I wish they’d post them more than once a year these days…

I mean, Pomemon generally pass the Harkness test. They are certainly intelligent enough, and communication is a little tricky, but general jist is simple, and some people can get some pretty complex information from their partners with enough time spent together. That’s before counting the fact that if they really want to, they can learn human language.

I do usually. 90% of the time, if it’s AE, then it means it didn’t allow Æ.

Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.

Once upon a time, English both used thorn, the character you are replacing, and eth, the one I just used here. One was used for words like that, this, there, and the other was used for thin, thank, and throw. That didn’t last very long, linguistically speaking. They quickly became interchangeable, and thorn rapidly became the most popular one. But I think if people want to bring it back, we should bring them both back. And while we’re at it, we should bringing back the “four form system.” IE, we used to have two different ways to say yes or no, those two words were specifically used to answer a negative question. Current English leaves negative questions impossible to answer with a single word wothout ambiguity. “Will they not go?” cannot be answered with only yes or no in Modern English’s 2 form system. But with a 4 form system, we had yea and nay for general usage. “Will they go?” Yea means they will, nay means they won’t. But with the negative form of the question, “Will they not go?” Yes means they will, and no means they won’t. Over time yea and nay were both dropped and yes and no became universal.

Also important to remember most of the traditions about it are pagan. Christ wasn’t even born in December. They just decided to celebrate it then to coincide with the existing solstice traditions. Many places celebrated the solstice as a new beginning, the days were now getting longer, and people needed a pick-me-up in the dark season. It was often one of the biggest annual celebrations. So it was co-opted with one of the most obvious Christian signs matching the theme, Christ’s birth being the beginning of the end of a time of darkness. First by giving a new meaning to Saturnalia, then adding more bits from other regions they were trying to convert.

Um, they very much did make promises to that effect. Neither were in good position to actually help the Poles when push came to shove, hence the Phony War. Brittain did some good with their navy, but neither could get enough troops to where it mattered to help, so they buckled down on ramping up their own war efforts at home to better mobilize. Did they fo it out of cowardice and throw the Poles to the wolves, or out of necessity because they would have been overrun had they over commited? That’s a question that has been the subject of much study. But they both very publicly and loudly commit to their defense, they simply failed to meaningfully uphold that commitment.

I mean, the obvious answer is instead of trying to divvy the sovereign nation between them, they should have stood up for them and defended them when the Nazis rolled in. Barring that, they should have liberated them, then left them the fuck alone. Even a stopped clock is right sometimes, this comparison is pretty clearly silly. They weren’t lamenting the lives of Nazis lost in the battle to push them out of Poland. They were lamenting the lives of the Poles after falling under the Russian boot, after the battles were won.

It is definitely possible to create that. The question is, will it ever be profitable, or cheap enough to be user made/controlled? I doubt it. Tech growth isn’t just limited by what’s possible, but also by what’s practical.

I misread that as naval play, and then followup with titanic. Was wondering what that weird shit was.

Yeah, I have rejected increased cost games for this very reason. But Nintendo is one of the few companies I believe would do it to cover their costs instead of just preying upon general apathy towards inflation since covid to jack up profit. They are too rich for my blood at the time, but if I had the income to splurge this would be one of a vanishingly small number of places I would be willing to put up with it.

Just speak the incantation of motive energy and light the incense to soothe the machine spirit.

For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.

People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

Everything bends when you move it, usually to such a small degree that you can’t perceive it. It’s impossible to have a truly “rigid” material that would be required for the original post because of this. The atoms in a solid object don’t all move simultaneously, otherwise swinging a bat would be causing FTL propagation itself. The movement needs to propagate through the atoms, the more rigid the object the faster this happens, but it is never instantaneous. You can picture the atoms like a lattice of pool balls connected to each other with springs. The more rigid the material, the stiffer the springs, but there will always be at least a little flex, even if you need to zoom in and slow-mo to see it.

While it is true that will always result in a winning line, it’s not true that it is the only way to force a win. Half of their moves will allow you to play adjacent to you starting corner towards an open corner and still force a win, as long as their first play isn’t the opposite corner or any of its 3 adjacent spaces. In fact, if they start in one of the adjacent sides or non-opposite corners, you have 3 winning moves. If they start on a side, you can take either the open, non-opposite corner, the side leading to that corner, or the middle. If they start in a non-opposite corner, you can take the first two moves above, or the opposite corner.

That’s not true, you can force a tie at worst from a middle start. The issue is, if you start middle, you can only force a win if they take a side, not a corner. If you start corner you can force a win as long as they don’t take the middle.

It wasn’t as unrelated as it might appear. Firstly, they used their D+ account to make their Disney account. Secondly, the whole point of that argument was that in the Disney account EULA, the relevant one, there is an arbitration clause. They only brought up the D+ account in passing because it has the same clause, emphasizing that they had to read and agree to the clause twice, and if they didn’t catch it it’s not Disney’s fault they lied about reading it. They basically said “look, this is an issue regarding the Disney account, and they said right here they read and understood the terms that include arbitration. And here, they read and agreed to the exact same terms a few months earlier on D+. This shouldn’t be any surprise if they were truthful when they claimed to have read it.”

Disclaimer, arbitration clauses are bullshit and need to be reworked/eliminated as they are generally very anticonsumer and I don’t think it’s good that they have that clause. But accepting that this exists, Disney didn’t really do anything particularly scummy.

Specifically skeletons are a big deal. Lots of games edit them out, WoW had alternate models for the Undead players, who generally have exposed bone joints and other bits of bone protrusions, to cover them all in flesh. I think it is sometimes OK to use skeletons as enemies, but never for player characters, IIRC.

I mean the graph starts in 09, and Chrome launched in 08. I assume that did more to them, but both were probably notable.

There isn’t really much about eternal torture or damnation back when Satan was still an agent of God, and he certainly wasn’t in charge of Hell. All the talk of gnashing teeth and lakes of fire was originally metaphor for how much it sucked, not literal.

Hell isn’t a place, it’s a state of complete lack of Grace. The idea is that everyone has a 2 way connection to God, and all good feelings and emotions must come from it. People are free to reject that connection by committing mortal sin, but “the line stays open,” as long as someone lives. Honest repentance is accepting the connection back. If one dies before accepting grace again, God shrugs and accepts they aren’t interested, and cuts his side of the line. This leaves an existence with zero positive thoughts or feelings, best case scenario is eternal meh. Of course, it was hyped up to be awful to help convert and maintain control. And, ofcourse, Satan did do a bit of torture here and there, but it was generally all on living folk to test them.