help me, Leon! 💢 #AshleyGraham #re4 #ResidentEvil4 pic.twitter.com/hBxRFXEllv

— tenletters (@_tenletters_) October 29, 2024

Kamala Harris' 'Fortnite' map bans guns, has less than 400 people playing https://t.co/qXmqRtCxJC

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) October 29, 2024

@Goomblebusters hat

KOJI10、配信中です。 https://t.co/bDgx7NDj6x pic.twitter.com/gqSqFb5Mgo

— 小島秀夫 (@Kojima_Hideo) October 28, 2024

In new documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a Norwegian couple talks about the rich experiences their disabled son had online in the World of Warcraft game – without their knowledge.

When Mats Steen died at the age of 25 in 2014 from a degenerative muscular disease, his parents, Robert and Trude Steen, were surprised to be contacted at their home in Norway by people from all over Europe, mourning his loss. The Steens knew that their son was an avid g*mer, but they'd not grasped that for nearly a decade, he had had another virtual life in the game World of Warcraft. The story of Mats, and his avatar Ibelin, is now being told in a documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

"I leave this world, and I spend most of my time in a distant world called Azeroth," begins Mats Steen in the film, his words spoken by an actor, introducing the audience to the virtual landscape familiar to players of World of Warcraft. "In there," he continues, "my chains are broken, and I can be whoever I want to be."

To discover that their son, who had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and used a wheelchair for much of his life, experienced much of what other young people his age did – socialising, friendship, love – was a revelation to his parents. "He was born more than 35 years ago now, we lived under the same roof as him for 25 years, four months and 15 days," Robert Steen tells the BBC. "Then he died having suffered quite severely from the disease that he was born with. And we believed that he lived a lonely and isolated life, without experiencing love or being important or making a difference in the lives of other people, because that is all we saw. The day after his passing, we inserted a small post into his blog saying he'd passed away, as we thought we ought to, since he spent so much time in the gaming world. That's when emails started to come in telling of [people's] strong relationships with Mats. And that was the turning point of our own life. His death was also the beginning of the story, because in the 10 years since he's passed, we've learned so much about his life."

Mats Steen's double life was first explored in 2019 by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and then in a BBC News article, which inspired Norwegian film-maker Benjamin Ree to tell the story as a documentary. "I think his story asks some questions that are really relevant today," he says. "Is it possible to become friends with someone you've never met? Is it possible to experience love with somebody you've never met? And how close a friendship can you have with someone you've never spoken to, just written to? And at the same time, I think it says something about the generational gap, about my generation's fascination for gaming – I'm 35 years old – and being in a virtual world. Mats really came of age within that game. Also, both Mats's friends and family have told me that towards the end of his life, he really wanted to have mattered. He seemed to have lived such a short life, but he wanted to be remembered."

Ree crafted the documentary using VHS footage of the Steen family, as well as using an actor to recite parts of Steen's blog, titled Musings of Life, which was published shortly before his death in 2014. While some of his friends from World of Warcraft are interviewed, Ibelin and other avatars from the game are animated. Steen had also interacted in the game by text, not by voice, and all his communication had been stored while he was gaming. His online community (known as a "guild" within World of Warcraft), called Starlight, helped make around 42,000 pages of discussion and directions available to Ree, so that he could piece together Steen's inner life as Ibelin. Ree describes it as "like a film script that's 42,000 pages long, which really tells the story of an actual lived avatar life during those eight years".

"All of Ibelin's feelings and actions were in that archive," he says. "So, if Mats wrote, 'Ibelin seems sincere yet saddened,' we knew exactly where and when that happened, and in the film, we try to interpret the complexity of the writing and the emotion into actual animation."

Just how possible is it for an online avatar to represent a real person? Mats Steen named his alter ego after Orlando Bloom's character Balian of Ibelin in Ridley Scott's 2005 historical epic Kingdom of Heaven. In the game, Ibelin is tall, muscular and blond, and runs through Azeroth for 30 minutes each day. He introduces himself in the documentary as "Ibelin Redmoore, famed detective and nobleman, who finds friends and fights evil wherever he goes", and Steen describes the character as "an expansion of myself, of different parts of me".

A generational divide

Ibelin Redmoore may sound like an idealised superhero, perhaps because he was created by a 17-year-old, but Steen's parents received messages from other players saying that he "would always lighten the mood" in the game. Another tribute read, "He was there for me, and I could also talk to him about the stupid things." The film meets Xenia from Denmark and her son Mikkel, who play online as their avatars Reike and Nikmik, and she says that Steen's mature advice was essential in helping them improve their mother-son relationship.

Another friend, Lisette from the Netherlands, recounts how the teenage Steen wrote a letter to her parents when they took her computer away from her as her grades were suffering, asking them to find a different solution, because she was depressed. "I think she's a great person and I consider her one of my closest friends," he had written.

"He was an incurable romantic and always had success with women," another friend of Ibelin's wrote to the Steens. And it was Lisette, in the form of her avatar Rumour, who seems to have been the great love of Steen's life: the two met in the game when they were around the same age as teenagers. In the documentary, Ibelin encounters a "dark-haired, mysterious beauty" who steals his hat. Later, they exchange a kiss on the cheek. "It was just a virtual kiss, but boy could I feel it," Steen says about the meeting.

DMD teens mogging rdramacels, depicted.

"It's a good thing I'm in this wheelchair or I'd be out giving my mother a heart attack," Mats Steen writes.

Indeed, what makes the story so compelling and well-received (it won both the directing and the audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival, often a harbinger of an Oscar nomination) is the character of Mats Steen that Ibelin helps reveal – his strength, his humour, and occasionally his melancholy. "In this other world, a girl wouldn't see my wheelchair or anything different, they would get my heart, soul and mind conveniently placed in a handsome strong body," Steen says about life in Azeroth. "At high school there were parties, attractive girls, so many things a boy of 17 years old desired, but they were all just dreams, things beyond my reach. Dreams are nice, though, in this way. You can always visit again."

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is streaming on Netflix

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1ge5fkn/skill_up_i_do_not_recommend_dragon_age_the/

!nwahs

At the Steins;Gate one world exhibition, a new Steins;Gate reboot was announced for release in 2025

https://old.reddit.com/r/steinsgate/comments/1gd62bu/steins_gate_one_world_exhibition_photos/

(pictures of the event)

during the event a new reboot game was announced, which seems to include a visual character change with new art and potentially some small story expansions.

HOWEVER,

It IS NOT Steins;Gate ??? , the confirmed sequel to the original game either in planning or active dev.

My guess is that the reboot is to reintroduce the series into the current cultural landscape and then later release it. I believe they want a large amount of traction for this reboot as possible since steins;gate and the Science Adventure series not having any huge memorable games that were the same peak as Steins;Gate. They've been doing a lot of game collabs recently, with stuff like japanese Majhong Gacha games

Overall I think this is a good sign for the series and I'm guessing the Steins;gate ??? will release in late 2026

Steam Sale Page

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/SPIKECHUNSOFT/sale/mages2024

https://www.pcmrace.com/2024/10/28/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-pc/

This is why he was banned. He made it a CON that they focused so hard gender on identiy (You can make your character non-binary or trans THIS IS TRUE ONG ) ResetEra stans devolve into seething about 'nazi' game reviewers.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-thread.1020987/page-9#post-130774476

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-thread.1676719/post-269735487

This CHUD starts gloating in Neogaf ( ) for being banned.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/dragon-age-the-veilguard-review-thread.1676719/post-269735777

!chuds banned the transphobia

"This review and SkillUp's couldn't be further apart. I'm feeling that this game is going to massively cluster reviews on both ends of the 1 to 10 scale. Interesting."

"I'm sure you are being honest, but this does kind of confirm what fextralife was saying about how the developer was screening reviewers and only giving keys to those who were more positive about the game in order to attempt to inflate the scores, which is quite deceptive on the developers part. I hope everyone that gets the game enjoys it, but shady business practices like that get a hard pass from me."

Went to a Halloween party, too hungover for an effort post.

Naturally, the Anti Girl Peepee Aut Right Chuds are big mad that the game isnt a failure.

Turns out its getting good reviews

Naturally the Pro Girl duck Aut Shift Lib Chads are more positive that the game is reviewing well.

Radical Centrist Redditors

https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ge47j2/dragon_age_the_veilguard_review_thread/

Dragon Age Fanboys

https://old.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/1gds5y6/dav_spoilers_general_review_embargo_lift/

Generally people are shocked that Eurog*mer gave this a perfect score, and people are pooping/praising tthe Skullup guy.

In general it reminds alot of people of Mass Effect 2, which is good enough for me.

ok so I will try and keep it open literally all day, I wfh today so Ill be checking in occasionally

im literally screaming, Ill update the post if the server crashes and we have to restart

i feel like lobby code: VOBRY

I just think it's funny that ( )

Theres no way elder scrolls lore is popular enough for 50 metal bands to pop up, there hasnt been a tes game in like 13 years and one that has mattered in 20

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

Miners working in the Erzgebirge. I forgot to include this in the last episode am using this as a segue from the last episode.

Hunt for Formulas

A few of the more important cities have universities, the same ones that had one in real life. There's one in Leipzig but we're heading to Bohemia anyway so let's go to Prague. Charles University was established in 1348 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV as the first university in Central Europe. There was like, I dunno, 8 universities in Europe at this point and most were in Italy, so this was a really big deal. About 80% of the students were foreign as it was the only university in the eastern half of Europe. The Hussite revolution of 1415 that wracked the whole Empire began here. It's one of the oldest universities still operating today.

To save time, we'll take a boat up the Elbe. One criticism I hear of the game is that the cities are all interchangable. Obviously that's a really tarded observation because the city couldn't be nearly this complex if you made them unique. And there are some subtle differences that you'll pick up on if you know your history. Like notice here that the castle is the Hradcany.

Academia is full of uncooperative peepeeheads just like in our time. It'll be tough to find someone who can navigate their bullshit. One person in the party is the "leader". This is the person who will take on any solo task that doesn't depend on the whole party. For almost the entire game up to this point I've left Sasha as the leader because almost all of those tasks involved talking to people and she's the charismatic one. But these university students are a bunch of spergs so we have to deal with them on their own level. Yuna is perceptive and has 29 in Speak Latin, but Redactor has the same skill and slightly more when we add up the other two attributes.

I'll get Thunderbolt. It's explosives. (I'll describe these in detail below.)

After that it was night time so we had to leave. Let's try this again tomorrow. Wow! Redactor pulled it off again. What to get now? Noxious Aroma and Eyeburn are fairly useful in combat. (These are the two potions that evil alchemist used against our guys in the last fight.) Unfortunately the formulas they're selling are for the best versions of it, so they're probably way too hard to make until Redactor gets extremely good at alchemy. So we'll get Black Cloud. This isn't used in combat, but in a lot of dangerous situations it lets you create a smokescreen. Now that Redactor has 5 formulas it's more likely that other alchemists will trade formulas with him.

Having gone through all that ordeal of finding a university and convincing them to sell me a formula, I remember that actually the regular local alchemist will also sell them in any relatively big city. Well at least you guys got to hear the university music. Let's take a look at our formulas. (No I will not call them "formulae".) "Mystical number" is the difficulty. 112 is fairly easy. There's only three ingredients which means it's very likely I'll find both of them soon. (BTW: "Pitchblende" is a uranium ore. Marie Curie first discovered uranium in pitchblende from the Erzgebirge.) Looking at my other formulas I see that actually I've collected all the ingredients needed to make Quickmove, so I could have demonstrated alchemy to you guys a whole episode ago. Oh well. I'll do it now.

Alchemy

We could just stay at the inn and do our alchemy here, but some of these potions will blow up in your face if you make a mistake. If that happens I don't want it to happen in the middle of Prague. So we go camp just outside the city. Quickmove temporarily increases agility, which doesn't help much in combat but is very important in a lot of other situations, like any time you need to climb. Let's look at that equation:

• +100 - Bonus for making just one

• +18ps - The quality of my philosopher's stone. This is something you keep permanently that helps you do alchemy. I picked up a cheap one at some point. Getting a really high level one is expensive and a pain in the butt since you have to deal with the university.

• +42int - I hope this is obvious.

• +44alch - My alchemy skill

• -101mn - The mystical number of the formula.

We got enough ingredients to make more than one, so let's do that. Generally you mix up potions in big batches. It gets increasingly difficult after the third one though. If we try to make 4, that +100 bonus turns into +50 and our chance of success drops to 53%. At a batch of 6 it's a +33 bonus, and so on. So obviously we'll make 3. Nice. That's what I like to see. I'll actually stay here and make a few more batches. You can sell the potions for a profit. Late in the game you can make obscene amounts of money this way, but late in the game you've already got all the money you'll ever need.

More Wandering

At this point I think we're pretty well ready to get into mid-game content with one exception. We really need Redactor to make some potions for us because we're going to run into trouble that you don't want to face with just steel. Also the game will tell us when we're ready. So I'm going to do more wandering, focusing on learning new formulas and stockpiling alchemical components.

We run across a rural monastery. Let's go in. They usually have a lot to offer.

Well these guys seem like peepees. Monasteries run the spectrum from honest to wicked. (Reading the game's data files, there was going to be crypto-Satanic monasteries where if you spend the night they send a Satanic nun or monk to try to seduce one of your party. If they fail a Virtue check they... do things that you're not supposed to outside of marriage. I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that got cut just because they were so far behind schedule.)

This is not my kind of monastacism!

I can't complain about their library though. Books can't be corrupted. We pick up St. Hubert. He was a bishop in the Ardennes in the 600s-700s who is famous for spending a lot of time hunting and just hanging out in the forest with the animals and converting the people around Liege. In the game, he'll help us out a lot. If we run into an encounter in the wilderness that we want to run away from (this will happen) our Woodwise and Stealth skills will be tested. Even Nathan only has 24 in each.

I wandered over to St. Joachimsthal and it definitely wasn't just an excuse to give you a history lesson. It only has a couple thousand inhabitants now, but it was a boom town after the discovery of silver in 1512. Coins were minted called Joachimstaler. This was soon abbreviated as thaler and evolved into the word "dollar". Agricola, who revolutionized metallurgy and geology and pushed alchemy toward being science instead of bullshit did much of his studies here.

Wolves! With our equipment we should be pretty well immune to their attacks, but they're always a little scary. In Darklands if you lose a battle most opponents will take all your money and equipment but leave you alive. Wolves are one of the exceptions. If you lose they'll eat one of your people. I'm glad our New World wolves are nicer. Wolves attacking humans is pretty much unheard of in North America.

Notice how they've landed a 1 point and a 2 point hit on us. That indicates they're not penetrating our armor.

They're not a big threat during the day though. One of the great things in this game that they really follow through on is the day/night cycle. Before electricity a lot of your life was dictated by where the sun was. The Darklands are much more dangerous when it's literally dark.

Kutna Hora, the other important center of silver mining in Bohemia. It played an important role in the Hussite Wars in the early 1400s. Actually I'm pissed because it's depicted in the game as being a small town when in real life it was a major city in this era. If Arnold Hendrick were still around I'd give him an earful.

I guess I'll have to pay. It would be a pretty major sin to get in a physical fight with a bishop even if he is in the wrong.

We go east and spend some time in Moravia. We can get good bows there. Thrown weapons are just not going to be viable going forward because they only have 2-3 penetration. I get Sasha and Yuna longbows. These have 6 penetration, which cuts through any armor an ordinary human wears.

Well we can't let this happen. This aggression cannot go unchecked. It's time to draw a line in the sand.

A surprisingly easy fight. Sasha got beat up pretty bad because she's not strong enough to wear the same level of armor as everyone else. I'm gonna have to figure out what to do about that. I might have to actually do some math and see how much weight we can cut by losing the longbow and maybe even giving her a lighter weapon. I don't need her out there slaughtering the enemy, the rest of my party can do that, but I do need her to stay in the fight. If she gets knocked out there's just 3 of us and we'll get swamped by whatever enemy we're facing.

Castle

Eventually my wandering takes me to the castle of Zossen in Brandenburg.

Sasha tries to figure out if the local lord is a good guy by talking to people but can't figure out anything definitive.

Yuna prays to St. Dorothea of Montau, a native to these parts who lived a pretty hard life. She reveals to her what this guy's true nature is. Woodchippers haven't been invented yet, but we all know what needs to happen to male feminists.

How are we going to get in? We could try to bribe someone but they might just con us. Nathan is very agile (and we could give him one of those Quickmove potions we made to increase his agility even more) but there's always risk there. Yuna could implore St. Reinold, the patron of stonemasons to help.

I'm gonna pick the last one just because even after all these years I've never done this yet. Nice. Now we're going to get into an extended combat, like the raubritter castles but bigger.

Oh wait, actually we won't. We happened to climb into the room where the castle lord is so this will be a quick fight to the death.

Whoa... -17... I think that's the single worst hit we've ever taken so far.

It gets pretty chaotic. Yuna is knocked out but the lord is taken down at about the same time. These guys were wearing brigandine armor, level 4, same as chainmail, so it wasn't easy, but we prevailed.

Zossen turns from a castle into an ordinary village. Let's stop in and see if we can heal our wounds here. Hey wait, wtf, they're Satanic??? Maybe they did need some brutality to keep them in line. We'll mend our wounds and then come back and massacre them.

More Wandering

Eventually we come back to Magdeburg. Everyone loves us in Saxony so it's good to be back home. It's a good place to sell off some of our loot, taking advantage of the bonus from our local reputation.

I bounce around the region for a while doing various boring things. We had about 50 florins worth of dead people's armor to sell off and we invest most of that into alchemical components for Redactor. We concentrate on stuff we need for the formulas we already know, but get a little of everything in case we learn something new. We can afford to now. Also we do some more training.

We've now collected the ingredients for every formula Redactor knows. I was a bit surprised by this. We must have gotten lucky with what happened to be available in the towns we visited. Let's go camp out in the woods and start cooking up some potions.

Alchemy - Mass Production

Of the 6 formulas that Redactor knows, we've made a lot of Black Cloud and Quickmove. We'll only need to use these on rare occasions and we already have more than enough. As for the other 4, all of these are very useful in combat. I'll make at least a few of each. One thing to watch out for is that some of them use the components. So for example I don't want to use up all my orpiment making Fleadust and not have any left to make Thunderbolt. For each formula I'll explain what it does in game and what the ingredients are, because even I don't know what the heck half of these are. After all, this is edutainment. (It's been decades since I took chemistry so tell me if I write something stupid. And some of this I'm just copying from the manual.) Note that for each kind of potion there are 3 different formulas that can make it. They make increasingly high quality versions of the potion but also are more difficult.

First, let me explain the bases. Alchemy ties into the other sciences of the time, so of course the four elements play an important role. The bases are just common mundane stuff that is associated with an element. This stuff is cheap and very common. All the formulas at least one. I'll just copy the descriptions straight out of the manual.

MELANCHOLIC BASE: A variety of plants considered useful in alchemy, such as bell mushrooms, belladonna, camphor, hemlock, seed of sea holly, nightshade, thorn apple, henbane, turpentine, etc.

SANGUINE BASE: A variety of animal materials, such as eye of newt, toad tongues, bat claws, powdered unicorn horn, etc.

CHOLERIC BASE: A variety of acids and other liquids considered useful, including aqua fortis, vitriol and Roman vitriol, alcohol, distilled water, etc.

PHLEGMATIC BASE: A variety of common minerals, such as kupfer (copper), lead, lime (calcium oxide), quicksilver, and kohle (coal).

Fleadust

This reduces the skills of anyone caught in the cloud, affecting them more the heavier their armor is. This ranges from 10% if they're just wearing leather up to 50% if they're wearing plate. We have the highest level formula for Fleadust so the effects will last for 60 seconds.

This is a really useful one. Weapon skill makes a huge difference not just in hitting the enemy but also in defending yourself. The 60 second duration is enough time for me to send someone out to kill the guy before he recovers. It's less effective against poorly armored enemies, but I wouldn't be wasting potions on them anyway.

Orpiment is an arsenic sulfide mineral. It was used as a pigment for its striking yellow color. Some alchemists figured if it was yellow it must be somehow related to gold so they studied it a lot. Be careful with it though, it's extremely toxic.

Cinnabar is a mercury sulfide crystal that looks kind of like quartz. It comes in all kinds of colors. The red kind was used as a pigment. More importantly for us alchemists, pure mercury could be distilled from it. Why ours has to be white, I dunno.

Nickel was named by the miners of the Erzgebirge after a mischevious supernatural being that lives underground. (I wonder if we'll ever run into one?) They were pissed off because they would dig up what they thought was copper ore but it turned out to actually be nickel ore and they had to blame someone for it. In the 1400s it was a curiosity but there wasn't any use for it yet.

Breath of Death

Poison gas. We have the lowest level formula for this so our potions will do 5-12 damage to anyone caught in the cloud. Victims with higher endurance will take less damage.

That may not sound like a lot of damage but the cloud is pretty big so you can easily catch several enemies with it. Note that even though Redactor has the easiest formula, it's still pretty darn hard to make. We've only got a 31% chance each time we try.

Marsh Vapor A natural gas, whose medieval admixture produced a sharp smell. Acquiring and containing this vapor was extremely difficult because it is virtually colorless. It is also known as methane.

Aqua Regia A mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid. This is dangerous stuff as it can dissolve lots of things, including people. Alchemists were fascinated by it because it could dissolve gold.

Thunderbolt

A bomb. Anyone nearby is hit by a fragment. These are treated just any other missile. Damage and penetration depend on how close the victim is to the explosion, dropping off rapidly with range. In my experience, if you throw this into a crowd the guy who is actually hit will take significant damage but for the rest it will be less than 5.

Redactor only knows the lowest level formula, so it won't be terribly useful in combat. It may be better to just use an ordinary missile weapon instead. A longbow or crossbow might do a little less damage in total but it will all be concentrated on one target. However, there are a lot of non-combat situations where we might need to blow something up or just create a distraction.

Manganes You probably had a chemistry teacher light this on fire to show you how incredibly bright it is when it burns. Alchemists found that just as cool as you do.

Arabian Fire

Greek fire or napalm. It does about the same damage to the target as Thunderbolt and a few points to those nearby. It slightly reduces the quality of the target's armor.

I don't see this as terribly useful, especially the low level formula we have. In order to noticeably degrade the target's armor you'd have to hit them 5-10 times. I imagine it will have some noncombat uses so it'll be good to keep a few on hand.

Naphtha The lighter part of petroleum. This stuff catches fire very easily.

Conclusion

We spend a couple weeks camping out while Redactor churns out potions. I made 10 Fleadust as I expect this is actually the most useful in combat and several of the others. We've defeated two evil alchemists and looted their potions so now I think we've got the alchemical support we need to get into mid-game content. I've been dragging my heels a bit as there's a special event that plays when the game explicitly tells you that you're ready. I thought it would have triggered by now. Maybe next time we'll move along to a new stage in the plot.

LSF Thread https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1gdj7sk/tim_walz_was_g*mer_1/

!g*mers and !chuds in SHAMBLES

I just made my first batch of yellow science.

Blue circuit production and various other things.

Red circuit production with uranium processing barely visible on the left.

Green circuits (yes I am aware this is nowhere near enough production), science , my early coal power, and my newly minted nuclear reactor.

Solar power and accumulators. The scale is completely unnecessary now that I have nuclear power up and running but it will be useful again some day.

Smelting setup for a double line of copper plates.

Fluid processing. I haven't played in a while but fluid processing seems a lot easier than I remember. I spent like half an hour setting it up and since then I have barely had to even think about it.