My apartment complex wants me to download some third-party app just to pay my rent, instead of using their perfectly serviceable web portal. I assume they’re getting a data harvest kickback that’s buried in several layers of fine-print legalese, which will be used to send me targeted spam and junk mail. And that data will be sold and re-sold to other parties ad infinitum. Whatever they can collect about my personal life, for sale to any asshole with enough cash in their pocket. Fuck that. I shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit just to keep a roof over my head.

Monks in D&D are no joke. I’ve gotten torn up by them before. That class has actually been around since the very beginning. I think I might replay as one.

The issue I have with non-Apple laptops is that comparable performance requires an active cooling system that is often distractingly loud. I am willing and able to pay extra for a platform that lets me focus, and lets me watch some Netflix without having to crank the volume to drown out the fans. Then the all-metal exterior is also quite durable, the trackpad and speakers are top-notch, the Pro comes with that XDR screen, and the battery life is hard to beat. Plus I can take it to a nearby Apple store if I’m having a problem with it, instead of having to mail it to a regional support shop and wait potentially for weeks without the device. It’s more than the sum of its parts–and that is reflected in the resale value as well. Some Windows laptops will do specific things better (chiefly game support), but I didn’t find anything that was as good overall as an M1 Macbook Pro, and I say that as someone who had never owned a Mac of any kind, despite using PCs since the early 1980s and building them for the last 25 years.

I would have preferred a laptop that could run Windows or Linux, but I just couldn’t find anything that was a complete package like the M1 MBP.

Arguing in bad faith?

I almost pulled the trigger on one of these during Amazon’s recent big sale, but there was a trend in the user reviews that troubled me. I went with a Samsung unit instead. No regrets.

I can imagine the conversation.

Elon: “I own this website, and you’re telling me that I’m not allowed to see this person’s profile or activity because they blocked me?”

Good luck getting a massive narcissist like him to understand why every user should have that right.

I’m coming into Act 3 now, and there definitely have been a few story junctures where a failed check would have had severe consequences, or it would have caused me to miss out on some nice loot.

I’m also not a fan of a 1 being a critical failure. I think if you have the bonuses, they should always be counted. Maybe scale them down to compensate for the adjustment. Maybe even use a different die. But don’t negate them entirely, unless maybe the character who’s rolling truly has no relevant proficiency.

It made me miss the RPG systems where if you have like 50 points in Speech or Intelligence, you just automatically pass a dialog check. It lets people be consistently rewarded for investing points in a specialization.

Still a fantastic game with an epic fantasy vibe that I haven’t felt since Dragon Age Origins. It’s a small gripe.

Founded in 1973. It’s not a coincidence that we started to see establishment pushback organizations popping up in this time frame. Because in the 60s, people of color started voting en masse after generations of systematic suppression. The civil rights movement empowered them to express their political views like never before. The word “Heritage” in this context means “white people.” When they say “traditional American values,” they mean “no gays or mixing of the races.” When they say “limited government,” they mean “weak regulation.” When they say “individual freedom,” they mean “freedom from consequences,” specifically for white males. When they say “the war on drugs,” they mean “the war on black people and liberals.” And so on. They’re speaking in code, and their very name is a code. But it’s easily cracked if you’ve been paying attention.

Yeah, cows are adapted to eat grass, but that doesn’t fatten them up. So we give them corn and whatnot instead. It’s a generally unhealthy diet for them. As in, they are literally more prone to disease because a grain diet impacts their immune system.

When you offer a cow grass in one hand and grain in the other, they will always go for the grass.

I hope I can mod a replacement image without too much trouble-- that flare on the right is uncomfortably bright when the image is expanded to full screen on my desktop monitor. There’s all kinds of pre-existing Starfield art assets that would work, starting with official wallpaper that scales up to 5K.

The clip was part of Guldbrandsen’s documentary, A Storm Foretold, released in March of this year.

So there’s nothing actually new about this video. It’s just that Donald forgot that someone filmed the slimy inner workings of his re-election campaign when it came time to mount a defense, and he doesn’t have any good lawyers to help him avoid painting himself into a corner again. Hell, he probably lied to his lawyers, too.

Be careful, most cheap NVMe drives have low endurance. Llike, not “Oh, you’re just hand wringing about nothing,” endurance ratings but an actually and relevantly low number of terabytes that can be written before the drive becomes failure-prone. They also usually lack a DRAM cache, so certain operations can be as slow as a mechanical hard drive, thereby negating the major advantage of opting for solid-state storage.

That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.

Why would that be considered outrageous?

This has been reported on for years.

Example 1, Example 2.

I’m sorry, I don’t follow. What did I say that would be considered an outrageous claim?

I’m saddened by the phenomenon because there’s plenty of evidence that the audiences for these most of these games hate the experience, but they can’t stop playing because they’ve become victims of predatory psychological tactics designed to keep them addicted and their wallets wide open. These publishers and studios literally hire psychologists who specialize in generating this addiction, using models optimized to prey on their own users as much as humanly possible. It’s sickening. The sports games are especially shameless about this. Ruining people’s finances and their core sense of financial responsibility to fatten their pockets. I don’t know how they sleep at night. Sociopaths, the lot of them.

It turns out that there is a paladin option. But you have to do some evil stuff to recruit her.

• Half elf Order of the Ancients paladin
• Shadowheart light domain cleric
• Karlach beast ranger
• Wyll champion fighter

I wanted Karlach in the party, but I didn’t feel like I had room for her at the time as a barbarian. Booted Astarion and made Karlach a ranger so that I could still have rogue-like utility. Rogue or bard didn’t make sense for Karlach lore-wise. Made Wyll a fighter because it turned out that I could have another melee fighter, and I simply cannot figure out a way to make warlocks as combat-effective as the other classes. And I don’t like the absence of a proper spellbook anyway. But I like his personality. I chose paladin half-elf for the player character because there isn’t a good-aligned paladin option otherwise, and half-elves get a +2 charisma racial bonus and fey ancestry.

At this point, I could probably restore Karlach as a barbarian and make Wyll a ranger. I like rangers because of the tactical options provided by pets. Particularly birds, because of how few enemy types are immune or resistant to being blinded. Plus, birds can cover ground quickly by flying, without using up an action. It’s effectively a teleport that you can use every round.

Playing without a pure offensive caster seemed crazy at first, but it’s going all right on the standard difficulty. Shadowheart’s light domain spells fill in a surprising number of gaps – and they are particularly effective in Act 2, which is where I’m at now.

The nice thing is, if I change my mind, reclassing is pretty inexpensive. Unlike many other games of this type, the price does not scale with the number of times you do it, or with character level, or anything else. It’s always 100 gold.

Funny how Firefox can be at least as secure without it having to phone home every time you click on a link.

Usually when this happens, we call it spyware, nuke it from orbit, and find an alternative.

Since when did we need to flip a coin on issues like this? Spoiler: We don’t! There are plenty of resources to go around.

If anything was a waste of time, it was this poll. Go home, Pew Research, you’re drunk.