Over the decades of my life, I have been assailed with literally dozens of different meatball recipes, from the traditional ("mix ground beef and pork, some oregano, thyme, salt, pepper, and garlic powder, then put in an egg and some oatmeal for firmness") to the truly bizarre (one used cardamom and mint).
To this day, I have yet to find a meatball I prefer over plain (15% fat) ground beef.
This appalls and offends people. Even Shiro had at me, telling me I at least had to add some lamb, I couldn't possibly serve a plain beef meatball. Impus Major's friend demanded, "It's going to be incredibly bland! Don't you want to add some oregano?" to which he responded with the brilliant, "Do you add oregano to your hamburgers, or do you use plain ground beef?"
So, what do people think of plain ground beef meatballs? I'm frankly astonished at how much they offend people. And yet I've never had anything better. What does that say?
So, I'm sure this will offend someone, so today is
Impus Minor's Campus Orientation:
A year later, Impus Major still tirades about this orientation as, "Teaching White Dudes to become right-wing nutjobs" training.
Apparently there's a 15-20 minute tour of campus, at which point they have a moment of silence for the indigenous people that "the White man slaughtered to steal this land". Impus Major described it as being incredibly awkward as one of the few White males in the audience and the sheer number of sidelong glances he got during that moment of silence. The tour proceeded to spend hours going over all the resources for minority students: Resources by ethnicity (Black, Asian, etc.), gender (women's studies, LGBTQ+ rights), disability (ADHD, physical, etc.), and so forth. And somehow at every single stop the guide made some disparaging remark about White males. As Impus Major put it, "It was 15 minutes of orientation and then five and a half hours of telling me what a s*** I was for being a White male."
And Impus Major is incredibly laid-back. For HIM to have that kind of reaction, it has to have been really bad. The whole, "We're an inclusive school, unless you're a White male." We'll see how Impus Minor reacts.
Yet again, I find myself wondering why IT isn't allowed to levy fines.
I had a sick day yesterday (very unpleasant, thank you) and came in today to see my Slack full of alerts. I think, "Uh, oh, what did I miss?"
What I missed was the dreaded "Hi, #channel!" that sends an alert to everyone on the channel. Our Slack channels run from the hundreds of users to the thousands of users. If you use @channel, Slack is configured to post a warning: "This will send an alert to everyone in the channel. It is reserved for messages of extreme importance. Do you still want to do this?"
And of course they hit "Yes" anyway.
I keep saying: If you use "Reply All" or "@channel", your pay should get docked by $1 for every recipient who had no interest in that message. Once one of these buffoons starts losing $800 per button click, they might start learning.
Speaking as a parent, I will never give parents crap for having their kids on leashes. They're worse than kittens when it comes to running off and endangering themselves. You can be staring right at them and they'll take off at a full run just so they can dart in front of a forklift.
Speaking of the hellions...
...Impus Major found an old rabbit hide we somehow acquired or inherited over the years. He thought it would make nice bedding for the kittens so he put it on some padding on his dresser so the kittens could sleep on it. A real fur.
So, I'll give props to the tanner -- that thing has survived an astonishing amount of abuse. Didn't last 5 minutes on the dresser before the kittens were playing some form of game (I know what we called it in elementary school, but horrifically offensive these days and I don't know the new name for it) where one kitten would grab the hide and run with in and the others would pursue, tackle, and seize the hide.
In under 24 hours the fur has visited every room in the house. I occasionally see a tiny streak as one of the hellions runs headlong through the house to seize the hide and either skid across the hardwood floor on it or carry it to a new battleground.
Not exactly Impus Major's plan for the hide, but he is pretty darned pleased with himself nonetheless.
EDIT: And yeah, OMG. "Barn cat" vs. "Purebred cat". Fluffy doesn't know what the big deal about the hide is. But then, even when they're watching squirrels she just watches them. The hellions? They will clearly happily kill anything within reach, no matter the size. I fear Morrigan once she gets accustomed to the limitations on the leads and gets to hunt in the yard...
Speaking of people not being able to do their jobs...
My beloved Takagi TK-2 on-demand water heater finally stopped working after 23 years of zero-maintenance service. It's pretty much the only repair we've done on the house that I have been 100% satisfied with ever since we had it done. So, I called the plumbing company that fixed our shower because they did a darned good job for a reasonable price. And yeah, you can pretty much guess where this conversation is going:
Scheduler: Can I get a phone number?
NobodysHome: The best number is (510) xxx-xxxx. It's a land line, but it's right next to my work desk so I can't miss it when it rings. Does that work for you, or does it have to be a cell phone?
Scheduler: No, a land line is fine. I'll make a note to the technician that it's a land line.
NH: OK, good. 'Cause lat time to technician sat there trying to text me and couldn't get through.
Scheduler: Oh, I'll make absolutely sure they know it's a land line and they should call.
...time passes...
Technician: I've been texting you all morning! Why don't you ever check your phone?!?!?!
NH: ...
EDIT: Yes, I think it's particularly annoying to me because Global Megacorporation provides a surprisingly good Field Service application and when you enter a customer's information there's a little "preferred contact method" selection where you can choose phone, email, or text, then when the field technician wants to contact the customer they hit a "Contact Customer" button and it automagically uses the customer's preferred contact method.
But, as usual, enterprise software is expensive so people do their own stuff.
It's Official: Planet Kibbeh, aka Fluffy, at the ripe old age of 6 months and 1 day, has caught up with the Fluffernutter at 7.20 pounds to tie for heaviest cat in the house.
I swear, there are two incompatible types of people in the world, and one of them shouldn't live in densely-packed cities.
Back yard neighbor's kid had a friend sleep over last night. So, being kids, they woke up ultra-early and full of energy. When I was a kid, we'd go to the park. Impus Major says that when he was a kid, they'd find something quirt to do like video games in his room so as to not disturb other people in the house.
...and then there are the people who can't be bothered to concern themselves with anyone else in the world.
So yeah, at 6:30 am on a Sunday morning the kids went into their back yard and started playing basketball. I was awake, but they woke up both Impii and probably some of the other neighbors around them. They were screaming, playing, and having fun, and it was "pleasant" noise. But at 6:30 on a Sunday morning? Either find something quiet to do or go to a nearby park where you won't be waking everyone else up.
(This message brought to you because Impus Major was having a major tirade about them this morning and I was thinking, "It's NOT just me...")
So, I know that there are people who swear by the "let them cry" method of infant care. I may disagree with the method, but they say that their kids "grow up just fine".
Well, I'm worried that New Neighbors broke their boy. He's 2 years old now. And he's still crying every single day, multiple times a day. And not the standard 2-year-old, "I want to eat tacks and you won't let me!" cry, but the whiny, "I'm vaguely dissatisfied so I'm going to make your lives miserable for the next 45 minutes by crying incessantly," cry of an infant.
At 2.
And it's not like there's abuse (emotional or physical) going on there; the whole reason I can hear him crying all the time is that our uninsulated walls are 6' apart; there are few secrets between neighbors. (Our previous neighbors commented on how much they loved listening in to our political discussions.) They're just as loving and supportive behind closed doors as they are in public.
And he just. Keeps. Crying.
It is very odd and I've never seen it in a toddler before. And I've never met a child raised with a ruthless "let him cry" method before. Correlation is not causation, but it does make me say, "Hmm..."
But she's 6 months old, still growing at 6-7% a week, and watching her pursuing the other kittens during playtime is like watching the Bismark chase down a destroyer.
EDIT: LOL. The first time I clicked your link it went to an ad for the history channel, so I thought you were sending something from that. We BOTH did Indy Neidell! Perfect!
I swear, that picture really does do justice to just how big Fluffy is; we jokingly started calling her "Planet Kibbeh" when she was growing at 8-9% a week and would eventually reach Earth's mass in her lifetime.
But she's 6 months old, still growing at 6-7% a week, and watching her pursuing the other kittens during playtime is like watching the Bismark chase down a destroyer.
Good night at game. Not only was the game fun, but the dog let me hold him and cuddle for a good 10 minutes or so.
Last night Impus Minor was running his game in the living room/dining room area (it's one big attached area that counts as three rooms: Foyer, living room, dining room), so I was in the bedroom playing Solasta on the craptop on one of those breakfast-in-bed tables.
First Stripey shoved herself up between the table and my belly because she likes tight spaces. Then Blacky curled up in my "lap" (is it a lap when you're lying down?). Then Fluffy came over and sprawled out on her back just out of my reach, as cats do. ("Prove you love me! Move 6" to pet me!")
And they were there for a good 3 hours. It was very pleasant.
(1) I very consciously did not give them a phone number in my letter. So they called multiple times from a "Caller ID Blocked" number. And gee... I didn't answer.
(2) When they reached out by email, I re-explained my two issues: In the program, you accumulate points that you then convert into $5 online coupons. You are also awarded 3 additional coupons per month. My complaints:
a) As far as I can tell, there is no way to see how many coupons you have at the moment unless to start an online order, load up the cart with nonsense, and go to checkout. At which point it will show you your active coupones.
b) After multiple attempts, you cannot use the coupons in the store.
The agent's response? "You can always see your point total here, and if you go into the store your sales associate can apply the coupons."
Not what I asked, and no, no you can't.
The kittens' first test is upon them: The lemon rats have returned.
Our lemon tree produces a ludicrous number of lemons for its size. The rats have learned this, and some move into the tree for the summer to enjoy the bounty. They're smart enough to avoid coming into the house, but the kittens have definitely smelled them in the side yard. I suspect that if Fluffy encountered a rat she would attempt to adopt it, which isn't a particularly useful way to save our lemons. Stripey and Blacky were born of and raised by a barn cat. Blacky already nearly downed a crow.
I'll be interested in seeing how long it takes before the lemon rats perish.
So, I understand that for consultants, time is quite literally money so questioning their clients' decisions isn't in their best interests.
But today's question is such a, "No! Bad customer!" (Beats customer with a rolled-up newspaper) moment: "We want to know whether there's a maximum number of performance review cycles per year, because the customer wants (over 110)."
So, you have a customer who wants to implement a performance review system where there's more than two performance reviews per week? And you're NOT telling the customer, "Um, you might want to re-think your business processes on this one, rather than simply unquestioningly implementing it in software"?
Yes, I'm sure our application could handle several thousand review cycles a year. But what the heck are you doing!?!?!?!
Impus Major: I love to get home, reach into a flower, and pet a kitten. And if that isn't the most wonderful sentence in the English language, I don't know what is.
Impus Minor has been formally accepted to CSUEB, so he has to attend a mandatory all-day orientation over the summer. Yes, of course they allow a "parent or supporter" to come along. Yes, of course I signed up Impus Major as the supporter.
No, I have no regrets. Almost. But no. The joy they inspire will be worth it.
It's been quite a while since I wrote one, but today PetCo got a NobodysHome Letter™. Such letters have generated apologies from the IRS and DMV, or hundreds of dollars in free kit from Brio (gotta admit, Brio REALLY cares about its customer satisfaction).
I strongly suspect PetCo will ignore me, but the short version is that they offer a $240/year membership program that's supposed to get you $15/month in rewards points, but you're extremely limited in how you can actually spend those points and you can't ever check the total to see whether you're getting your money's worth, so it feels far more like a rip-off con than a rewards program.
Which, speaking as an industry insider who helped write courses on customer loyalty programs, is a Bad Thing.
First, I learned that the Monsters, Inc. ride at Disneyland is shutting down after 20 years. In spite of all the lost memories of my alcoholic years, one of the best memories I have of the kids' childhoods was taking Impus Major on the ride when it very first opened. I forget why, but an attendant let us in a side entrance to skip the line. Impus Major loved the ride and screamed his little head off at all the appropriate points. And when we got off the ride, he was awarded a "Screamer of the Day" certificate by a beaming Disney cast member. Back when Disneyland actually cared about, y'know, the whole experience 'n' such.
So I was already on memory lane when I went out to light the pilot light in the studio and the Fluffernutter asked to come in with me, then meowed insistently for pets... and purred and purred and purred like she hasn't done in a decade. And I remembered how we used to refer to her as "the purr monster" and we hadn't heard that motorboat-like rumbling in nearly a decade. The meds are doing an incredible job for her. But realizing this, and the fact that she's being nearly forgotten as everyone dotes on the kittens, made me sit there petting her and listening to her purrs for a solid 10 minutes, thinking about her life and how soon she'd be leaving us and what I can possibly do (besides the drugs) to make her life better in the meantime. I thought she was enjoying her (possibly) final spring and summer in the yard, spending every daylight hour lying among the ginger lilies or on the sun-warmed concrete, basking her old bones and dreaming of times past. But she wants us, too. She made that very clear this morning. And I'm going to go out and pet her some more, because otherwise I'm a monster.
And yes, FTR, Stripey's mother is already small, and Stripey was the runt of the litter, so I am fully expecting her adult weight to be under 7 pounds. Fluffy's father is a monster and she shows every sign of following in his footsteps; she may well hit a healthy weight of 14-15 pounds. So that 2:1 weight ratio is unlikely to go away.
Speaking of S-class kittens, Stripey is definitely showing her stripes, as it were. She's now outweighed by Fluffy by more than 2:1. So she's learned where all the little nooks that Fluffy can't fit into are, sets up defensively there, and they have epic battles as Fluffy attempts to pierce her fortifications and she puts up a fierce defense. They have an absolute blast.
Blacky, erm, just jumps on Stripey when he sees her out in the open. Then gets mauled by Fluffy because adoptive sisters. I feel kind of bad for him, but the hoomans love his dopey beauty, so I think he'll be fine.
EDIT: He has also absolutely mastered the, "Curl up on a black piece of furniture and gaze at the hoomans with big golden eyes," trick. I wish cameras could do him justice. He is a majestic, beautiful beast. And he is NOT "dumb as a post". He is an average-intelligence cat surrounded by brilliant cats. So not "dumb but beautiful" but "average but beautiful". And isn't that worse? 'Cause he probably knows the other cats are all smarter than him...
What is the difference between an S-class kitten and a C-class kitten?
The Fluffernutter is so old and decrepit that she exists on soup: I mix canned cat food with water, microwave it, and bring her warm soup four times a day. For reasons beyond my comprehension, all three kittens consider this the Best Food Ever and persistently try to steal it.
C-class kitten: Hears me open the can. Runs into the kitchen. Watches me prepare the soup. Attempts to follow me into the room. Gets grabbed and tossed out. Every. Single. Morning. Without fail.
S-class kitten: Started off with the same behavior as C-class kitten, realized it didn't work, and started staying in the room waiting for the food to arrive. She'd still jump down while I was in the room and get thrown out. Then she'd try to take the food while the Fluffernutter was eating and the growls would alert me. So this morning when I started stirring she left the bed. I have no idea where she went. She completely hid while I put out both the kitten food and the Flutternutter's soup. I never heard a growl nor a peep. But once i opened the bedroom door half an hour later the soup bowl was empty and I finally spotted her happily trotting around the house. I have no idea where she hid. I have no idea how she got the soup without upsetting the Fluffernutter. But I'm sure she got it, and I have no idea how.
Oops. I just inadvertently created the "squirrel death challenge".
After Blacky nearly caught a crow yesterday (got within 2' of it and if he'd been bigger/a better hunter he would've nailed it), I moved the crow food on top of the catio. (Literally an outdoor cage you put your indoor cats in so they can enjoy being outdoors without the dangers or the harnesses. They hated it at first, but now they've started going in there and hanging out even when they're free on leads.)
So, the squirrels love the crow food (at least the nuts). But they must now climb a wire cage full of kittens to get at it. And oooh, they are NOT happy about this arrangement.
Friend of mine doesn't understand what I do for a living.
I ran into a strange audio issue on 2 of the three PCs in the house. Minor annoyance, I'll get to it later.
He's trying to help me troubleshoot, unasked. He's just trying to be helpful, and he is a friend. I'm trying so hard not to tell him to just go away.
But... you're not female.
No, I take it back. That would be, he knows what you do for a living, tries to help anyway, and explains how to fix it incorrectly in a condescending way.
What's truly terrifying is that I can personally testify to this.
TL;DR: How?!?!?:
In FFXIV, everyone in our sister guild assumes I'm a woman, to the point that they call me "mom" and complain about various feminine issues to me. They know I work for a major tech company, build my own computers, do coding, and have been working with/in computers for decades now.
Yet when I was helping GothBard's mother with a security issue with her Microsoft account and two-factor authentication, one of the male guild members started trying to explain (in incredibly condescending terms) how passwords, passkeys, and two-factor authentication worked. He kept going even after I corrected him because he was wrong. He kept going even after I asked him how many implementations of security protocols he'd done, 'cause I'd bet my number was infinitely times his because I've done them. He never stopped. I just tuned him out and he eventually went away.
But holy **** I wanted to punch him in the face. And I'm a peaceable guy.
Sitting through another "Reply All" storm, I wish Microsoft would provide a button where you could produce an auto-generated, anonymous response of, "Why the **** are you Replying All to this thread? Are you a ****ing moron? Do you really think everyone on this 2,000-person list cares that, 'I see it, too!' Learn which button to push, idiot!"
Yes. I have filters for all our major department mailing lists. Yes, they created a new list that included multiple old lists. So they managed to bypass my filters for the sole purpose of me reading 160 "I see it too!" responses.
If that hadn't been so ridiculously cute it would've been downright menacing:
(Gets up from desk walks through kitchen towards bathroom) A black kitten sits in the hallway door, gazing at me intently.
(Takes a few steps forward) A white kitten emerges from behind the bedroom door, sits down near the black kitten, and gazes at me intently.
(Steps between the two kittens into the hall) A striped kitten emerges from behind the hallway door, sits down so I'm surrounded, and gazes at me intently.
Were they not embodiments of pure cuteness, it would've been something right out of a horror movie...
It's actually a really interesting read -- I've never seen that site before, but the short version of the famous quote's history ("The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco") is:
James Quin, London, attributed to him in 1789 even though he died in 1766(When asked about a cold winter) Yes, just such an one last summer!"
Mark Twain, Paris, 1880: "Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the Damnable. More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “Last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris.
(Notice that Twain got his quote and his years right, just blamed Paris instead of London)
R.Q.Grant, Duluth, MN, 1901: "He says the coldest winter he ever experienced was the summer he spent in Duluth."
(So the first "modern" version of the quote they found was from 1901)
It got attributed to Twain in 1928, still about Duluth. It took until 1963 to be applied to San Francisco.
Now I want to spend the day looking up other quotes on that site...
Our department has started using a text-to-speech tool. Such tools have existed for decades. And yet ALL of my co-workers started calling them, "AI voices."
At a team meeting a month or two ago I pointed out that we were NOT using AI voices, and were just using old-school text-to-speech.
At this morning's team meeting again, "The AI voices sound really robotic." So I pointed out that the company that provides our text-to-speech services also provides premium "AI text-to-speech" at a much higher cost, so if the team keeps using that term and it gets back to the vendor, they will be rightfully upset with us for publicly misidentifying their products.
And I see it on an almost-daily basis. People take something that's been around for years, or even decades (for example, self-driving car technology). And they randomly slap AI in front of it even when the product has never remotely been approached by AI.
It incenses me, because you're giving AI credit for stuff it has nothing to do with.
Proposal for a new international law (possibly an addendum to the Geneva Conventions):
Any adult who gives a child under 10 a battery-powered device whose primary purpose is to make noise shall be imprisoned for a period no less than 1 week in a solid 20'x20' cell with at least ten such children with ten such devices.
I suspect it's part of my OCD that I am hyper-aware of situations, but it still stuns me just how little people can think about the repercussions of their actions.
For example, I put a folding door on WhimseyShire. It collides with the door to our bedroom if you open both at once. It's been more than a year. And yet several family members still routinely slam the doors into each other, as if they're somehow surprised that there are two doors trying to occupy the same space. It took me a week or so to learn to start opening the doors carefully. I cannot comprehend how a year later people are still banging the doors.
Which leads to this morning. As I've mentioned, we have raccoons, possums, and skunks scavenging in our yard every night. Everyone in the family knows this. Everyone in the family has seen this. Yet last night someone brought out their trash, saw that the trash cans were out front for pickup, and just put their trash bag at the normal location of the garbage cans, presumably to put the bag in after pickup. And to absolutely no one's surprise, the raccoons found the unprotected bag and had at.
And I'm left at a loss -- I know my brain is wired differently, but, "I'm going to leave a trash bag out in the side yard overnight and see what happens," just seems like such basic unawareness that I can't understand not realizing what was going to happen...
Summer break has its perks for adults as well: Talky came to visit today. He's living in a no-cats apartment so he and the Impii proceeded to spend over 2 hours playing with the kittens. They left, I'm back at work, and there is much unconsciousness.
NobodysHome: Well, I hit my production for the day but it's only noon; I guess I'm going to have to hunker down and work ahead for the afternoon. (Hard, because my eye is still bothering me.)
<An email comes in at 1:12 pm>
Email: Annual compliance training is now open.
NH: Woo hoo!
(I suspect I'm not like other people, who can just be at work and goof off. If I'm at work, I have an incredibly strong drive to do something work-related. So compliance training is about the closest thing I get to goofing off.)
What's fairly interesting/pathetic about U.S. politics is that the President was originally instilled largely as a figurehead; Congress made the laws, the courts verified that the laws were constitutional, and the president signed off on the laws or oversaw the departments that implemented the laws. There was a HUGE amount of discussion about how much power the president should have during the Constitutional Convention; it was probably the second-most-debated matter (after state's rights), and the "weak president" faction won.
Unfortunately, in the intervening 200+ years, Congress hasn't wanted to take responsibility for anything and people have shown that they adore a dictator, so the president has been given more and more leeway to do whatever the **** he wants, to the point that our modern presidents are pretty much mini-emperors.
An Obama/Trump example:
A good example was the recent stripping half a million immigrants of their quasi-legal status: In 2012, President Obama issued an executive order granting amnesty and a path to citizenship for them. This is far beyond the scope of what a president should be allowed to do under the Constitution. But the Democrats controlled Congress and they didn't want to block him, so he did something fundamentally beyond the scope of his powers. Then Trump came along and issued a new executive order that undid the previous order.
The U.S. Constitution does now allow for presidential actions that create new laws; that is completely within the purview of Congress. So Obama's original order should have been declared invalid the moment he made it. Instead, everyone accepted it and it became de-facto law. Then Trump undid it and upended half a million people's lives for no particular reason.
Which is what you get when you let individuals make the law.
I frequently have to have multiple documents open; 3-4 PowerPoint files or 5-6 Word docs. When I mouse over the taskbar, I want to see a list of file names, NOT a bunch of thumbnails with the titles cut off so I don't know what I'm looking at.
I found the registry key that fixed that for me. Applied it. Everything worked great. Until last week's Windows Update disabled that registry key. So, quite literally, "No, we will not allow you to view files in your preferred text-based format. You HAVE to use our thumbnails."
Just how bad is food delivery service in our area?
GothBard's having a horrific vaccine reaction. I have my eye thing. Impus Minor will be in a game. Impus Major will be out. So no one can cook and no one can pick up food.
In spite of this, we've all decided we'd rather go hungry than risk yet another food delivery fiasco.
When food delivery is worse than having food at all, you know there's an issue with the industry.
No, seriously, apparently there were at least two incidents when people came to vote and died - 97 old lady and 84 year old man. In the first case, she fainted before she received her voting card.
In this (second) round of presidential elections, we have one casualty so far (and over two more hours to go) - a 75 year old fainted while voting and died on the way to hospital.
That's some voter dedication, there...
Speaking of getting old, once you're in your 50s or 60s you're likely to suffer from a posterior vitreous detachment (PVD), where your retina slowly pulls itself away from the gel that fills your eyeball. As long as it happens slowly and doesn't tear the retina, it's just an annoyance...
...*but*, if you're like me, and you spend all day every day doing physical labor, it can get really annoying.
I just emptied the studio shed onto the lawn. Stood up. Saw a sea of floaters saying, "Stop all physical activity NOW".
So my kitchen and lawn are going to be full of crap for DAYS, because it's not just, "Stop working for a few hours to let it fix itself," it's, "Give it at least a week."
I'll see whether I can get the kids to throw stuff back in the shed.
*SIGH*.
The only good part about getting old is that it beats the alternative.
Speaking of S-class kittens...
...you know all those videos that show crows sledding on snowy rooftops and how it's proof of their intelligence?
GothBard and Impus Major were cleaning up from Impus Minor's game and leaned the whiteboard against the table. Stripey tried to scramble up it and slid back down. So she tried again. And immediately got the hang of it, jumping up to the table, jumping onto the whiteboard, and sliding down over and over again. Fluffy heard her and came to investigate, and soon the two of them were getting into wrestling matches at the top of the board, tipping themselves over onto the board, and then sliding down paw in paw.
I am looking at the reviews of Elden Ring: Nightreign and...
Uh... I see a lot of nice things that I would love to play with, improved movement, class skills, and such, but the fact that the game is not scaled for solo play, and the tight time limit for a run (two days lasting 20 minutes each, and the final boss fight, that leave little time for exploration and actually getting used to game) make me rather reluctant for foreseeable future...
Now I wonder, if NobodysGroup is masochistic enough to give it a try...
So, when a game asks, "Are you hardcore enough to beat our game?", our answer is an immediate, "Nope," and we take our money elsewhere.
Right now we're thoroughly enjoying Solasta, which answers the question, "What if Baldur's Gate skipped all those convoluted plotlines and personal relationships and just focused on implementing 5e rules well with a straightforward AP from level 1-20."
So, it's simplistic and linear and the relationships are paper-thin. But it's a 5e campaign the three of us can play together without an eccentric GM trying to "make things more interesting" for us by changing all the rules.
It's even worse than you can imagine. They apparently just did a Google/AI search for any city with the words "immigrant" or "sanctuary" in any of their minutes. So, California has a very large conservative population. And those cities and counties want to make it very clear to the world that California is not the liberal hellhole that everyone makes it out to be, so they passed resolutions along the lines of, "We are NOT a sanctuary city, and we will be assisting immigration enforcement by any method at our disposal."
And they all got flagged. It's just awesomeness.
