Review of the Blood of Dawnwalker If you can't fight em, bite em! Do you like open-world games? Do you like vampires? Then maybe The Blood of Dawnwalker might be for you. Some of the individuals behind The Witcher 3 have come up with an open-world game where you play as a vampire during the night and with only human powers during the day. The game is based on melee combat and "magical" powers (no crossbows or bows). The skill tree is divided into three branches: witchcraft (can be used daytime only), fighting/melee (can be used both daytime and night), and vampirism (night only). The world is not pure fantasy like in *The Witcher*, but rather a hybrid of the real world in 1200s Transylvania, in a fictional subregion of Transylvania with added vampires and other monsters. The story is basically (no spoilers): the land is wrought with plague and pestilence, but vampires have offered a deal: drink some of the vampires' blood and keep healthy and survive the plague, but let the vampires drink some of your blood in return (nice circular economy there...) Of course, the vampire ruling class does not want to play nice. At some point early in the game, the main character becomes a vampire and must rescue his family from the evil vampires. The "main mission" to rescue your family has a 30-day timer. I.e., if you fail to rescue your family within 30 days, they die. However, regardless of whether you manage to save them or not, you can continue to play the game after the 30 days. Also, time only advances if you do special actions (marked with a time symbol). Freely exploring the world does not advance time. This is not The Witcher 3, but you can recognize similarities in the game mechanics (for example, tracking/scanning with RMB). You do not have a horse, but only travel on foot. A rough estimate of the "size" of the game (in terms of hours played) would be roughly half of that of The Witcher 3 (without the DLC). One of the game's minuses is that you are likely to get stuck (not permanently) in corners or against walls when fighting multiple enemies. However, this is not game-breakingly bad and is fairly manageable. There is a parry system where you can choose to parry in four different directions, and also just "omni" parry. Directional parrying works fairly well on slower, larger enemies. Otherwise, omni-parrying is usually the easier option, but it doesn't give you the same opportunity for a counterattack. Graphics: 3.5/5 Performance: 4/5 Story: 4/5 Gameplay mechanics: 3/5 Overall: 4/5 (recommended) #games, #gaming, #vampire, #RPG, #fantasy

Very nice pictures! Are they photographs, or computer generated?

I bought my first typewriter. The only typewriter I used before was an Olivetti lettera 31 as a child. Now I bought a Royal Model-C from 1948. It works great, and has "magic margin" for the left margin.

I have been experimenting with a strfry relay on my local LAN (not open to the internet) to locally send direct messages between computers on my LAN using nostr-cli. When updating the strfry server to Ubuntu 26.04.1, and updating strfry, the ability to send or receive dm messages suddenly stopped, but some downgrade of strfry (I don't remember exactly how, with the help of an LLM) fixed it. However, I always had the problem that when sending direct messages between computers, (using NIP-17), you had to restart the "nostr dm" twice (can easily be done by pressing backspace+enter twice) on the receiving computer to show the message. However, I just discovered that using --nip04, makes the messages instant. Hence: nostr dm --nip04 gives instant messages between local computers. It also seems that when one of the computers runs Linux, it uses nip04 by default (Arch), but not windows computers (NIP-17). Anyway, problem fixed! I'm sure NIP-04 is secure enough (e2ee) when sending messages on local LAN. However, I don't want to send clear text messages, even on LAN. #strfry, #nostr, #nostr-cli, #e2ee, #messaging, #privacy