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[Felonious Python]

Shorting Arm & Hammer's parent company on Monday due to unrelated cannibalism.

 

[Steazy Doo]

Anyone here have Ulcerative Colitis or know anyone who has? How’d your life change, if at all?

 

[Felonious Python]

Anyone here have Ulcerative Colitis or know anyone who has? How’d your life change, if at all?

Shayne Corson and Fernando Pisani have it.

List of people diagnosed with ulcerative colitis - Wikipedia

UC's Wikipedia page says that it's possibly connected to gut bacteria and diet. What foods someone eats are incredibly underrated in the general population, and small tweaks can sometimes get big results.

 

[Felonious Python]

Shayne Corson and Fernando Pisani have it.

List of people diagnosed with ulcerative colitis - Wikipedia

UC's Wikipedia page says that it's possibly connected to gut bacteria and diet. What foods someone eats are incredibly underrated in the general population, and small tweaks can sometimes get big results.

Just realized the obvious. The Wikipedia list of people diagnosed with UC includes YouTuber Hank Green. He's made videos on what it's like.

 

[Felonious Python]

I liked how some company put a commercial out during the Super Bowl about winning a chance to go to space or something (like that's something anybody can think about right now) and it got utterly obliterated by Sesame Street for Doordash immediately after.

My viral detector is still pretty sharp though. I had a hunch that The Weeknd inside the stage, and that oat milk ad would go viral.

 

[Felonious Python]

I know that we all have Garfield Kart in our Steam libraries (and downloaded to all our devices), but in case you lost your Steam password and need to start rebuilding your library, IndieGala is giving the game away. Fools. Giving away billions in profit.

https://freebies.indiegala.com/garfield-kart

 

[Felonious Python]

Shorting Arm & Hammer's parent company on Monday due to unrelated cannibalism.

Well, well, well. Look what stock cratered 0.7% today.

 

[Felonious Python]

There's some tea that someone at Disney/Lucasfilm deliberately leaked Gina Carano getting fired right before Disney's quarterly earnings call (which I found strange myself).

It's a Kennedy vs Favreau faction thing of course.

 

[Felonious Python]

Going to say it. Judas and the Black Messiah. 97% Rotten Tomatoes score. 7.9 IMDB review score. Great cast, fascinating (real life) premise. A bit of a snooze.

 

[LightningStrikes]

I love reading FP’s diary!

 

[Felonious Python]

I love reading FP’s diary!

Wait, you all can read this?

 

[Felonious Python]

Zack Snyder made the genius move to have Jared Leto's Joker say the thing. People didn't like his Joker, but now he's the meme Joker. The most dangerous of all the Jokers.

 

[Felonious Python]

I miss March-April when I was a national hero for staying home all day.

 

[Felonious Python]

Joker update: Cruella de Vil lives in a society

 

[Felonious Python]

Anyone familiar with Imperator: Rome? I got it in a Humble Monthly Bundle a few months ago, but didn't touch it since the word at the time was that the game had just started to turn around through patches after a tepid release.

Seems the internet is liking the game quite a bit more after the 2.0 patch.

It's a Paradox grand strategy game, so lots to learn, even being familiar with CK2 and to a lesser extent EU4. Probably have to play as Rome first to learn the ropes, right?

 

[The Macho King]

Anyone familiar with Imperator: Rome? I got it in a Humble Monthly Bundle a few months ago, but didn't touch it since the word at the time was that the game had just started to turn around through patches after a tepid release.

Seems the internet is liking the game quite a bit more after the 2.0 patch.

It's a Paradox grand strategy game, so lots to learn, even being familiar with CK2 and to a lesser extent EU4. Probably have to play as Rome first to learn the ropes, right?

I didnt love it. Just no real flow to it. I prefer their older EU: Rome but that one is pretty old.

 

[Felonious Python]

I didnt love it. Just no real flow to it. I prefer their older EU: Rome but that one is pretty old.

Supposedly Imperator has turned it around recently though. I'll give it a try either way.




Password manager LastPass is also going to make free accounts choose between PC and mobile only next month, so there's been a mass migration of their users to Bitwarden.

edit: anyone know if Bitwarden is related to Chad Warden at all? I'd give my money to that. Not that $600 means anything to him.

 

[Felonious Python]

Imperator isn't too bad, actually. Although I'm still basically in the early game. I'm doing the tutorial with Rome, so I'm focusing on taking over the Italian peninsula first.

I can see the game's DNA though, so I think I can get what they were trying to do. Way back in Rome: Total War (when TW still came at the end of the title), characters and families were a thing, and it's something I sort of missed. Not really for the drama, but to see how my commanders and governors stories developed. It's part of why I like Crusader Kings so much.

The family focus seems kind of pointless in the early game, at least in the tutorial. I can have whatever laws I want with the right research, so it's not like the empire is teetering on the brink. I'm The Guy, not the characters. Who cares about their egos. I'll outlive their grandkids in an hour. In CK, they're a threat because you play your dynasty, and you probably don't want to go back to governing some backwater duchy.

Being guaranteed to buy a fabricated CB is straight fire though. I didn't know if they had CB's back then. I'd figure that they were put in place IRL exactly to stop a Rome from happening again.

The automation is good too. Combat in Paradox games isn't particularly satisfying, so having the AI just do the wack-a-mole routine for you lets you focus on other issues. Rome IRL had wars all over the place anyway.

It reminds me more of an earlier time period EU4 than anything.

 

[Felonious Python]

On the radio, they advertise a podcast hosted by Charlie and Dixie. I don't know who they are, and they don't say their last names or what they do.

Now I hear an ad because their parents have a podcast.

I never want to know anything about them, but I do want these peaks into this ever expanding universe of theirs.

 

[Felonious Python]

If you were still holding $GME for some reason, maybe look at your portfolio sometime today.

 

[Felonious Python]

I played through a game on normal in Imperator Rome as Rome.

I'm basically just scratching the surface of a game like this, but it feels like a game where you're trying to find the dominant strategy, and not necessarily a mechanically deep game. The most interesting mechanic I found was intentionally failing to enforce peace. It would make you enter a war, but you didn't need to worry about CB's or stability. It's free real estate.

The Roman Republic (precursor to the Roman Empire) fell apart for a few reasons, so if you never allow your generals to get too powerful and disloyal, and aren't shy about replacing them, then that's a major threat basically gone. Another significant patch or two and this could be balanced.

Diplomacy needs a huge overhaul. I didn't really ally or feel the need to cooperate with anyone until late in the game when I wanted to ally with Egypt (as a check against Carthage and the large empires in the east I was running up to) but couldn't do it because I was too big of a blob. Alliances can be exploited (see the HRE in CK2), but it made me disengage with diplomacy in a game where you play as a nation.

In these games you generally want to go wide, and keep expanding rather than build tall with lots of improvements in each province. There is a 'macro builder' button where you can plop all the buildings you want, so it encourages a formula of building the necessary things, and then just leaving it.

There's also shockingly few unique events, even as Rome. Giving the game like this a bit of optional structure isn't bad. The available missions don't really provide you with flavor text usually either, so it lacks world building.

It's not really a bad game, but it is sort of a letdown compared to CK2 and EU4. Paradox has a build your own bundle with Humble going on right now, btw. I'll note though that CK Complete is CK1.
Paradox Build Your Own Bundle | Humble Store

 

[The Macho King]

Been smoking a brisket since midnight. Just wrapped it through the stall, so about 6 hours left.

It smells so good y'all.

 

[The Macho King]

Brisket was real good. I have a buddy that works in a brewery so traded some for some beer and now I think I will sleep for 20 years.

 

[Felonious Python]

Coming 2 America is unnecessary. Too much of everything. Licensed music, cameos, plot lines, characters, product placement, etc. I think Darryl Jenkins (Erik La Salle) may have been the only significant cut. Even Samuel L. Jackson's robber made it in via flashback.

The immersion-breaking soundtrack really sort of bugs me here. They went with an extremely modern mainstream American soundtrack, but I don't buy it for the universe they're trying to establish for Zamunda. I don't see the problem with an original soundtrack. Maybe at the end, when the cultures are finally in-sync or make the licensed music work as sort of a leitmotif for Lavelle.

 

[The Macho King]

Just switched my daughter to a toddler bed. Went up after her nap and she found her night time diapers and had put 9! Of them on as a joke, and started cackling when I came in the room.

Kids are weird.