In addition to what others have said, I’d recommend two things:

1. Deliberately understalt food. You can always add more salt on the table, you can’t take salt away.

2. Prep compound butter beforehand with someone helping you taste. Grab roasted garlic (2-3 heads), red wine vinegar (a couple drops), 400g of good quality butter with no added ingredients (eg avoid garlic butter bars), handful of fresh chopped thyme and rosemary, and bit of pepper and salt (same thing as before, underseason). This will give you an already prepped flavour bomb to add to savoury foods. I usually add a couple bones’ worth of marrow as well, and the resulting butter goes well with any meat (non-fish), vegetables, bread, even plain rice.

Puuure pazaak

Second. Performance should probably be better (I was struggling before I upgraded), but it is great fun. Very, very dark in subject matter.

Oh yeah. They added contextual interaction promots. The closest thing I had played before reforger was DayZ though. But Reforger is very intuitive. Most everything can be done by looking at stuff and pressing F (entering cars, bandaging wounds, taking on and off attachments on weapons, etc.).

It’s a bit more complex than Squad in the things you can do, but the approach is much more simple (like, in Squad you press f1-8 to switch seats, in ArmA you can freelook and look at the seat).

Great rec. Teamwork required, easy to learn but hard to master (especially the vehicles, which also require teamwork).

Honestly squad is pretty strange for me. I’m not very fond of talking to people (SzPD at least, might be on the spectrum), but Squad does not work without teamwork and communication. Guess the difference is that I don’t really get casual communication but effective comms on Squad rely on briefness and exactness. Triple Ds, that kind of stuff.

If you do end up jumping into Squad, expect some hiccups. The game is not terribly well optimized, and the community almost always picks the same factions and divisions. The devs have shown off a UE5 upgrade that’ll be dropping in the near future, so that might be good.

In a similar vein, ArmA: Reforger is great. Completely replaced my Squad addiction. While Squad is more focused (which is good), ArmA is way more free and varied in objectives. Plus, I feel like it might be more easily moddable. WCS and RH feel almost like they were vanilla, while the most polished Squad mods feel like mods. Not a knock against the mod teams, maybe unreal is harder to mod.

Both of these recs are honestly great, Jojo Mayer in particular would be great as a theme if I slow it down some. Thanks!

Thanks! Skeleton Quarter and Jü sound like what I’m after. Hopefully it won’t be too dissonant for my table.

Speaking of music, has anyone found anything that resembles a mix of jazz, techno, and punk? Hell of a mix, but I kinda wanted something cool for a campaign I’ll run in a custom setting, in New Orleans. At this point, even something with an energy similar to Samurai or Atari Teenage Riot but jazzy would be cool as a “soundtrack”.

You’ve got a lot more faith in the system than I do, I think. I don’t think people like Milei wouldn’t coup if a global conflict that strained trade routes were to happen. Authoritarians like him don’t need much prodding to take advantage of a bad situation.

Big hypothetical, ik, but it wouldn’t surprise me if people like him leaned on fascist legacy.

Wouldn’t bet on argentina. They’ve got their own dickhead in chief who’s also waging war against progress.

Something tells me that comment you answered to was a bit tongue in cheek

Definitely. I love the freedom ArmA gives. It allows to really engage with any objective as you see fit. The structure of a typical AAS or RAAS match in squad doesn’t really allow for that to happen.

The day before yesterday a buddy and I managed to round up 4 people to come with us to retake Cabin on a WCS server. W After that we went to Chotain. While the team took farm, we went on to take Laruns, then quarry while the team took Camurac, and then Penant’s . We went from losing Military Hospital to the enemy team struggling to even field helicopters to the western coast.

Haven’t ever gotten close to that in Squad. Though I will say that rounding up enough volunteers to do that is kind of hard.

I never played ArmA before Reforger, but coming from Squad it feels great. From my understanding of common gripes long time ArmA players have with Reforger, it’s a bit less milsim, so take that into account if you want to jump in.

Vanilla:

• Mortars
• New MI-8 and Huey variants, armed.
• New Soviet and NATO IFV (NATO has an amphibious IFV now, similar to the BTR)
• Rank requirements for weapons and apparel
• Point capture changes (can’t respawn on contested points, and capture rate depends on how many friendly points connect to it).
• Structural destruction (eg: buildings and trees)

WCS (probably the most popular mod pack along with RHS) also has new stuff coming with this patch:

• New weapons
• New vehicles (inc. Mh6 variants, tanks, new IFVs), some of which are armed with new stuff I think.

To add to the film thing: if travelling with film, keep it in carry-on bags and ask for hand checks. Film gets exposed by the radiation from machines at checkpoints; the higher the ASA, the more it’ll get ruined. 400+ will for sure be destroyed by a scan or two.

I ruined 4 rolls of the best street photography I’ve ever done from a trip to chicago because I didn’t know about it.

The Neighborhood Kids. They’re a small-ish rap group whose biggest song has a bit over quarter million streams on Spotify (Biddi Bomb). They’re really interesting because they sound and feel like politically active 90s west coast rap. Great beats, great lyrics, and very creative.

A complete 180 from what tops the charts nowadays. Biddi bomb is their biggest song and is rap through and through, while Third World Problems feels RATM. I honestly hope they keep at it because I love what they’re doing.

Lethal Company, Battle Talent, Ready or Not, and Arma Reforger. Bit of Stalker GAMMA and Crusader Kings as well.

I’m halfway through my first kcd2 playthrough and I’m waiting for the barber update. The game is fantastic, and I really want to keep playing, but I kinda liked costumizing henry in the first game. Looking at the rest of the game, I imagine this one’ll be much more polished.

Yeah! I was looking for something horror or horror adjacent and I was not expecting religious horror to pop up. It’s easy to read too, though it does get a bit, uh, what’s the word, crude at times. Not in the writing, but what’s being portrayed.

Reading, honestly. Though I don’t read on my phone, too many distractions. I read whenever I’m out and about and waiting, which isn’t much these days.

Christopher Buehlman has some, though idk if they’re grimdark or just horror. I’ve read Those Across The River and Between Two Fires, both standalone stories with no connection between them. Between Two Fires is the better of the two, with just some of the latter half feeling a bit too long (even if the story is still interesting).