WytchStar

It’s interesting how some things have changed over the years when it comes to chat rooms. And how other things haven’t. When I first started in The Palace the internet was new, and chat rooms were for shut-ins, agoraphobes, and nerds. We basically lived on the internet. So it made sense to some to treat the room as a place you entered and left.

Now you can sit on a discord server on mobile and have a life, pop in the middle of a conversation somewhere and then leave it. And some servers still suggest you greet a room like you live there.

It’s like, when I was a kid, having internet access to all human knowledge, anywhere, would have been a divine gift. Now we all have computers in our pockets and some people still argue about basic facts that can be resolved instantly. We treat technology very strangely.

The end of Red Dead Redemption. Spoilers for a game that’s over a decade old, but John’s death was a brutal cruelty that stayed with me for a long, long time.

And here I am handing out candy to the neighborhood kids while they walk around with huge smiles and laughter.

This whole fucking thing is fucked.

For me it wasn’t the fire that kept drawing comparisons to Divinity. It was the writing. The opening is beat for beat Divinity tropes and it was off-putting. It took hours more gameplay and character development for that edge to wear down, though it has probably permanently shaded my first playthrough. Perhaps that opening was one of the first things written, and thus the most akin to its predecessor.

Once the game settles in, things feel less Divinity and more Faerun. The fire metaphor is apt though. Things do creep in from time to time to remind you who built this adventure. It’s like a signature. I don’t always like it, seeing the hand in this case is more jarring because of how sensitive I am towards the setting and gameplay. But the craft is so thoughtful otherwise, it’s broken through those barriers for me.

Hey so like, new games come out like every day, dude, so…

I’m in my 40s and dealt with a lot of pain and gum recession because I didn’t develop good habits as a kid. Parents, teach your children to floss. Gentle, compassionate dentists are not as easy to find as you might think. Your kids will suffer later in life if you don’t emphasize good dental care.

These guys think the service they provide is so invaluable, so critical to the lives of their users, that they’re betting on those users’ willingness to shell out for the experience they’re accustomed to.

It doesn’t seem like a winning strategy but he’s desperate to turn a profit off this thing and I don’t think the long term is much of a consideration right now.

Watching 14 years go as I write.