It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety… It looks like I’ve played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven’t even touched yet.

Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

• Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You’re playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
• Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it’s a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It’s a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
• Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

The irony kills me on this one. I would like to imagine that if you send your ID in they auto-fail you, but I’m sure they’re not that clever.

I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

If they put the effort in this could be a really good show. The LN has a lot of rough edges, but on the whole it’s a great concept that goes in interesting directions. But the art does a surprising amount of heavy lifting; the depicted horror of the characters to those unfamiliar with them creates this interesting dichotomy with how a lot of the day-to-day interactions proceed, and it would be really easy to just gloss over that and make a fairly generic isekai.

Code: White was so much fun in theaters. It kind of runs into similar problems to a lot of other anime movies, with the non-canon status-quo excuse for a big fight, but Spy X Family naturally handles that better than many series and it turned out to be a ton of fun.

!The fact that the fate of the world rests on Anya not taking a dump is just peak comedy, I don’t care what anyone says.!<

I have a few evergreen notes that I update as needed, but the most frequent one is simply a list of what books I have on preorder and when they’re expected to ship. I have a book buying problem.

Otherwise most of my notes don’t get referenced often because they’re stores of knowledge, not items related to active projects. I have several reference docs for fiction writing and DnD that I reference and update often because I work on those projects often, but my note on the Zanclean Flood is just obviously not going to come up almost ever. But writing is how I learn, so I wrote about it 🤷

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

As far as I can tell, he’s basically a random web designer who got traction on Twitter with criticism of Trump. It’s kind of impressive how prolific a dude can be out of nowhere.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

We really got the whole spectrum of Darkness being best girl this episode. This season has truly been blessed.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

If the bad guy hears rumours about someone asking the question, does anything change?

When a clock fills in these contexts that should indicate that something needs to happen, and that something likely requires PC response. So if it isn’t going to significantly impact the PCs until the third clock, it may as well be one big clock with stuff happening in the background as it fills. But if each clock has an impact and the PCs can do something to impact future clocks, stacking makes sense.

Regarding handling the consequence: it definitely depends. I’ll sometimes use a clock if they’re trying to overcome some major obstacle, so filling it means that they have less to deal with and that’s probably going to be an RP exercise. But most of the time it’s going to result in a change in position, or a need to resist something, or even a material change in their crew’s territory that requires some response. In the example above, especially for such a large clock, I’d probably have the consequence be something like the bad guys invading their territory targeting the PC asking questions, which requires more than a mere change in position to resolve. That could involve a full-on heist to thwart.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

Unciv works perfectly fine on a phone if you feel like risking significant amounts of your time (:

This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.

Is that the damage formula based on, uh, circumference?

Haven’t actually read the book, thankfully, but I recall hearing that was a thing.

Honestly, it’s halfway correct, if I need to go into the office I’d rather be able to interact with people IRL. Most of my work unit tries to be there on Mondays for that reason.

The caveats are that I’d still rather not be there at all and that our office sucks so most people are at least as effective at home anyways.