BenVimes

I mean, Traveller's Gate is still good, if a bit unpolished in hindsight. It's just plain fun, especially if you're familiar with fantasy and anime tropes, though I recommend keeping a glossary nearby to make the comprehension of the the various terms easier.

The Last Horizon, the series he's working on now, is also a lot of fun. It mixes sci-fi and fantasy, and all the main characters are already able to bench-press continents (literally or proverbially), so their development comes via different avenues than Cradle, where Lindon's personal growth was tied directly to his power level. I wasn't as enamoured with the second Last Horizon book as I was the first, but it was still good, and unless Will Wight starts writing Nazi propaganda or something I'll continue to read everything he publishes.

I've been reading Will Wight's stuff since the first Traveller's Gate book. He's my favourite living author.

Orthos, sacred beast of the Path of the Black Flame

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.

Well, there's the fact that outrage seems to drive more activity than other types of content. YouTube sees it as a more profitable option to advertise a Very Angry Gamer(tm) to you, even if you aren't interested. I guess they assume that you'll find something to watch anyhow, but if they will profit even more of they can hook you into the outrage machine.

Then there's my personal hypothesis that in order to enable this, YouTube's algorithm weights your demographics, subscriptions, and viewing history much more heavily than your manual inputs.

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.

Here's one:

Tactics Ogre Reborn came out in late 2022 for Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC.

That game is a remaster of another title called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which came out for the PSP in November 2010 in Japan. This puts it 12 years before Reborn.

But the PSP game was itself is a remake of a game with the same name that came out originally for the Super Famicom in October 1995, 15 years before its remake and 27 years before the remaster of that remake.

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.

House of Wacks has you covered.