u/Inevitable-Donkey186

Just thinking about how Souls is the one mainstream series that is not dead easy and doesn't have an auto win mode that people fall to and yet mainstream audiences love it anyway. I think a huge part of it is it is the one series where people are actually okay with failing, trying again and getting better. So many people could be so much better at every game by simply trying again on a boss fight instead of making sure they are put in a comfortable place where success is a given.

For difficulty and gameplay to have stakes, failure has to be nearby. Your mistakes have to be able to lead to failure; you have to have that dance.

I'm thinking of a recent playthrough I had of Metaphor Refantazio. I played on hard mode to get more out of the gameplay, which worked for the first third of the game before RPG snowballing took over. But I want to highlight my experience on what was probably the best boss fight gameplay wise, and yet the game emotionally was telling me that everything was terrible.

In Dark Souls, you get a stoic statement of fact on failure: You Died. That's it.

On the best boss fight of the game, the game wouldn't shut up about how badly I was playing it. Frequently I had party members on the brink of death or I'd be experiencing critical blows from the boss. My helper fairy would shout constantly:

"OH NOOOO! KEVIN IS POISONED!!! FUCK QUICK YOU HAVE TO HEAL HIM OH MY GOD"

"NOOOOOOO STACEY JUST DIED. OH GOD YOU HAVE TO REVIVE HER"

"BILL IS AT LOW HEATLH OH GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE. HEAL HIM PLEASE!!!!!"

Then when I lost my first battle narrowly, the music swelled to a tragic crescendo with various voices saying "nooo oh god how could be lose oh fuck this is terrible". Before I could try again the game suggested "hey want to dial down the difficulty?". All this is the game telling me that this experience is bad; this primes me to think it is bad as a player. The joke is, this is actually as good as it gets. It was great; it was a genuine tactical battle I narrowly lost, now trying again with slightly better prioritization I can finish it. So the game is injecting a negative emotion tainting the best gameplay scenario it has to offer like it is some kind of mistake.

So to up the ante on Neil is Max claims, I'll say Neil is actually Antinous.

It couldn't be more obvious; literally the same actor and in the same franchise. The Odyssey so clearly links to Oppenheimer which was so clearly linked to Tenet and now they form a circle.

First, how? Just some more basic straight shot one way time travel at the end of Tenet though a means we weren't shown yet.

Second, why? To ensure Bronze Age collapse. Just as the present was at war with the future, we can be at war with the past. After all from the future's perspective they are at war with the past. In this sense we are in a pincer.

Antinous needs to goad the suitors in to terrible behaviour and in particular he needs to goad Odysseus into rage. Why? The ultimate end to this is bloodshed and violence that ends with Odysseus' exile.

Without Antinous, it is likely that the suitors wouldn't have been so riled up as to stand up to Odysseus after he won Penelope's challenge; furthermore Odysseus likely wouldn't have witnessed such cruel behaviour that would be worthy of his vengeance. It is likely he could have peacefully reclaimed the throne. From that position of strength and stability with his wisdom, Ithaca could have navigated challenges and sidestepped Bronze Age collapse. This massively shifts the x-axis on the exponential curve of human development, meaning the new timeline's Oppenheimer equivalent is some Greek dude from thousands of years ago.

Perhaps this leads to technology that directly destroys the present the way the future wanted to invert us away, or perhaps we just aren't as ready (not that we were) for nuclear power and we actually annihilate ourselves then.

Whatever it is, Neil had to cruelly throw a poor old dog on a dung heap to ensure we could live. It's the bomb that does not go off that changes the world.

What about him dying after unlocking the gate for The Protagonist? Probably a body double/twin/faked his death idk.

(also I'm not a schizio; I know this is a batshit idea but it was fun to write)

I'm planning on maxing out my 4% yield with one final prepayment on my momemtum before cancelling it and before the structure changes. Very cool feature.

Though doing so would be like 2.5x my rent; so I guess that means for two months I don't pay anything. For the 3rd month do I just only pay half on my next credit card? Credit card splitting in general seems to require Chexy plus, which I don't plan on getting; I'm assuming that this would be one circumstance where you effectively get it for at most one month.

I bought a 2 year subscription because topcashback was offering 120% cashback so it was free money:
ExpressVPN Offers, Cash Back, Discounts & Coupons

It appeared in my dashboard as "pending" right away but tons of reviews are giving horror stories of them not actually honoring the deal. To get the money I would have to wait it out past the refund deadline; part of me is getting cold feet and thinking I should just refund sooner as to avoid them scamming me.

Anyone have experience with this?

Game simply cannot get past a cutscene (mode settings doesn't help at all) like 4/5 way through the game. I've liked the grimdoomer OPL for drag and drop management with iso bigger than 4gb. Is the compatability better all around the board for HDD games with the newest changes on the non-grimdoomer branch?

Just trying to decide if I should reformat everything or not.

I've read multiple sources stating that if you *lose* active trader status, subsequent payments drop from 3% to 1% matching over 24 months. But does the reverse hold? Can you transfer into WS as a not active trader (in large part because your funds are not there yet) then when you get your portfolio over, you start being a degenerate gambler with some subset of your funds; Can you then upgrade your status so that a couple of months into your 24 month period, the bonus payments triple from that point forward?

Also, the cap of $20000 earnings at 1% I see in the app, is that limit of the cash you cash you can get at both tiers? Like you get 1% of funding of an account of 2 million but best you can do at the high yield is 3% of an account of 0.6666 million or if the earnings cap $60k?

It either seems like false advertising: recurring expenses get you 4% but not really in actuality, or some kind of bullying and anticompetitive behaviour with respect to how Scotia is bullying Chexy.

I'm not a lawyer, and I imagine there's wording in the contracts with Scotia to get them out of this, but there's also lots of precedent I've seen with shit like this where the loopholes aren't enforceable and judges make calls that clearly one party is acting in bad faith with respect to shit like what Scotia is doing.

But I think the main play would be to get a temporary freeze to changes to how the card works from a judge before they can then proceed to litigation. That buys both us as customers and Chexy as the platform holder time.

I've been paying rent with Chexy for about two years now. Looking into churning an amex soonish; I read something about amex having some intense verification and how that might force my account to upload a lease document and all that. I don't have any of that paperwork handy and it'll be a pain to wrangle it all up so that would be a reason to not bother with churning the amex in the first place.

Is that just for new accounts? Or would my established account have to go through all that in the event I connected an amex as a payment?

https://preview.redd.it/f1wil0bt2phh1.png?width=701&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ccf592e9a53314066a17b172d6d5caa5a571df9

https://preview.redd.it/y666s53v2phh1.png?width=679&format=png&auto=webp&s=8d03641f051c7efd87407ce0d7dfb53cbb7c4481

I'm trying to churn various bank account chequing offers while still doing all my main banking on WS. So much free money though to quickly do a bank account elsewhere for $500 here and there; often a requirement is "pre authorized payments"; now setting up my credit cards and ensuring these vestigal churn accounts have the exact float for a credit card is a pain, it would be so much simpler to just take out like $10 from WS a few times to meet the terms in the most trivial way possible. Anyone here have luck with that?

RRSP/fhsa utilization was always trivial: max it out and every penny put in got you 50% back because marginal tax rate was 50%. Stopping part way last year; my marginal tax rate is only about 30%; I can dump all my rrsp/fhsa for the year to get that 30% return, though part of me is wondering if I should hold out for the possibility that I return to employment.

My intuition is that 30% is still *good enough*. If I hold out it's possible I can't ever attain a 50% marginal tax rate again (like just working part time or for only part of a year) or if I do it's in the far future and it was just silly to not get the time value of my current 30% or it never happens and I threw away the risk free 30% I could have gotten now. Also it's not like I'll have zero room if I use what I have contributed for 2025, as my partial workyear earnings have still created a chunk of rrsp room for the future.