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Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread! What did you get over the holidays, what are you playing?

Having a blast playing Skyrim modded. Been playing a lot and also just looking through modlists. This is one area I've found AI to be extremely fun and useful to work with, which has been rare for me lately.

Didn't buy anything, none of the new releases or discounts seemed to offer anything new.

Terra Invicta recently had its 1.0 release, but I'm reluctant to start another run. They go on for very long (made by developers of The Long War, so no surprise), and I'm not sure the updates since the last time I played actually added enough to justify the investment.

Shokuho, a Warring-States-Era-Japan mod for Mount & Blade II Bannerlord recently had a minor update, and on a whim I picked it up again and slapped on whatever mods would fit. It ended up being a bit of an ordeal to get it to run, because I needed the exactly correct versions of each and every mod so they played nice together. It works now, and I play it on and off on an old campaign that miraculously still works. IMO Mount & Blade is peak singleplayer gaming; the single-best genre formula ever devised. Unfortunately the actual games are made in Turkey and the quality is accordingly somewhat lacking, but man did the Turks get the basic idea right. Anyways, now I can fiddle with Shokuho and try to do pike and shot tactics in medieval Japan. It mostly works fairly well, except for the part where I can't control the proportion of pike to shot that my NPCs recruit, so I end up with too little pike for how much cavalry is running around. Also, pikemen can't drop their pikes - if they have a secondary weapon, they'll just magnetically glue the pikes to their own backs to draw swords. Which looks extremely stupid. So I outfit my pikemen with no secondary weapons...which makes them significantly less capable in chaotic melee and sieges. So I need to keep specialized swordsmen around as well, which is some unwelcome micromanagement. Maybe there's a modding solution for that, but I haven't found it yet.