Serenes Forest's Teehee Thread

[Armagon]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

[Sidereal Wraith]

 

[Acacia Sgt]

Okay, it comes to me I should've started making preparations to start playing EUIV beforehand... but eh, it's fine.

At least, I already prepared my CKII save file to use on the Converter.

[Interdimensional Observer]

TIL 

Yuzo Koshiro has his own music channel.🎵

...When I resumed EO Nexus, I was on the boss of the 9th labyrinth, now I'm halfway through the 12th of 13. Almost done, but dang the fatigue instantly set in when I entered the Northern Shrine. Who thought it was a good idea to have four visually-identical big labyrinths?😑

Edited Sunday at 01:27 AM by Interdimensional Observer

[Dayni]

  Teehee, you ever look at something that had potential, but have to admit "dang, the grind's a bit much?"

That's Sonic Battle. Arena battler, but with many matches taking 10 lives and trying to use Emerl when you don't have the points to make him have better everything of the cards to select that because you grind them out by playing the game? It's unfortunate that it ended up this way.

On 10/11/2024 at 10:38 PM, Armagon said:

I will kill to have Transformers Two.

Imagine, if you will:

Transformers One

Transformers One Shall Rise

Transformers One Shall Fall

Peak trilogy

Spoiler

It'd give enough time to actually deal with the Quintessons and the Civil War.

On 10/12/2024 at 3:32 AM, Eltosian Kadath said:

So I have decided to push through this Three Houses run, so I have a few comments... OK it actually got long enough that I decided to put it in a spoiler box.

Spoiler

First off I ended up using seminars at this point just to save time, as the between stuff feels like it completely ran out of steam to the point of becoming tedious. Lost items went away a while ago, the only quests left seem to giving Hilda goods I already have, supports are filled up to point that tea loses most of its value, and I am starting to outpace my students in some of the skills I want to raise, so only faculty can train some of them, and I ran out of paralogues to make auxiliary battles interesting. Sorry, probably complained about this already, but it is very present.

Moving on to more positive things, Claude managed to hatch a second scheme. I am tempted to joke it was Hilda's scheme, but Claude did add a little to it by sneaking in some Almyrans (side note, Nader should be recruitable), and faking an attack to sneak them into the fort, but the Death Knight sniffs us out the moment we get in the door, although in a way that was too little too late. It was also funny how cowardly the Death Knight was when we got close to him, but I guess he sniffed out the missile strike as well, which ended up saving us officially from a story perspective. I guess the missile thing deserves talking about, but it just feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. I am alright with the idea of "magic" that is just modern day technology, but if that was the direction they wanted to go with the Slither's magic, I would have liked to see that with their earlier appearance in smaller ways (like Kronya pulling a gun on Jeralt, or Solon talking to his allies over a walkie-talkie or something), or the forbidden time out magic looking a bit more technologically incline before a massive fucking missile drops onto our head. As is, the missiles just fells a little out of place.

I did also continue on to the taking of Enbarr, and for funsies I deployed a basically unused Manuela just to get the Goddess Dance. Actually, I think I just missed that battalion last time around, as it is kind of secret, and I feel like I would remember the group dance gambit. I am also amazed that Three Houses had the restraint not to make us besiege Edelgard's castle for a month of down time after taking the city, so in a loving breath of fresh air, I get to enjoy two story maps in a row, which lifted my spirits a bit after deciding to continue on. Although that does bring me to one ludicrous story moment, where Dedeu talks a big game about bring back Edelgard's head on a platter, and then they give him the Mercy skill when fighting Edelgard. He literally can not kill her, with the battle ending when he would have, leaving Edelgard at one health, even if Edelgard started the battle at 1 HP. I went through a bit of effort to setup to see if her starting at 1 HP would make a difference, and I am just flabbergasted at how poorly this was handled. Why even have him show up and talk such a big talk if he is going to chicken out at the last minute like that. Why not make him recruitable if you are going through this kind of effort. I am sure some people will try to act like this is a gameplay improvement, that the green unit can't steal your exp, but Edelgard is not so weak that Dedue is going to kill her on accident, you have to clear the way and set things up for the guy to pull this off, and I wish there was some story payoff for letting him get his revenge.

Edit: This kept formatting weirdly.

Spoiler

....I have a feeling I didn't help myself on this by having so many units being used. The quests disappearing is all too true to be clear. As for tea, you'd only want it for Charm increases, which only works twice a month.

On the use of future tech, Part of me wants to joke about the others being sufficiently advanced tech as to be indistinguishable from magic, but these are clearly ballistic missiles. Also, the idea of Kronya carrying a gun is terrifying, Garreg Mach would have had a bad time if she'd been able to do that.

Feck sake, the game actually does that with Dedue. Wow. Honestly, if the game had the guts to make it a secret recruitment condition that he kills her, I'd probably have a bit more respect. Not even letting him kill her, smh.

Edited Sunday at 09:11 AM by Dayni

[Interdimensional Observer]

3 hours ago, Dayni said:

Teehee, you ever look at something that had potential, but have to admit "dang, the grind's a bit much?"

Very first thing that comes immediately to mind is the idea of learning all the Mantras with everyone in Digital Devil Saga. When the later Mantras cost over 1 million in funds and each has to be purchased per character, joy. -You have no need to do this, yet IIRC there are some minor stat boosts that you receive in Digital Devil Saga 2 if you have a DDS1 file where people have learned all the Mantras.

3 hours ago, Dayni said:

That's Sonic Battle. Arena battler, but with many matches taking 10 lives and trying to use Emerl when you don't have the points to make him have better everything of the cards to select that because you grind them out by playing the game? It's unfortunate that it ended up this way.

I played that back in my Sonic-having youth (GC-GBA era only). 

The skill point limit is far below what would be necessary to equip a ****** data card in every skill. Maxing those out wasn't the issue for child me, it was the RNG acquisition of new skill data. For all the hours I put in, I know I still had many blank spaces.

While I didn't dislike Sonic's pseudo-answer to Smash Bros, I don't think I loved it. The spritework is lovely and Emerl was nice. Yet the whole "special moves can OHKO if a gauge is filled" was a bizarre decision for a fighting game. And I have lingering memories of the unfun that was me cheesing Rogue's story by flying over a corner of the battlefield and staying there, letting everyone jump up at her and slowly sky-kicking them to KO whilst avoiding almost all harm in the process. The E-102 "Recovery Mode" was a questionable little decision too.

3 hours ago, Dayni said:

Feck sake, the game actually does that with Dedue. Wow. Honestly, if the game had the guts to make it a secret recruitment condition that he kills her, I'd probably have a bit more respect. Not even letting him kill her, smh.

There is one SRPG I know of where in order to recruit someone, you do have to make sure they kill a certain enemy whilst the potential recruit is an NPC, it has been done before.

[Acacia Sgt]

Finally, the forums are back! I wonder what happened...

[Eltosian Kadath]

2 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Finally, the forums are back! I wonder what happened...

I did a little digging during the down time, and saw that someone contacted staff about it and was told it was caused by an outage on their provider's side of things.

It was a bit irritating as I did finish up my Three Houses run, and want to start writing up my end of part 2 thoughts, but the forum outage delayed that. Although with one run down, it is time to take a break with my first playthrough of the somewhat seasonally appropriate Metroid Dread.

Very early opinion on Metroid Dread so far is I like a lot of it, but sometimes it feels like the E.M.M.I sections can be a bit frustrating when you are still exploring an area and don't know which doors they created to simply trap the player to death in. Once you have a better understanding of the map and aren't stumbling around playing a game of guess what the developers were thinking, they are kind of interesting. I do also love the Chozo power armor foe from the opening cut-scene, it is a fun way to play with Samus's back story and the lore of the world.

 

[Interdimensional Observer]

😄

-As this is my only social life, I might've been panicking a little yesterday.🥺😅 I mean, eventually this website will die, but I expect a warning some time in advance, to prepare myself to accept the end.

---

Anywho, I read over the past there days the National Geographic October 2024 issue, which was entirely dedicated to one topic- the Amazon. I watched the 44 minute documentary on the same afterwards. Quite good, after the introduction, the story flowed the from the peaks of the Andes and cloud forests, to the lowlands, and then out to the Atlantic Ocean. 

Paragraphs of details:

Spoiler

The Amazon River Ecosystem is roughly the size of the Lower 48 of the USA, with 344 billion trees, and more than 6200 rivers and tributaries amounting to 20% of the world’s freshwater.

The Amazon begins (well, one beginning of many) in the Nevado Mismi -the most distant tributary source of the Amazon, located in the Peruvian Andes- 18363 ft (5592 m) above sea level and surrounded by snow and glaciers. Where the clouds directly mix with and nourish the treetops. Some remote locations in these highlands and headwaters are still surprisingly undocumented by scientists, for so rarely do humans visit them.

The Andean headwaters descend into the 320,000 square miles (829,000 square kilometers) of lowland wetlands (out of 2.3 million square miles/5.9 million square kilometers of rainforest in total). Wetlands where in during May and June -the peak of the wet season- the land can be inundated with up to 40 feet (12 meters) of water, which does not fully recede until October or November. And yet, life thrives. In branches where birds nest when dry, fish swim when it floods.

The Amazon River Ecosystem discharges ~58 million gallons (220 million liters) of water 84~88 Olympic swimming pools- into the Atlantic Ocean per second. A volume of water discharged that is greater than that of the next six largest rivers in the world combined. The sheer mass of freshwater is so much, the traditional semi-salty brackish water doesn’t exist at the mouth of the Amazon. It creates separate layers of blue-gray saltwater and brown sediment laden freshwater in the Atlantic. Though it recedes in the dry season, at its maximum extent in July, this Amazon River Plume can reach 1,000 miles (1600 kilometers) away, embracing the entirety of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean and even reaching Puerto Rico. Sea turtles on islands like Antigua and Tobago, they swim in waters nourished by submerged soils that may have originated in mountains so far way.

~10% of all the Earth’s plant and animal species live in the Amazon, with scientists adding a new species on average every other day. The biodiversity includes:

• 40000 species of seed plants
• 2406 species of freshwater fish
• 1300 of birds
• 1500 of butterflies (and millions of other insects)
• 427 of amphibians
• 425 of mammals
• 371 of reptiles.

Things like mountains-loving Andean Bears- the only bear species (of eight globally) in South America, small among bears yet capable of dragging cow carcasses up trees. Arapaimas (aka Pirarucu)- the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish which can grow up to 10 ft (3m) and weigh 440 pounds (200kg). And Pink River Dolphins- one of two river dolphin species in South America (the other four species live in Asia).

While they didn’t include any archaeological articles, Nat Geo did mention that humans have been living in the Amazon for at least 13000 years, with 75000 cave paintings having been discovered. One pre-Columbian 1492 estimate puts the number of people living the Amazon as having been 10 million (present day- 40 million), which was subsequently reduced by 90% from Eastern Hemispheric diseases. The depopulation caused by contact led the first European naturalists to explore the Amazon in the 1700s to conclude that the rainforest had always been inhospitable to human existence, that small packs of hunter-gatherers were all the Amazon could support of premodern humanity. Only in the past decade or so with the invention of ground-penetrating radar and lidar, have archaeologists realized that human civilization had before Columbus once flourished in the Amazon. These ancient societies went so far as to build structures like canals, no small feat. Scientists have also realized that for the enormous variety it has, a mere 299 species of trees make up half of the Amazon rainforest. These "superdominant" trees include acai, rubber, Brazil nut, cacao, particularly around known pre-Columbian human settlements, and indicate that humans intentionally cultivated them.

However, the articles did speak continually of the modern indigenous living with the Amazon and the need for their support to sustain long-term environmental conservation efforts within the ecosystem. The fact that in the past 23 years, 130 million acres (526,000 square kilometers) of forest have been cleared was brought up as well. Plus mercury-laden illegal gold mining, and the treat posed by climate change. Major fish-massacring droughts (last year and this one 😐), glacier retreat, river turtle poaching (the egg-laying mothers and their unborn progeny need to be protected by rifle-toting night watches). And, every tree cut down interrupts the water cycle, wherein trees release stored water, some of which evaporates into clouds, which the dominant winds blow westward, which falls as snow in the Andes, which melts and comes down the mountains in the rivers, and so the cycle repeats.

Interesting stuff.🤓

 

15 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Finally, the forums are back! I wonder what happened...

Hopefully it was just maintenance or something.

 

2 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

It was a bit irritating as I did finish up my Three Houses run, and want to start writing up my end of part 2 thoughts, but the forum outage delayed that.

You could've written it offline and then just copypasted it here, like I did above with the wall o' text. Would also prevent you from losing all the text from some freak accident that happened mid-writing or upon submission, that has happened to me before.

3 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

it is time to take a break with my first playthrough of the somewhat seasonally appropriate Metroid Dread.

I didn't finish the game myself (I gave up at the end), but I hope you enjoy it.😀

[Eltosian Kadath]

5 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

You could've written it offline and then just copypasted it here, like I did above with the wall o' text. Would also prevent you from losing all the text from some freak accident that happened mid-writing or upon submission, that has happened to me before.

I could have, but I wanted to be able to see what I wrote before to keep from repeating myself too much.

 

8 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

didn't finish the game myself (I gave up at the end), but I hope you enjoy it.😀

There are quite a few things I am liking already, but we will see how it goes.

 

[Acacia Sgt]

28 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I did a little digging during the down time, and saw that someone contacted staff about it and was told it was caused by an outage on their provider's side of things.

Oh, I see. Well, good to see it wasn't something actually malicious.

---

So, I finally began my EUIV playthrough. Playing with a converted save file is certainly interesting. Already in the late 1460's, and lots of things be happening.

Done a few missions already. Discovered the New World. Already have a colony there. Been exploring and developing. Embraced the Renaissance. Could trigger a Golden Age for the Age of Exploration. Etc.

Man, thought I'd have a tense moment when Maghreb allied with the Byzantine Empire after I took some of my Claimed provinces due to missions (as Spain can get claims on most of the Moroccan coast), but I was able to fight them off. Good, since the Byzantines hold south Italy, which I have Permanent Claims there.

The converter also resulted in some weird or funny moments. Like, since my last CKII character's heir was a monarch of her own right in a different country. In EUIV proper she showed up both as the Queen of Italy, but also as the Heir of Spain. And... the game treated them as two separate characters. As in, the Queen of Italy suddenly died... but the Heir of Spain was still alive, pft.

Also, the converter created a Turdetanian culture, seemingly out of nowhere. I can only guess the converter database had some Imperator stuff (since the Turdetani do show up there), but why this single culture? Beats me. The converter also created an Iberic culture. Again, not sure why. Considering the name, I wonder if it's meant to represent a unified Iberian identity. Would be interesting to roleplay it that way. Now, if only I knew how to make it actually spawn so I could convert provinces...

[Acacia Sgt]

Duuuude, sounds like right up my alley. XD

https://zonatmo.com/library/novel/86236/meconvertienelprincipeherederodelimperiomexicano

[Dayni]

 Well that was an interesting breakdown to happen.

Meanwhile, there's been a big leak again, Game Freak this time:

Spoiler

https://old.reddit.com/r/PokeLeaks/comments/1g2g2wz/beta_blaziken_sprite/

Latiken was real to the point of sprites.

I've been moreso interested in past stuff. Some of the scrapped lore pieces are quite fucked. In some ways fascinating as written fictional mythology, but I am completely unsurprised those didn't get in. Will not link because.... no.

There's some spoilers for future stuff out there, have tried to avoid all that personally. And of course the personal details that were in the leak be fucked up, not happy about the risk there.

10 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

I played that back in my Sonic-having youth (GC-GBA era only). 

The skill point limit is far below what would be necessary to equip a ****** data card in every skill. Maxing those out wasn't the issue for child me, it was the RNG acquisition of new skill data. For all the hours I put in, I know I still had many blank spaces.

While I didn't dislike Sonic's pseudo-answer to Smash Bros, I don't think I loved it. The spritework is lovely and Emerl was nice. Yet the whole "special moves can OHKO if a gauge is filled" was a bizarre decision for a fighting game. And I have lingering memories of the unfun that was me cheesing Rogue's story by flying over a corner of the battlefield and staying there, letting everyone jump up at her and slowly sky-kicking them to KO whilst avoiding almost all harm in the process. The E-102 "Recovery Mode" was a questionable little decision too.

The RNG nature of it is unfortunate. Already gotten a decent amount of dupes and I wasn't that far in.

Funny the game has the Playstation All Stars idea of specials instakilling after filling a bar, but it's implementation isn't as central and thus bothers me less. I'll admit I bomb spammed (Mainly for Tails), which made Emerl even harder to justify imo, doesn't even have an option in the beginning there. E-102 surprised me for a moment, but it's not that hard to avoid if you finish with specials instead of in the middle of a combo.

49 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

I did a little digging during the down time, and saw that someone contacted staff about it and was told it was caused by an outage on their provider's side of things.

Dancing on a pin so we are to connect across such vast distances. Technology is powerful alright.

49 minutes ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

Very early opinion on Metroid Dread so far is I like a lot of it, but sometimes it feels like the E.M.M.I sections can be a bit frustrating when you are still exploring an area and don't know which doors they created to simply trap the player to death in. Once you have a better understanding of the map and aren't stumbling around playing a game of guess what the developers were thinking, they are kind of interesting. I do also love the Chozo power armor foe from the opening cut-scene, it is a fun way to play with Samus's back story and the lore of the world.

I'd say I'm not that bothered, but I kinda sucked (I may have been starting to suffer drift by the time I got to Dread) and some sections got frustrating. Hell, in the first real EMMI section I kept missing a button and was stuck on progress because of it. That doesn't really happen again either.

Oh, we'll get to that guy eventually.

[Armagon]

2 hours ago, Dayni said:

Well that was an interesting breakdown to happen.

Yeah the leaker was from here so Nintendo had to shut us down.

[Armagon]

Also the public transportation in London is dogshit on account that it's way too expensive. Motherfucker, an all-day bus ticket for all of Central Florida is $4.50 meanwhile a single bus ticket in London in $17.

Bus and trains in Paris and Madrid? Pocket change. Public transportation in London? A fortune. And it turns out, it's because it's privatized.

[Sidereal Wraith]

 

[Sidereal Wraith]

I wonder if Square Enix is going to sue for plagiarism.

[BrightBow]

I wish Tri would stop recapping everything you've just seen happening. I get messing up "show, don't tell". But doing "show" just to then "tell" you anyway after the fact is just really weird.

God, I miss Navi.

[Sidereal Wraith]

4 minutes ago, BrightBow said:

God, I miss Navi.

 

[Shrimp of the North]

3 hours ago, Armagon said:

Also the public transportation in London is dogshit on account that it's way too expensive. Motherfucker, an all-day bus ticket for all of Central Florida is $4.50 meanwhile a single bus ticket in London in $17.

Bus and trains in Paris and Madrid? Pocket change. Public transportation in London? A fortune. And it turns out, it's because it's privatized.

Weekly ticked for Zone 1+2 should be enough tbh. Was like 40 pounds iirc and you could use everything

[Interdimensional Observer]

The final labyrinth disappoints, but the new battle theme is okay. I'm also a little surprised that the lore behind the ancient calamity of the week included humanity being unable to deal with a mass influx of immigrants.

 

 

7 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

The converter also resulted in some weird or funny moments. Like, since my last CKII character's heir was a monarch of her own right in a different country. In EUIV proper she showed up both as the Queen of Italy, but also as the Heir of Spain. And... the game treated them as two separate characters. As in, the Queen of Italy suddenly died... but the Heir of Spain was still alive, pft.

Turns out your last CKII person never realized they had twins.

 

7 hours ago, Dayni said:

Funny the game has the Playstation All Stars idea of specials instakilling after filling a bar, but it's implementation isn't as central and thus bothers me less.

And enemies rotate one special that they're immune to, I don't exactly get why they did that.

6 hours ago, Dayni said:

The RNG nature of it is unfortunate. Already gotten a decent amount of dupes and I wasn't that far in.

The idea of building your own fighter is cool -but there should've been a better way for learning new skills. I get the idea of having "rare" skills, but there could've been a better way to handle this, even if I'm not sure how (would lottery/gatcha be an improvement?).

[Shrimp of the North]

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/arbeitsmarkt/babyboomer-rente-arbeitnehmer-100.html

...we're so beyond fucked

[Capt. Fargus]

6 hours ago, Armagon said:

Yeah the leaker was from here so Nintendo had to shut us down.

Moles?!

To the deep six with em. 😎

[Acacia Sgt]

4 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Turns out your last CKII person never realized they had twins.

Haha, maybe. The converter is fanmade, and for sure loads better than the official one Paradox made... but certainly not perfect. At least this wasn't a problem for me.

[Venger_06]

Good mourning

I'm on Futaba's palace now, I'm feeling fatigued (it's not good)