Everyone left that is.
I just discovered the font colour mechanics
Also, I'm generally behaving a bit like a retired person. Married, moved into a cheaper-to-maintain house, and spend my days writing "romantasy" under a pseudonym. Nothing I'm exceedingly proud about, but it's fun to write and terribly trashy, plus it pays the bills. And I once got a review that said, "At least it's not as bad as Terry Goodkind," which is where my handle originally came from.
If I may run on a tangent for a bit
My excuse for the Sword of Truth stuff: I was in my mid-teens. I didn't know anything about libertarianism, nor did I realize the series was basically a propaganda medium. I also learned about libertarianism via William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Wollstonecraft... and thought of it as more of a precursor to liberal communism and was too naive to consider that wildly different philosophies could use the same label. So, I didn't realize (even when I heard that Terry Goodkind was a libertarian) that it was the right-wing nonsense... just like I didn't realize at the time that the communism of Karl Marx was not just the opposite of Stalin - despite both being called "Marxism" - but wasn't even the same kind of philosophy - as one was a theoretical model for how Karl Marx thought the socioeconomic structure of the world would evolve, as well as the hows, whys, and whats - and the belief that working-class individuals through a series of revolutions would come to take control of the means of production and eliminate the need for a government or capitalist class; Stalin's Marxism was a system of applied policies for a totalitarian imperialist government where the means of production was controlled by the state. Not much like Marx's predictions at all. Marx predicted the irrelevancy/withering of the state, not the totalitarian dominance of it. So, it's kind of like that - the libertarianism I first learned about was the one focused on maximizing liberty for all people, while Terry Goodkind's libertarianism is maximizing liberty for the economically powerful, while reducing it for everyone who can't achieve financial liberation - since it's economically unfeasible for them to take advantage of the freedom, while the wealthy wield their freedom to maintain a hierarchy.
Back to my post
Books: I'm currently reading a few. Isaac Asimov Foundation and Empire (reading group), and we've done I Robot and Foundation. I just finished a re-read of Dracula and Lord of the Rings - both books I've read over 20 times (perhaps a lot more; I lost count, and I read these ones like I used to watch old Simpsons and Seinfeld re-runs). I recently read Ender's Game for the first time in quite some time, alongside Brave New World and Childhood's End.
I'm preparing to read Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction, which I've never read before.
All of these are on e-book. I don't do audiobooks because I'm a very poor listener (my mind wanders, and if the audiobook keeps going, I don't pay attention), and I don't do paper books anymore for a variety of reasons - mainly, they are a bitch to move.
In film, I recently watched The Substance, that's my favourite film of 2024, only seen it while high so far. It's got a lot of ridiculousness in it, but it comes with the art horror genre. The film has a lot of influences from Kubrick, to Verhoeven, Lynch, Cronenberg, and Carpenter.
In music, my favourite album of last year is the Death of Slim Shady - we've discussed it recently in the forum, so I don't need to do it again here - but in short, it's a concept album which has an angry Slim Shady jumping 21 years into the future (from 2003 to 2024) and wondering what the fuck is going on - he has a Fight Club-esque feud with Marshall Mathers. Other than that, I've been rediscovering Lana Del Ray in the past few months. Putting a great deal of her music on my regular rotation along with The Weeknd, Hole, Nirvana, Pac, Lennon, Cranberries, Sneaker Pimps, Lush, The Knife, and Tove Lo (pronounced 2-vah-loo, well a cross between that and toe-vah-loo).
For games, I recently wrapped up Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone and am about 30-40% into a game of Romancing Saga 3 remaster on Switch, and hoping to finish it before the remasters of Suikoden 1 and 2 come out next week - I doubt I'll finish both of those before Xenoblade Chronicles X (which comes out two weeks later, on the 20th of March). Lunar Remasters are coming out in April, but I'll probably do those games after I finish Suikoden 2 and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. Romancing Saga 3 is graphically a cross between Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger, as it had a lot of the same crew and direction as those two games - including Kaori Tanaka (AKA Soraya Saga) who was one of the major artist/writers of FF6, and co-creator of Xenogears. It's experimental like the second game in the series, but perhaps a little more straight forward - although, I find a lot of valuable information is hidden.
(the following will be nonsense if you don't know much about Saga games)
The only thing I think you need to know is that any character can use any magic, weapon, or skill, BUT - if the character is magic focused and has 0 SP, never use them as an attacker, if a character is attack focused and has 0 MP, don't use any magic. The reason is that certain characters have shit special skill growth, and others have shit magic growth - and if they hit 45 SP or MP they gain a crown which gives some bonuses to magic or SP; to keep things simple in your first play through, it's best to go for these crowns and then if you choose to New Game+ it, you won't have screwed up the crowns for all time (as I have done on most characters, including Undine who would have otherwise been a better mage instead of a still very good mage with a shit physical attack. For me, I hate looking at guides/walkthroughs unless I'm already invested in the game and know where it's going. Some stuff you can deduce through play, I think I played about 50-80 of the investment mini game before I figured out what the hell was going on (basically, you try to dump more money in, and the different skills have different effects, but the only one I really figured out was "Under the Table" which is 1 million gold, do it twice, and you can ask all of the company's and conglomerates for capital - this is all I needed to win the entire mini-game; and yes, this investment mini-game is exactly what I mean by there not being enough information in game. Still, I am having a load of fun with the game - but I like Romancing Saga 2's story and gameplay better, but graphics, pacing, and characters are superior in this one.
One last thing about Romancing Saga 2, you will screw that one up the first time through. But I think I'm going to be able to finish the third game on play number 1 without much trouble. Both RS2 and 3 have New Game+.
I just discovered the font colour mechanics
Also, I'm generally behaving a bit like a retired person. Married, moved into a cheaper-to-maintain house, and spend my days writing "romantasy" under a pseudonym. Nothing I'm exceedingly proud about, but it's fun to write and terribly trashy, plus it pays the bills. And I once got a review that said, "At least it's not as bad as Terry Goodkind," which is where my handle originally came from.
If I may run on a tangent for a bit
My excuse for the Sword of Truth stuff: I was in my mid-teens. I didn't know anything about libertarianism, nor did I realize the series was basically a propaganda medium. I also learned about libertarianism via William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Wollstonecraft... and thought of it as more of a precursor to liberal communism and was too naive to consider that wildly different philosophies could use the same label. So, I didn't realize (even when I heard that Terry Goodkind was a libertarian) that it was the right-wing nonsense... just like I didn't realize at the time that the communism of Karl Marx was not just the opposite of Stalin - despite both being called "Marxism" - but wasn't even the same kind of philosophy - as one was a theoretical model for how Karl Marx thought the socioeconomic structure of the world would evolve, as well as the hows, whys, and whats - and the belief that working-class individuals through a series of revolutions would come to take control of the means of production and eliminate the need for a government or capitalist class; Stalin's Marxism was a system of applied policies for a totalitarian imperialist government where the means of production was controlled by the state. Not much like Marx's predictions at all. Marx predicted the irrelevancy/withering of the state, not the totalitarian dominance of it. So, it's kind of like that - the libertarianism I first learned about was the one focused on maximizing liberty for all people, while Terry Goodkind's libertarianism is maximizing liberty for the economically powerful, while reducing it for everyone who can't achieve financial liberation - since it's economically unfeasible for them to take advantage of the freedom, while the wealthy wield their freedom to maintain a hierarchy.
Back to my post
Books: I'm currently reading a few. Isaac Asimov Foundation and Empire (reading group), and we've done I Robot and Foundation. I just finished a re-read of Dracula and Lord of the Rings - both books I've read over 20 times (perhaps a lot more; I lost count, and I read these ones like I used to watch old Simpsons and Seinfeld re-runs). I recently read Ender's Game for the first time in quite some time, alongside Brave New World and Childhood's End.
I'm preparing to read Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction, which I've never read before.
All of these are on e-book. I don't do audiobooks because I'm a very poor listener (my mind wanders, and if the audiobook keeps going, I don't pay attention), and I don't do paper books anymore for a variety of reasons - mainly, they are a bitch to move.
In film, I recently watched The Substance, that's my favourite film of 2024, only seen it while high so far. It's got a lot of ridiculousness in it, but it comes with the art horror genre. The film has a lot of influences from Kubrick, to Verhoeven, Lynch, Cronenberg, and Carpenter.
In music, my favourite album of last year is the Death of Slim Shady - we've discussed it recently in the forum, so I don't need to do it again here - but in short, it's a concept album which has an angry Slim Shady jumping 21 years into the future (from 2003 to 2024) and wondering what the fuck is going on - he has a Fight Club-esque feud with Marshall Mathers. Other than that, I've been rediscovering Lana Del Ray in the past few months. Putting a great deal of her music on my regular rotation along with The Weeknd, Hole, Nirvana, Pac, Lennon, Cranberries, Sneaker Pimps, Lush, The Knife, and Tove Lo (pronounced 2-vah-loo, well a cross between that and toe-vah-loo).
For games, I recently wrapped up Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone and am about 30-40% into a game of Romancing Saga 3 remaster on Switch, and hoping to finish it before the remasters of Suikoden 1 and 2 come out next week - I doubt I'll finish both of those before Xenoblade Chronicles X (which comes out two weeks later, on the 20th of March). Lunar Remasters are coming out in April, but I'll probably do those games after I finish Suikoden 2 and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. Romancing Saga 3 is graphically a cross between Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger, as it had a lot of the same crew and direction as those two games - including Kaori Tanaka (AKA Soraya Saga) who was one of the major artist/writers of FF6, and co-creator of Xenogears. It's experimental like the second game in the series, but perhaps a little more straight forward - although, I find a lot of valuable information is hidden.
(the following will be nonsense if you don't know much about Saga games)
The only thing I think you need to know is that any character can use any magic, weapon, or skill, BUT - if the character is magic focused and has 0 SP, never use them as an attacker, if a character is attack focused and has 0 MP, don't use any magic. The reason is that certain characters have shit special skill growth, and others have shit magic growth - and if they hit 45 SP or MP they gain a crown which gives some bonuses to magic or SP; to keep things simple in your first play through, it's best to go for these crowns and then if you choose to New Game+ it, you won't have screwed up the crowns for all time (as I have done on most characters, including Undine who would have otherwise been a better mage instead of a still very good mage with a shit physical attack. For me, I hate looking at guides/walkthroughs unless I'm already invested in the game and know where it's going. Some stuff you can deduce through play, I think I played about 50-80 of the investment mini game before I figured out what the hell was going on (basically, you try to dump more money in, and the different skills have different effects, but the only one I really figured out was "Under the Table" which is 1 million gold, do it twice, and you can ask all of the company's and conglomerates for capital - this is all I needed to win the entire mini-game; and yes, this investment mini-game is exactly what I mean by there not being enough information in game. Still, I am having a load of fun with the game - but I like Romancing Saga 2's story and gameplay better, but graphics, pacing, and characters are superior in this one.
One last thing about Romancing Saga 2, you will screw that one up the first time through. But I think I'm going to be able to finish the third game on play number 1 without much trouble. Both RS2 and 3 have New Game+.
