I typically turn the water off if I’m brushing in the shower. Hop in, shampoo, rinse, apply conditioner, turn off water, brush teeth, scrub body, turn water on, rinse, done. Makes use of otherwise dead time I’d spend waiting for the conditioner to work, and is comfortable enough with the residual heat from the walls and steam.
Are you insane, or have you achieved CHIM?
Not that there’s an appreciable difference…looking at you, Michael Kirkbride.
Art like this is why I check the Black Gate blog almost exclusively for the book covers. I suspect I’m a generation or two removed from the regular contributors, so they are frequently featuring genre books with this same painterly, abstracted style, and I find it all just so evocative.
Try these cool moves, like, playing the game!
…God I miss forum-based let’s plays. I was never a SA member (Something Awful, not Sturmabteilung, though there’s probably some degree of overlap there), but I did browse the lparchive website once upon a time. Some folks put so much effort into their presentation, I want sure where the game ended and the LP narrative began.
There was one in particular that was an LP of the Blade Runner adventure game. That’s a game I had watched my dad play on our family Compaq back in the day, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the combination of the game having secret narrative branches (that change based on a random seed when you start a new game, I think) and the posts being written in a first person, hard-boiled noir style, made me think that we had played different games.
For sure! You’ve convinced me to give it another look after unfairly writing it off. It sounds much more interesting than I originally anticipated.
Could be that I’m a product of a country which produced Kevin Costner as Robin Hood, and therefore don’t have the best grip on the culture cross the pond, but I feel like suggesting “Arthurian”=“Irish” might get you in trouble in certain pubs.
Alright everyone, turn your 3 AAR comments in to your squad leader before we get back to cantonment. As always, use IDR format. Johnson, put your goddamn hand down. If I have to explain IDR to you again, as God as my witness, I will cheetah-flip in your ass. PSGs, consolidate NLT than COB, to present at tomorrow’s CUB, when we can file all of these lessons learned in the commander’s “special” filing cabinet and totally forget the feedback when we do this event next year."
//Idk if the Marines do these things different than the army, but I imagine the process is the same, even if the terms are different.
Interesting. I remember taking a look at the previous game from a couple of years ago because, in spite of myself, edgelord dark fantasy is still appealing to me if it’s done knowingly (which is different, I’ll hasten to add, from not taking it seriously). However, one glance at the screenshots told me it was a deck-building game and I immediately disregarded it. It’s just not a mechanic or loop that I enjoy.
However, given that this appears to be to Skyrim what, say, The Outer Worlds is to Starfield (narrative tone notwithstanding), my interest is piqued.
Are you enjoying the game?
Love me some Goth Gamer Nation, but the other creator is unknown to me. Always happy to find another creator though, thanks for the recommendation.
I mean, that’s the goal of all of these AI companies. If you peruse any marketing material for Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT, Grok, etc. they almost all mention the “agentic capabilities” of their flavor of spyware.
Personally, an AI model which is capable of doing tasks like this would actually interest me. However, no organization (for profit or otherwise) is trustworthy enough to have access to all of the data on me that it would take to make an agentic AI actually useful, so, for me, it would have to be something I run locally. However, rather than invest all of the time, effort, and money into learning how to make that happen, I think I’ll just call the damn dealership and schedule an appointment. I may suffer from terminally online brain rot, but I’m not so paralyzed by human interaction I can’t make the occasional phone call.
AgenTic, not Agenic. As in, an AI that acts as your agent. Meaning, the goal would be to have an AI model that you could direct to perform certain tasks in the background while you focus on other things.
For example, youre in the middle of doing something or another when you remember that your oil change is due. You pull up KraftonAI and tell it to “book me a service appointment for my vehicle at the dealership this weekend”. The AI proceeds to work on that task in the background, only prompting you for input if it meets a road block it doesn’t understand.
The on-set intimacy coordinator gave me the go ahead! They said, in fact, “squish that spider or so help me you’re going to NEED a paid professional to conduct intimacy in this bedroom”.
Friendly cuddles without consent? That’s assault, brother!
Shit dawg, say less, that’s what my afternoon plans were anyway.
No, you’re fine, I totally understand the mistake. I AM a pretty big HoMM fan and I was unaware that they had licensed out the IP as well, so I can’t blame you for not knowing.
I agree that there is something bland about the aesthetics of the game. From a distance (or in a thumbnail), it looks very good and faithful to the art style of the original games, just with some extra bells and whistles. However, upon closer examination there is something about the design language which feels like I’m looking at a mobile game ad. It could be that I associate HoMM with a hyper specific micro genre of fantasy art. My views are very HoMM 2 coded, and that game feels its art was ripped from the book jackets of Del Rey and Tor published paperbacks circa 1987. I love the look, especially the hero portraits.
So, this new look doesn’t really do anything for me. I’m not knowledgeable enough to suggest that AI was used to design some of these assets, but that’s the impression the art gives me, which I’m sure was not their intent.
But, it’s not? Unless you’re aware of something I’m not, this game is published by Hooded Horse, and developed by Team Unfrozen.
If you have affinity for survival horror and adventure game (or 90s goth aesthetic)I recommend adding Grim Beard to your rotation.
Would never ask you to.