Shadowheart, Gale, and Karlach. My custom character is an Oath of the Ancients Paladin. I'm currently about halfway through through Act 2.
I don't bother swapping, even for lockpicking and disarming. I instead respecced Gale to have 16 Dexterity and Sleight of Hand proficiency. I haven't yet encountered any check that he couldn't pass, especially with Guidance.
I'm kind of bummed about not taking Lae'zel to the creche, but I can always do that in another playthrough.
I hate this two sentence headline format ("John Doe did blankety-blank. Now he's yadda yadda whatever") almost as much as I hate seeing headlines with the words, "slam," "rip," and "sparks outrage."
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 met my wife on a dating site, though I had an assist from a mutual friend.
My biggest takeaways were:
Don't expect instant and constant results. You can go weeks in between meaningful matches, and at some point you will actually tap out the "market" and there will be no one new for you to see in the app.
Be selective, but not demanding. Someone having a less-than-stellar profile may just mean they are bad at writing about themselves, not that they are a boring or unpleasant person.
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.
It looks like there's a lot of Ogre Battle in there as well.
Unlike a lot of things that were considered funny on the internet circa the early 2000s, PBF has aged like fine wine.
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 seem to remember them being surprised by the success of Bravely Default, not expecting a deliberately old-school RPG to appeal to modern audiences.
The cynical part of me believes this is performative on their part - they know a game like that will be popular, but it won't be the most popular thing ever and they won't make all the money. So, they try to push bigger games that are more easily monetized in hopes that people will just forget their own preferences.
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.
I'm in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.
This hour has 22 minutes indeed.