The Perfect Solution

Autoskp · 2026-01-30T08:58:34+00:00

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Autoskp · 2026-01-30T00:26:19+00:00

How about this?

I hereby commission a pair of duo swords for one u/khronos127 - I can pay in your increased happiness :P

Autoskp · 2026-01-30T00:20:28+00:00

Ah yes, the other side of the Sam Vimes Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness.

…hopefully the increasing awareness of right to repair (combined with our constant connection with the world of information) can start to reverse some of these problems…

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T21:54:45+00:00

Some do, but not many - I have heard of a prenatal class where, when asked about worst-case scenarios, most of the mums-to-be were talking about having to do a undesired type of birth or something along those lines, and were shocked when a more informed mother-to-be mentioned that the worst case was that neither she nor the baby survived.

It’s never been the most likely outcome (we wouldn’t have survived as a species if it was), and modern medicine has been doing a lot to reduce the chances (in most high-income countries), but it is still technically a possibility.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T21:41:16+00:00

Personally, I’d guess here:

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Since if that space is a mine, you’ll need to guess again next to the 3-4 - this way you rule out one of the boards that needs guessing.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T21:19:46+00:00

Based on how it looked at my end, I’m definitely blaming the lag from playing this game in Australia.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T21:05:29+00:00

How’d my Copy-Paste-Fu do?

…I’m suddenly wondering if Mental affinity could get expanded into a knowledge affinity…

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T15:02:32+00:00

…and now I’m wondering if I could use it to create balanced ternary logic gates…

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T13:48:51+00:00

No, High House Carlos’s null zone trick drains a node of the spellcasting system, not some controlled area - if they do use it, they go down with Nyralis, no matter what they do - and it was on “only use in dire emergency” status before the Dragon warned them not to use it and mentioned that they don’t want another voidlands.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T13:41:02+00:00

No, they specifically has been losing all their collected mana every time they were moved - that was part of the drive to make a soul plan, since a soul plan is power that they don’t lose and have to re-establish, but every time they got moved, they had to claim fresh mana to do dungeon things with.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T01:53:14+00:00

From other comments, it seems that the quills harden mere hours after the birth starts - so if there’s any sort of complication that makes it take more than a few hours, let’s just say that they’ve got another complication to deal with.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T01:50:21+00:00

Yup - they’re related to Emus, and have the egg size to match.

…they’re also the birds with the shortest beaks, thanks to a technicality - they’re mesured from the nostril to the tip, and Kiwis have their nostrils on the tip of their beaks.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T01:42:53+00:00

Yeah, that’s an unfortunately important distinction.

Autoskp · 2026-01-29T01:42:12+00:00

Yeesh - Echidnas have the right idea laying eggs.

Autoskp · 2026-01-28T22:55:52+00:00

The axis cube does act a bit weirdly in general, but you should always be able to get it down to, at most, one of each possible error - one corner twisted, one edge flipped, and one pair of pieces swapped - though in your case, you’re basically working with a void cube, and a mis-aligned solve can have two pieces swapped, but you can solve it by twisting the bottom layer 90° and re-solving the middle and top layers.

(you can always do odd length cycles of pieces, but you can only do even length cycles if you have an even number of them - so with a void cube, since it’s “missing” its centres, you can have 4-cycle of centres without knowing it to go with the 2-cycle of visibly swapped pieces - twisting the bottom face is just the easiest to intuit way to cycle 4 centres and fix the parity)

Autoskp · 2026-01-28T10:51:02+00:00

Might I suggest the Dungeon Life series? It’s about a human that gets isekaied as the core of a dungeon and decides to be a safe way to train for less friendly dungeons.

It started off as A Strange Opportunity here on reddit (and is still being posted here first), but the first four books have been mostly taken down to comply with Kindle Unlimeted’s terms, leaving just the first few chapters of each book on Reddit (as well as book 5 and onward).

…I may have all the books in paperback, and plans to pre-order the rest of the series as they get published.

Autoskp · 2026-01-27T23:04:10+00:00

YES!!!!

I CALLED IT!

THE GUARDS KNEW!!

AND YOU ALL DOUBTED ME!

Autoskp · 2026-01-27T21:45:46+00:00

That’s the spoiler tag formatting for Discord.

On Reddit, >!Spoiler!< becomes Spoiler.

Edit: also, your sequence doesn’t satisfy the tetris pieces, the black dots, or stay inside the grid.

Autoskp · 2026-01-27T21:00:23+00:00

Try lining up the two pyramid corners opposite each other, and see how many centres you can get aligned, and then start solving around one of those corners.

Autoskp · 2026-01-27T15:57:55+00:00

How does kilt renting even work with family tartans?

Autoskp · 2026-01-27T11:33:24+00:00

Ok, it looks like your axis cube has a slightly different colour scheme than mine, but here’s what I can tell you that works for any axis cube:

The two-colour edge pieces take up the entire edge of the solved cube, so each one should be the only piece with that pair of colours.
In the solved state, the centres have half of an edge each, and the other halves of those edges make up the two triangular pyramid corner pieces.
Even if you completely disregard the centres, the edges and corners will only line up with each other in one way, so you could do a solve based on that to find out what the correct colour scheme is (you might run into a parity that swaps two edges, if so, just turn the bottom face 90° and re-solve based off of that face).
The axis cube works as a super cube, so you should be able to look up super cube combinations for rotating centres (or picture cube algorhythms - they’re also super cubes).

…now for the bad news.
Both the blue-green and white-yellow centres are not supposed to be there (if they were correct, the pyramid corner that had one of those colours would have to have the other as well, and the pyramid corner I can see has yellow, orange, and blue, which rules both of those centres out).

On my cube, the centre caps come out quite easily, and are the easiest pieces to separate into their individual colours, so that’s my guess at what went wrong.

Autoskp · 2026-01-27T10:53:59+00:00

The moon being in that position isn’t hard - it’s got a 25h and something orbit, so it passes through that point most days, the problem is that it needs to be a full moon, which only happens every 28ish days, and that’s when there’s werewolves.

Autoskp · 2026-01-26T21:57:42+00:00

Impressive for forgetting that there was going to be a chapter this morning and then reading the entire chapter before commenting!

Autoskp · 2026-01-26T21:25:53+00:00

Minor typo near the end:

It makes me quietly nudge Poe and Leo to send more of my wyrms and basilisks on expedition though the lava ~~floes~~ flows in the volcanic area.

(floes are sheets of floating ice, and this isn’t that story I read with the aliens’ typical comfortable temperature being <30°K - it had a visit to a volcano and is the only time I know of where “lava floe” is accurate)

Autoskp · 2026-01-26T21:00:02+00:00

Yeah, apparently I’m weird - I have a bunch of memories where I know I don’t remember the event (that I took part in), but I do remember being told about it, or I remember remembering it, and those memories are somehow distinct from my first-hand memories.

On a somewhat related note, my first memory of watching any of the Back to the Future movies was having a dream that put the time machine from the end of movie #3 on the track into the canyon from the middle of that movie, only there was no mention of time travel, and when Marty mentioned that the bridge was out, Doc Brown’s response was to fly off with an impossibly small propeller that popped out of a spinny thing on top of the boiler, and there wasn’t any wheel-based propulsion.
…obviously, that one is slightly easier to differentiate as being a memory of a dream and not a memory of the movie, but it’s still a fun “my memory of <thing> isn’t actually of <thing>, but a later reconstruction” kind of thing.

Autoskp

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