"After approaching the coelacanth to encourage it to move between two cameras positioned on a custom-made stand, the team turned on the lights. "At this depth, some think that there is no light," says Ballesta. "There is [very] nice light. It's tiny, it's soft, but there is still light. So, it's important to not use too much artificial light. It's like driving in a car at night. If you put your lights on full, you see just in front of the car, and all the rest is dark. If you switch off your lights – and there is a little bit of moon – suddenly you see everything: the road, the mountains, the forest. It's the same when you're deep.""

For anyone else wondering.

Listening to He Who Fights With Monsters rn and enjoying it. Started out slow, but once the ensemble characters get introduced it picks up.

I enjoyed Trash of the Count's Family (licensed in English as Lout of Count's Family by Seven Seas) until it got too repititve and drawn out for me (which tbf was smtg like 600 chapters in) though that one's lighter on the game interface aspect (ie you're not getting stats and ability blocks). The found family focus is nice.

So I'm a Spider, So What? is really heavy on the game interface, but the weirdness of the premise (what it says on the tin here) and the quirkiness of the protag with a sort of deuteragonist who handles the more serious side of the story until it all comes together was good.

There's also an whole "girls' genre" focused on visual novel games that's pretty popular (haven't read/watched it, but My Next Life As A Villainess I think is the most popular). Heads up though these ones are usually around having to build relationship and romance meters if you're just looking to stick to power leveling "boys' genre" stuff (which no shade both are fun!). Villains Are Destined to Die is a pretty good one I've read for the genre, but severely depressing (there's a bigger story, but most of it is about "I'm stuck in a game world that forces me to deal with an abusive family and it's making me suicidal"). Probably more happy girls' genre ones, but I can't think of any that have an official English translation/are default English off the top of my head haha.

If you wanna dive into the genre I think most important decision is what amount of gamifying you want to read about it cause it extends from "character woke up in/is playing a game and it's rarely if ever mentioned this is a game world again" to "every other page you have massive game statblocks dumped on you and are supposed to remember entire stat systems, skill trees, etc".

Really interesting subject thank you for the recommendation!

Beautiful, thanks for sharing! I'd buy this today it looks that nice.

This is the one I bought. It works pretty well and has controls for each half so I can just heat one side if I want to address aches on that side or both if I'm trying to warm up quick. Haven't run it through the wash yet so I'm not sure how it holds up there. Otherwise for pets (since I have a cat) their claws don't get stuck on it, but they may cause threads to get pulled out (I haven't had this happen a lot, but I figure if you have big dogs or something you'll see a lot more threads pulled out; I have a miniature pincher sized cat so small dogs I assume wouldn't cause too much wear and tear). It heats up pretty fast too, I think it only takes about ~2-3 minutes and once it's heated up you don't feel the lumps from the wires inside.

King size heating blanket. Wrap myself up like a burrito after work and I'm in heaven. Just wish I'd done it sooner, my last place didn't keep heat in well, but I felt like spending $100~ on a blanket was crazy and was stacking multiple cheap ones to not freeze in my own home.

Iirc everything's loaded as one map so you don't have long loading times going from lot to lot. So if your sim goes on a date downtown you don't have to then load downtown to continue playing and then reload the sim house when they go home.

Idk about hit, but decent success maybe? Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers wouldn't be bad with a re-release that fixes the controls (gameplay is mainly a series of mini-games which the timing is off for making attempting completing them a rage inducing task) and the travel map areas redone to have actual purpose instead of "here's a zany spot with cyclical weather where you can throw stuff around to play with our gravity code". The story was pretty good/interesting imo as a Final Fantasy version of Cowboy Bebop.

• Boardwalk Empire - 1920s-30s period drama about mobsters, prohibition, etc set in New Jersey/Atlantic City
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries - 1920's period detective show set in Melbourne
• Peaky Blinders - haven't watched it myself, but my understanding is it was pretty popular, 1920s period drama about a gang set in 1920s Birmingham
• Fargo (season 4) - haven't watched it again, but I've heard good things and season 4 (it's an anthology series, each season is a different cast/story so you don't have to have watched the previous seasons) is 1950s Missouri with gangs

From playing d&d with a few definitely... Never had another group try to convince me it's simple math to work out the dynamics of a fireball and how far it would really go in a tunnel system because they wanted to get enemies around a corner too lmfao.

It's definitely frustrating. I'd understand if the modteam (same ones are top mods for the subreddit and the discord I was told) have a plan for a different space, but I didn't see any replies from them on reddit or the discord unfortunately beyond their post on the subreddit for the most part.

I did advertise on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and I've been keeping an eye out for asklemmy threads about community recs, so hopefully we can get some more organic growth continuing forward. I am unfortunately in the same boat of having currently quiet hobbies though. I mainly TTRPG and Wizards decided to blow their drama in the beginning of the year unfortunately lol.

I love how fed up Damar gets by the end of the war lol

US, 30s, yep. When I needed a new car decided to get one cause I was driving an hour to work and thought it would help me with driver's trance (cue sad laugh track...). Ended up having to order a new car cause I couldn't find one I wanted that was manual within a reasonable driving distance that wasn't complete junk. Didn't really help my problem, but I do love driving it lol.

Kind of weird because automatics make me uncomfortable to drive now, they accelerate so easy I feel like I have less control (though I'm sure this is just a skill issue on my part).

We've got a lot of reposts though I am working on a write-up of that time a Japanese romance comic had a black heroine's reward be "you turn white".....

This is a good article I think for DMs who have only done one system! I can only talk about 5e here, but:

Backgrounds as Skills

Iirc in the DMG you are encouraged to take backgrounds into account though not really given a tangible way to figure this. In modules too there are backgrounds tailored to the adventure, but again you're not really given direction in how to figure this. Personally I just lower DCs, make information more accessible, etc to people whose backgrounds it would apply to. For example I often get the my girlfriend was killed by X and I've been genociding them in revenge background from new players so if the enemy they're facing is X I'll give them more insight into the enemies' tactics, culture, etc than other players as their character has a background of vested interest in fighting this foe.

Super Easy Monsters

All I can say is the 4e directions on how to run monsters never should have been ditched. I don't mind the long statblocks that much (though it is annoying because many of the spell selections tend to be nonsensical fluff, what is that lich going to do with prestidigitation....). I haven't even played 4e, but I do like to convert older dragon and so on magazine adventures to 5e for one-offs and every time it's a 4e adventure it's so much easier knowing there will be a how to run the combat section. When I do 5e straight up I usually rework the encounters myself to make a bunch of video game-esque combat cycles (first the monster will use bless on allies and then x and then y, etc). So I feel like it's not even the long statblocks that are the main issue here, but that it's hard to divine from them in 5e what the go-to combat round actions envisioned here are.

Escalation Die

This is an interesting concept, but honestly I'd just rather lower AC and HP to be more in-line for the experience you're trying to give. My players talk way more about one shotting enemies in round 1 than they do about finally being able to get that hit to one-shot in Round 4 so I'd rather lower AC if it's an intentional fight to make them all feel like heroic badasses. Just from a numbers point as well the monsters would also be getting more "heroic" and you have the problem of their ability to one-shot your players (at lower levels) increasing. I think lowering AC/HP and sticking to average damage (no rolls, attacks just do X) for monsters probably works better here, especially at low levels.

Icons

So 5e does kind of have this. Modules have backgrounds with built-in connections and there's an optional rule called Plot Points (p. 269 DMG) that's similar to this, just not focused around important NPCs. I actually like a rule from another game described to me by someone (I think it's Blades in the Dark or another heist game) where you get a point and can spend it to overcome a complication as long as you explain how your character prepared for it ahead of time. This doesn't require the PC to play off any NPC connections which I find to be harder for players who are there more to roll dice than tell a story and new players.

Range Bands

I think PbtA uses a similar system (haven't played it, just been told by my players) and it works really well for TotM. Personally I just limit it to melee and ranged. Keeps it simple and if we're doing a big boss battle I pull out the map. I don't really do combats on wide open plains so I don't find far to be useful, but that's just me!

Thanks for sharing!

Fair, I think they're really at a loss what to do with her. I think she was best when she was Nadja's kind of secretary, maybe she could help one of the others with something in the future lol especially since Guillermo's dealing with his own stuff too much to be the servant sidekick right now

Bestupdates is an archival community bringing together all the parts of a posted saga into one post. It's not for giving advice to the original OP. To do that you should follow the info at the post start and link at the bottom to track down the original posts from the original OP.

tl;dr- this is a voyeur community, not an advice community

Very fun episode, I love seeing the Baron and the roast was great. Was nice to see the Guide again. Sad her storyline of trying to fit in with the group has just kind of fallen off, I always enjoy her.

Just looking for low! Doctor said a piece of toast is okay, but there's a big difference between a toast slice and a big bowl of Chex mix lol. Thank you for the suggestion!

ETA: also I'm splitting this between six individuals lol so if something is carbs and X I can always add more X so the carbs are lower for everyone as long as it's not like oatmeal or something that's like all carbs all the way down lol

Thought the time honored tradition was switching to another channel to watch another show's opener so you'd know what was going on when you switched there during commercial breaks. Just my family?