I use a lot of off-meta melee (if there is such a thing, since most melee can be made powerful). I guess the ones on my list that count as "mediocre" are Mios, Ninkondi, Prisma Dual Cleavers, Guandao Prime, and Twin Basolk. If we're counting hidden gems, I'd also add Caustacyst, which I liked even before I had a riven for it, and now use on my Kullervo loadout as well.

Currently breezing through Auberon by James S.A. Corey, the story between books 7 and 8 of the Expanse. Not sure what I'll read next.

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Finished Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky. The world-building around the Zone was as cool as I'd hoped, and I appreciated that expeditions into it were realistically strenuous, grimy, and dangerous. The overall tone is a bit bleak, though, and I didn't find the characters particularly relatable. There's a cool afterward from one of the authors, describing how difficult it was to get the book published (and when it was, how censored it had to be).

Bingo squares: Older Than You Are (1972), It Takes Two, Now a Major Motion Picture, (alt) Translated (hard).

Just want to add: forma are for when you've run out of capacity after you've installed a reactor/catalyst. You can install them before, but it's really inefficient.

Also, if you put all the basic mods on a weapon, and it still feels weak, take a look at its base (unmodded) crit and status chance stats. If, say, base crit chance is significantly lower than base status chance, then replace crit mods with more status/status chance, and see if that feels better. Same principle for frames: some frames have really low base shield, or their abilities don't need range, or they don't need to worry about energy management, so you're better off swapping out some mods for others.

MR30 here. Apart from the prime and lich stuff, there's definitely a few easy things you've missed, and some clusters of stuff you can work on simultaneously or while doing other things (like cracking relics or grinding aya):

• Have you done all the zaws, kitguns, k-drives, and amps? Wasn't sure if what you're using tracks them. If not, that's potentially a big chunk.
• BPs from the market: pandero, carrier, dethcube, shade, wyrm, various archgun/archmelees (parts require syndicates)
• BPs from the dojo: catabolyst, mios, helios, djinn, itzal, dorrclave, hema
• Nightwave: heat dagger, dark sword, wolf beacons for wolf sledge
• Deimos iso vaults: aurum spinosa, sporothrix, cortege, and necramech parts; rep for cortege and bonewidow BPs. Note that arcana iso vaults have better drop rates for aurum spinosa and sporothrix parts, but you'll probably be stuck doing them solo.
• Stuff from syndicates, all of which are tradable if you don't want to swap syndicates: various archmelee and archgun parts, sancti/secura/telos weapons, abyssal beacons for dorrclave mats
• BPs, parts, and relics from corpus railjack derelict caches: carmine penta and nautilus, plus relics for valkyr prime, nyx prime, cernos prime, scindo prime, hikou prime, and venka prime
• Baro: prisma weapons, vericres, halikar wraith, vulkar wraith, prova vandal, supra vandal, vastilok, ax-52 (probably)

As a side note for sibear, I found getting cryotic passively while grinding circuit much less tedious than trying to grind it directly, but that might just be me.

Will it give me arachnophobia, if I don't like spiders, but am not at the level of full blown phobia?

Mmm if they give you the ick, then maybe avoid it. I don't think it's too bad, but YMMV, and I'd rather not mislead you accidentally.

Ring Shout sounds interesting, but am not a fan of racism and slavery in the (fiction) books, specially the ones that go to dark places. Does it end well? 😀

The author actually uses a much lighter touch on the racism and mentions of slavery than I was expecting. It's there, and it ties into the story, but the focus is really more on fighting literal demonic creatures. Like I said the other week, it's really more of an action-adventure than disturbing horror. It ends mostly well, with room for a sequel.

Iirc from my time on kbin, posts are for the "microblog" part, i.e. the part that interacts with mastodon.

100% agree; I was so bummed Riddick was just inferior Pitch Black. The animated one, Dark Fury, was fun, though, iirc.

This is correspondence and such that's been sitting around in a warehouse for however many years, untouched.

Hackers.

Fanart of artist rendition:

I have the sound of this stuck in my head now, thanks.

Did a quick search, looks like ExeKiller, which isn't out yet. Hope you find something good to play in the meantime!

I finally watched it for the first time very recently, so I appreciate you and your coincidental timing.