Shorty

Well it's being a bit of a pain in the butt. I can tell you that.

I have noticed that it certainly hasn't solved things. One thing I have been considering is that if I bulk purchase 2 years of hosting, I get quite a significant saving, so I could put this towards extra memory. As the site goes down and up again, that's mostly me messing around with caching settings etc trying to speed things up, so I'll see if I can determine the cause the bottleneck and go from there.

I just broke the site trying to tweak the settings for speed, luckily the great wise words of the IT Crowd saw us through.

I'm going to set it so people can login with their username, but as it's a fairly sensible security precaution, I think I'll redisable it after some warning

I can't believe two people managed to screenshot and send me the white-text-on-white BG header in the 20 seconds it took me to fix it 😝

Well, if you're here and reading this, you're looking at the new forums I imagine there'll be some kinks to work out, but for now, I rest.

Pretty similar experience with me except on a much smaller scale When I joined my company I was the fourth employee. Now we have about 30. Covid put a bit of a dent in our growth trajectory or we might've been a bit bigger now, but also with the rise of WFH we have lots of people we've hired from around the world that we never see in person. We've gone from being a creative agency to very much a corporate back-end systems agency with a little sprinkling of the creative stuff still happening on top, and that side was always what interested me most. On the other hand I've climbed a (fairly small) corporate ladder and got a small team now, and the money's decent. But yeah, hard to not get nostalgic for the simpler days. Once, in our first couple of years, work got quiet and the whole team just played CoD MW2 in a mini lan party. These days we're lucky if anyone comes out for a drink one Friday a month.

Sorry to say that I had an unsuccessful attempt at upgrading the forum this evening, not sure what the issue was really but backing up the db here did not behave itself the way it did during the test run. After a lot of attempts it just started to get a bit late. I'll give it another shot soon.

For the like... 2 people still using it ( @Sheikah @bob ?) - I'm sorry to say that Tapatalk won't work after the forum is updated. They have shown no interest in updating the plugin to work on 4.7 from what I can gather. On the plus side, the latest version of the software works smoothly as a progressive web app - i.e. it should feel close to an app experience on the web.

New server, new OS and new forum software all seemed to spin up and migrate quite smoothly in testing. The roadblock we've actually hit is more to do with a third-party service that has some sort of painful reset to its billing cycle that's keeping us locked out of an important step for a few days. Once we're over that hurdle I'll bring the forum down late-ish one evening so that no content is lost in the transfer. Then it'll be a case of "once you can see the new (basically temporary/unthemed) look, you're on the new server". In all honesty this is a bit of a "clean slate" approach as opposed to digging in and working out what was going wrong in the first place, but that should put is in a more futureproof state, even if a little is lost and has to be figured out again along the way.

I'd like to thank you and the the other Patreon supporters, you do more to keep the site running than I do these days

Well I was right that Early Access wasn't far off! Anyone giving this a go yet? I've snap-bought it but don't actually have time to play it at the moment 🥴

This is currently an absolute bargain on PS5 and Xbox on Amazon, ~ £12.35 - think I'll give it a go after seeing the positive feedback here

For what it's worth, what I've played feels incredibly tight, like a demo for an already released final product. Not sure what technical difficulties they were expecting to weed out but I haven't come across any of them

Anyone else subscribe to and get an invite to alpha test this? Most games I would shy away from that for fear of ruining the end experience but with this I'm kinda excited to be part of it!

I've only played this for a few hours but I'm really liking it so far. At the moment I'm just enjoying an RPG that's not too silly but not too serious? Tired of grimdark or over-dark humour in my sci-fi games and this seems to be having a bit more fun. Ultimately it just feels like more Skyrim but on planets. I do agree with some complaints that a lot of traveling has been reduced down to menu navigation, but when you do choose to float around space it feels very cool. I'm only playing on a gamepass free trial but fairly sure I'll buy the Steam version when that runs out (would've stuck with gamepass if it could be modded....)

I've been playing this entirely in co-op and having a great time. I've been playing D&D for years so it's great fun to see the lore, recognise the races, to create facsimilies of players we've been in the past. Also the choices you get to pick in conversation, especially for difficult deception checks etc, feel exactly like the kind of laughable ideas a player would come up with that you all find hilarious when you actually land a 20 and it works. That said, I'm not 100% convinced the game benefits that much from D&D as a play structure, especially in combat. It already changed a lot of fundamentals because they knew D&D is pretty flawed in combat. And I miss some of the great aspects of Divinity like all the mixing of elemental effects. Still an awesome game though, despite that.

I thought Attack on Titan had already completely finished - because I saw people sending death threats because they hated how it ended so much? Or was that just the manga.

Actually they were releasing 3 episodes a week which is pretty reasonable I think, and they're all out now. I personally prefer a slower release of shows so I can fight the temptation to binge watch and won't go very long gaps with nothing to watch (which is what I'm experiencing now) Also not sure if you're aware of it, but the whole thing is an adaptation of a popular podcast/video series called Critical Role - a group of famous voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons, the campaign written and DM'd by Matt Mercer, another big name in VA. They have a lot of laughs and act occasionally and typically childish for a D&D party, hence the general tone/swearing/violence. The players reprise their characters' roles for the cartoon too.

I literally dusted off the Gamecube to play this a couple of months ago, thinking a remaster would never happen. Typical

I really need another super low stakes TV series that you're always happy to stick on, especially while you're eating your evening meal. Two past examples of this that I think you'll agree are basically identical, are Star Trek Next Gen or Masterchef: The Professionals.

I bought myself a guitar, yes I'm hitting my midlife crisis a little bit early. I had an electric guitar when I was a teenager but I never wanted to take lessons, I just wanted to learn the tabs of my favourite riffs from my favourite songs, but I never got any good at it. I always thought I'd be able to just follow video lessons, but the internet was also still fairly young then and YouTube was barely off the ground. Such a thing didn't really exist then... but it does now. I sold my guitar and sold my amp when I moved house 2.5 years ago....... hell I didn't even keep my strap, and I gave my cool pedal to a friend. And so now I decide I want to pick it back up... I have to buy everything again. Along with a discount yearly sub of the "Justin Guitar" app -- I'm putting some effort in for 2023, so far I've practiced 20-60 mins every day for the 31 days since it was delivered. Also if you know guitars, don't ask me which guitar I got, cos you'll shake your head at me for spending so much as a beginner (but I did get 20% off) I'm posting about this here because I want to be held accountable for this and check back on my progress in 2024.

This is a damn fine TV. Not sure how that happened. This and Andor were definitely two that I had low expectations for, and couldn't have been more wrong.

If you have a Switch but you've never had any other means/inclination to play a Persona game - I really, really advise that you check out Persona 4 Golden. It's one of the greatest RPGs ever made and I don't think you'll be disappointed. An incredible experience start to finish. I am however a bit disappointed in the version of Persona 3 that they chose to release, they could've done so much more with it. It's well suited for the Switch though and still an amazing game.

25, that's crazy! I wish we had a bit of a write-up somewhere of where it all began, it's becoming a blur for me in my old age.... Thanks to everyone for their hard work contributing over the years, and thanks to all the Nintendo fans for sticking around