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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • You know what’s fascinating about that?

    I’m pretty sure that every CD had the entire game and all the art assets for every town / place you could enter on the world map. Every enemy. All the music.

    The only difference between each CD was the FMV cutscenes contained on them.

    At least that was the story / rumor at the time. For optimization they could have reduced the art assets and music to only areas you could enter at that point in the game, and only enemy models you would see, but supposedly that wasn’t the case.


  • You can find port crystals around the map or via quests. There are also some fixed ones on the map.

    You can place them anywhere… Outside I think? But maybe just anywhere.

    Once you find/place them you can use a Ferrystone while outside to travel to any one you have placed. There is almost always at least one Ferrystone for sale in each town, and it will refresh after a few days when you buy it. It will cost 10,000 gold.

    The number of port crystals you can place are limited (in the first game it was 8 or 9?). You can find roughly 5 per playthrough iirc. You can NewGame+ as many times as you want once far enough in the main quest (retaining most items, equipment, all vocation levels and experience…i imagine any vocation master skills too; generally just the quests and the world reset). I’m still on my first playthrough so haven’t tried.

    But there are no issues finding Port crystals and buying / finding Ferrystones. You DO NOT NEED MTX. That headline was so overblown.






  • Millennial here. Doing alright. SINK tech worker with no pets.

    Was sort of on a track to retire at as early as 45, though recent inflation has made me rethink how much I need saved.

    I bought my condo, 1 bedroom + office, in 2016, and it was within my budget and was slightly bigger than apartments I had rented in the past. Back home though I could use my parents garage when needed.

    Now I feel somewhat trapped because to get even a small place with a garage (I miss working on my car myself), is prohibitively expensive given how interest rates and house values have changed. Sure my condo is up quite a bit in valuation (something like 50% increase in the past 8 years), but homes have gone up quite a bit more, like 100% increase in some cases. Also my HOA dues just keep going up too, and we don’t have a pool or anything crazy. Not to mention developers in the area grab up small starter homes before they can hit the market, bulldozer them, and drop a mansion on the same land that is completely unaffordable for me.

    So my options are stay where I am (and it’s fine for now I guess), or move and expect to have to work much longer, and have a longer commute.

    Pretty much checks all the boxes you said. No debt except mortgage. Emergency fund. 401k. HSA. I’m not house poor. These days I can afford pretty much anything I could want in life except for a slightly bigger house :p

    But I look at how prices are changing and I’m still worried for the future. Ideally I live another 60 years. Statistically another 40 or so. That’s a long time for high rates of inflation and greed to change things.

    Edit: also with all the tech layoffs happening, there’s just an underlying sense of gloom. I’ve been laid off twice throughout my career. Once it took me something like 6 months to find a job. The other time a little under 2 months. Not fun though.






  • I mean, without browsing levels.fyi or anything like that you can get 4 to 10 software engineers for 1 million (anything from 100k to 250k depending on location, experience, etc.).

    Not all employees are engineers but that would imply 80 to 200 staff for the 20 million they state.

    That’s only the component paid to the actual staff though. There are additional costs like Healthcare, unemployment, social security, etc, and other benefits that may not be included in wages (though some portion may be deducted from salaries), but they are including in that statement / summary.


  • As someone who owned a Jeep in a place where they salt the roads in the winter. Fuck torx.

    That being said no other screw head would have been any better, and maybe it was just a cheap torx socket (you could see I had actually twisted the whole head on the tool, before stripping the screw). A hex bolt for that particular application would have been much easier to remove (or snap the head off :p)