Yeah, that’s the plan. I’m leaving the originals alone, I’ll just make a new post for those games.

It can definitely seem unfair at times. I mentioned in another comment that it feels like the game has a story it wants to tell and it punishes you for straying too far from the plot. Fortunately, it marks your conversation choices, so if you have to redo conversations, you know which path you previously took.

I think 02 must be the sheep.

Ah! That makes sense! I wondered if there was going to be some twist in the plot where the original Jan was an alter himself (the actual #2) and the real original died with the rest of the crew. But I didn’t want to speculate and inadvertently spoil a good twist.

I’ve watched thousands of movies and TV shows and played a lot of games, and my wife gets mad at me because I’m pretty good at spotting a twist coming a mile away now. So I do my best not to speculate where the plot is going in these posts. But you’re right, it might just be as simple as counting how many clones have been made.

Yeah, there definitely seems to be a story the game wants to tell, and you’re punished for veering too far from the plot. I’ve definitely restarted a save or two to undo a bad choice.

I do like that it highlights your previous conversation choices, so you know which route you picked and could try another option in your next run. That definitely makes it a bit easier.

I’m excited to see what new alters you create and what their personalities will be like, but I’m also kind of dreading the personnel management system getting too complex.

Thanks! I do this as a hobby and would probably get burnt out if I had to do this for work. I attempted to make daily posts for a while as a personal writing challenge and I got to #50 before I had to take a break.

But my posting would definitely be more consistent if someone paid me to do it. 😆 I need to go back and redo the first handful of posts I’ve made here, since I started out just posting a single screenshot. It’d be nice to actually discuss those games in depth too.

Thank you! I enjoy discussing video games (and movies, but my movie review blog has been abandoned for the past couple years), and I’ve always wanted to find someone who goes into a little depth on games; someone who introduces people to the premise of a game and gets them interested. The little summary on Steam isn’t always enough to let me know if it’s going to be fun or not.

Since I couldn’t find any content like that, I decided to just create it myself. I’m retired young and I got nothing else going on, so why not?

It’s published by the same studio (11 bit studios), but they each have different developers. 11 bit studios also created The Alters, but Starward Industries created The Invincible.

When I was a kid, I always got confused for an adult. Nobody believed I was a minor. I once got confused for a college student when I was just about to graduate from elementary school.

Now I’m 41 and I have the opposite problem. Everyone thinks I’m in my late 20s/early 30s. Even with a white patch on my beard, people still think I’m just a young man who’s going gray young.

It doesn’t help that I retired at 38 years old. No one believes me when I say I’m already retired. I’ve had a few people ask me if I’m just living with my parents and calling it “retired.” Ha!

When I first bought Red Dead Redemption (well over a decade ago, for the Xbox 360), I got it exclusively for the “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack. I love zombie games, and setting it in the Wild West? That’s a unique twist I hadn’t seen yet.

However, I didn’t want to just jump right into the zombie gameplay. I wanted to be intimately familiar with the world and its lore first, so I could squeeze all the enjoyment out of the zombie expansion. I wanted to know all the townsfolk, so when I had to blow someone’s brains out, I’d understand their relationship to the main character and how emotionally impactful that choice was.

Suffice to say, I was so anxious to get to the zombie expansion that I rushed through the entire game in maybe 2 evenings. I didn’t really enjoy my playthrough because I was just trying to get it over with as quickly as I could.

When I finally got to the zombie expansion, I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It was at that moment I realized that the original game was far more fun than the zombie expansion. But I had rushed it and wasted my whole experience.

Last year, I finally got around to playing through the game again and I made sure to slow down and really enjoy it. It’s such a fantastic story. I played the Undead Nightmare expansion afterwards and made a post about it here for Halloween month. That, too, was more fun than I remembered.

Now I need to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve owned it for years, but I always get bored maybe an hour into the gameplay. They put so much effort into making it as realistic and complex as possible that I just get distracted and lose the plot. RDR1 was a more straightforward plot and kept me engaged, but I keep losing focus on the sequel. I need to force myself to sit still and power through it sometime. #ADHDproblems

That’s very interesting. I learned the history of my name through living descendants of my ancestors in Norway. (Two brothers immigrated to America, while a third brother stayed behind in Norway) They were the ones who told me Norway was conquered and ruled by Denmark for a while.

Perhaps it was a mistranslation between us; I had wondered how Norway was able to preserve their country’s heritage and language while being ruled by their neighbor.

My family is originally from Sauda in Norway. Norwegian tradition used to be that your family name was the name of your home. If you moved to a new farm, you adopted the name of that farm as your new family name. They don’t do this anymore, as it got really hard to track genealogical records with families changing names all the time.

When my ancestors immigrated to America, Norway was under Danish rule, as Denmark had conquered Norway at the time and was forcing Danish pronunciation on the Norwegian language. So my family name’s pronunciation of “saw-duh” became “sov-dae.”

When my ancestors got to America, no one could pronounce my family name correctly, so they changed the spelling to be more phonetic in the English language. And that’s how I got my current family name!

I mean, this is my public username. It takes a very quick Google search to dox me. Most of my name is in my username already.

In my 40+ years alive, I’ve never met anyone with my first name, although I know they exist; a quick Google search shows me at least a handful of people who have it.

My last name is an Americanized spelling of a Danish pronunciation of a Norwegian farm name. There are very few people who have my exact last name, and every one I’ve ever spoken to has been a descendant of my ancestral family who immigrated to America a century and a half ago.

Combine the two, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person on the planet with my specific name. I’ve never had a problem making accounts with my first.last name anywhere.

He turned a 1993 Fiat Panda into a 1993 Flat Panda.

United States of America: We’re made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we’ve hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

Technically, we didn’t call them “states” until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were “colonies” before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

I only use Lemmy. Fuck Reddit. And this is from someone who spent over a decade using Reddit religiously. I dropped them during the whole API scandal. I had been growing more and now dissatisfied with Reddit and that was the last straw.

The only mainstream social media program I use is Facebook, and I don’t really use it anymore. I only keep my profile because I’ve met people from all over the world who I stay in touch with through Facebook. Plus all my childhood friends and family members are there. But Facebook (and Meta as a whole) is garbage and I have a bunch of tools to prevent them from feeding me garbage content and recording my data while I’m trying to keep up with my friends and family there.

I have a Bluesky account, which I don’t know what to do with. Twitter always felt like social media for celebrities; there wasn’t much going on there for us normal people. I created a Bluesky account just to get away from Twitter, but I don’t have much to post and none of it gets attention from anyone, so I just feel like I’m talking to myself. I don’t have anyone really interesting to follow there either.

I also use Discord to stay in touch with my closest friends, on a personal server I built. That’s pretty much it. I don’t trust any other social media programs. So Lemmy is my main source of news and content.

The Vesper is James Bond’s personal invention, from the very first novel, Casino Royale. It’s basically his own custom twist on the vodka martini.

He explains he only has one drink before dinner, but he prefers it’s a large one, ice cold, and made very well. He drinks plenty of other types of alcohol throughout the books, but he’s pretty particular about this one evening aperitif.

The movies kind of latched onto it and just made him drink vodka martinis in general. Although the 2006 film Casino Royale had him order his custom invention from a bar, almost word-for-word from the original novel. It’s named after Vesper Lynd, the first girl Bond truly fell for in the novels.

James Bond was an alcoholic, with good reason. He didn’t drink vodka martinis for the taste, he drank them to dull the pain and horrors of his job. As much as he drank, he probably didn’t really taste the booze anymore.

The original James Bond from the novels was a dark and brooding high-functioning alcoholic, who operated at his best with a drink or two in him at all times. He was pretty useless without the drink. A vodka martini would quickly get him in the right headspace to accomplish his latest mission.

The movie Bond was reinvented to be this dashing, handsome womanizer who drank and smoked socially and was charming as hell. Basically, a 1950s ideal male fantasy. This Bond probably could’ve used a classier drink than straight vodka, but that’s one aspect of the books they kept pretty loyal.