In pog dog form!

To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.

Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.

Hear, hear! You can burn out at anything, even your most beloved hobbies.

I was a video game modder for most of my life, but burnt out on the hobby completely after several years of maintaining a dozen or so mods for an early access game.

Making new features was great, and hunting down reported bugs in my own code was enjoyable. Constantly fixing compatibility issues due to updates (and having to rewrite perfectly valid code due to shifting or deprecated APIs) wasn’t.

I love modding, but even things you enjoy get old after a while, and the feeling of obligation to continue (even if only not to disappoint your fans) wears at you.

By that logic most of Star Trek isn’t canon. Lemmy would be in shambles!

Would Enimal be a Water/Earth type, or Water/Poison?

~700 Miles (British)

Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.

Megumin’s other problem is she only specced into things that would improve her explosion’s damage output, neglecting basic mage things like mana capacity and efficiency. So she can only cast one (stupidly overpowered) explosion spell before all but passing out from using more mana than she actually has. It’s why no other party would take her, because even in situations where the spell would be useful she becomes a massive liability after casting it.

We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

It’s strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.

I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That’d help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.

Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.

(But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)

February 2011.

It was, which is why it sucks that it got snuffed out instead of one of the dozens of less interesting subplots.

I liked how there was a multi-book background subplot of some Aes Sedai investigating the Black Ajah in secret, only for them to get killed off between books (and their deaths only mentioned in passing during the next book’s prologue) and the Black Ajah plot thread put on hold, then for the solution to the Black Ajah to be handed to Egwene with a wrapped bow a few books later.

I get Jordan was trying to cut out extraneous subplots and actually finish the series, but it sucks that so many pages were wasted on something that went nowhere, and the eventual resolution didn’t even need them in the first place.

I loved the descriptions of the Carheinien Game of Houses, where everything was political theater and anything you did in public was scrutinized for multiple deeper meanings. It’s a shame the actual politics shown in the series was mostly pampered and immature nobles complaining that preparing for the literal imminent apocalypse was too inconvenient.

It’d make a great RPG setting, but IIRC every attempt at a licensed adaptation (aside from a forgettable FPS like twenty years ago) has ended up in development hell or terrible. Or both, in the case of the show.

I do like that the portal to alternate dimensions ended up being how the Seanchan acquired the weird monsters their army used. That was some quality world-building.

Matt and his crew, Thom, Aviendha, Min, Verin… There are so few likeable characters, especially amongst the women (you could write an entire book about how WoT handles women - I should note two of the three I listed as likeable are tomboys and were therefore saved from Jordan’s normal characterization). And due to the aforementioned thousand named characters, the good ones get almost no screen time.

But there’s always time for Egwene and Faile, the two worst “good” characters. Don’t you want to know what Salidar or the Shaido are(n’t) up to for the billionth time?

It’s funny. I actually liked the Wheel of Time, but any time I talk about it it’s to rant about its flaws.

There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon’s Field crew (Matt, after he stops whining and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).

Don’t forget Skimming, which is plot relevant like twice after teleporting is introduced (and one of those times isn’t even for traveling, it’s to throw an invincible murder golem into the void between dimensions).

Are they at least ill-tempered?

The battle pass from Genshin/Star Rail boggles the mind. You have to grind like crazy or play almost every day to complete it, and the majority of the rewards are character and weapon advancement materials. You know, something you’d usually have to grind for.

Escape the grind through more grinding.

Oh, and you only get 1/6 of the battle pass rewards as a F2P player. It’s ten bucks to unlock the majority of the rewards. And the headline feature, the weapon/star cone you unlock at tier 30 (only it you pay, naturally), is easily outclassed by stuff you’ll get as a F2P player.