It also seems like there's some sort of unlock mechanism for what civs will be available for you to choose from in the next era - you'll assumably have to do certain things in an era to unlock specific civs for the next era

I NEED IT!!!

I'm about done with Winter, the last book in the primary Lunar Chronicles quartet. It's been a really great read thus far, like the rest of the series. I'm excited to see just how the big bad gets their comeuppance, as well as what becomes of the cast of characters. Then I'll be on to the two addendum books to the series - the first is a series of short stories, but I didn't know how they relate yet. The second is a novela about the backstory of said big bad, which should be intriguing.

I finally picked up Cinder by Marissa Meyer last Thursday. I knew immediately that I was going to want to read the whole series, so ordered them to be shipped to my house. Unfortunately, I finished the first book on Friday, and my package still hasn't arrived. I was able to check out the 2nd through Libby, but I read that in 2 days as well, and the 3rd is checked out through my library, so I'm stuck waiting for the shipment.

In the meantime, I started reading Top Ten Games You Can Play by Yourself In Your Head - I found it through a random role playing game blog, and bought it on a whim. While I support expanding your imagination, and the games and structure included do seem pretty entertaining, the author has managed to write the most pretentious book I've ever encountered - it's insane.

So, to take a break from that, I'm rereading The LEGO Book - LEGO's retelling of their history. I've read it once before, but it's been a while, and it's a pretty fun walk through the history of the company, from tiny wooden toy shop to globally dominant construction toy company.

I just started Ordinary Monsters, by J. M. Miro. Too early yet to have any real opinions, but it feels like it's setting up an intriguing story, so I'm looking forward to getting further.

Very much so, although the author manages to make it much more poignant than I expected, but it was for good reasons.

Yeah, H.G. Wells. I finished it a couple nights ago. It's very... Pompous? It's so over the top that it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually supposed to be satire... but I don't think it was. I'm glad I read it, but I highly doubt I'll ever pick it up again. Oh, and it's The Time Machine, not Traveler - sorry for the brain fart.

On Monday, I finished The Winter of the Witch, the last in Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy - it was absolutely fantastic from front to back. Last night I picked up The Time Traveler - I got a physical copy for super cheap from a second hand book store. I've never read it, so I'm excited to see how it reads. So far, it's pretty good - a bit pretentious in some of the word choice, maybe, but I suppose that's kind of to be expected.

Nope. They push the yeerks off of Earth, and then chase them out into space

As someone who read all 54 core books last year, this is factually incorrect

I finished The Bear and the Nightingale a bit ago, so moved onto the rest of the series. I pretty quickly pushed through the second book, The Girl in the Tower, and have just started the last book, The Winter of the Witch. It has thus far been a fantastic series, and I'm very much looking forward to a certain character finally getting his well deserved comeuppance (and it had better really hurt...)

I'm taking a break from Animal Crossing to try and finally finish Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. We'll see how far I get this time. It's got a lot of classic RPG feel that I really love, and the Ghibli animated cutscenes are gorgeous, but I'm really not used to having to "watch" my games, so we'll see.

The oldest system I have would be the NES. My brother received it sometime before I was born. I'm just holding onto it for him, though - it doesn't get played right now. I actually intend to clean it all up and retrobright it before sending it back to him... eventually... The oldest system I have that still gets occasional use would be my Gameboy Color, which I received, with Pokemon Red, for Christmas when I was 8 or 9. Unfortunately, I need to find a better plastic polish, to take some light scratches out of the lens, and until I do, it will remain disassembled... I've also been contemplating using the board for a complete boxypixel overhaul, but there's something about still having my full original GBC that I'm having a problem getting over...

Continuing with my wizard's island in Animal Crossing, although I'm more just putting my daily time in right now. I finally worked up the drive to continue on my Minecraft chateau build, so that's eating most of my creative energies right now.

I'm not super sure. If I recall correctly, we've known for a while that something was going on, because surface hearing alone couldn't account for all of the water evaporating from oceans, but we couldn't tell what. In defense of humanity here, the concept of photons interacting with something as comparably massive as molecules is kinda wild. We were caught way off guard when the photoelectric effect was announced, and that's photons interacting with whole atoms instead of just elementary particles. The idea of the photomolecular effect is thus even wilder.

If you read the article, it's pretty clear. Instead of the energy of the photons being used to heat the water molecules to state change, that energy is used to break the molecular bonds between small groups of water molecules, and those groups are small enough to then be picked up by the air and evaporate. This way, the energy contained in a photon is converting much more liquid water to water vapor than if that same amount of energy was actually used to excite the water molecules, as in a microwave.

I recently started The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Its the first book in a trilogy, and while I've read - and loved - this book, I haven't read the rest of the trilogy yet. I'm quite excited - my wife blitzed them and said they were very good.

Come Sail Away - Styx

I own and have played the Gameboy remakes a few times. I would say going 1-2-3 shows the progression of game mechanic development really well - each feels like a refinement of the previous with some fresh new ideas added in. Additionally, though it's a fairly loose tie , the story across the 3 of them is related. That being said, though, I believe 2 is pretty widely considered to be the worst game in the entire franchise, so... Your mileage may vary. It is admittedly the one I've played least, and I probably haven't picked it up in the better part of 2 decades, so it's a bit vague for me anymore.

I am but a humble traveling troubadour of Lower Noblesse. Or that is what I would have you believe. In truth, I am an information broker and spy for Steel Anne, the infamous forest bandit, and her band of Jolly Fellows from the Robbin Woods.

Last weekend I just needed something simple for a while, so I finally started an Animal Crossing island on my switch lite. My wife and I have put a bunch of time into crafting an island on our original switch, so it's been fun to start so over. I forgot just how slow moving the game is, though. 😛 My plan for the island is to keep it standard fantasy themed - my house will be a wizard tower on a hill, amidst a dense forest. There will also be a "secret" fruit forest that you have to quest for. All the houses and buildings will be located in a single, village-like area with some farms

Progress! Yeah, I think I scrubbed at the game boy for about a half an hour before I could get a reliable connection. My guess is that the handshake still isn't quite completing correctly, and maybe more scrubbing would work? It would be really helpful if you had a known-working cartridge with which to test. Beyond that, though, I would have to do subs Google sleuthing to find anything else.

I will say, though, that your screen seems fine, so it's probably not that.

Something similar happened with the one I repaired for my mother-in-law. I had to scrub the cartridge loader contacts in the game boy pretty vigorously with a toothbrush and 99% isopropyl alcohol before it would reliably load appropriately. I would suggest doing the same scrub in the cartridge, as well.

IIRC, Game Boy games do a handshake with the system before anything can load, and that is shown on the screen. When the handshake is successful, you get the normal Nintendo logo. When something in the handshake is wrong, you get the corrupted logo screen.

If that gets you past the logo screen, but you're still having lines on the screen, that's probably a bad ribbon cable connection. You can reheat the connection points to get a proper connection again, but it's definitely an exercise in patience. There are a bunch of guides on this one on the Internet.

Silver Dragonborn Ancients Barbarian - I wanted to try a tanky build again, after not liking my attempt with paladin. He was Con primary, Str secondary, using a Warhammer and shield, and I was excited to see how the path of the ancients intersected with things like shield Master or sentinel. He was from a tribe of remnant Dragonborn after Abeir split back off. His tribe used to rely on shamans that communicated with their ancestors, but the last one had passed in his grandfather before he was identified as a new shaman. His sister died in a horrible accident, and his communication with her spirit was how he was identified. No one in the tribe knew how to help with his gift, so he went out into the world, accompanied by the spirit of his sister, to see what he could learn. His rage manifested as an icy white cloud rolling over him and falling to the ground, slowly revealing the spirits that accompanied him. I planned for him to notice and get to know more and more of his ancestors' spirits as he got more powerful - including his grandfather, a taciturn half-dragon, and a happy-go-lucky silver dragon. Unfortunately, I had to bow out of the campaign just as we hit level 3, so I never got to experience any of it. ☹️

I have lots, but the top of the list is probably Cairn - doubly so now that the Cairn 2e Kickstarter is out. It seems like the perfect mix of light mechanics and shenanigans.

Like many others, I haven't played because my group is in the middle of a multi-year D&D campaign. That, however, got put on a deadline, as our second child will be along later this year, so who knows what the future holds?

Still running around in BotW. I finally beat all of the divine beasts, and am just about to finish up the Champions' Ballad DLC. After that I'll do some quest clean up, some dragon hunting (need to get the Wild gear up to max), and then I suppose it'll finally be time to storm a castle.

Uh, akshually, that's Lauralanthalasa, "friend". 😛

I assume this is Laurana from Dragonlance, but does anyone know why the Golden General is wearing all her upper body armor, boots and greaves, but no pants?

That's pretty much what I expected, which is really cool to see. The next number I would love to see is some sort of price per weight comparison. As @edgemaster72@lemmy.world pointed out, the next common argument is that LEGO sets have a lot more smaller pieces now, so if the PPP has stayed roughly the same, the price per weight should have gone up.

Pokemon - I love the whole series for what it is, but if I had to pick a favorite I would probably go with Heart Gold.

Wind Waker - I was late to Zelda games, and this was the first I ever beat. The whole feel of the game still keeps it as my favorite - it's a lot of light-hearted fun, with gorgeous visuals and fantastic music, but still tells a story that feels grave and important.

I think I shall boot Breath of the Wild back up, and see if I can't finish soon-ish. I got about half-way through during the Christmas/New Year's holiday break, but then got distracted by a restart of the Minecraft server I play on. :-P

Okay, so that gets to the crux of the "problem" with d&d, then - characters have fairly easy access to very effective crowd control abilities, so big monsters in d&d need a way to counter those. The answer, then, is to either give the monsters the ability to nullify character abilities, or remove character abilities. One of those things will generally go over better with your players than the other...

I'm not familiar with Dragonbane - if it doesn't have PC ability nullification, how do "Monsters" deal with PC control abilities? Stunning Strike, Hold Monster, Hypnotic Pattern, etc, all need to be answered in some way, or even the biggest encounters can be trivialized.

Yes, and that's their goal. They don't want viable universities for the masses.

IDK. Most of the early games were actually pretty entertaining. I fairly recently played sorcerer's stone on the gbc, and it was still pretty fantastic.

I buy for myself only sporadically - most of my stuff comes from Christmas presents. It probably comes out to about $200 a year, maybe $300. Admittedly, if we lived closer to a LEGO store, it would probably be a fair bit more...

I haven't played most of these, but I will gladly add an endorsement to the early Harry Potter games. They often only tangentially related to the movies, but they had some awesome mechanics, and played into the full story really well.

While it never got much past the concept phase, I think it would be fun to play a circle of stars druid as a magical girl. I was thinking this ancient elven man who learned a bit of the druidic magics of his people, but was always more fascinated with the stars. One day he connected with a group of gnomes who invented a flying machine that could take them to the moon, and immediately signed up for the trip. When he got there, he discovered a moon goddess that had been trapped there. They hit it off famously, he offered to help free her, and she turned him into a knight of sorts, giving him the transformation ability. When he transforms, he turns into this young, bubbly, vivacious eleven woman with crazy armor and the standard anime oversized weapon that is based on which form he transformed into. She still has all the same memories, ideas and goals, but with a completely different personality. It would be pretty entertaining.