This was one of the first games I followed the development for. I was super pumped because I loved Star Wars in general and Knights of the Old Republic in particular. I even got the deluxe pre-order.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get into it at the time, probably because at that point I was pretty sick MMO quest structure after several years of playing WoW.

I’ve always thought of returning, mostly to experience the stories, but I’ve just never found the space in my life for the time commitment.

That I will never enjoy the taste of wine.

I figured out I would never like coffee in my teens, and had the same realization about beer in my 20s.

But it wasn’t until this year, in my mid-thirties, that I finally accepted that I don’t like the taste of wine and probably never will. After years of trying the full spectrum of wines, I had to admit that it wasn’t the “notes” that were turning me off, nor was it a problem with the quality of the wine. It was the fundamental “wine-ness” that I disliked, the same as I don’t like the “beer-ness” of beer or the “coffee-ness” of coffee.

It really wants me to host a webinar. I get a pop-up every day telling me about how great this function supposedly is. You’d think there was a VC generative AI project attached to it with how hard it’s being pushed.

They are mostly a toy store now. Last time I visited a GameStop I was told they don’t even stock new games at release, except for pre-orders. There doesn’t seem to be a point in going there anymore.

Octopath Traveller is a game I should have theoretically liked because I have so much nostalgia for SNES RPGs. Unfortunately, it felt more like a proof-of-concept demo stretched to a full-length game than a complete experience in its own right.

I’ve heard that the sequel is better, but I haven’t tried it.

I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.

Briefly: I didn’t.

More substantively: I never owned a cell phone growing up, even though I was at the right age when they became a common thing for teenagers to have. It wasn’t a money thing, nor household rule, as my sisters got phones when they were in high school. The biggest reason was probably just how I communicate. I wasn’t big into IM services either, and I preferred email or face-to-face, or a (landline) phone call if it was an urgent matter.

Then there was also my adolescent brain thinking I was making a bold counter-culture statement by steadfastly resisting the march of technology. In reality, I was probably just being a pain in the neck for my friends and family, and I probably unnecessarily endangered myself at least once.

I did finally, begrudgingly, get an old hand-me-down flip-phone in my final year of university, but that was out of necessity, and I used it to make maybe only a dozen calls the 2.5 years I had it before getting a smart device.

To bring it full circle: I did try sending a text message with that flip-phone exactly once, at the insistence of my family. That message was predictably a garbled mess, and to this day my sisters still wonder how I managed to get a number to appear in the middle of the “word”.

I have a number of other somewhat amusing stories about people’s reactions to my lack of a cellphone, but this post is long enough already.

Am I the only person in my generation who never learned to type on a number pad? It wasn’t the only thing I didn’t recognize from the “test”, but it stuck out to me.

My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we’ve learned, these milestones sneak up on you.

I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That’s around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend’s house within the neighbourhood on my own.

Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.

One huge advantage Larian had was years of experience making games in this genre, and I doubt many other studios have that sort of corporate knowledge. Obsidian may be the only sizable one that comes close. Maybe Beamdog too, as they are responsible for the Enhanced Editions of all the old Infinity Engine games, including some original content.

At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate “do not use” by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn’t want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.

It was one of four games I backed on Kickstarter years ago, and now it is the last one to come out. I haven’t played Suikoden, so I only know vaguely what to expect. I do hope I like it more than the other games I supported, though.

My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was “impossible” because I had “just renewed.” It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service another year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn’t let me do.

My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.

Or so I thought.

I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I’m presuming they were going to ignore.

Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents’ behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse

Definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to cancel a subscription.

Having learned French as a second language, I can say that the gendered noun thing wasn’t the most difficult aspect, but it was the most consistently annoying. There are signifiers that makes the gender of some nouns very obvious, but then there are just as many others where it feels arbitrary or even contradictory to the established trends.

When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.

I feel this in my soul. My university house had mould on the bathroom ceiling, and one of my roommates was allergic - they went into violent sneezing fits every time they showered.

Our landlords tried everything to avoid addressing it, up to claiming that, “people couldn’t be allergic to mould like that.”

They only “fixed” it after one of my other roommates threatened to talk to his father who was a lawyer. Their “fix” was to paste over the ceiling with vinyl plates.

Don’t forget every magical staff , necklace, and ring that casts a spell.

Will I ever use Create Water from the Rain Dancer? Probably not, especially with Shadowheart lugging around more than a dozen bottles of water. But what if I really need it?

I’ve seen S2E1 so far. It was a bit slow, but at least Egwene and Nynaeve are mostly in the right spot, and Perrin is almost exactly where he’s supposed to be (a bit strange considering of the five main characters he was the one with the biggest change to his backstory)

I’m probably on my own in being a big fan of the books and also liking the first season for the most part. Despite the changes, the world felt recognizably like Randland. I only really hated the last episode.

But that last episode was an absolute trash fire. It wasn’t just different, it was wrong. A bunch of characters and story elements are either killed off, not present to begin with, or in the wrong place at the start of the second season.

I’m willing to forgive a lot of that due to the troubles the production had with COVID and the loss of one of the main actors. All that was on top of regular old studio meddling that happens with these things.

My hope then is that the second season will go about trying to correct everything and put all the characters where they are supposed to be at the start of season three, which I’m assuming will align with the third book.

Bit of an obscure one, but Fire Emblem Gaiden.

There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.