Pike so I think I got that part. 4 Gnome Barbs sounds hilarious, maybe I’m not in such bad shape if I’m all weapon damage and heals.

Yeah, totally, I just meant she stayed a relatively pure cleric. Trickery domain sucks and I wanted the fire/radiant AoE.

Interesting idea for Lae’zel.

For the rest I guess that depends on whether this is a “strong group” without someone to deflect spells. And for the planning I’m sorta worried that I’m going to diverge a lot since the first party isn’t evil, but at the same time it’s not like the main quest changes a lot (AFAIK)

I’ll be deep in the cold cold ground before I recognize Mizora!

Definitely agree. Had a couple of them and loved some of the ideas (touchpad sticks, gyro to mouse aim, all of the Steam Input flexibility) but they never really eclipsed my rechargeable Dualshocks in terms of feeling right. Taking some of the Deck’s refinements and giving it another spin is welcome.

Nah man, BG3’s release was a phenomenon. I had people who are barely gamers casually start talking about D&D party dynamics and how nice it was to have a game focused at adults. I don’t think Larian was even prepared for it to be such a slam dunk.

I put this on expecting a trainwreck and a cash grab too, but it still had me laughing my ass off. It really felt like they understood why the originals were so funny.

Yeah, my parents are still basically the same liberal Democrats they were when I was a kid. Meanwhile I’ve gone farther left and the rest of the family mutated into a virulent strain of fascist.

In a weird way this makes Linux a microkernel. They’re “macro” but isolated and cooperative. Coolest patch set I’ve read about in a while.

You are getting this from Xwayland, so you’re running a rootless X server in the background. It’s nice that it works seamlessly, but it’s not really Wayland doing anything but managing the X window.

I don’t have experience with MSI recently, but I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I’ve seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.

On the one hand, this is sort of what betas are for.

On the other hand, doesn’t this game require secure boot for anti-cheat? I thought making your multiplayer game enforce security policy meant it was impossible to cheat!?!? Get fucked EA.

I used the communicator chime for a long time, but these days I’m basically permanently in do-not-disturb. My phone only makes sound when a close contact calls, or for a timer/alarm. Anything else can wait.

Intel has been struggling overall, and lately has been letting some of its Linux engineers go. Nothing absolutely fundamental has been affected yet (AFAICT) but I guess Clear Linux didn’t make the cut.

It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they’re separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what’s up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.

I love that song and yeah, nailed it.