Accept nothing they offer you without cause. But if you do them a kindness, without thought of recompense, and they offer a gift in return regardless, then it is generally safe and likely beneficial. Generally— exceptions do apply, particularly in the case of user error or suddenly getting really greedy with the gift.

Errr… this applies to the fae, but not customers, I guess. Perhaps the analogy is not perfect then.

Generally, they don’t include intentional ones, or rather, haven’t done so since Super Metroid (and there, only with the wall jumps). When they release new versions of older games they often do so with patches to try to remove sequence breaks. And in new games they try to make sure not to include known older ways of sequence breaking, and sometimes include pretty drastic measures to prevent it.

Speedrunners sequence break anyway, because that’s how they are. But Nintendo gives every indication that they hate this for some weird reason.

Ah, here’s a YouTube link that goes into more detail about it: https://youtu.be/QLWKsugJPy4?si=gsT78aNb3wsQwCax

Will they be obsessive about trying to remove sequence breaks again? For a genre that is has a rabid following expressly because of the existence of sequence breaking, it’s so strange to me how much Nintendo hates the very idea.

Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.

We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t burn everything at the end. I mean, I get that sanitation in that situation was pretty darn important, but it was the author’s choice to choose something that required that outcome. That ending made me sad for a long time. Definitely didn’t know how to handle it. Not sure I can even now.

From the title, I suspected it was Zach actually, because I know fewer people know that name and would be more likely to need the “dwarf fortress co-creator” label. Tarn definitely should have been named.

I once had a session that became infamous amongst my group at the time. There was a magic forest that only the elves knew the way through, but no elves had come through for a while. One of the players was an elf, and I had given him a note explaining that there was a path featuring a sequence of specific species of trees, oak then spruce then elder, that sort of thing. He was supposed to go in the direction moss grew on said trees until seeing the new species, then look for the moss again, and so on and so forth. I expressly noted on the note that if he didn’t see the exact sequence of trees I gave in the note, “something had gone seriously wrong”.

Of course, the idea was that something had gone wrong and the path through the magical maze forest was screwed up, hence no elves arriving recently. My reason for setting it up this way was so that the elf would lead the party into the woods, he’d try to find the path, realize the path was broken, tell the party, and then they’d get down to the business of figuring out what was wrong and fixing it. You know… start the adventure.

Instead, what ensued was an entire multi hour long session of nothing happening. The elf would lead them. I’d tell him the trees they were seeing, out of order. He’d just keep following the moss, the “path” as he always did. I started emphasizing the wrongness of the trees he was seeing. He kept leading the party. I nudged him harder and harder. He just fucking kept going. The party was confused of course, as the whole path thing was supposed to be an elven secret that they didn’t share. And the elf player just kept ramming the entire party’s heads against the stupid wall for real world hours and I couldn’t stop it until I eventually dropped the 4th wall and flat out said this isn’t working, I’ve told you it isn’t working, please do something else! And then we had to end the session and start again next time.

It was incredibly frustrating in the moment, but it actually worked out well for the game as a whole. Became a running gag, a source of a lot of laughs, and it somehow ended up hammering in the point that something was wrong with the world and forest far more effectively than it might have if it had ended quicker. So good times in the end after all…

But MAN was it frustrating in the moment.

Yet again, censors are afraid of gambling motifs more than actual gambling… loot boxes get a pass as long as the loot box isn’t decorated in a shape similar to a standard playing card (sports trading cards are apparently fine), or of a slot machine.

I would bet on it being a little bit (well, a lot) of ablism mixed with people wanting only answers that they personally can use. Which circles back on the ableism… people don’t want to believe that they could suddenly join this minority group at any time.

I had to be in a wheelchair for a year. The internalized shame from pervasive background ableism is horrible.

Oh yeah, I fully understand why the stupidity happens/happened. I don’t know how to fix it or if it can be fixed… that’s why I posted it here, in the unsolved problems in your field thread!

I will genuinely never understand racism against tribal members or descendants thereof. I know, I know, racism in general is not rational. But this particular form of it still baffles me.

How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?

The only possible word that comes to mind is “anticlockwise” used in (some parts of?) the UK instead of “counterclockwise”… but that doesn’t exactly match “diagonally”. Is it the word though?

Wonderful! Root out the corruption! Expose it all to the cleansing fire of sunlight! Burn it away and start anew!

More like… take the orange, with the peel still on it, into the shower. Dig your fingers straight through the peel deep into the center of the orange, and then rip it open. Smash your whole face into the middle of the orange, shoving the sweet insides into your mouth and not caring that much of it is smearing on your face. Then shower normally… no sticky residue because you’re already in the shower and it washes right off.

A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.

The question is how many of those suicides were conducted by jumping off the bridge. And don’t say “they’d just choose another way to end themselves”. Studies and historical evidence shows that making suicide even slightly less convenient to perform actually does save lives. People get fixated on a method that seems easy. When that method is no longer easy, it gives them a chance to not go through with it.

Nah, it’s fully polymorphed, it just cast the spell after it sat down.

I legitimately had my players pull that one on me once. Door into a secret lab disguised as a closet was beyond their skill, warded by powerful magic, etc etc. They looked at the floor plan and saw that the closet protruded from the main wall a bit. “Why not go in through the side?” I hadn’t thought about it. I figured the villain hadn’t thought about it either. A simple pickax later and they were in.

Correct. To be more specific, in Tolkien lore, Bilbo (and later Frodo adding to it, organizing it, and editing it) wrote the “Red Book of Westmarch” which was later translated by the narrator of the books into the Hobbit and Lordnof the Rings. Many (most?) Tolkien fans prefer to frame things this way when discussing the stories, and for good reason— that’s how Tolkien himself viewed the stories. As a translation of something in another language. He was a linguist, after all.

Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch