Right, but in my non-US country, the recipe is in grams or ounces (ie, by weight) and butter is sold in different-sized sticks to in the US. So, whenever I come across US recipes, I have to do some kind of conversion that involves me looking up how much butter is in a cup, how big a US stick of butter is, or how much a tablespoon of butter weighs!
I came across an American recipe using cups of butter a week or two back, so obviously not everyone got the memo! Sticks isn’t so bad, but I do wish it was all just done by weight. Whenever I encounter recipes using sticks, I still have to convert it because butter is sold in different quantities here.
I agree about flour, it absolutely needs to be done by weight!
Especially for things like butter. Who measures butter in a cup, America?! Unless you just have vats of liquid butter sitting around, in which case I guess scooping up a cup is pretty easy… But even then, weighing it out is better, I think.
You’re welcome, of course! I’ll definitely see about refining it and finding somewhere to post it, that’s a good suggestion! It’s given me some ideas to discuss in a more broad essay about complexity, depth and accessibility, too.
One criticism I’ll add that I didn’t mention in my above comment (because I ran out of characters and had to trim some stuff!) is the atmosphere of the game. It’s not bad, and some of the level design is really nice, but the game doesn’t have a strong tone, aesthetic or level of writing in the way Grim Dawn does, for example (although Grim Dawn is probably the peak as far as atmosphere and world-building in ARPGs goes, I think, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison). Last Epoch has some interesting ideas relating to time travel, and it’s pretty cool seeing some of the same areas in different eras (plus it’s a clever way for them to reuse assets, I imagine), but I’d say it’s weaker than other major ARPGs in the story/world-building/atmosphere department. Of course, most people tend to play ARPGs for the gameplay first and foremost, and LE does a great job with that, so it’s a more minor criticism from me than it would be in other genres of game.
But yes, definitely look into it!
It was somewhat less of a knock when they first started making the game; it was a successful Kickstarter project ~5 years ago so it’s been in development for a while. For what it’s worth, I’ve got ~250 hours in the game and think it’s shaping up really well (you can find my not-so-mini-review elsewhere in this thread).
I’ve played Last Epoch for ~250 hours (and counting) over the last year since I bought it, so I’ll give a mini-review here. The TL;DR is that it feels like a brilliant middle ground between Path Of Exile and Diablo - it has depth and complexity but doesn’t have the brutal learning curve that Path Of Exile does. It doesn’t have the content variety that Path Of Exile has, but it’s also an early access game right now so that’s expected. It’s a great foundation, their patches have been substantial, their communications tend to feel good, and I feel like they’re a good development studio. A lot of the developer insights make it feel like they take very good approaches to problem-solving, too.
The combat feels absolutely fantastic. The animations are smooth and feel modern. It can feel a little “floaty” for some people, but personally I have no issues with the way it feels. It’s paced in such a way that fighting regular enemies still feels engaging (unlike Path Of Exile’s zoom- and dopamine-fest) but isn’t a slog, and more powerful enemies can put up really good satisfying fights. There’s a good variety of skills and the way you modify them with the skill tree system can change them significantly. The build depth isn’t quite as crazy as Path Of Exile’s, but considering most POE players just follow build guides rather than taking their own builds, I’d say that won’t matter for most people. And for people who do like creating their own builds from scratch - which I do - there’s still plenty of depth to Last Epoch’s system.
It’s very realistic (and encouraged) for new players to experiment and create their own builds. Respeccing is pretty simple, and the skill systems are simple enough that new players can work it out for themselves, but there are also some interesting combinations and min-maxy things for more advanced players can figure out and build around. Each skill has its own skill tree, and while the trees aren’t super complex, there’s a good variety of ways to modify each skill. Some of the skills also have interactions with other skills - for instance, Teleport has a modifier that means your next skill has no mana cost; Meteor has one where your Fireball has reduced mana cost for a few seconds after casting it. You can chain that into a skill rotation: Teleport > Meteor (which normally has a high mana cost) > Fireball spam and suddenly you’re going to have a much better time with mana sustain, but perhaps need to work out a way to deal with the fact that your movement skill is being used offensively and won’t be available for dodging. So the game sort of gently hints at some skill combos like that, but they never feel forced and you still feel smart when you put it all together yourself.
The loot system is good. It has the single best crafting system I’ve seen in any ARPG, and crafting is absolutely worth your time and a necessity if you’re pushing your build as far as it goes. But you need good starting items to work with - you can’t just take a terrible item and craft it into something amazing. Crafting lets you upgrade the tiers of modifiers, add new mods if there’s space, and sometimes modify items in slightly more spicy ways if you’re feeling brave. But items have a “crafting potential” which depletes as you craft on them, so looting items is important.
The legendary item system is also very good. Unique items have their usual fixed stats, but they can have something called “legendary potential”, which rolls between 0 and 4. Legendary potential does nothing by itself, but it allows you to combine a purple-tier item with your unique item; the amount of legendary potential you have dictates the number of mods from your purple item that will be randomly added to your unique item. Non-unique items can have 4 modifiers, so being able to create legendary items with the unique stats and powerful regular item stats is a really good end-game chase.
Most unique items are target farmable in the end-game. That’s not to say you can get them immediately, but you can target “unique rings” as a reward, for instance, or target a specific boss that can have a chance to drop the item you’re looking for. So overall, I think it’s a good item system!
I think they’ve taken a very good approach to problem-solving - their upcoming trade system, for instance, looks (on paper) like it’ll fix the biggest issues with Path Of Exile’s trade system and Diablo 3’s auction house, while also having the benefits of both and while giving players an avenue to progress without engaging with trade at all. (Basically, players join either the trading guild or the “solo” guild. Traders can trade, solo players get a boost to their loot and can target farm things more easily. People can trade with their party/friends separately from this trading system so the whole guild system doesn’t matter for co-op play.) It’s smart, and that kind of thinking can be seen across multiple systems in the game.
You’re right. My CEO deserves 118x my pay because I only work 8 hours a day, while they work 944 hours a day…
Yes, a CEO will likely have the most individual impact on a company, but that doesn’t mean what they’re doing is necessarily harder work than what someone on the shop floor is doing. They have more individual impact because they’re CEO; they’re not CEO because of their individual impact. Take that person from the shop floor and put them in the CEO position and they’ll then be the one with the most individual impact instead.
It’s a different set of skills, sure. But one of those skills is definitely “being good at persuading people who make the actual product / provide the actual service to work for far, far less money than the CEO who simply co-ordinates it all”.
Green Wing. It’s a British sitcom set in a hospital. There’s absolutely nothing medical-related in it; the hospital is just the place where everyone works - a backdrop and nothing more. It’s somewhere between a sketch show, a soap opera and a comedy drama - it’s surreal, exaggerated and definitely has a lot of “sketch-like” scenes, but the characters are fleshed out and consistent, and have proper emotional arcs.
It has an absolutely fantastic cast, and a lot of them have gone onto have very successful careers since then. Olivia Coleman, for one, but I’m sure you’ll recognise Tamsin Greig, Stephen Mangan, Michelle Gomez and Mark Heap - if not their names then at least their faces.
It has an incredible editing style and score, too. Like, it’s impossible not to notice how good they are, even if they’re not something you’re usually remotely interested in. In particular, it makes heavy use of slow-motion and fast-forward at the start and end of scenes, with the brilliantly catchy score as the only audio, which really highlights the actors’ body language as well as making for great transitions between scenes.
It’s laugh-out-loud funny, memorable and surprisingly endearing for such a surreal show. I always found it surprising that Black Books - which is also fantastic (and also stars Tamsin Greig) - managed to find an American audience but Green Wing never seemed to. Both are on par with each other, I think.
It’s the second article from this site I’ve seen today - both posted by the same account - and they’ve both been horrific. The Cities: Skylines 2 one had some awful title gore, too.
Part of me wants to just block OP so I don’t ever see this website again. But part of me doesn’t want to because I want the news still, and I think there can be valuable discussion in the comment sections even if the article itself is awful.
Yeah, it looks pretty bad from that list. It may not be quite as bad in practice - some of them may have their name attached because, for instance, they co-own a production company where only person is involved but all three co-owners get their names on the credits. And some of them may be involved on the technical side, some for the story side, some just for financing, etc.
But even so, that looks like far too many names to have any kind of coherent vision.
That’s a good reason!
I’m curious: why are you using Mastodon when you’re a kbin user already? Why not just use the microblogging aspect of kbin? It’s even federated with Mastodon!
I don’t know about guides, but I do agree it can be a little confusing. Trying to work out what instances are and which one you should join is difficult until you understand the concept and a little about how the tech works - it’s the same with the threadiverse. Realising it’s like email domains is what made it click for me.
And if you personally ever decide to get into Mastodon: you’re on kbin already, which federates with Mastodon and has support for microblogging, so you don’t even need to do anything new - you just need to start using that functionality on kbin!
That was a fascinating, albeit terrifying, read; thanks for sharing! Some of the spy stuff in Mission Impossible suddenly feels a lot more grounded…
I personally opted for kbin.social - I like the UI more, I like the community in the kbin-specific threads, and I like that I have the option to follow Mastodon users and interact with the whole micro-blogging side of the fediverse as well as using the “threadiverse” (Lemmy, etc). I think the occasional issues are bound to happen regardless of your instance, purely because it’s such a new and growing platform. kbin’s largely been rather stable, though.
The biggest downside for a lot of people is that kbin isn’t supported by most of the mobile apps yet. Personally, I don’t mind this - there’s a PWA (progressive web app - essentially just a fancy bookmark to the mobile site that keeps it in its own unique browser instance with the tabs, menus, etc, hidden so it looks like an app) that works really nicely. The mobile site is really nice to use in general, so I’ve no issues just using this until a killer app comes along.
Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne! Milk for the Khorne Flakes!