kbal

To judge from the trailer, this 2024 remake of If... (1968) with Ryan Reynolds deviates a long way from the original.

First time since March 2023!

Feeling the need to urinate, I went in to the appropriate room and found the big black cauldron that people are meant to piss in on the floor next to a fireplace. As I got going I noticed that the room wasn't empty, and that I was standing right next to a table for two where a man and his wife were trying to eat dinner. "Excuse me sir, didn't see you there" I apologized. They looked unhappy. As I continued, everyone else in the restaurant turned to look at me. As if I was the one doing something weird.

Here are some mods I can recommend that directly affect game balance, feel free to suggest more. For the most part I've listed only things that directly affect the basic variables in simple ways, not including survival mode stuff, combat overhauls, perk tree changes, the paraglider, and many other things that obviously do also affect game balance but aren't only about that.

*Skyrim Skill Uncapper for SE and AE - Adjust rate of level up for each skill individually. I like level-ups to be way slower than the base game, like 10 times slower, but with skills where tedious grinding is already the only way to train them left closer to normal but contributing less to character level advancement. Enjoy being level 1 for a meaningful amount of time.

*Armor Rating Overhaul - Makes early-game armour not completely useless. Getting some should be the priority it normally is in such games. The base game armor rating algorithm seems weirdly broken, any of this mod's options is better.

*Yet Another Difficulty Mod - Adjust damage dealt/damage taken, optionally changing it automatically as you advance. In my current game it's set to start with 1.0/2.0 at level 1 and smoothly progress to 0.5/5.0 at level 30 (compared to 0.25/3.0 for default legendary mode) and so far that seems good.

*Extra Encounters Reborn - Encounter more problems when wandering around the world.

*High Level Enemies - Make those you encounter more dangerous. Many of the people and animals who live only to murder passing strangers scale to higher levels than previously possible.

*NPC Regen Nerfed - Taking away their infinite magicka supply makes things a little easier.

*Simple No Health Regen - If you don't go full survival mode, maybe at least have no health regen.

*Smart NPC Potions - They might use two or three healing potions during a fight. Also they might poison you.

*Maxsu Combat Escape - When fights are actually difficult you might want to be able to run away without that stupid ogre continuing to be angry at you forever from the far side of a mountain.

*Simply Better Movement Speeds - My current choice of movement speed mod.

*Encounter Zones Unlocked - Probably helps if you're going to have a playthrough that goes on for a while.

Squardle is the best one. There's something of a learning curve. It looks intimidating at first. Once you get the hang of it though, it's just right.

It's given me a few minutes of word game entertainment every morning for the past year. I may not know much, but I know all the five-letter words now.

Z-Library is said to be down. Historians of the future will marvel at the way our civilization repeatedly built fantastic tools capable of freely distributing all our music, books, and movies across the world to anyone who wanted them in an instant, and then tore it all down and arrested the people who built it.

"We kept companies small for the same reason that we limited the height of skyscrapers: not because we opposed height, or failed to appreciate the value of a really good penthouse view – rather, to keep the building from falling over and wrecking all the adjacent buildings and the lives of the people inside them." — @pluralistic@mamot.fr

I'll just quote that so as to have a slightly better chance of remembering it. If Jagmeet Singh were on the fediverse I'd @ him too. How do we build a society where politicians have the basic common sense it takes to follow Cory Doctorow?

Why didn't anyone tell me that Papyrus Tweaks NG is mandatory once you have too many other mods?

Too many being probably about four hundred in my case. Script lag was getting ridiculous and then it started locking up, and now suddenly with that one addition, it's smooth and solid again. With that I guess my personal version of Skyrim is pretty much done, or at least ready for play testing.

they've gone too far this time

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt.

This legislative triad would grant the government sweeping new powers to censor and censure, undermining privacy rights.

Update available! This version is very old.

Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn't had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?